Bruce Jay Friedman

During his four-decade (and counting) writing career, Bruce Friedman has published eight novels, four story collections, numerous plays, and such screenplays as Stir Crazy (1980) and the Academy Award-nominated Splash (1984).

Though he never became a literary household name, Friedman has many famous admirers and friends. Godfather author Mario Puzo once described Friedman’s stories as being “Like a Twilight Zone with Charles Chaplin.” Neil Simon adapted Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” (originally published in Esquire magazine) into a 1972 movie blockbuster, The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin. And Steve Martin, who turned Friedman’s semi-autobiographical book The Lonely Guy (1978) into a feature film in 1984, provided a back-cover blurb for Friedman’s story collection, Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos (2000), that perfectly, if not sarcastically, summarized the sentiments of so many of his contemporaries and would-be imitators: “I am not jealous.” (Gordon Lish, the well-respected publisher of, among others, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Don DeLillo, is also blurbed on the back-cover: “Bruce Jay Friedman is an American original whose least engaged considerations can beat the crap out of almost anything else on this block.”)

Friedman may dismiss most of his stories as “little ones,” but he wrote at least one full-length novel, Stern, that is widely considered to be his masterpiece. The book, published in 1962, and which John Kennedy Toole (author of A Confederacy of Dunces) once called his favorite modern novel, tells the story of a man, the eponymous Stern, who takes his family out of the city and moves to the suburbs. But what he discovers there is far from the small town bliss of his imagination. He’s attacked by neighborhood dogs. He develops an ulcer. His family is harassed by an anti-Semite, who, during one altercation, pushes Stern’s wife to the ground. Suburbia is not what he’d hoped for. In fact, it’s a dangerous landscape where a Jewish man with urban, paranoid sensibilities believes he is in constant, Gentile danger.

Born in the Bronx in 1930, Friedman’s initial ambition was to become a doctor. When that didn’t pan out, he decided to pursue a career in writing, earning a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. But his true literary education didn’t come from academia. Instead, he learned most of what he needed between the years 1951 and 1953, when he served as a First Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. As he tells it, his commanding officer saw promise in the young Friedman and suggested he read three novels: Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River; James Jones’s From Here to Eternity; and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. After consuming those novels in a single weekend, Friedman realized that he wanted to attempt to write for a living.

Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Friedman is often credited as being one of the pioneers of “dark comedy.” From plays like “Steambath” (1970), in which it’s revealed that a Puerto Rican steamroom attendant is God, to short stories, such as “When You’re Excused, You’re Excused” (first published in the anthology Far From the City of Class, 1963), in which the main character tries to convince his wife to let him skip Yom Kippur to work out at the gym, Friedman’s take on humanity is almost always bleak, but hilariously realistic.

In his foreword to Black Humor, an anthology he edited in 1965, Friedman argued that the thirteen writers represented in the collection weren’t just “brooding and sulking sorts” determined to find levity in the world’s misery. Rather, they were “discover[ing] new land” by “sailing into darker waters somewhere out beyond satire.” Not surprisingly, the very same sentiment could be used to describe Bruce Friedman.

I’ve read that you don’t like to be known as a humorist.

I don’t, especially. Thurber, Benchley, Perelman—they are the great humorists. They set out to make you laugh. That’s never my intention, although it’s often the result. As a writer, I couldn’t possibly be more serious. Sometimes the work is expressed comedically. The hope is that it’s unforced and doesn’t seem worked on, which, of course, it is.

I’m not much good at jokes, can’t remember them. However, once upon a time, I volunteered to be the master of ceremonies at a sorority event at the University of Missouri, which I attended in the late forties and early fifties. The mic went dead after about six jokes, all of which were borrowed from a Borscht Belt comedian. The room was filled with gorgeous women who began to talk among themselves and to cross and uncross their legs.

I became rattled and shouted out, “Will you please quiet down? Don’t you see I’m trying to be funny here?” I then fainted. Someone named Roth helped revive me. “What did you have to faint for?” he asked. “You were terrific.”

So you agree with Joseph Heller that humor isn’t the goal, per se, but the means to the goal?

I’m not comfortable with the idea of “using” humor to achieve a purpose. I can’t imagine Evelyn Waugh, while writing Decline and Fall, saying, “I think I’ll use a little humor here.”

