This Is a Town Worth Digging in and Fighting for (Tributes) (Norman Mailer) (In Memoriam‪)‬

I WAS THIRTEEN WHEN I NOTICED BRISK ACTIVITY In the East End of Provincetown, where my family had a home. People scurried from house to house, their arms clutching folders of manuscripts that seemed to contain secrets, and which I saw explode, during the summer, in the pages of a talked-about publication called the Provincetown Review. The editors lived next door. Norman Mailer seemed to be some sort of advisor, and had contributed a piece about Picasso to one issue, declaring the artist's "exploration of reality" as one of "travel not from object to object but from relation to relation." I watched their inscrutable mission take shape in the issue published in 1960, which contained a volatile chapter from Hubert Selby's novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The editor, Bill Ward, was arrested for selling obscenity to a minor. Later, I discovered my father's back issues of the Review, a total of seven running more or less annually from 1958 to 1968. It was an ambitious publication--possessing local excitement plus literary significance. The Selby story was inflammatory in its cruel punishment of a predatory prostitute who is finally defiled in a violently sexual gang rape by sailors along the Brooklyn docks. The Provincetown police chief was alerted to the contents of the story when a mother complained that her son had purchased the magazine at a local restaurant, which had a stack of copies for sale. The editor was put on trial. Rueben Goodman, an ACLU attorney, admirably defended the Review's right to publish. Norman Podhoretz, Seymour Krim, Jason Epstein, Allen Tate, and Stanley Kunitz were called to testify, providing historically important statements. Kunitz, in particular, spoke of the role of little magazines in fostering groundbreaking modernist writers. He cited the censorship battles of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, resolved in the U. S. Supreme Court. The entire transcript of the trial was published in the issue that appeared the following summer: "EDITOR JAILED" the cover screamed. When I read it, I struggled to understand the judge's reasoning. First of all, the young man who purchased the journal was not underage. In a decision bizarre for its oblivious irrationality, Judge Welsh pronounced Ward guilty. On appeal, the case was quickly dismissed. The Provincetown Review went on publishing for a few more summers, while our family moved to Minneapolis, where my father taught in the studio arts department of the University of Minnesota, eventually serving as chairman.