A letter came Thursday from a Radcliffe girl called Anabel Handy who was angry about a review of Signature that had appeared on this page the day before. That review was written by me; and after due consideration of her letter, a profound scarch of my own soul, and deep thought about the nature of the universe, I have decided that there is but one course for a man of conscience and honesty to take. But being what I am, I can't face asking Miss Handy to take over my job starting Monday morning at 9 o'clock. Instead, I'll make a base compromise and say that her letter is completely, unequivocally right.

Her main point is that "Mr. Raphaelson's criterion 'easy to follow' applies best to the funny papers," which is so. It is also true that this standard led to some flippancy that Miss Handy points out, and to a false judgment of her own poem "Narcissus," which she does not point out, but which I hereby correct by announcing that in my chastened opinion, reached after a re-reading, "Narcissus" is a fine poem, in spite of the confusing punctuation that makes it seem harder to follow than it is.

But accurate as her letter is, I still have a quarrel with the assumption it rests on, which is that a criterion that applies "best" to the funny papers cannot at the same time be a good criterion for judging other forms of literature. Last spring the Dana Reed Prize for the best piece of writing to appear during the year in an undergraduate publication went to a story that ran in the Lampoon. The judges of the contest were the Curator of the Nicman Foundation, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and the editor of Harper's, and far be it from me to pretend to know their criteria. But one outstanding difference between Clement B. Wood's prizewinner and nearly every story the Advocate or Signature printed during the year was that in Wood's piece you could always tell who was talking, you could understand what they were saying, and when people weren't talking, you knew what was happening and where, while in the other stories you could hardly ever be sure of any of these things. In other words, Wood's story was easy to follow while the others were not.

The point is that Wood, like most authors who have something to write about, took the trouble to write is as simply and clearly as he could. Now if you happen to be James Joyce, and what you have to say is very special, then even the clearest way of saying it may not be at all easy to follow. The difficulty in Miss Handy's poem--which is its punctuaton--I now think to be this sort of necessary difficulty. But I will bet that Joyce and Miss Handy wrote as simply as their subjects permitted them to write; and I will state as a fact that most of the people writing for the Advocate and Signature write as complicatedly as they can, and that they do so in order to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. And this is why the criterion "is it easy to follow?" does not have to be held down to the funny-papers.

Miss Handy, as a staff-member of Signature, is at least partly responsible for the material the magazine runs. I suggest that she ponder the paradox of stories being harder to follow than Dick Tracy when they have less substance, which is often the case. And if she can go on from there to make the stories that do have substance as easy to follow as their content allows, instead of the opposite, Signature will become worth reading, and people will begin to buy it. Just the way they buy the funny-papers. Or Hamlet.