A Little Magazine with Stature

There are some people who have been waiting since the demise of i.e. The Cambridge Review for hopeful signs on the Harvard magazine scene. Like the Godot sojurn, this wait has been punctuated with a good deal of talk and some potato-chip philosophizing.

Hope has arrived as a great many people thought it would--not in expensive bindery or elaborate engraving. But on poor paper, mimeographed, adless, and bearing the unmistakable smell of ink. Voices goes on sale today, and if you can't always make out the words because of the publishing process, it's at least worth the effort.

Reflective

Voices, writes its editors, was christened over a reflective beer at Cronin's, and consists of people "similar perhaps only in their enthusiasm for writing." Everyone contributing is in Boston for the summer; and all are under forty.

Rene Tillich's short story "Point of View" and Ralph Hickock's poem "Song" are the two best pieces in the first issue of Voices. James Hill and Eleanor Kester both contribute some good poetry, although the bank-clerk-and-pin-collar ghost of T.S. Eliot appears to haunt Hill and most of the Voices poets.

Indeed, that ghost and a somewhat inane collection of conversation and childhood incident called "Cousin Jack" are the only real faults of the current issue. Hill, Hickock, Claude McNeal (who edites the magazine along with Hickock) and a couple of the female poets seem to be looking at Eliot as a mentor or an enemy--but not looking beyond him. A bogus character named T.E. Stearns goes on for several pages of Eliot parody--which should have gone out of fashion several decades ago.

Gentleman Magazine

But Voices has modesty and some good writing on its side. The Harvard community has been known to read anything that was worth reading--even in long hand. And the gentlmanly leisure with which the editors approach the business of putting out a magazine is a lollipop in the long hotsummer of intense young men and their ambitious literature.

Like the Marines in Lebanon, we need you, in a way.