Button-Down Boobery

Ivy Magazine, like the fiction that sired it, lives in a world of football weekends and cocktail prty conversation. It has spirit, seriousness, and superficiality.

Its latest issue, far from being a reversal of the trend towards well-dressed mediocrity, is as representative of the pseudo-sophisticate ethic as any of its predecessors. Except for one fine piece of reporting on the activities of David R. ("Yours for racial integrity") Wang, the December Ivy is as stupidly snide as its models--the Luce magazines.

The supposed keynote of the issue is a "controversy" between two writers, one of whom opposes the prep schools and the other, the public schools. Neither of them is particularly well-informed on his subject.

Apparently both articles were arbitrarily assigned by the editor, who pays well. The anti-prep piece has the one saving grace of criticizing the medium and the audience for which it is written, in short, the Ivy myth. Aside from this quality, the author shows little concern with the disciplines of a private school education, and places too much emphasis on the sexual ineptitude of its products. The writer, however, gets off one classic generalization which almost makes his effort worthwhile: "In addition the society serving as the basis for the New England preparatory schools--th upperclass, urban East--cannot help but be classified as a decadent society in a decadent region." His authority for the statement springs from a Boise, Idaho background.

His opponent--reputed to be one of the most "nego" products of Exeter--has the dubious advantage of glibness. He probably gave even less though to his article than his antagonist. To him all public school boys are doomed to intense concentration in academic life, aimed solely at getting a lucrative position in their home town environment. He throws around Mom and Togetherness as if tney were synonymous with a public school background, a theory which only demonstrates his complete disassociation from the world of which he writes.

The rest of the issue is given over to various meager, but undoubtedly lucrative attempts to be significant, humorous, or informative. One author describes a fictional seduction in the styles of J. D. Salinger and Sally Bingham, combined, and the results are highly predictable. There are three more or less newsy bits about jazz, Bennett College, and Jean Sheperd, a disc jockey, whose incisive wit suffers from the commercialization which Ivy gives it. A short article on Cambridge University probes an untrained needle into a host of generalization, and comes up with an interesting, but more or less meaningless analysis.

Ivy has come through with its usual assortment of trivia, phoniness, and institutionalized rah-rah. Maybe, in the dim beyond, its editors will mature, but they haven't yet.