Candy [antikvár]

PUBLISHER'S INTRODUCTIONWhen the first authorised British version of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's candy appeared in the U.K. in the autumn of 1968 it was greeted by a vociferous and hostile press. That hostility was not directed against the book, the critics were agreed as to its literary merit and standard, but was directed against the publishers who were variously accused of having expurgated a modern masterpiece and having failed in their avowed intent of 'publishing fearlessly' by bowing to unseen forces of censorship. The Times Literary Supplement summarised in its usual perceptive way:'What the publisher and his advisers have done to candy might be called bowdlerisation: but that would be unfair to Bowdler. That censor was trying in difficult times to popularise his author, claiming correctly that Shakespeare would still be excellent, even with all the bawdy cut. candy is a very different matter. It depends on bawdy from beginning to end: the cutting has removed the point. It is a joke without a punchline, not worth reading in its present shape. Curiously, it seems more dirty-minded, as if it were written in hints and innuendoes. The times are easier than Bowdler's; it would not have been too difficult to publish the original version in Britain - and fight for it in the lawcourts, if anyone wanted to labour the joke so far. Many have read the American version and it is freely available in the libraries of at least one London borough.'This report, however, did not reflect all opinions - nor was it able to do justice to the multitudinous reasons which had caused the publishers to issue the book as they did. Michael Wood in The Times was certainly not quick to condemn:'candy is a very funny book. It ought to be pornographic but it isn't, because pornography is more serious than this. Frank Harris, in the hands of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, would have been the great comic figure of our time.'5INTRODUCTIONby Professor David DaichesDean of the School of English and American Studies at SussexUniversityI thought at once of Voltaire, the great master of the literary device of mocking fashionable views and attitudes through the adventures of an ingenuous young person. The authors, of course, are aware of their master : the book opens with a quotation from Voltaire's l'Ingénu. The quotation is, in fact, a little puzzling out of its context. 'Elle ne savait pas combien elle était vertueuse dans le crime qu'elle se reprochait.' The beautiful Mademoiselle de St Yves can only save the man she loves from lifelong imprisonment in the Bastille by yielding her body to the influential M. de St Poulange. She does so in desperation, as the only way to help her lover. On being released by his beautiful deliverer, the hero, who does not know the means by which his beloved has secured his release, exclaims in wonder and admiration at her achievement. '// est donc dans la beauté et dans le vertu un charme invincible qui fait tomber les portes de fer et qui amollit les coeurs de bronze!' 'There is then in beauty and in virtue an invincible charm which makes iron gates fall down and which softens hearts of bronze.' At the word 'virtue' the poor girl bursts into tears, for 'she did not know how far she had been virtuous in committing the crime for which she reproached herself.' She has liberated her lover by yielding to another man, and her lover, in ignorance of this, attributes her success in helping him solely to her beauty and virtue.It is worth staying a little longer with l'Ingénu. The hero is a young and handsome Huron Indian, a noble savage, who arrives in Brittany and turns out to be by birth (but not upbringing) the son of a Frcnch couple who had gone to Canada. His ingenuous integrity is confronted with the religious, social and political customs of the France of Louis XIV, and the hilarious comic satire which Voltaire wrings from this situation can be imagined by anybody who knows Candide (of which, by the way, Candy8