ON THE SHELF

Let's face it. Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates are not turning out Great Literature. The undergraduate anywhere whose literary creations can stand successfully in the publishing market, or find an audience in the public of high or low brow, is a rare and fortunate fellow indeed.

For most of us, if we have the urge to try it, the trail to literary success will be a long one, full of overflowing wastebaskets, piles of rejection slips and tens of thousands of unprinted words. And most of us will never make it.

The editors of Signature have failed to realize that they are dealing not with literary productions, but with the crude, unshaped, often hollow, lumps of expression that come out of the undergraduate, or "afflatus," period in a writer's development. With absolute respect for the contributors to the current issue, I'm willing to bet that six out of the seven will soon be ashamed that these fragments were ever set in type. This writing has to be done, if these folks are ever going to be writers, but there is no law which states that it must be published and read.

So it is difficult to criticize, this Signature. These people are not writers; they are learning to write. Some have learned much since their last published attempts; others, A. Stavrolakes and Naomi Raphaelson, have already produced more artfully than they do in the current issue. Therefore one cannot just take aim and fire. It would be too much like shooting a fawn.

But some things, in all honesty, cannot be ignored. The editors have contrived to fill up this issue with Death. Three out of four stories, two of four poems, tackle the old Reaper--and lose. Anabel Handy's story "Desire of a Fish," and the poems, by Adrienne Rich and Rachel Benet, deal with more lively themes, and come closest to effectiveness.

For another thing, none of the stories is really more than the literary prospectus of a story situation. Characters are in the same place at the end as at the beginning, and they have been stuck there all along. Robert Sherwood's "One Man's Sorrow," is particularly static.

The poems suffer from the same lack of direction. In verse, of course, a poet can succeed by scratching just one image into your mind. But Signature's poets, possibly excepting Miss Benet, don't even do that. They simply fail to arouse, or to "make the reader care."

It might be that these people have nothing to say. But it's difficult to talk when you're smothered by such amateur symbolism as: "Oh Dante, I'm in hell" (Handy). Perhaps it's just a matter of getting the words out right and putting the paragraphs in order, techniques which can be acquired. Anyway, isn't it pretty to think so?