Signature

There are five stories in Signature's fall issue, and four poems, and you can find in them some of the best writing that the magazine has yet published. In the prose, to put the poetry aside for a moment, there are good ideas, good dialogue, and good description in the better moments of the better stories. The result is readability, a fairly important aspect of fiction that has been almost totally absent from Harvard's and Radcliffe's literary magazines in the recent past. But even the very best of these stories crics out time and gain for cutting, for clarification, for a different word here, for an additional sentence there. And that is to say that although Signature is at last getting work by authors who have something worth writing, the magazine is not yet supplying editorial assistance to those authors to make the finished product polished and consistently first-class.

"Brightness Falls," by Geoffrey Bush '51, makes as good an example as any. It is about the miserable effect as unsuccessful coming-out has on the creature who came out. Mr. Bush has a sense of character and he has a sense of narrative. But he confuses his reader far too often. He doesn't make his setting clear soon enough. He doesn't make his shifts from mood to mood easy enough to follow. And he doesn't quite manage to get across just what was wrong with the party, or with the girl, or with the girl's friends. He writes will enough in places so that there isn't any reason to suppose that he couldn't write equally well all through if he had an objective critical editor to work with.

"Chloee," by D. Carlton Hauck '51, is less subject to this sort of criticism than the other stories. It is about a boy's cruclty to his deaf grandmother, and stylistically it is the most successful story in the magazine. Of the three stories left, I liked "Perchance To Dream," by George Rinebart '50, the best, possibly because I couldn't quite figure out the point of the other two. "Perchance To Dream" is chiefly a dialogue piece, in spirit a combination of Noel Coward, James Thurber, and Evclyn Waugh. Here again a good editor would have made a big difference. The dialogue in places is poor, and no good editor would let Mr. Rinchart write instead of a simple "he said," such things as he started, he snarled, she snapped, she giggled, said the man evenly, and said the woman triumphantly. Ring Lardner once wrote a satirical story in which every character always said things with a lordly snort, or with an easy sneer. Mr. Rinchart should read that story.

On to the poetry. I liked two of the poems and I didn't like the two others. The poor ones were "Oaks In Winter," because it is like all the other poems written by young girls about trees and flowers, although technically, I suppose, it is quite good; and "Narcissus," because it is too hard to follow. The good ones, for my money, were "The Innocents," by Adrienne Rich '51 and "That Time Removes," by Anne Tolstoi '49. Both authors have a sure grip on the language they use, and on their media in general. Miss Rich's poem is particularly lucid, and she has created an image toward the end that is in itself one of the finest bits of writing to appear since the war in Cambridge's undergraduate literary magazines.