The Island

The University's literary efforts have had a mixed year this year. House magazines have been conspicuously dead. The Advocate has produced two issues and is facing Commencement with a third at press. Current's large winter issue offered a perfectly acceptable modicum of creativity. Perhaps the multiplying drama and political reviews have shown more steadily convincing signs of life, despite the fact that Charles River Literary Society shelters a bevy of unreconstructed Randians and no poets.

On the other hand, there are developments, Scorpion, partly supported by Adams House, broke print for the first time with an interesting issue--all the more so because its editors seem to have solved their problems of selection by including everything they could find. The infrequent throwaway of an undergraduate publishing cartel is reputedly paying for undergraduate fiction--something nobody else can afford to do. And then there's the Island, the first fruit of an extraordinarily literary freshman class.

Which is not to say that the Island is a freshman magazine; only three freshman have appeared in the publication so far. But Robert Shaw and John Plotz, both '69, were evidently no sooner settled in Wigglesworth than the project began to take shape; they have produced three mimeographed issues since mid-winter, publishing some of the best writers in Cambridge.

Their March issue displayed a bright cover and a considerable increase in both finesse and chuzpah. The editors taped lengthy conversations with W. H. Auden and P. L. Travers--both interesting and neither terribly well structured. Auden was too cagey to say anything at all, and Miss Travers--who seems to have written her own interview--said rather too much rather too well to preserve the conventions of the occasion. The failure of The Island to extract from Auden anything more significant than his remarks on the American postal system led the interviewer into a few unskillful New Yorkerisms ("The Island wanted more coffee"..."As a matter of fact, the Island has been to Iceland"); (and the mountain to Muhammed?). Despite Miss Travers' sweet disarming mysticism, which occasionally peeps out from behind the Mary Poppins syndrome ("One doesn't invent anything, you see; ideas are dredged up from goodness knows where--they're there abiding, lying in wait..."), there are a few gems, among them her recollections of the Irish poet A.E. (George Russell) ("He took me under his wing and licked me into shape as a mother cat her kitten") and her suggestion that Christopher Robin may have indeed have been a bit light on his feet.

In that issue the property was spotty but generally solid. Sam Abrams, a Weaton professor, specializes in disjuction and fails to connect student here, surrenders occasionally to the soft blandishments of consecutive words but does it very well, particularly in two Costa translations. Derek Mahon, an Irish poet and Trinity man now in Cambridge, has conquered a deceptively relaxed idiom, and but for an occasional relapse into bluster ("The great wings sighing with a nameless hunger") uses that idiom most effectively. "The Fall of Troy," by Rachel Hadas '69, is a successful exercise in academic wit; her logic doesn't always carry, but the bulk of he poem rings true:

Aeneas weeps

at winds or passion, but steadfastly keeps carrying battered merchandise marked ROME in one direction, pondering it all.

The present issue is bright and readable. Some time ago Mssrs. Shaw and Plotz were clever enough to offer a cash prize to draw contributors; as a result, there's not a bad poem in the issue, if we except Eric Anderson's extemporaneous blues price which I am not qualified to judge but did not enjoy reading. John Lewis' "Certitudes," which think the right word is "reassuring." His poems in the March issue, particularly "The Uses of Poetry," had more glitter, but Mr. Lewis is a consistently skilled and mature writer. This poem, an anatomy of a dying grandmother, works.

Mary Ann Radner, a recent Wellesley graduate, writes lucid, formal, sensually immediate lyrics and writes a great many of them: two are here. She engineers a fine collaboration of sight and sound.

Convexities sit generally in the air balanced among hills.

The final light streams from the stretched land, forms the turning dark in colors of deep-coursing water.

Richard Tillinghast is utterly fluent, "Not Being There" is not one of his best, but his expert use of the first person singular and infallible control over the progression of a poem enable him to be both professional and insurrectionary. And Robert Shaw offers a long, successful suite of voices from a madhouse, something like Spoon River Anthology. Shaw handles forms extermely well; his quatrains make him the most entertaining poet in the issue.

Eight in the morning, bells begin to ring. Uprising in a mass, Mass showers, mass finger and toenail clipping. Our eyes sting. Footbaths of disinfectant come to pass.

It is too bad that he knows the rules so well, and is so cautious about breaking them. Influence of Lowell and Jarrell have been absorbed and should be purged; the relation to some of Lowell's hospital poems, like "A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich," is too evident. And his literary interest in madness leads him into a crude final section about Christopher Smart, which is regrettable.

Which all goes to show that anyone with fact, gall and intelligence can raid the Big Ones for interviews and contributions; it would seem that the Island's evident weakness--its mimeographed format and tiny circulation--is a hidden asset when it deals with genuinely kind people like Auden. But it takes a lot of wit and perseverence to collect as impressive an issue as this one; Shaw, Plotz a Co. have done it well and quietly. I hope they persist.