Irving Rosenthal was not as famous as the Beat figures he associated with – Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others. But he was an integral part of their scene. In fact, he propelled it forward at a pivotal moment.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Rosenthal was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and the editor of its accompanying Chicago Review magazine. He and his poetry editor, Paul Carroll, loved the Beat writers who had sprung up on the West Coast and elsewhere and began publishing them. The spring 1958 issue featured Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and others who had made an impact on the San Francisco poetry scene, as well as an excerpt from Burroughs’ shocking (yet unpublished) novel “Naked Lunch.”
Another excerpt from “Naked Lunch” appeared in the fall of 1958 and received a lot of attention – not all positive. “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” read the headline of an October cooking column by Jack Mabley of The Chicago Daily News. Mr. Rosenthal soon felt pressure from university officials; he was told the next song had to be “completely innocent,” something he couldn’t guarantee.
“Since we’ve planned it,” he wrote to the university’s chancellor, “it won’t be harmless.”
Rather than give the university an excuse to destroy the magazine, Mr. Rosenthal resigned and took the galleys for the suppressed edition with him.
He, Mr. Carroll, and other editors who left the Review founded Big Table, an influential but short-lived magazine. In the first issue, published in the spring of 1959, they published the material planned for the Review, including more “Naked Lunch,” writings by Kerouac and Edward Dahlberg, and three poems by Gregory Corso.
Mr. Rosenthal died on April 22 in the San Francisco branch he founded in 1967. He was 91.
Eric Noble, a historian well versed in the Beat era and who had known Mr Rosenthal for decades, confirmed the death.
Rosenthal’s life after the Chicago Review episode had its colorful moments, including a lawsuit over an attempt to suppress the Big Table and the publication of his gay novel “Sheeper” in 1967. His San Francisco congregation was known for its print shop and newsletter, Kaliflower. But for the most part, Mr. Rosenthal remained a background figure in a scene defined by big names, which was his preference.
“Irving had a radical disinterest in fame and notoriety,” author Steve Silberman, who was a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg, said by email. “After Irving jump-started the Beat Generation by publishing William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso in his Big Table magazine, Irving spent the rest of his life hiding from the literary and academic establishment and the press, while living his anti-capitalist beliefs. in a commune that has survived from the Summer of Love era to the present day.”
“As successive generations of his heroes ‘sold out,'” Silberman added, “he maintained a kind of impeccable purity through the sheer power of crankiness and monkish devotion to the countercultural community in which he built and died.”
Irving Rosenthal was born on October 9, 1930 in San Francisco to Sidney and Belle (Wolfred) Rosenthal. He received a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 1952.
He attended the University of Chicago and studied human development when he started working at, and then headed, the Review. Eirik Steinhoff, who would be the magazine’s editor in the 2000s himself, recreated the clash of the late 1950s in a 2006 article in the Review.
“If small magazines are barometric instruments, as Lionel Trilling described them,” wrote Mr. Steinhoff, Mr. Rosenthal produced “a magazine that made as much weather as it matted.”
Mr. Steinhoff elaborated on Mr. Rosenthal’s impact in an email exchange.
“Irving Rosenthal broadened the horizons of what was possible, both on and off the page,” he said.
His broad vision was made clear in the Summer 1958 issue of the Review, which was devoted entirely to the subject of Zen in all its manifestations.
“Whereas Burroughs’ publications accelerated an unavoidable intergenerational seismic transformation,” noted Mr. Steinhoff, “the Zen materials provided a sustainable methodology for dealing with disturbance.”
Mr. Rosenthal’s censorship battle didn’t end when he left the University of Chicago. The first issue of Big Table was seized by the US Post Office, which found it too obscene for the post. In 1960, a U.S. District Court ruling rejected the Post Office’s arguments, saying that the magazine could indeed be shipped.
After leaving university, Mr. Rosenthal spent time in Cuba and Tangier, as well as New York, where he tried his hand at running a small press. He was also involved in experimental filmmaker Jack Smith’s projects, appearing in his “Flaming Creatures” (1963) and “No President” (1967).
In 1967, he returned to San Francisco with George Harris, who would soon take the name Hibiscus and gain fame in gay circles and beyond by founding the Cockettes, a collective of drag artists. They lived in the commune Mr Rosenthal founded, originally known as the Sutter/Scott Street Commune after the site and founded “on the principles of communal treasury, group marriage, free arts, gay liberation and selfless service,” as a catalog entry posted. it for an auction of back issues of the Kaliflower newsletter.
Mr. Rosenthal’s survivors include members of that congregation, where he has lived ever since.
As for ‘Sheeper’, Mr. Rosenthal (the title refers to the central character), Donald Stanley, writing in The San Francisco Examiner when it was published in 1967, described it as having no plot except “the repetition over and over again about the details of Sheeper’s homosexuality.” ”
“But if we leave the question of morality to better moralists than me,” he added, “one is stuck with the belief that this approach, this amazing candor, this violation of old taboos will become more common before it becomes rarer.”