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Chicago Review, the Beats, and Big Table: 60 Years On

Cover of Big Table 1, 1959.
Preface

This year marks sixty years since the publication of the first issue of Big Table, the journal started by Irving Rosenthal, Paul Carroll, and other staff members of Chicago Review after the University of Chicago suppressed the Winter 1959 issue of CR. We gather a wide array of materials here to commemorate the anniversary, and to look back to an important episode in American literary history. The Big Table story, and CR’s history leading up to it, is told in detail in former Editor Eirik Steinhoff’s essay “The Making of Chicago Review: The Meteoric Years (1946–1958)”; this was published in CR’s sixtieth anniversary issue, and appears in an expanded, revised form here in this feature. Rosenthal and Carroll began publishing the Beats in 1958; some of the correspondence between the editors and Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs is included in this feature. Excerpts from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch appeared in two issues in 1958 (12.1 and 12.3); a journalist for the Chicago Daily News responded with an article titled “Filthy Writing on the Midway”, in which he called on the trustees, no less, of the university to “take a long hard look at what is being circulated” under their sponsorship.

They did so, and soon Rosenthal was told by the Dean of the Humanities Division that the next issue had to be “completely innocuous.” Rosenthal called a staff meeting, the notes from which are included in this feature, in which two options were considered: refusing to comply with the strictures, or electing “a new editor of the Review who could publish in good conscience a next issue which would be acceptable to the University.” Understanding the risk that was posed to the future existence of CR in pursuing the first option, the second route was chosen by vote. Hyung Woong Pak was elected the new editor, and went on to edit several excellent issues. The rest of the editors resigned, taking with them the manuscripts of work by Burroughs, Kerouac, and Edward Dahlberg that were to appear in the next issue of CR, with which they started Big Table.

It was a principled editorial stand against censorship, and a shameful episode in the history of the administration of the University of Chicago, which has now made a brand out of championing “free expression.” The affair sparked off internal controversy, including an investigation by a Special Committee of the Student Government (selections of the report are included here), and the Chicago Maroon, the University’s student newspaper, covered the matter in detail. But it also became a matter of national debate—a number of clippings are included below—and was a part of a larger process of the triumph of Beat literature over what were perhaps the last attempts to suppress literary work in the US through the charge of “obscenity.” After suppression by the University, Big Table was confiscated by the US Post Office. The ACLU took up the case for the publication and won, Joel J. Sprayregen, counsel for the ACLU, claiming that “this is one of the most important censorship decisions” since James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso gave a poetry reading in Chicago as a fundraiser to help establish Big Table (the press release is included here). A snide article covered the event in Time magazine: “With the crashing madness of a Marx Brothers scene run in reverse, the Beatniks read their poetry, made their pitch for money for a new Beatnik magazine, The Big Table, and then stalked out.” This chauvinism from the literary establishment elicited a classic Beat response from the poets:

Your account of our incarnation in Chicago was cheap kicks for you who have sold your pens for Money and have no Fate left but idiot mockery of the Muse that must work in poverty in an America already doomed by materialism. You suppressed knowledge that the Chicago Review’s winter issue was censored by the University of Chicago; that the editors had resigned to publish the material under the name Big Table; that we offered our bodies and Poetry to raise money to help publish the magazine, and left Chicago in the penury in which we had come. […] You are an instrument of the Devil and crucify America with your lies; you are the war-creating Whore of Babylon and would be damned were you not mercifully destined to be swallowed by Oblivion with all created things.

The first issue of Big Table was a success, and Paul Carroll would go on to edit four more numbers, and publish several books under the imprint of Big Table Books. Rosenthal took the opportunity of the publication to tell his version of the story in an “Editorial,” which we include here. Not mincing words, Rosenthal refers to the administration’s actions as blatant censorship, writing that Lawrence Kimpton, the Chancellor at the time, “does not want free expression at the University of Chicago; he wants money.”

The episode left its mark on former editors, and has been passed down as a defining moment in the history of CR. As we approach the journal’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2021, we’ve been collecting memoirs from former editors and staff members in an experiment in collective self-memorialization and self-historicization. To round out the feature, three memoirs are published here: one from Barbara Goldowsky, née Pitschel, who joined the staff under Rosenthal, resigning as Managing Editor; one from Edward Morin, who joined the staff at the same time as Rosenthal, and went on to serve in several editorial positions, moving on just before the Big Table fracas; and one from former Editor Peter Michelson, who joined the staff under Pak’s editorship just after the events of 1959. Together, the three memoirs recount the period leading up to the suppression ordeal, the event itself, and the aftermath.

Happily, the period of University oversight of CR passed, as did the period of attempts to suppress the Beats and other writers for obscenity. What has lived on is the writing itself, a testament, among other things, to editorial insight and courage.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to our editorial interns Alexis Franciszkowicz and Wahid Al Mamun, who spent much of their summer in the Chicago Review archive at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, without which labor this feature would not be possible. Our current editorial interns, Cynthia Huang, Caitlyn Klum, Sam Mellins, and, again, Alexis Franciszkowicz, have helped to prepare this web publication, and we’re very thankful. Thanks to Eirik Steinhoff for his patience and care in preparing the updated version of his essay published in this feature. Finally, our gratitude is due to Eileen Ielmini, Kathleen Feeney, Daniel Meyers, and all of the staff at the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library for their generous assistance in preparing the materials for this feature.

– The Editors