Chicago Review poster for Zen Buddhism lectures.
When I joined the Chicago Review in the autumn of 1957, I was studying political science and history in preparation for a career in journalism. The two years I spent on staff turned out to be tumultuous for the Review—replete with accusations of obscenity, tabloid notoriety, cries of censorship, battles against the suppression of avant-garde writers, and the eventual resignation of half a dozen editors, including me.
I was Barbara Pitschel then—an immigrant, not yet a US citizen. In 1950 I had come to Chicago from Germany with my mother and my younger brother. After completing four years at Senn High School on the North Side, I attended Wilbur Wright Junior College, where I majored in journalism and worked on the student newspaper. The University of Chicago awarded me a tuition scholarship designated for “a deserving foreign-born student.” My family, thrilled as I was by this splendid opportunity, moved to the South Side so that I could live at home but be close to the campus. This arrangement saved us the cost of a dormitory room. It also enabled me to work after school and contribute to the family income. I found a part-time job in the library’s bindery and repair department.
I loved the political history courses that my advisor had recommended. I studied hard and read every textbook in the syllabus, which left me little time for literature. While buying a required text at the bookstore one day, I leafed through a copy of CR and was fascinated. I was impressed with the look and feel of the journal: the artwork on the cover, the quality paper, and the crisp printing. I was an avid reader of newspapers, but this elegant publication offered a glimpse into another world—a world of poems and stories, essays and book reviews.
“Is this published here?” I asked the salesclerk.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a quarterly run by students; they feature new writing. It’s seventy-five cents.”
I paid for my book and the magazine. Looking over the Review’s table of contents, I realized with shock that I did not recognize a single name. Here was new writing, indeed, and one immigrant who needed to catch up on contemporary American literature!
In high school and at Wright College I had read the classic poets taught in English classes: Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Longfellow. I had read works by Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway. The most recently published fiction I had read was Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar. My German childhood had familiarized me with the heroes and villains of the Brothers Grimm and the exploits of Wilhelm Busch’s bad boys, Max and Moritz. Alice in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer were strangers. I knew about Stefan Zweig and Bertolt Brecht, but not about Nelson Algren or Philip Roth.
At the time, I spoke and wrote English fluently although I could still get tripped up by colloquialisms. My knowledge of grammar and spelling was good enough to have earned me a position as a copy editor on the Wright College newspaper. I loved and admired the power and beauty of my adopted language. I felt a strong attraction to writing as an art form. If the editors of the Review would have me, I thought, I would join the staff.
After studying my copy of the magazine, I wrote a letter to the Review, asking for an interview. I explained my interest in journalism and my experience at the Wright College newspaper. A short time later, I was invited to meet with Irving Rosenthal, the editor, at the Review’s headquarters in the Reynolds Club. I had never been inside the Reynolds Tower; I pictured an office suite as grand as the imposing Gothic exterior of the building.
The red carpet and the dark oak paneling of the staircase to the second floor were as elegant as I had imagined. The large office I entered had no carpet. Several massive desks stood against the walls; bookcases held stacks of magazines and boxes filled with folders. Some of the desktops overflowed with papers; some were organized, with open-topped cartons full of bulgy envelopes standing on them.
Irving Rosenthal, a lithe, dark-haired young man with huge brown eyes, was alone in the office.
“Welcome,” he said. “People come and go at different times, so there’s no one else for you to meet right now. Take a seat; let’s chat.”
This job interview was so relaxed it made me nervous. Perhaps the Review did not need any additional staff at the moment. Would I be sent on my way after a few minutes? I began talking about my political science studies and about my ambition to become a reporter.
“But I want to learn about literature as well—I mean writing as a creative art,” I explained. “I haven’t read much for pleasure. Required readings take a lot of time.”
“I know,” the editor smiled. “If you want to join us, there’s a box of submissions over there that we’re reading and commenting on. When we’ve all gone over them, we have a staff meeting and the editors make decisions. You’ll like our poetry editor, Paul Carroll. He’s very hip—in touch with all the new voices.”
“Do you mean I can work on the Review?”I asked, not quite believing I had been accepted so casually.
“Yes, if you have the interest. It’s all voluntary, you know. No pay, no course credits. It’s a great group of people, though.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rosenthal,” I said. “Thank you. I’m more than happy!”
“Call me Irving. Come in whenever you have a couple of hours. Before you start reading manuscripts, look over the back issues; familiarize yourself with what we publish. When you’re ready, the submissions are in the envelopes the authors send us. There’s a sheet of paper for comments in each one. Write your thoughts on that and keep everything together so the manuscripts don’t get mixed up.”