Every once in a while I’ll catch myself chuckling over something I wrote. But that’s generally a bad sign.

In l965, you put together Black Humor, a collection of short stories featuring such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov. In the foreword, you popularized the term “black humor.” You’ve since said that you feel somewhat stuck with that term.

I do. I hear it all the time, and it makes me wince. Essentially, it was a chance for me to pick up some money—not that much, actually—and to read some writers whose work was new to me.

In retrospect, a more accurate term would have been “tense comedy”—there’s much to laugh at on the surface, but with some agony running beneath. I had no idea the term “black humor” would catch fire to the extent that it did—and last these many years. The academics, starving for a new category, wolfed it down.

What similarities did you notice among these “black humorist” writers’ works?

Each one had a different signature, but the tone generally was much darker than what was found in most popular fiction at the time. It also confronted—perhaps not consciously— social issues that hadn’t been touched on. Pressed to the wall, I’ll use a term that’s sickeningly in vogue today: it was edgy.

Why do you think the term “black humor” became so popular, so quickly?

It’s catchy, and that’s appealing to publishers, critics, academics. Some of it may have had to do with the political and social climate of the mid-sixties. The drugs, the Pill, the music, the war—comedy had to find some new terrain with which to deal with all of this. I imagine each generation feels the same.

After the book was published in l965, my publisher threw a huge “Black Humor” party—I still have the invitation—and the whole world showed up. I recall Mike Nichols and Elaine May having a high old time. The “black humor” label started to get reprinted and quoted after that party, and it never stopped. Ridiculous.

When did you begin writing your first novel, Stern?

In l960; it took about six months. I had been trying to write another book for three or four years but it never came together. Certain notions aren’t born to be novels. I figured that out—at great expense.

Stern, published in l962, seems like a break from the type of books that came before it. Stern seems more ethnic; more psychoanalytic. The main character is an anxiety-ridden Jewish nebbish, who feels taken advantage of by his Gentile suburban neighbor. The book was very influential for a lot of writers, including Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and, later, John Kennedy Toole. When you were working on it, did you feel as if you were working on something new?

I was simply trying to write a good book, and an honest one, after struggling with one that kept falling apart. I was living in the suburbs and feeling isolated, cut off from the city. I constructed a small and painful event, and wrote a novel that centered around it. I hoped it would be published and that afterwards I wouldn’t be run out of the country. I’m quite serious. I thought I’d hide in Paris until it all blew over. Such ego. It’s not as if I had a dozen book ideas to choose from. Stern was the one I had—the story felt compelling—and that’s the one I wrote.

This main character was not your typical macho, male literary hero; he was fearful about many things, including sex.

I certainly had that side at the time. All writing is autobiographical, in my view, including scientific papers.

My agent, Candida Donadio—she also represented Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon—told me I had written a very ugly book. I was devastated by that.

What did she find “ugly” about it?

She never explained it. Years later, she claimed she loved it and always had; but that wasn’t the case. Actually, the book she did love—truly love—was my first book, which never came together. In a dead man’s scrawl, the kind you see in Westerns, she swore she’d get the book published. And then she died. I’d be reluctant to publish it, even now, assuming I could find a copy.

What was it called?

You Are Your Own Hors D’Oeuvres. A key character was an early Martha Stewart type who toured Air-Force bases assuring the wives of officers that they did not have to worry about being bad hostesses. The thrust of her lecture was embodied in the title. The hero, Green Sabo, was a young lieutenant who tagged along and had adventures along the way.

Related to all this, Stern was a book that was in direct contrast to that first book and to the short stories I had written up to that time. I’m told that it was a departure from much of the era’s fiction. The New Yorker literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called it “the first true Freudian novel.” The only book that had a distant echo was Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. And, of course, John Cheever’s stories, which touched on suburban alienation in New England.

Do you think Stern influenced Revolutionary Road?

I doubt it, but I do know that Yates was aware of it. I knew him when I was working as an editor in the fifties and sixties, at the Magazine Management Co., which published men’s adventure magazines. He just showed up without explanation, this man with a handsome and ruined look, and attached himself to our little group—and then he disappeared. From time to time he’d call me from the Midwest to ask if I could get him a job. It annoyed me that he thought of me as a publisher or producer—who could do such things. Never once did he acknowledge that I was a writer. But I later learned that Stern was one of the few novels that he taught in his writing classes.

