Lessons in Censorship
Recently McQuade heard much more. Now an editor at a small press in Minneapolis, she set out to interview prominent writers who’d passed through the university, a project that eventually took the form of the recent book An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, a collection of reminiscences.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Paul Carroll was poetry editor of the Review. After he and other senior editors resigned in protest, he helped found and then ran Big Table, which published the long, steamy excerpt from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch that the Review could not. The U.S. Post Office promptly held Big Table to be pornographic, but when federal judge Julius J. Hoffman upheld the magazine’s right to publish, a new day of liberty dawned in American letters.
Novelist Richard Stern remains on the U. of C. faculty. He and Saul Bellow are the ones who came up with the idea for An Unsentimental Education, and it was Stern who asked McQuade, a former student, to conduct the interviews. Back in ’58 he was the young head of the faculty committee advising the Review. In Gerald E. Brennan’s account he’s an ambiguous figure who ultimately serves the purposes of Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton.
Big Table is long gone. The Review survives. “It’s very well run at the moment,” says McQuade. “David Nicholls has been the editor the last five years. He’s a graduate student in English. They’ve done a lot of special themes, one about contemporary writing in India that was sold to Penguin and published as a book.”
“Neither paper has any journalistic reason to print this,” Donald Graham, publisher of the Post, insisted. That of course is flatly untrue. You’re a sick man, Unabomber, but I suppose hypocrisy registers on your radar. Your denunciations of civilization as we know it have struck a certain chord. Among the public there’s the modest clamor for more that justifies diagramless crossword puzzles, Ziggy, the Tribune’s Online NewsExtra service, and many things editors put in their papers.
The papers don’t just convey the world–they fashion it, they tidy up, they filter out. Consider what the editor of the American Journalism Review told the Chicago Tribune when the Post printed your diatribe: “It sets a very dangerous precedent, particularly since there is so much anger out there, with people going to such a great extent to express their rage. This is like turning over a newspaper at gunpoint.”
