KENTON, Maxwell; [Terry SOUTHERN & Mason HOFFENBERG] Candy. Paris: The Olympia Press.1962.
Small format 8vo., original green card covers, ruled and lettered in black and white; pp. title page with border in green; pp. [vi], 7-189, [iii]; an uncommonly bright example, just slightly rubbed at edges and creased along spine, clearly read but only minimally so.
First edition, No. 64 in the Traveller’s Companion series, priced 1200 Francs. to the lower cover. Printed in October 1958 by S.I.P., Montreuil. In December of the same year, the publishers changed the name of the book to ‘Lollipop’ in an attempt to fool the authorities,
bypass the censorship rules, and sell the remaining copies.
One of the most infamous and important novels to be produced by the Olympia Press. Maxwell Kenton was the joint pseudonym for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, who had first met in Paris in the late 1940s. There, they became part of a large circle of writers and artists which included such figures as Alexander Trocchi, expat James Baldwin, and existentialist writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Later, Southern settled in Greenwich Village, New York, and through Hoffman became involved with a second artist’s scene, the Beats, where he was introduced to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
Work on the Candy manuscript had begun in New York in the late 1950s, where Southern had conceived of the idea for a novel “about a girl in Greenwich Village who got involved with a hunchback because she was such a good Samaritan". In 1956 Southern returned to Paris and showed the manuscript to Hoffenberg, who believed the central character should have more adventures. Together, they began to work on the book by penning alternate chapters. “I began to write other chapters”, Hoffenberg wrote. “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”. The pair approached the ‘dirty book’ publisher Maurice Girodias, who paid them the equivalent of a $500 flat fee, and it was first published in Paris in October 1958, where it was immediately banned by the Paris Vice Squad.
With a plot revolving around a young woman whose willingness to help others leads her into a series of sexually exploitative situations, the book was also banned in America, although defended by scores of librarians who resisted its censorship. In 2006, Playboy magazine famously listed Candy as one of the sexiest books of all time, writing that the book was “a kind of sexual pinball machine that lights up academia, gardeners, the medical profession, mystics and bohemians."
Scarce indeed in such fine condition.
Kearney (p.85).
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