Yates had a difficult life. He was a major alcoholic, and he always struggled for money. In other words, your basic serious novelist.

It’s a shame that his life was so difficult. He was a brilliant writer, and a very funny one.

I agree. He was a gifted man—his writing was pitch-perfect—but he probably had a demon or two more than the rest of us. There was an incident in which a few writers and editors, including myself, went out for a drink, and Yates joined us. He drank so much that he collapsed and fell forward, hitting his head on the table. My secretary at the time, who hadn’t paid much attention to him, scooped him off the floor, and off they went together. I never saw either of them again. They ended up living together.

Tell me about your experience editing adventure magazines for the Magazine Management Co. What were some of the publications under the company’s umbrella?

There were more than a hundred, in every category—movies, adventure, confession, paperback books, Stan Lee’s comic books. I was responsible for about five magazines. One was called Focus—it was a smaller version of People, before that magazine was even published.

I also worked as editor of Swank. Every now and then the publisher, Martin Goodman, would appear at my office door and say, “I am throwing you another magazine.” Some others that were “thrown” at me included Male, Men, Man’s World, and True Action.

Swank was not the pornographic magazine we know today, I assume?

Entirely different, and I don’t say that with pride. Mr. Goodman—his own brother called him “Mr. Goodman”—told me to publish a “takeoff” on Esquire. This was difficult. I had a staff of one, the magazine was published on cheap paper, and it contained dozens of ads for automotive equipment and trusses, which are medical devices for hernia patients.

It wasn’t even softcore porn; it was flabby porn. There was no nudity, god forbid, but there were some pictures of women wearing bathing suits—not even bikinis—and winking. There were also stories from the trunk—deep in the trunk—of literary luminaries such as [novelist and playwright] William Saroyan and Graham Greene [The Power and the Glory] and Erskine Caldwell [the novel Tobacca Road]. When sales lagged, Mr. Goodman instructed me to “throw ’em a few ‘hot’ words.” “Nympho” was one that was considered to be arousing. “Dark triangle” would be put into play when the magazine was in desperate straits.

In doing research for this interview, I read older issues of those magazines and found many of the articles to be incredibly funny and entertaining.

We tried to keep to a high standard, within the limits of our pathetic budget. Some awfully good writers passed through the company. The adventure magazines had huge circulations and were mostly geared to blue-collar types, war veterans, young men—up to one million, with no paid subscribers. But their popularity faded when World War II vets grew older and more explicit magazines became readily available. The only reader I’ve ever actually met in person is my brother-in-law.

Were these types of magazines called “armpit slicks”?

Only by the competition. They were also called “jockstrap magazines.”

Believe it or not, there was a lot of status involved. Truemagazine considered itself the Oxford University Press of the group and sniffed at us. We, in turn, sniffed at magazines we felt were shoddier than ours. There was a lot of sniffing going on.

We published a variety of story types. People being nibbled to death by animals was one type: “I Battled a Giant Otter.” There was no explanation as to why these stories fascinated readers for many years.

“Scratch the surface” stories were also a favorite. These were tales about a sleepy little town where citizens innocently go about their business—girls eating ice cream, boys delivering newspapers—but “scratch the surface” of one of these towns and you’d find a sin pit, a cauldron of vice and general naughtiness.

The revenge theme was popular, as well—a soldier treated poorly in a prison camp, who would set out to track down his abuser when the war ended. And stories about G.I.’s stranded on Pacific islands were a hit among veterans—especially if the islands were populated by nymphos. “G.I. King of Nympho Island” was one title, I recall.

Sounds convincing. Did any of this happen in real life?

Mr. Goodman always asked the same question when we showed him a story: “Is it true?” My answer was, “Sort of.” He’d take a puff of a thin cigar and walk off, apparently satisfied. He was a decent, but frightening man.

Walter Kaylin, a favorite contributor, did a hugely popular story about a G.I. who is stranded on an island and becomes its ruler. He is carried about on the shoulders of a little man who has washed ashore with him. There wasn’t a nympho on the island, but it worked.

Who, by and large, wrote for these magazines?

