ON THE SHELF

Those who cling to the notion that Mother Advocate leads an incurably rakish and irresponsible existence, should be pleasantly surprised by the September issue, which, among its other virtues, has four features bearing directly on the war. The fears of the editors that their magazine is "a luxury with which the College might well dispense" seem ungrounded in face of the excellence of this issue, and of the fact that now, of all times, colleges should fight to keep a grip on the values of the creative life.

In his entertaining and closely reasoned article, "By-Paths on the Road to Rome," Eric Larrabee evaluates contemporary religious revivalism from a Spenglerian deterministic point of view. His main point, that thinkers should try to understand the war in its relation to their ideals, to "assimilate their own tragedy," rather than fleeing to comforting but false "eternal verities," is well taken. In the case of Huxley and T. S. Eliot, however, he fails to make it clear why the Christian mystical experience is not a valid truth-criterion for anyone lucky enough to have it.

The stories are all worth reading. Top honors go equally to Curtis Thomas's "Ascent" and Doug Woolf's "The Knifeman." Both are compact, sensitively chiselled pieces of work, relaying on restraint and carefully prepared surprise for their effects. Thomas accomplishes the feat of writing a fantasy in a realistic style. A too conscious attempt at atmosphere occasionally swamps Albert Friedman's "Carnival," while David Hessey's "Launching" sacrifices a powerful theme to occasionally slip-shod treatment. Cecil Schneer makes a heroic attempt to get inside a converted isolationist by reducing him through pain to his Freudian common denominator.

In the stories, all traces of the magazine's former old-rose-and-lace preciousness seem to have disappeared, but as is natural enough, some of it lingers on in the poetry. Old idols cannot be so easily and quickly uncrowned. Obscurity, still one of them, reigns supreme in Phemister's three love sonnets. Musically reminiscent of Donne, they lack Donne's fine-grained intensity. In "Furlough" Crockett tries with some success to fit a difficult French verse form to a mood of lyric nostalgia, but the same attempt in "Embarkation" does not come off as well. Both, however, are considerable improvements on his earlier work. Harrison's "The Trap" is a rather conventional cry of despair in the Eliot tradition.

In the book section, Carruthers' otherwise sound review suffers from an acute attack of italics, Crockett discourses learnedly on Rousseau the artist, and Yarmolinsky discusses Stephen Spender's latest work. A newcomer, William Ober, handles the music department with considerable case and finesse.

All in all, this issue presents the work of a group of new writers sensitive to their surroundings and interested in doing a workmanlike job. Thus, the magazine's future seems reasonably promising.