In Signature: two easy lessons for hack writing

In this issue, Signature's earnest editors treat the problems of "What is Wrong of Right with College Writing?" by printing two articles of advice to young literary people. Mrs. Jano Pierce, Travel Editor for Glamour Magazine, tells her readers, "Ask Yourself which magazine would seem to be most receptive to your idea--then try to fit it as nearly as possible to the pattern of that magazine . . . Of course if you're a genius, you won't have to worry about those rejection slips anyway." The managing editor of Good Housekeeping advises, "If you write for your own amusement, you can be as dismal as you choose, but the public continues to prefer entertainment to morbidity . . . I often feel that if I come across one more trauma or psycho-analyst's couch in a manuscript, I will become a manic-depressive and scream."

These knowing rules-of-thumb for the aspiring back pose as "Advice to the Young Writer," and in the confusion between the two there is a danger that Signature has failed to notice. If a college literary magazine advises young writers to serve up the saccharine puree that Good Housekeeping and Glamour prefer, 1960's novelists may very well be a bunch of alayeys, modeling their work to the taste of every tired, disillusioned woman's magazine editor. Signature would have done better if they tried to obtain local writer-teachers such as Albert Guerard or John Ciardi to give advice. They at least would have recognized that writing is still an art and a calling, not a trade that pays less in dignity and common rewards than pawnbroking.

Fortunately the writers in this issue of Signature are more ambitious than their advisers would have them. Although the contributors share the faults of most young writers, they try, often successfully, to be original, and their work represents a colossal improvement over the material in last fall's numbers of Signature. There are four short stories, all of them sensitive and honest, and none shows any effort of the author to mold his work to fit the frayed banalities of the slick magazines.

"The Easter Rabbit," by Robert K. Bingham, is the most finished and interesting piece of fiction in the magazine. An introspective young man buys a live rabbit and gives it to his mistress, but the forgets that she has a large dog in the house. The relationship of the two animals symbolizes the doubt and fear in the man's mind, and the story becomes at times terrifying by placing brutality in the limited world of the animals.

Polly Seliger's "The Bond" is not so effective, yet its complete sincerity breaks through the fumbling descriptions and little awkwardness. The bend is between a mother and her small girl, and the story is refreshing in its lack of any sort of artifice and in its genuine communication of the child's knowledge that she is loved. Miss Seliger makes the mistake in marring the directness of her story by a final twist, but even that might be excused on the grounds that it is the child's realization that she will never again to be loved so completely.

The other two stories are also about childhood; they are more complex and less forceful that "The Bond," but they are both written with conviction, if with little prospect of being sold to Glamour Magazine. Norman Zierold's essays, "A Critique of Freud," tries to be witty, but without success. It is a parody of Freud, that shows only ignorance and a distasteful sense of humor. Aune Tolstol's poem, "A Penny for the Blind Man," is the only one in the magazine. It is a poem that seems uncontrived, yet the simplicity is finely formed, and the verses give a sensitive pleasure. Signature announces that its next topic for discussion will be "Religions Opinions at College." If the good idea of monthly forums is to be successful, and editors must get responsible and informed contributors for these provocative discussions.