Nonfiction | December 18, 2023

When English Departments Were Actually Hip . . . for Me, Anyway 

Peter LaSalle 

 A fine spring afternoon in 1981, and I was heading with the writer Dave Ohle across the University of Texas campus—all handsome Mediterranean architecture, the buff stone buildings with red terra-cotta roofs, no shortage of fountains and blossoming flowers in freshly turned loam gardens, too—on our way to a university graphic designer’s office. We were delivering some ideas for a poster announcing an upcoming campus reading by Terry Southern, coauthor of what had been an almost mandatory 1960s experience, the bawdily satiric novel Candy.  

We spoke with the designer as he sat there on a stool at his drafting board and listened to our input for the poster’s artwork. 

Wearing jeans, T-shirt, and a newsboy cap, the laid-back way about him maybe characteristic of his native New Orleans, Ohle told the designer, “Well, Southern is best known for the novel Candy, about an innocent, very pretty teenage girl, an early hippie, you might say, who a string of men are pining after. Also, he worked on the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove.” 

The designer nodded. 

“Candy is sort of a take-off on Voltaire’s Candide,” I put in, “and there’s another book of his, Red Dirt Marijuana.”  

The designer was young and wore thick-lens glasses; he nodded again. 

Ohle’s office in the English department was right across the hallway from mine, and a few days later he wanted me to see the result as soon as he picked up the mock-up from the printer. We were both young ourselves, had gotten our faculty jobs through more or less the back door, if not the basement bulkhead door. Neither had a PhD, by any means, not even an actual MFA, just some published fiction to qualify us for that still relatively new phenomenon on campuses at the time, creative writing professors. The size of a movie poster, the thin cardboard sheet showed a drawing of a lovely naked hippie girl seen from behind and wearing only a floppy sun hat as she walked with a string of balloons in hand toward a giant mushroom cloud, star-leafed marijuana sprigs decorating the periphery; on the white background, the time and place of the public reading were given. A sweet job, indeed, I suppose we agreed. 

Or sweet until another few days after that. Apparently, word had come from the office of the dean of liberal arts—the dean himself displeased, if not seriously angered—that printing be halted and—this actually happened—a pair of dark panties be stamped onto the girl’s bare bottom on each and every sheet in the stack before any distribution.