THE PLASTIC SAGE

The results of the second Intercollegiate Short Story Contest conducted by Harper's Magazine reiterate the lesson taught by the first: young and ambitious authors are likely to be much more successful if they write about something with which they have had some personal contact and concerning which they are at least adequately informed. This, being a literary truism, needs a practical demonstration, such as this contest and others similar, to prove its soundness. Where the rub comes is the editorial insistence on college stories.

It is all very well to demand stories of college life from college authors. The bitter truth, however, is that such efforts mean little or nothing either as fiction or fact. There is a thing known as a sense of proportion and it is not entirely out of place in literature. Practically any college student who has passed his elementary courses in English composition can sit down and describe the life around him-as he see it. And the consequence in the majority of cases is extremely uninteresting and also inaccurate. His proximity to his material makes proper vision impossible; what he sees as great pulsating problems turn out to be mere details which always clutter the collegiate scene. On the other hand that which he may dismiss as "ordinary" is likely to prove the real meat of his discourse.

If editors wish to get the undergraduate point of view they must be prepared to accept much that is in every way untrue and false as compared with a more mature understanding. The worst and most hectic tales of college life are written either by college students or by young graduates. And the more intelligent samples come from men who have been away from college long enough to discuss it calmly, and who have lost what may well be termed a sophomoric attitude toward life and academic environment.

There are occasions when accuracy and balance are not desirable in fiction, when personal narrative, however biased, however immature, is wanted. And in such occasions college stories written by undergraduates exactly fit the requirements. They offer what is at the moment the sentiment of the writer and although they may be nothing but expressions of that fleeting sentiment and may violate all the rules of reality, to say nothing of good taste, they are for that reason valuable. But to go the undergraduate for the truth-whatever that is-about himself and his fellows is as wise as to seek advice from as infant on the subject of the care and feeding of children. One is amused but one gains little information except that of an intensely subjective and irrelevant nature.