ometime this week or next, a long-awaited little package will arrive for me in the mail. In it will be a single copy of Number 27, the November/December, 1962 issue of a little magazine called Evergreen Review. It will complete a collection I have been building, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ever since I was in school in the 1950s. With Number 27, I will have a copy of every Evergreen Review published between 1957, when it was started, and 1963, when it was turned into a larger-format magazine that focused a little more on politics than literature.

It's not what you would call a major collection. Copies are reasonably easy to find, and still inexpensive. But it has a particular interest for me, not only because the magazine had a profound effect on my knowledge of and interest in culture, but because it provoked a pivotal incident in my life.

Evergreen Reviews had an influence on the culture of their time that was really unusual. The only other magazine with which I am familiar that had a similar effect was the Yellow Book, published in England between 1894 and 1897, which caused such a scandal by publishing drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, a friend and associate of Oscar Wilde, that its premises were attacked by a mob. (At one time, there used to be a set of Yellow Books in Bermuda's National Library ? I wonder if it is still there.)

If you look through the contents of these magazines now, you might not be particularly surprised. Yellow Book published writers like Edmund Gosse, Walter Crane, Sir Frederick Leighton, and Henry James ? names so without controversy these days that we're beginning to forget them.

Evergreen Review published writers like Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Hara, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Eugene Ionesco, Henry Miller, Jorge Luis Borges, Gunter Grass and Harold Pinter. It carried articles about artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock and George Grosz. Its covers were often photographs taken by people like Robert Frank, Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai.

These are all names which those who follow the arts will be completely familiar with these days. But 50 years ago? Evergreen Review was a detailed, almost unbelievably prescient roadmap of who and what would, half a century later, be acknowledged as the principal cultural influences of the 20th Century. Yellow Book didn't come even close to Evergreen's achievement.

Evergreen Review still exists?sort of. You'll find its most recent issue on the Internet?an issue in which, I mention for the sake of interest, it re-prints an article called , written by current presidential candidate John Kerry and first published in one of the more political Evergreens, in 1971.

The fire, though, that made Evergreen Review burn so brightly as a little magazine, has obviously gone out.

It was started by Barney Rosset, founder of the avant-garde publishing company, Grove Press, in New York. Actually, it is more accurate to say it was started by Donald Allen, a Berkeley graduate from the West Coast whom Rosset hired as an editor.

People may remember Grove Press because of its association with the publication of DH Lawrence's novel , and with Henry Miller's book . Both were the subject of long and hard-fought court cases ultimately won by Grove, which published both books. Penguin's case against the UK authorities for banning (remember the prosecutor who wanted the jury to consider whether they would want their servants to read the book?) was brought after it had been published in the US, and was really in response to Barney Rosset's success.

It is hard to remember, nowadays, what a big issue artistic censorship was in those early days of the Cold War. Censorship was invoked not simply for works whose subject matter was sexual, but also for subject matter thought to be "degenerate". Even poetry might fall into that category ? Allen Ginsberg's was banned by the authorities until freed by a West Coast court case (and published shortly afterwards, in its entirety, in Evergreen Review # 2). The little magazine published article after article in defence of the freedom to publish or read any book, regardless of how controversial its contents might be. Their outraged and urgent tone must be hard to understand, these days, for anyone who wasn't around at the time.

But all that's by way of background. To get to the point of this story, I have to tell you that in 1958, in response to some no-longer-remembered impulse, I managed to scrape together the $3.50 it cost for a subscription. By the time my last year came around, I had built up a little collection of ten or 12 Evergreen Reviews.

I missed the first four issues, I think, and began with one that contained, among things, Samuel Beckett's short play, , an article by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (one of the founders of existentialism) on the atomic bomb, and , an often-quoted poem by Ed Dorn, who is a thoroughly good, but under-appreciated American poet who died four or five years ago.

To my taste, verses like Dorn's

were a welcome relief from having to plumb the non-existent depths, in English class, of the likes of William Allingham's sweet, but mind-bogglingly plonking

But of course, not everyone has the same tastes. And one Sunday evening, at dinner, I fell to discussing poetry with an English teacher (I don't think I was in his class), who thought good poets had died out when Queen Victoria was a boy. Modern pretenders ought mostly to be hanged or imprisoned for incompetence and degeneracy, was the way he came at it.

We spent some time arguing, and then both had to go and do other things. I offered, generously I thought, because this man was known by even very junior students as being not quite right in the head, to lend him copies of my Evergreen Reviews, which I reckoned contained material good enough to change his mind. He'd read them carefully, he said, and give them every opportunity to do so.

Some days later, when I sought him out to see how he was reacting to them, he told me he'd burned them. He thought they were a bad influence.

Just like that.

It was an outrageous wrong ? worse, even, than dropping my ice cream cone on the beach at the age of four. My first impulse was to march straight off to the headmaster's office to complain?no, more than that, to have a really good rant about it.

But, encouraged by my eminently sensible Mexican roommate (and life-long friend), I thought again.

What would that achieve, he wanted me to tell him. What good could it possibly do? The most likely result is that you would force the headmaster to back his teacher up, even though he will undoubtedly understand that you were right. What other choice does he have? And if you put him in that position, the effect will be that the English teacher will win ? and you will lose ? a second time.

Get over it, he said. You were right. He was wrong. It's so obvious that even he probably knows it. Ignore him. Go buy yourself some more damned Evergreen Reviews.

I took his advice. With the benefit of nearly 50 years of hindsight, I think he was right, and I think learning that way that protests and demonstrations of disagreement are likely to turn on the protesters, unless they have a realistic chance of succeeding, was a valuable lesson. It is, perhaps, one worth passing on to those who have ears to hear.

Still, if the gods are at all interested in promoting correct harmony and balance in the universe, the moment I slide Evergreen Review # 27 on to my book shelves, they will see to it that the tall stack of large-type Reader's Digests that barbarian of a teacher undoubtedly keeps by his chair, these days, collapses and falls on top of him.

They shouldn't hurt him, mind, just make him wonder what on earth he's done to deserve such treatment. It might come to him.