Wake

If several of the poorer items in this sixth issue of "Wake" were not so blatantly characteristic of a certain persistent type of writing, I would by-pass them entirely in favor of the better pieces, which comprise the bulk of the magazine. But when creations such as Austryn Wainhouse's "Selection: The Peripateties," typical of that irritating sort of writing that requires the reader to approach it as if it were a puzzle, continue to appear in magazine after magazine, there is good reason to offer a hesitant objection. I say hesitant, because baffled as surely I am as to the meaning of this story, I cannot say honestly whether my reaction is the result of my own confusion or of the author's. But it is one or the other, and the sort of writing that forces such a choice on the reader is not likely to have many intrinsic qualifications as literature.

Such writing tends to be symbolie to the point where everything is a symbol and nothing is real, which is a point of meaninglessness. It tends to deal with undefined moods, hazily defined characters, and ponderously defined natural trivia, e.g., "They sat on an ironwood tree's outcropping roots, roots tangled like gray fingers in wild interplay with Medusa's hair." It tends to make the reader suspect that the author is sentimentally fond of writing, but unfortunately finds himself with nothing or little to say about people or events. Generally, although not necessarily, authors with something to say take care to say it clearly.

Albert Guerard certainly takes such care in his story entitled "Miss Prindle's Lover." It is the closest approach to old-style narrative in the magazine, and whether you happen to be interested or not--I was--in a story about the peculiar attraction a middle-aged spinster has for a young man, it is impossible to deny that Guerard has drawn convincing characters and taken them through a series of comprehensible events, rare virtues indeed.

Two other stories--"Worth A Golden Spoon" by Cledwyn Hughes and "Episode of a House Remembered" by John Rogers (one of the three undergraduate editors of "Wake")--appear to me to be cleanly written and clearly conceived pieces, but they nonetheless left me with a peculiarly unsatisfied feeling. "Worth A Golden Spoon" misses because it rests on an idea never quite made clear--the idea that a beehive, presented to a railroad employee by his associates, has a peculiar and special meaning to him. I couldn't help feeling that the exact nature of this meaning ought to have been indicated somewhere in the story. My objection to "Episode of a House Remembered" is perhaps the result of my prejudice against pieces that are too strictly concerned with mood.

"Walk" is 96 pages long, so I cannot comment on all the various contributions, but must omit some that I liked, such as "Canto 6, Dante's Purgatorio" by Theodore Spencer, and some that I did not like at all, such as "Oono Dos Treys" by Bert Morton in order to get to the poetry, much of which is remarkably good. ("Oono Dos Treys," I should explain, is a labored story about a foetus that refuses to be born, but talks in erudite English inside the mother, an idea whose grotesque charm wears off rapidly after the first few scholarly pronouncements from the womb.)

To indulge in the highly personal for the moment, I was particularly struck by two of the three poems contributed by Seymour Lawrence (the chief editorial hand behind "Wake")--the ones entitled "City Nun" and "A Love Song." I also might mention that I found a little piece of wit, charm, and whimsey by E.E. Cummings called "A Little Girl Named I" the most entertaining thing in the entire magazine. It is lonely in its modernistie company: but it is wonderful.