The Problem of the College Magazine

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Mr. Joseph Auslander '17 has asked me to amplify my suggestions about the editorial policy of college literary magazines in general and of the Advocate in particular; and although I hesitate to occupy any more space in the CRIMSON, plainly his inquiry requires a reply.

I am sorry if I led anybody to infer that I meant that college magazines should lower their literary standards. But it is not a mistake to imply that literary merit and interest to the reader are incompatible? What I was trying to bring out was the point that an article need not be upon what is sometimes considered a "literary" subject in order to have merit. We who live in academic surroundings are perhaps too prone to think that if we write about Shelley we are producing literature, whereas if we write about football or the tutorial system, we are necessarily producing something inferior. The truth is that the literary merit of our work depends principally upon how it is done. To my mind the editor who does the greatest service to literature is not he who turns his back on his public but he who seeks to interest that public and at the same time to hold his standards high. That this can be done the experience of many magazine and publishing houses will attest. That it can be done in a college community which is supposedly--and I believe actually--an intelligent community, I cannot bring myself seriously to doubt.

Mr. Auslander asks whether undergraduates are equipped to write authoritatively upon topics of interest to their fellow undergraduates, such as the technique of football, or the teaching of literature at college. All I can say is that if there are no undergraduates sufficiently well informed to treat such topics capably, the student body must be less wide awake than I had supposed it to be.

Has the undergraduate who knows about such things, pursues Mr. Auslander, the ability to write about them? Perhaps not; but this is where the editor or collaborator comes in. Excellent articles may be produced, as professional publishers are aware, by able writers working in collaboration with men who have not the gift of literary expression but do know what they are talking about. If an Advocate editor with a nimble pen were to collaborate with a keen-minded member of the football team in turning out an article on the development of the forward pass, I for one would be glad to read it, and I think numerous undergraduates would share my taste. Unless they leave their brains behind when they go in thousands to the football games, the technique of the sport must interest them.

What is more, the work of producing such an article would be excellent literary training for its writers. Every author, especially if he intends to make a profession of literature, must command the attention of his public or be lost, and practice in getting the utmost interest out of a subject is always useful.

I said in my review that the college comic magazines have the advantage of being edited for their public. Let me give an example. The Lampoon has its ups and downs, but if I were asked to pick out examples of first-class undergraduate literary work at Harvard, I should include a good part of the Lampoon's former burlesque of the Transcript. The men who wrote that burlesque probably did not think they were doing anything of any particular literary significance; they simply wrote for the delectation of their classmates and friends, and then like the gentleman in Moliere's play who found he had been speaking prose all along, they found they had succeeded in turning out literature. Similarly, if the college literary magazines were better simply as magazines, I believe their literary value would almost take care of itself.

The editorial creed of the Atlantic Monthly ends with some such words as these: ". . . . and finally to remember that of all useless things an uninteresting magazine is the least deserving of respect." Such good literary influence as the Atlantic has exercised in its successful career has come not from forgetting its public, but from writing for that public at its best. The same holds true of many another excellent magazine, and the doctrine is a sound one for college periodicals to follow. Do your utmost to find subjects the reasonable treatment of which will stir the thought of your readers and provoke discussion; have those subjects treated without sensationalism, but ably and vigorously; and if you succeed in performing this difficult task you will have not only a more readable magazine, but also, I will wager, one with more literary vitality than most college periodicals of today possess. FREDERICK L. ALLEN '12.