The Return of 'The Magician'

...But the aberrant legal system was adamant: Reprint The Magician, it said, and you are committing a criminal act...

...I was informed that people in Wisconsin were driving as far as 300 miles to try to get a copy of the banned book because, to the dismay of the book banners, it had sold out everywhere within reach...

...It was mind-rattling to imagine what these books might have in common, and no one would fully explain, but as the only author of the three still alive, I decided to try something...

...Peter Coe was to direct and Kenneth More was signed for the lead...

...One result of the new interdiction was that for the first time in its then 16-year history The Magician could not be reprinted or sold on pain of imprisonment...

...This was confirmed by an incident on the David Frost show when I was promoting the book...

...This made headlines in Wisconsin, of course, and reverberated in the news elsewhere...

...The demand continued, evenin the form of large, prepaid orders from school wholesalers...

...The specific reasons for the banning were finally revealed in an account of the controversy's eventual outcome in the American Library Association's Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom: "After a lengthy debate marked by shouting, catcalls and Bible-reading from members of the audience, the Montello School Board voted 6-1 not to remove The Magician, a novel by Sol Stein, from the high school curriculum...

...However, within weeks, the management of 20th Century Fox changed and, as is not unusual in Hollywood, the new regime ultimately decided to shelve every project initiated by its predecessor...

...In London, a squabble between producer, director and star turned into a melee, while the production hung from the rafters, unnoticed and soon quite dead...

...An army of hands went up...

...Fewer than a dozen titles escaped the judicial net woven around the company...

...I retreated to my study and in 17 nonstop days rewrote the script as a novel...

...Several parents had objected to the book on the grounds that it contains explicit sexual scenes and profanity, and that it allegedly presents a pessimistic view of the U.S...

...Stein's ninth novel, The Best Revenge, will be published by Random House next April...

...The book, now entitled The Husband, was published by Coward-McCann in 1969 and by Pocket Books the following year...

...Before you leap with pleasure at the news of censorship being defeated, you should know the account went on to note that Montello's School District Administrator told the 17-and 18-yearold students they had to have their parents' permission in writing to take the dangerous "English novels" class where The Magician was again to be taught...

...The Magician thrived as a Dell paper back for l4 years.In l985 I reacquired the rights and licensed them to Stein and Day, the publishing company I headed for a quarter of a century...

...According to a large number of the correspondents, the teacher who put The Magician on the reading list had in the previous generation been their teacher...

...Luckily, I had licensed the rights to Stein and Day for only three years, so The Magician is now back in the hands of its author...

...Sol Stein 's essay here will appear in slightly different form as the Foreword to the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of The Magician...

...I was tempted, echoing E.M...

...The Newsletter further reported that exactly one week after the decision to reinstate TheMagician, agroupof "Concerned Citizens" removed 33 "objectionable" books from Montello school libraries and declared their intention not to return them...

...In the late '60s, a play of mine called Of Love or Marriage was performed at the Actors Studio in New York, with Darren McGavin in the lead, and then was licensed by Bernard Delfont (later Lord Delfont) for production in London...

...The film rights were sold to 20th Century Fox...

...Hartley's The Go-Between and he knewIdid...

...The theater, like the film business, is fraught with uncertainty...

...Life abounds with countervailing forces...

...Early in the interview, I turned to the studio audience— mainly visitors to New York from all over the country—and asked whether any knew of a high school extortion racket in their home community...

...If this teacher picked TheMagician, many concluded, they didn't want anyone else dictating that their older teenagers could not read it...

...Imagine my happiness...

...I didn't for two reasons...

...McCarthy journeyed to Scarborough, New York, to discuss the script, which, as a former playwright, I was eager to do...

...judicial system...

...Roger Stevens, a brave man who had lost a bundle on a play of mine, entreated me to come back to the theater...

...The Magician was one of some 1,200 books whose continued publication was stopped by two descendants of Gutenberg and Caxton: R.R...

...If you can't ban books, steal them...

...Though the central character is George Thomassy, a lawyer who has persisted through four of my novels, the action centers on a group of teenagers involved in an extortion racket that in one form or another appears to be universal in high schools...

