"Amachure" Verse in Monthly

There was a time--within the memory of men yet living--when the reader was at least sure of finding good verse in the Monthly, be the prose what it might. The present number of the Monthly was, I am told, intended to be a "Poetry" number. It contains four poems and a piece of metre which essays to imitate a freight train crossing a bridge, and succeeds. Of the four poems the best is that by Herbert Bates '90, which serves as a heading to Mr. Trynin's story. Mr. Garland's verses "The Lee Shore" have spirit and simplicity, two excellent things. The other two contain such lines as "to take life naked at primeval hands," "that men have meant me nothing," "crossing the languorous lilts of water," and other phrases which are neither beautiful nor sensible. The verse in the number bears distinctly the mark, not of the amateur, but of the "amachure."

The Prose is much more encouraging. The Hollywood the principal story are of the solution used to and in the Monthly and nowhere else in college journalism. Mr. McCormick's story, which struggles from time to time with a dialect only half digested from "The Tragedy of Nan," suffers less on that account than one might imagine. The last page has a genuine, if uncanny, power. Mr. Jacobs's dialogue, which is not melodrama, is an amusing skit on the political honor of our Mexican neighbors.

But Mr. Watson's study of Bandelaire under the title "The Greatest Decadent," together with the story "Poet of the Ghetto" by a Ben Sion Trynin--an obvious and awful pseudonym--remain the only things really worth while in the number. The first is, if not profound, at least refreshingly sane and balanced in these days when to be young is necessarily to be decadent--or one would imagine so from recent Monthlies. The second, apart from a shabby and sentimental plot, possesses, in dialogue and description, a sense of actuality of life on the East Side of New York that is almost startling. The writer's methods are not those of contemporary English or American writers. Perhaps they are Russian; or, more likely, as Jewish as Zangwill's. But they are very successful.