On the Shelf

Through the pages of the April issue of "Radditudes" parade what is probably the most homicidal and sexually maladjusted collection of characters ever to appear in a girl's college magazine. In itself, this fact does not condemn "Radditudes." A gang of misanthropes, murderers, and masochists, handled properly, can make excellent reading. For the most part, however, the stories in "Radditudes" offer neither narrative, nor clean-out character studies, nor reasonably penetrable allegery, but substitute slightly pretentious, somewhat mystifying, and extremely bloody vignettes.

"Feathers," by A. M. Koehler is an exception, and one of the nicer pieces of writing "Radditudes" has published. In fact, if the reader hadn't already been confronted with so many previous examples of deranged mentality, he might find this study of a strapping youngster who knifes his mothers because she makes him kill chickens too often grimly entertaining, ridiculous as it sounds in synopsis. But it unfortunately follows a story called "The Cottage With Ducks in Normandy," by Austryn Wainhouse. Towards the end of his tale, one of Wainhouse's characters, "faintly aware of some unbalance or maladjustment or something or other, tries very hard and with mighty sincerity to understand; he feels as if he should be compelled by all this display to know something; is all this some esoteric concert, some tragic sequence?" This passage sums up the reader's feelings perfectly. After wading through a series of nauseating images such as a basement where "guts ran knee deep," and after watching a woman 'who likes to be beaten up in bed and two men who achieve this for her wander through a section of their mutually depraved lives, the reader does not know if he has read a parody or a psychological study. If parody, it is not clearly such, and if psychological, it is pompous, muddled, and shocking just for the sake of being shocking.

Of the three other stories one concerns a frustrated pianist, and another a frustrated man who just sits in a cafe. The remaining story, by Miss Miriam Ginsberg, it is a pleasure to report, is humorous, and despite the very mild nature of its wit, her account of a girl's gym class seems practically uproarious when compared with the morose material which surrounds it.

For the record, this month's poetry ranges from fair to poor, excepting Miss Sally Higginson's "Snow in the City," which is nicely done. And an article by Durham M. Miller about the contemporary mating "dilemma" is amusing and has a point. More of this sort of thing, more simple narrative along the lines of a story in an earlier issue entitled "Good Men Are Hard to Find," and less overblown neuroticism would make "Radditudes" more balanced than it has been in its last two issues.