Something Tangible to Strike at

Abstract

In August of 1960, Glenn Stuart would insinuate himself into the literary history of the United States without having penned a single word to contribute to its cause. That summer, two men approached the Warwick, Rhode Island, teenager to peddle their own literary magazine, The Provincetown Review. Stuart obliged the vendors by purchasing a copy and in doing so set off a scandal that would not only grant the magazine a minor spate of fame but would also gain one of its writers, Hubert Selby Jr. an enduring notoriety. With a first line as provocative for its content as for its lack of adornment— “Tralala was 15 the first time she was laid”—Selby’s story, named after the aforementioned character, was deemed by the local authorities to be too vivid in its sexual portraiture and thus pornographic.² The accusation framed the editor of the magazine and one of its sellers, Bill Ward, as a trafficker of smut, and the unwitting Stuart, a youthful victim of such traffic. In a year’s time both parties to the exchange would sit before Judge Robert A. Welsh of the Second District Court to determine whether Ward was guilty of socially corrosive commercialism and if Selby, the true though absent culprit in this crime, was culpable of pawning crude sexual depictions off as an audacious literary aesthetic.

I cannot sit down and write anything until I understand the moral imperative behind it. When I understand that, the sense of morality, then I can write.¹

—Hubert Selby Jr.