Candy (Southern and Hoffenberg novel)

Candy

First edition
Author	Terry Southern Mason Hoffenberg
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Published	1958
Publisher	Olympia Press (France) G. P. Putnam's Sons (United States) Lancer Books (paperback)
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
ISBN	978-0802134295

Candy is a 1958 novel written by Maxwell Kenton, the pseudonym of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, who wrote it in collaboration for the "dirty book" publisher Olympia Press, which published the novel as part of its "Traveller's Companion" series.^[1] According to Hoffenberg,

Terry Southern and I wrote Candy for the money. Olympia Press, $500 flat. He was in Switzerland, I was in Paris. We did it in letters. But when it got to be a big deal in the States, everybody was taking it seriously. Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So right away I went back and reread Voltaire to see if he was right. That's what happens to you. It's as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it's the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.^[2]

Southern had a different take on the novel's genesis, claiming it was based on a short story he had written about a girl living in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood, a Good Samaritan-type, who became involved with a hunchback. After he read Southern's story in manuscript form, Hoffenberg suggested the character should have more adventures. Southern suggested that Hoffenberg write a story about the girl, and he came up with the chapter in which Candy meets Dr. Krankheit at the hospital.^[3]

He wrote that and I began to write other chapters. Every once in a while, I would show him what I wrote. It was like telling jokes back and forth. Your hearing of the joke becomes as important as telling the joke. In that sense, it was such a good thing because there was this built-in obligation to write the next chapter. It was like returning a good favor. That approach worked quite well and was in perfect sync with the kind of creative work that people try to do together.^[3]

They finished the book in the commune of Tourrettes-sur-Loup France, in a cottage that Southern's friend Mordecai Richler rented for them.^[3]

Southern and Hoffenberg battled Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias over the story's copyright after the book was published in North America by Putnam under the authors' own names and became a best-seller.

In 2006, Playboy Magazine listed Candy among the "25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written", and described the story as a "young heroine's picaresque travels, a kind of sexual pinball machine that lights up academia, gardeners, the medical profession, mystics and bohemians."^[4]

The novel was made into a film by Christian Marquand in 1968 as Candy.

Several of the items depicted in this book were included by director Gail Palmer in the 1978 adult film The Erotic Adventures of Candy whose opening credits state it is based on Voltaire's Candide.

The book The Candy Men by Nile Southern, published in 2004 by Arcade Publishing, details the lives of Southern and Hoffenberg as they came to write, publish and then endure the wildly improbable success of the novel. Unusual in the field of books about literature, The Candy Men makes a lengthy investigation of the rampant sharing of the inadvertently uncopyrighted original novel.^[5]