Gifted, half-broken people—and I was one of them—who didn’t qualify for jobs at Time Life. I don’t think of them as being hired, so much as having washed ashore at the company. In terms of ability, I would match them against anyone who worked in publishing at the time. We just didn’t look like the cover models for GQ.

Walter Wager was a contributor, and he went on to write more than twenty-five suspense novels, including, under a pseudonym, the I Spy series. He had a prosthetic hand that he would unscrew and toss on my desk when he delivered a new story. Ernest Tidyman worked for the company; he wrote the Shaft books and the first two movies. Also, the screenplay for The French Connection.

In the early sixties, I was editing Swank when Leicester Hemingway—pronounced “Lester”—came barreling into my office. He was Ernest’s brother, and he looked more like Ernest than Ernest himself. He actually called Ernest “Ernesto.” He was bluff and cheerful and handsome in the Clark Gable mold. He had gotten off a fishing boat that very day and wanted me to publish one of his stories. How could I say no? This was as close as I’d ever get to the master.

He left. I read the story. The first line was “Hi, ho, me hearties.” It was totally out of sync with what we were doing, and it was unreadable. So, I was in the position of having to turn down Ernest Hemingway’s brother.

A few years later, I went to a party given by George Plimpton, and I met Mary Hemingway, the last of Ernest’s four wives. I told her that I’d had the nicest meeting with Leicester. “What a wonderful man he is.” “That swine!” she said. “How dare you mention his name in my presence!” Apparently, this highly decent man was considered the black sheep of the family—at least by Mary. And that’s really saying something.

How many stories did you have to purchase for all of your magazines in a typical month?

Fifty or sixty.

Per month?

Yes. I was an incredibly fast reader—a human scanner. My train commute to work took more than two hours each way, a total of close to five hours. I got a lot of work done on that train—much more than I do now with a whole day free and clear. I wrote most of Stern on that train.

My best move at this job was to hire Mario Puzo, later the author of The Godfather. The candidates for the writing job got winnowed down to Puzo and Arthur Kretchmer, who later became the decades-long editorial director of Playboy. I knew how good Kretchmer was, but I needed someone who could write tons of stories from Day One, so I hired Puzo in 1960 at the princely salary of $l50 a week. But there was an opportunity to dash off as many freelance stories as he wanted, thereby boosting his income considerably. He referred to this experience as his first “straight” job. When I called him at home to deliver the news, he kept saying in disbelief, “You mean it? You really mean it?”

Was Puzo capable of writing humor?

He was concerned about it. Now and then, at the height of his fame and prominence and commercial success, he would look off wistfully and ask, “How come Hollywood never calls me for comedy?”

There is some grisly humor in The Godfather. As for setting out consciously to write a funny book—I’m not sure. At the magazines, one of the perks as editor was that I got to choose the cartoons. Mario insisted he could have done a better job of it, but I never allowed him to try. It was the only disagreement we ever had.

What sort of stories would Puzo write for you?

You name it—war, women, desert islands, a few mini-Godfathers. At one point we ran out of World War II battles; how many times can you storm Anzio, Italy? So we had to make a few battles up. Puzo wrote one story, about a mythical battle, that drew piles of mail telling him he had misidentified a tank tread—but no one questioned the fictional battle itself.

There has never been a more natural storyteller. I suppose it was mildly sadistic of me, but I would show him an illustration for a thirty-thousand-word story that had to be written that night. He’d get a little green around the gills, but he’d show up the next morning with the story in hand—a little choppy, but essentially wonderful. He wrote, literally, millions of words for the magazines. I became a hero to him when I faced down the publisher and got him $750 for a story—a hitherto unheard-of figure.

Do you think this experience later helped when he wrote The Godfather?

He claimed that it did. If you look at his first novel, The Dark Arena [1955], you’ll see that the ability is there, but there is little in the way of forward motion. He said more than once that he began to learn about the elements of storytelling and narrative at our company.

I can’t resist telling you this: In l963, Mario approached me and somewhat sheepishly said he was moonlighting on a novel, and he wanted to try out the title. He said, “I want to call it The Godfather. What do you think?”

I told him that it didn’t do much for me. “Sounds domestic. Who cares? If I were you, I’d take another shot at it.”

A look of steel came over his face. He walked off without saying a word. He was usually mild-mannered, but the look was terrifying. Years later, he always denied being “connected,” but anyone who saw that look would have to wonder. The thing is, I was right about the title. It would have been a poor choice for any book other than The Godfather.