...They described her as a remarkable woman who had imbued them with an appreciation of literature, and said they were eager for their children to have the same advantage...

...However—it is the "howevers" that tangle our feet wherever we go—in 1981 The Magician suffered a midlife crisis when the School Board in Montello, Wisconsin, banned three books: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Magician...

...Forster, to give two cheers for democracy...

...Schools throughout the country, not just an isolated school district in Wisconsin, were therefore compelled to remove The Magician from their curricula because copies were unavailable at any price...

...To my astonishment, five were interested in publishing it, and one particularly perceptive editor, Marc Jaffe, guessed that I was the author because a character in the book loved L.P...

...Donnelley, the largest printer in the United States, and BookCrafters, U.S.A...

...Second, putting on a play is a communal enterprise...

...I persuaded the powers at Dell to join me in an attempt to reach the citizens of Montello...

...Frank McCarthy, who had just producedPitfton and was assigned to produce The Magician, proclaimed it the best novel he had read inthesixyearshe'dbeen working on Patton...

...Their actions affected approximately 700 authors who had done nothing wrong...

...During an earlier production of another play, I was warned that neither the director nor I should stand close to an open window...

...To every head of household in the school district, we offered a free copy of The Magician...

...Not knowing whether this initial attempt at fiction was worth a farthing, I arranged to have the manuscript sent to six pubUshers without revealing the author's name...

...I later learned that the one member of the School Board who voted against restoring The Magician to the curriculum was the only member not re-elected...

...Once the mercenaries of our society—the hired guns of the law—took over, Stein and Day was never permitted to publish another book...

...Sales eventually passedthe million-copy milestone...

...So I opted for "deserting" (Roger Stevens' word) the theater in order to write what I thought of as a real novel—that is, a work conceived in the form from the beginning, and written not in 17 days of anger but whatever time was needed for completion...

...First, Broadway had begun a long period of avoiding new dramas in favor of musicals and revivals...

...Inl971Delacorte brought out my first "real" novel, TheMagician, and it was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club as well as published in many countries...

...The book publishing world I also inhabited at the time was a quieter place...

...I received some 900 letters from parents in the school district, almost all opposing the idea of having their youngsters' reading censored...

...A writer for the American Film Institute's magazine called the script "one of the great unproduced screenplays of all time," but since Fox refused to release it to anyone else, it was left to atrophy as an accountant's asset...

...Sales of the reissue surged (press runs went as high as 100,000), but within two years, amid problems I have detailed in A Feast for Lawyers (Evans, 1989), I discovered that in a democracy there are ways besides censorship and stealing to remove books from public view...

...Apparently teenagers were taking to The Magician because they felt the book reflected their life as it was, rather than as perceived by most adults...

...judicial system when I wrote the novel was not pessimistic enough...

...In truth, the audience was really one, for if the New York Times' critic didn't bless a production, it could easily vanish forever before the next Sunday...

...Dell's paperback edition of The Magician was being adopted in high schools from Phoenix to Poughkeepsie, often, I was told, in place of The Catcher in the Rye...

...In effect, the inept judicial system bears a major part of the blame for causing what may well have been the biggest long-term suppression of books in the history of the United States...

...In February, on the 20th anniversary of its original publication, the twice-embattled book will have a new life under the imprint of The Colophon Corporation...

...Apparently my view of the U.S...

...it involves an impromptu family of actors, director, producer, and investors, with all of a family's tensions elevated to a pitch because of the billowing sums at stake...

...A book, I had found, has many critics and audiences, and is less dependent for life on the predisposition or gastronomy of one man sitting in an aisle seat on a particularly anxious night...

...Moreover, a playwright then had a decisive audience of six on Broadway, the newspaper critics...

...Judge Howard Schwartzberg sentenced nearly 1,300 works—the backlist and the books about to be published—to a deep freeze from which some never emerged alive...

...I found the world of fiction hospitable...

...I had tasted the solitary regimen of a novelist, who is his own cast and director, and I relished being solely responsible for the merits and flaws of the final creation...