“Yes. I’ll be very careful,” I said. I felt like an inexperienced swimmer who had just jumped into the English Channel determined to make it to France. Without knowing the crawl stroke.
I became very busy. I remained conscientious about my course work and put in my usual hours at the bindery; my self-imposed effort to understand contemporary literature was completely engrossing. I spent little time with my family. After dinner at home, I prepared class assignments, collapsing into bed late and rising early the next morning.
At the Review, I learned that Irving Rosenthal was a doctoral student in Human Development. I could not imagine when he pursued his studies, because he seemed to spend twenty-three out of twenty-four hours at the office. I met Paul Carroll, the poetry editor, and six or seven other staff members, most of them graduate students. Paul, a tall, genial man, was older than the rest of us. He was a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a published poet. He and Irving, a native of San Francisco, regularly corresponded with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other members of the group called the Beats.
I had never heard of these authors, and I was relieved when other students confessed that they had not either.
“What does ‘beat’ mean?” I asked Irving.
“Kerouac came up with ‘Beat Generation.’ He says they’re not the lost generation or the found generation—they’re just here,just beat. You can also think of it as be-at, meaning open to the moment—beatific,” Irving replied, and he added, “We’re going to have a bunch of their work in the next issues.”
I did my best to be open to the moment. As I read poems by Philip Whalen, I noticed references to Zen Buddhism. I knew that Buddhists were a major religious community, but I did not know what Zen was. Hesitant about asking too many questions, I waited for enlightenment. The poems were written in free verse—so free that in some, the words seemed to have been poured onto the page, landing wherever there was room. Careful rereading did reveal rhythmic phrasing and there were evocative images of nature. These poets lived in California, where I had never been. I wondered whether the open form of the poems reflected the spirit of the place. The spaces between the poems’ words looked like deep breaths.
As decisions were made about the forthcoming issue, Irving asked me to help with copy editing. I happily agreed. It was a task I could do with confidence and feel useful.
I read through back issues and incoming manuscripts and gradually became familiar with the new writing the Review championed. Irving assured me that Allen Ginsberg would soon be acknowledged as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. As for the classics, my education was helped along by conversations with staff members who had read more widely than I had. They were gracious about my lack of background. When I admitted that I did not know who cardinal John Henry Newman was, Ed Morin, one of the editors, explained the importance of the nineteenth-century divine and poet.
Still, I felt very much at sea when asked for an opinion on the literary merits of the current contributions.
The feature titled “From San Francisco” was published in the spring of 1958 (CR 12.1). It represented the first exposure in a major national journal, except for some work that had appeared in the Evergreen Review, for poems by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and others. It also contained an excerpt from William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The issue was well received.
Our next project was another themed issue, devoted to writings about Zen Buddhism—a discipline that had captivated Irving but was unfamiliar to most Americans at the time. On a balmy spring day, as I was walking across the quadrangle toward the Reynolds Tower, I heard a voice from above.
“ZEN!”
I looked up. Framed in an open window on the second floor stood Irving, arms outflung, repeating, “Zen!”
“Zen!” I shouted back, adopting the new ritual greeting.
This issue, with its lovely Japanese cover art, sold well, increasing the Review’s circulation considerably. That summer, zori sandals, not yet mass-marketed as flip-flops, appeared on campus.
For me, summer 1958 brought the fulfillment of a dream. Early in the year, my advisor had told me that when I completed my current courses, I would meet the requirements for a B.A. degree. At the end of June, I received my diploma, granted by the Political Science department. It was a proud moment for my family. We had reached a milestone in our journey toward the American Dream. We were settled; we were not rich, but we were financially independent; education had proved to be achievable, thanks to perseverance and a good deal of luck.
Before I had joined the Review, I had planned to look for a job at a newspaper immediately after graduation. Now that time had come, but I did not want to leave the University. I was enthralled by my new world of language and writing. I felt the excitement of the literary revolution that was unfurling before my eyes and I wanted to be part of it, not an outside observer. I hoped it would be possible to take graduate courses in the fall. My scholarship covered tuition for two years, but I had completed my degree in three semesters. With my mother’s agreement and permission from the department chair, I changed my major to comparative literature, with a minor in German. I would start courses in the fall semester.
Meanwhile, it was summer and, as I had done every summer since high school, I sought and found a paying job with a commercial magazine working on the weekly entertainment listings. It was tedious; so different from my work at the Review, which was anything but.
Irving Rosenthal planned to include another section ofNaked Lunch in the Autumn 1958 issue, along with works by Philip Whalen, John Logan, David Riesman, and other previously published authors. I knew little about Burroughs. I had not seen the unedited manuscript of the excerpt that had run in the previous issue. Paul Carroll and Irving had prepared that for publication. Irving asserted that Burroughs’s novel was “raw” but brilliant.
