King of writerly cool

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At the height of Sixties hipdom, no one was ever as hip as Terry Southern. Creator of darkly satirical novels like The Magic Christian and the infamous Candy, a sexedup Sixties version of Voltaire's Candide, as well as the co-scriptwriter of two very different films that encompassed the rise and fall of the Sixties revolution, Dr Strangelove and Easy Rider, Southern's status as a king of writerly cool has long since been assured.

And then, as if to confirm his position at the pinnacle of counter-culture, there's Southern standing in his Ray-Bans at the shoulder of Edgar Allan Poe on Peter Blake's record sleeve for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band.

Yet the way in which the Texan-born writer achieved alternative-cult status relied upon traditional means. Having fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Southern gained an English degree on the GI Bill and then spent five years in Parisian cafès in a drink and drug-fuelled pursuit of hazy literary aspirations. During these wandering hours, however, the American fl?neur met and made friends with everybody from Sartre, Genet and Cocteau to fellow exiles such as James Baldwin and Mason Hoffenberg, the crabby heroin addict with whom he wrote Candy.

With its gallery of jaded monsters, anti-heroes or "preverts" [sic] swirling around a jailbaitjuvenile heroine, Candy marked a switch in America from post-war innocence into a more knowing irony and it became Southern's calling card when he returned to America in 1953. Indeed, it was because Peter Sellers gave a copy of the novel to Stanley Kubrick that Southern was asked by the reclu-director to work with him on the Dr Strangelove script in the autumn of 1962.

After contributing to such a critical as well as commercial success, Southern had the pick of any upcoming Hollywood scripts. Usually, the Texan existentialist chose well. He co-wrote The Cincinnati Kid, and then his updated spaceage version of Candy came to the screen in the form of Jane Fonda's Barbarella, but he was also induced by his old friend, Peter Sellers, to add some lustre to the script of the cataclysmic Bond movie, Casino Royale.

Such a rich life cries out for a vivid, dramatic account of the vital moments in Southern's story, as well as a reasoned re-evaluation of the writer's work; but Lee Hill's book, the first full-length biography of Southern, fails on both fronts.

Hill's determination to keep to the facts never allows room for Southern's outrageous wit and love of anarchy. What's more, Hill fails to point out that Southern's success as a writer of black comedy carried within it the reason for his later failure and loss of cultural currency: because he changed America's taste and made the outrageous and irreverent increasingly acceptable and then even routine in TV shows like Saturday Night Live and its offshoots, Southern also made himself increasingly irrelevant.

Such a curiously unenquiring approach to biography might be more acceptable if there was a shortage of material or records of important moments in Southern's life. But even a cursory look at other sources supplies dramatic twists and turns that Hill has either overlooked or not bothered with.

Most notable is Hill's exclusion of Southern's own account as troubleshooter and co-scriptwriter for Kubrick on Dr Strangelove. But, even more crucially, Hill fails to provide a full account of Dennis Hopper's and Peter Fonda's refusal to give Southern full credit for or a percentage of Easy Rider's stupendous profits for his essential contribution both to the script and to raising finance for the film's production.

As Southern said of his collaborators: "Neither of them are writers. They can't even write a f***ing letter." In the spirit of Southern's splendid savagery, the same could almost be said of his biographer. But what is certain is that Southern's words will outlive this life.