WARBABIES

Two weeks ago in these columns, the BOOKSHELF recorded the existence of New University Thought, a Chicago-based quarterly devoted to student political opinion; it must now note the emergence of another promising and even younger student magazine, the Warbaby Review. Unlike their predecessors, the editors of WR have not issued a detailed syllabus or manifesto of their intentions: their handiwork, it seems, is to speak for itself.

What it has to say, it must be noted, is not entirely reassuring. New magazines, and especially new student magazines, are notoriously difficult to establish-material is scarce and money is scarcer; and yet all too many of the pieces in the first issue of WR should have been rigidly rejected, even by the most desperate of aspiring editors.

Mr. Gordon Milde, to take but one melancholy example, has written a tiring, adolescent, bogus-religious, pre-New Yorkerish (one could enumerate further) bit of fiction; Mr. Roger Hagen, to take but one other, has written a tortuous, jargon-ridden assay on "new radical humanism"--his confusion is endemic.

And yet one appreciates the Review's obvious attempt to achieve catholicity-issue one includes poetry, fiction, Mr. Hagen's essay, and even some art work. And of the poetry, Mr. Fritz Eager's verse is quite handsome indeed, and Mr. Henry Lowell Mason III's translations of The Twelve is most impressive.

The Warbaby Review, as it presents itself in its preview edition, is, in short, an honest, struggling, and not unexciting little magazine--and certainly one that is worth looking at. The editors of WR hope to be publishing in the future on a quarterly basis. The first full-fledged copies of the first issue should find their way to Harvard Square newsstands by about the tenth of November. The per issue price is estimated at 35 cents.