In the mid-sixties, after the sale of the book, I heard him on the phone to his publisher, asking for more money. They said, “Mario, we just gave you $200,000.” He said, “Two-hundred grand doesn’t last forever.”

Wonderful man—perhaps not the most intelligent person I’ve known, but surely the wisest. On one occasion, he saved my life.

How so?

I became friendly with the mobster “Crazy” Joe Gallo when he was released from prison in l971. The actor Jerry Orbach, who starred in one of my plays, Scuba Duba, was also a pal of Joey’s.

Joey had a lot of writer friends, but there were about fifty contracts out on his life. His “family” would hold weekly Sunday-night parties at the Orbach’s town house in Chelsea. I attended a few of these soirees, and I noticed that every twenty minutes or so Joey would go over to the window, pull back the drapes a bit, and peer outside.

I told Mario that I was attending these parties, and that I wanted to bring my wife and sons along. The food was great—Cuban cigars, everything quite lavish. The actor Ben Gazzara usually showed up, as did Neil Simon, Edsel Ford, who was Henry’s son, and a great many luminaries. Mario considered what I told him and said, “What you are doing is not intelligent.” And that was it. I was invited to join Joey and a group at Umbertos Clam House the very night he was gunned down. Mario played a part in my saying I had a previous engagement.

Let’s talk about the chracters that you tend to create: They are often very likable, even when they shouldn’t be. One character, Harry Towns, who’s been featured in numerous short stories and in two novels, is a failed screenwriter and father. He’s a drug addict who snorts coke the very day his mother dies. He sleeps with hookers. He takes his son to Las Vegas and basically forgets about him. And yet, in the end, Harry Town remains very funny and likable.

The late Bill Styron paid me a compliment that I treasure. He said, “All of your work has great humanity.” Maybe he said that to all of his contemporaries, but he seemed to mean it. I tried to make Harry, for all of his flaws, screamingly and hurtfully honest, and that may have provided some of whatever appeal he has. I’m a little smarter than Harry; he’s a bit more reckless than I am.

I have about a dozen voices that I could write—my Candide voice, the Noël Coward voice—but I keep coming back to Harry.

Your characters also tend to be quite lonely, but your life seems like it was anything but.

I’m not sure what other lives are like—but one of my favorite words is “adventure.” With that said, for a Jewish guy an adventure can be a visit to a strange delicatessen. I have plenty of friends, acquaintances, family, but much of the time I enjoy my own company. Most of writing is thinking, and you can’t do much of it in a crowd. Whenever I ducked out on a dinner with “the guys,” Mario would defend me by saying, “Bruce is a loner.”

Let’s talk about Hollywood.

Must we?

For someone who has a good amount of experience as a screenwriter—you’ve worked on numerous screenplays over the years, including Stir Crazy and Splash—you seem to have a healthy attitude toward the film industry.

I don’t know of anyone who ever had more fun out there than I did. The work was not especially appealing, but I did have a great time. In fact, I would get offended when I was interrupted on the tennis court and asked to do some work. I thought Hollywood was supposed to be about room service and pretty girls, orange juice and champagne. When I was tapped on the shoulder and asked to write a few scenes, I was slightly offended.

I did my work in Hollywood with professionalism and never took any money I hadn’t earned. But I could never tap into the same source I did when I wrote my books and stories—or plays, for that matter. Perhaps if I’d had some hunger to make movies at an earlier time I could have learned the camera, studied the machinery of moviemaking, and it would have been different. But for me, the gods at the time were Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner; there were girls in the Village who wouldn’t sleep with you if you had anything to do with movies: “You’d actually sell your book to the movies?” This was spoken with horror.

Also, screenwriting is the only form I know of in which the work is being shot down, so to speak, as you write it. It’s always going to be, “Fine, now call in the next hack.” If someone were to submit the shooting script of All About Eve—updated, of course—it would be considered a first draft—and a parade of writers would be called in to improve it.

There’s an old-fashioned phrase—“pride of authorship”—that I never felt on the West Coast. I’m sure Woody Allen feels it, and maybe only a few others. Still, for a time, I was delighted as a screenwriter to be a well-paid busboy. And, oh, those good times!

