Identity has grown in stature since its early and unpromising days, and now attracts some of Cambridge's best writers. There has been an equivalent growth in price, so that each issue now costs fifty cents. Unfortunately, in the latest issue the size of the magazine continues static: Identity is as dainty as it was in the days of its sickly youth, publishing only a brief one-act play by Charles Mee, Anyone! Anyone!, Mark Mirsky's very short story, Shkootz, and Caroms, eight poems by Stephen Sandy.

If the problem is that there simply aren't enough good writers to fill up thick magazines (a fact of which I am unconvinced, having read much excellent unpublished material), then editors should include more work by the writers that they have discovered. Mr. Mee's play, for example, is part of a trilogy, and I would have been delighted to have the chance to read the other two plays.

Anyone! Anyone! is a delight, delicately treading the line between a blaring SIGNIFICANCE and a clever, amusing self-mockery. Arthur and Junior are two decrepit old men, trying to save their ramshackle house from destruction.

(Heerwego enters from the door on the right, dressed in sports clothes--with bright, flowered, garish sport shirt, straw hat. He is slightly chubby.)

Heerwego: Well, now. Well, now. How's about a howdy for Big Bill Heerwego?

Arthur: Heerwego?

Heerwego: That's what I said: Heerwego, from City Slum Clearance. I've come to give you the word about the building.

Junior: What about it?

Heerwego: It is going the way of all flesh. In a short time we tear it down--(with relish) SMASH! Like that.

Junior: We?

Heerwego: The people.

Arthur: Yes, I've met them, Junior. It's all right.

Heerwego: You'll have to move on out, my friends, before the big crane with the big steel bell moves on in--and SMASH! !

Junior: Move out?

Arthur: We won't move. I have influence!

(Heerwego laughs)

I have connections.

(Heerwego laughs)

Listen to me!

Heerwego: SMASH! The world turns. You can't fight city hall. It's all been planned, settled--everything in its place. We can't have everything our own way in this day and . . .

Arthur: You can't order the world, Mr. Heerwego. It won't stand for it. Not your order. There are other orders. You can't order us out. Orders! Your order orders us out.

Mark Mirsky is another writer whose work could have been represented more plentifully. Shkootz is an anecdote about a rabbi who must punish a little boy who scribbled a swastika on the Sunday School wall. Mirsky's prose is full of fire and yet maintains a reserved dignity. Only once does the writing seem to go out of control, for I don't understand the important passage explaining the rabbi's cry of "Shkootzim, shkootzim" at the children who had perpetrated the evil deed.

The high point of the issue is Stephen Sandy's poetry. At his best, as in He Wins!, Sandy writes with clarity, wit, and technical virtuosity. He has improved a great deal since his last appearance in print, over a year ago. He has become much more concerned with the sound of his poetry, and he has learned to use allusion unpretentiously and forcefully. Ironically, he compares his seeker of "Success's own sweet cadillac" with the seeker after truth in Marvell's "Garden" ("where fruits are ranged by lusters on each tree") and with Frost's lonely traveler ("and thinks he feels the miles he has to strive before he sleeps").

A few of the poems, like Fledgling, try to suggest too much, and jumble the puns and images. He taxes my imaginative power, at least, with an excess of overly potent words like "comes" and "calms" and "court" in contexts in which his aim is never quite apparent. But all the poems are interesting, worked at with great care, and each finds reflections of itself in the other poems of the series. They are worth the time they take and, if such things can be measured in terms so crude, the fifty cents they cost.