Charles Simic had a hell of a day yesterday. Not only was he named Poet Laureate, an honorary post that includes a $35,000/year stipend, but he was also announced as this year’s winner of the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, which brings with it a somewhat more substantial $100,000 prize.

It wasn’t until I read the NYT article announcing Simic’s laureateship that I learned Simic’s first poems were published in Chicago Review when he was 21. We went back yesterday to find the issue, from Winter 1959, and while I was looking it over, it struck me: that issue should never have been published.

That’s no dig at Simic. It is, rather, a recognition that that Winter 1959 issue of CR was really the second Winter 1959 issue that had been prepared for publication. The first was suppressed by the University of Chicago in a censorship scandal; when the contents of that issue eventually saw the light of day, they did so only under a new title.

The story starts in 1958. CR had been gathering steam under the stewardship of editor Irving Rosenthal and poetry editor Paul Carroll; they had published an important issue on San Francisco poets with a preface by Jack Kerouac, and their Summer 1958 Zen issue collected favorable notices from The Nation and Time. (Not all were pleased: CR’s faculty advisor, the novelist Richard Stern, told Rosenthal not to “turn [Chicago Review] into a magazine for San Francisco rejects,” and said of the Beat work they’d published: “This is as if garbage had garbage.”)

The suppressed issue was assembled by Rosenthal and Carroll and was supposed to include “Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac, “The Sorrows of Priapus” and “The Garment of Ra” by Edward Dahlberg, and three poems by Gregory Corso. Most significantly, it was also to include “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs. CR had published excerpts of Naked Lunch in two previous issues; the manuscript had reached CR by way of Allen Ginsberg, who wrote Carroll:

Only one unpublished in US so far is Burroughs who is equal to Jack K. in prose strength. […] You would do a great service if you can find a place to introduce Burroughs. […] He’s in Tangiers. Most of his work is too raw but I asked him to send something printable by us censor standards.

But things took an ugly turn after the Autumn 1958 issue came out. Jack Mabley, then a columnist at the Chicago Daily News, attacked Burroughs, and the issue, under the headline “Filthy Writing on the Midway.” “Do you ever wonder what happens to little boys who scratch dirty words on railroad underpasses?” he wrote. “They go to college and scrawl obscenities in the college literary magazine.” (Mabley, who kept a blog, died last year at 90.)

As former CR editor Eirik Steinhoff (whose excellent essay [PDF] is my source for this history) puts it:

Mabley’s obscenity charge couldn’t have come at a more inopportune moment. [U of C. Chancellor Murray] Kimpton’s controversial urban renewal plan for Hyde Park (the University’s immediate neighbornood), cosponsored by Mayor Richard J. Daley, was almost complete, but needed the approval of the City Council. Mabley’s spotlight on CR threatened the already delicate balance between the University, the City of Chicago, and the Catholic Church (which had been scrutinizing the plan and making both University and City squirm). As it happened, the infamous renewal plan was approved in early November 1958, and it’s tempting to speculate that CR’s suppression was a byproduct of that process.

A letter Kimpton described as being “of a somewhat more thoughtful kind than I have been receiving” said:

Obscenity is not just dirty words. It is action that took place “off scene” in the theatres of antiquity. It is the vulgarity and ugliness of real life which a society that still has a respect for values shields from public view. Just because garbage cans behind our house are necessary concomitants of human life, must we go sit in them? […] We business men are busy, but not too busy to think about the consequences of ideas in gestation in our universities. As you know, we are continually asked to contribute corporate funds to universities.

With local political realities as they were, the endgame was predictable. The University’s legal department sent Kimpton a memo stating:

The magazine contains filthy and obscene language that I associate with the gutter rather than the literary publication of an institution of higher learning. […] How this filth could be published in what must be regarded as a University publication will be very hard for the public to understand. We think that this publication will have a very serious effect upon fund raising, enrollment and our public relations generally.

The University eventually presented Rosenthal with a choice: produce an innocuous issue or shut the magazine down. The University’s terms were these:

(1) The next issue must be of a non-controversial nature.

(2) The Review must be subject to an annual appraisal by the faculty committee of the magazine.

(3) In the future the editor shall check with the faculty committee before publishing any manuscripts which he thinks might be objectionable.

Rosenthal, who had already decided for himself that “I do not at this point see how I can publish an issue with the criterion of innocuity,” told his staff that they could either refuse the University’s demands (and therefore put the magazine’s existence in serious jeopardy) or they could find an editor who thought he or she “could publish in good conscience” an issue that the University would tolerate. Hyung Woong Pak was the only one of the staff members who thought he could create such an issue, and the staff voted 15-2 to appoint him editor.

And now we come full circle, for it is Pak’s name that stands atop the masthead of the issue in which Charles Simic’s first poems were issued. We can’t be certain when Simic’s poems were first accepted, but do we know that “the Complete Contents of the Suppressed Winter 1959 Chicago Review” were published in the first issue of Big Table, a new magazine founded by Rosenthal and Carroll. And Simic’s poems themselves certainly don’t suggest anything either of the old editors would have been in a huge rush to publish.

So it’s likely thanks to a long chain of consequences—linking William S. Burroughs, Irving Rosenthal, Paul Carroll, Hyung Woong Pak, Jack Mabley, and Murray Kimpton, and even Richard M. Daley and the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago—that Charles Simic, a twenty-one-year-old “painter and student of languages and literature,” first became a published poet.

By such means are literary histories made.

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As I wrote above, the source for this account is Eirik Steinhoff’s definitive essay “The Making of Chicago Review: The Meteoric Years,” a PDF version of which may be found here.