Anything you care to tell me about?

I played tennis on a court alongside Anthony Quinn. Back then, I was actually told that I resembled him. He kept glancing over at me. We both had shaky backhands.

I collided with Steve McQueen in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. A hair dryer fell out of my suitcase. Needless to say, it was embarrassing to have McQueen know that I used one.

And I spent one summer as a “sidekick” of Warren Beatty’s. My main function was to console his army of rejected girlfriends.

How did you even know Warren Beatty?

He loved Stern, and he was convinced he could play the central role in the film. I had to explain, patiently, that it was a bit of a reach. He was no schlub, and he was way too handsome.

We would go to the clubs in L.A., including a place called the Candy Store. I never saw anyone who could bowl over women the way he could. He was a sweet, charming man—gorgeous, of course—and he made you feel that you were the only one in the world that he cared about. I don’t mean to be a tease, but there were a few episodes I’d be uncomfortable mentioning—especially now that he’s a family man with all those kids. Maybe if we have a drink sometime.

I’ll take you up on that offer and release the details in Volume Two. Were you happy with the first version of The Heartbreak Kid, which was released in l972? It was based on your l966 story for Esquire, “A Change of Plan,” which can be found in The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman.

I thought the first version was wonderful. I’m permitted to say that because I didn’t write the screenplay—Neil Simon did. It actually sounded like something I might have written. Simon said that in writing it, he pretended he was me—although we’d never met.

What did you think of the 2007 remake, starring Ben Stiller?

I thought the first part—the revelation about the wife—was hysterically funny. The rest, for me, tapered off a bit. They had a tough act to follow, so all things considered. . . .

By the way, I read a story that I just have to assume is not true: that actress Natalie Wood worked as your secretary. Was this before she became famous?

No, afterward. It was either my first or second trip to Hollywood, and I needed a secretary. Or the very least, it was assumed I needed one.

The producer Ray Stark [The Sunshine Boys, Smokey and the Bandit] said, “I’ll find you a good one, don’t worry.” I went over to his beach house and there, sitting by the pool, was Natalie Wood. Stark said, “Here is your new secretary.”

As a joke?

I said, “That’s very amusing, Ray. But this is Natalie Wood, from Splendor in the Grass, every boy’s fantasy.”

She looked up and said, “No, I really am your secretary.”

She was between marriages to Robert Wagner and seemed dispirited. I don’t think she was being offered major roles, and a shrink might have suggested that she try something different. This is self-serving, but I’d seen her at a party the night before and we had maybe exchanged glances. Who knows, maybe she liked me. What’s the lyric—I can dream, can’t I? In any case, she was my secretary for about a week.

Each morning, I’d pick her up in Malibu and drive her back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, all the while thinking, I’m sitting here with Natalie fucking Wood—and she’s my secretary. It was difficult staying on the highway.

Can you imagine a Hollywood actress doing that these days?

Unlikely.

Another story that I’d like verified: Were you once the one-armed push-up champ at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side New York restaurant that’s a gathering place for writers?

Yes.

How many did you do?

Who knows? I was probably too loaded to count.

Were you surrounded by a crowd of famous authors, cheering you on?

Not really. But we would have various athletic contests, generally beginning at four in the morning. There were sprints down Second Avenue, for example. It got more macho as the evening progressed.

I remember [the film director and screenwriter] James Toback trying to perform some push-ups and running out of steam. The restaurant’s owner, Elaine Kaufman, said, “Put a broad under him.”

You knew Terry Southern quite well, didn’t you?

We were good friends, particularly in his late years.

Do you think Terry’s contribution was important to Dr. Strangelove? Stanley Kubrick claimed that Terry’s role wasn’t as significant as many people imagined.

I would trust Terry’s account in this area. He was always collaborating and getting into awful squabbles about credits. He was a generous man and easily taken advantage of—picked apart, really—by the wolves.

How does a writer like Terry Southern age—where you always have to produce work that has the capacity to astonish?

Some keep it up. Some fade. Others simply push on. Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Terry had an especially tough time throughout the last decades. Had the culture changed? Was he out of sync? There is always that worry.

It’s a shame. He had the most unique voice of any writer I knew. He was a brave man in print, but vulnerable in life—no doubt a familiar story.