I looked at the manuscript. It was a mess. Typed on flimsy onionskin paper, the text was littered with erasures, crossed-out phrases, overwritten words, and miscellaneous comments in the margins. I could find few pages that were numbered and when I began to read, I asked if the pages were in sequence. “Not always,” Irving answered.
The story, if it was a story—I couldn’t seem to find a plot—was a nightmare. Drug pushers, boy prostitutes, sadistic doctors, and desperate addicts scrambled through episodes set in the slums of Tangiers. It was a dark, dark world, slashed by lightning bolts of gallows humor. The characters were like tortured figures painted by the gloomiest of the German Expressionists.
Naked Lunch was the exact opposite of the Zen writings I had begun to like, I thought. Instead of celebrating the beauty of selfless emptiness, this author plunged the reader into frenzy and despair, graphic violence and predatory sex. Instead of being invited into the calm of introspection, the reader was assaulted by obsessive, chaotic sensuality expressed in vulgar language. It was astonishing that Irving could find these vastly different styles equally attractive and meritorious. I helped him with the monstrous task of copy editing, thinking that this revolution was wide-ranging indeed.
The Autumn 1958 issue was published in September, with Naked Lunch prominently advertised on the cover. At first there was no adverse reaction. We continued to put together the Winter issue, which would contain even more Burroughs and work by Kerouac and Edward Dahlberg. But then, in late October, a Chicago Daily News columnist exploded into a tirade.
“Filthy Writing on the Midway,” blared the headline of Jack Mabley’s column. “Do you ever wonder what happens to little boys who scratch dirty words on railroad underpasses? They go to college and scrawl obscenities in the college literary magazine,” Mabley continued.
Without naming the Review, the columnist berated the University of Chicago for publishing “one of the foulest collections of printed filth” he had ever seen. The editors, whom he called “juveniles,” were not only “beatniks,” but “evidence of the deterioration of our American society…dangerous.”
Mabley concluded that the editors were too “immature and irresponsible” to be blamed. However, he strongly recommended that the trustees of the university take a long, hard look at what was being published. Not surprisingly, Chancellor Kimpton was alerted to do just that in short order.
In November, the Chicago Tribune picked up the story and ran an article and a photo in its Sunday magazine supplement on November 9.
“Chicago Review is midwest outlet for writings of beat generation,” the caption reads. Irving Rosenthal, who had grown a beard that made him look like a Russian saint, is shown in the foreground, hugging a copy of the controversial magazine to his chest. Eila Kokkinen, the art editor, and I—by now the managing editor—stand behind Irving. We look quietly defiant, with a hint of amusement. Also in the background is essay editor Hyung Woong Pak, a serious Korean student. In front of him, Doris Nieder, the editorial assistant, smiles impishly.
The Tribune article’s main point was that beatniks were a nuisance, but fortunately, most of them were already leaving Chicago and were on their way to the West Coast. The Furies, in the form of outraged trustees, a nervous administration, and a faculty advisor who had so far paid scant attention to us, were upon us within a week. Chancellor Kimpton told Irving and the staff that the Winter 1959 issue we had laid out could not be published as it stood. We could go ahead only if we removed the works by Burroughs and all the other “offensive” material and published a magazine that “a sixteen-year-old girl could read without blushing.”
The alternative, we were told, was to resign.
“Blatant censorship!” Irving and Paul responded. Others added, “Suppression. Denial of free speech.”
Irving Rosenthal, Paul Carroll, Charles Horwitz, Eila Kokkinen, Doris Nieder, and I resigned. Pak felt that he could produce an innocuous issue and chose to stay on as editor. I had been friendly with Pak; we had gone to the theater together and he had taught me to write my name in Korean characters. I wish I had not sneered that he was an opportunist. I should have remembered how hard it was to be a foreigner trying to make your way in an alien land.
The group of us that had resigned had no intention of letting the University bury the contents of our Winter 1959 issue. We did not keep quiet about its suppression. We made as much noise as possible, alerting the Maroon and the student government, as well as local and national media. Our message was that the University had engaged in censorship—an action unworthy of an institution of higher learning renowned for its liberalism. We decided to found a new magazine and to publish all of the works we had selected for the Review in our alternative forum. The new magazine became Big Table, which had to fight and win its own battles against censorship and seizure by the US Post Office.
I finished my semester of comparative literature courses and left the university in the early spring of 1959. By mid-March, when Big Table’s hugely successful first issue appeared, I had moved to Washington, D.C., bringing with me an enduring love of literature and a passion for writing.