I once leased an apartment in New York that had an S&M room. Terry saw the black walls, the mirrored ceiling, the whips and chains stored in the closet. A room that had his name on it. He said, “Grand Guy Bruce, would you mind terribly if I crashed in here for a bit?” I said fine. It was three in the morning.

I then realized that painters were coming at around seven in the morning to ready the room for my young son Drew, who was moving in for awhile. They were going to re-paint the all-black walls.

One of the painters said, “We can’t work. There’s a man sleeping in that room.” I said, “Don’t worry about it. Just paint around him.” Terry fell asleep in this Marquis de Sade room, and woke up hours later with photos of Mickey Mantle on the walls. He didn’t say a word, just shook it off and went on his way.

You leased an apartment with an S&M room?

It was a lovely place, had a great terrace, lots of space. It just happened to have a guest room with all that bondage equipment.

What was Terry doing in the room before he fell asleep?

He’d had a big night. Let’s put it that way.

Do you think Terry wasn’t respected in the latter part of his career because he wasn’t producing “quality lit”?

Terry is the one who invented that phrase. He was an easygoing man, contented, amused by life. I don’t think he ever felt bitter or resentful with the way things turned out in his career. I know he had grave financial difficulties toward the end of his life—but he wasn’t a complainer.

He was respected throughout his life by the people who counted, so to speak. And there are all these new readers coming along. His books and films exist, ready to be enjoyed.

You’ve written eight novels and more than one-hundred short stories. After all these years, is writing still difficult for you?

Actually, I’ve written more than two-hundred short stories—half of them are languishing in an archive.

But god yes, writing is still difficult and always will be. I’m suspicious of writers who go whistling cheerfully to the computer.

Are there any writers’ tricks you’ve learned over the years that have made the process a bit easier?

Not really. I’m hesitant to begin a short story unless I know the last line, or a close approximation of it. I’m always apprehensive when I begin work each day. After a lifetime of this, I still can’t get it clear that the actual process of writing tends to erase the fear.

I’m not the first to point out how essential it is to, on occasion, discard a favorite passage in the interest of pushing on with a good story. Isaac Bashevis Singer said that the wastebasket is a writer’s best friend. He also said that a writer can produce ten fine novels, but it doesn’t mean that the next one will be any good. It mystifies me that after a lifetime of writing, it would still be like this. I should be able to solve any problem—but it doesn’t work that way. Each story or book presents a new challenge. That’s probably a good thing, though. It keeps me on my toes.

I wonder if your readers understand how difficult it is to write a short story. Even though the story is smaller in scope, everything has to be pristine.

I don’t feel that a short story is necessarily smaller in scope than a novel. I read a short story by John O’Hara recently that has more dimension packed into its three pages than many novels.

To go back to your question—in archery terms—you either hit the bull’s-eye in a short story or it fails. I sometimes think there’s an invisible fuse that runs through a good story and, at the end, it ignites. There is no margin for error. You can’t take time out to admire the scenery, as you can with a novel. Norman Mailer called the short story “the jeweler’s art,” which I think is apt.

The short story is the stepchild of American literature. Publishers—and many writers—think of it as a step in the direction of a novel, not an end in itself. Sort of like saying the runner who excels in the l00-yard dash isn’t much of an athlete.

One last point: I think many of our acclaimed novelists do their best work with the short story: Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates.

Do you still write every day?

Yes—or at the very least, I worry about it.

I do some teaching, and I put the emphasis on focus, as well as the importance of making every sentence count. Francine Prose once quoted a friend as saying this requires, “putting every word on trial for its life.” I believe this. You can read the entire works of a major writer and never find a bad—or unnecessary—sentence.

Do you have any specific instructions for those students who want to write stories with humor?

I’d suggest they stay away from irony or satire; there’s very little money in it. You’re likely to wind up with reviews—like some of mine—that say, “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” There’s no such question in Dickens. Most readers would prefer to know exactly where they stand, where the author stands, and how to respond. Ergo, no irony permitted.

I also like the writer Grace Paley’s single piece of advice: “Keep a low overhead.”

As for television writers, in comedy or drama, there’s a simple rule: Include the line “We have to talk,” even if your characters have done nothing but for half an hour. Producers love that line. Writers are brought in and paid a fortune for their ability—and willingness—to write that line.