YOU CAN'T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER, UNLESS IT'S A MAGAZINE / Beatrice Mueller Of course, judging a magazine's fiction by its cover is only a superficial method. A more detailed analysis of the kinds of stories available in ten popular magazines, representing three major areas of interest, is necessary for an honest evaluation of the caliber of fiction available on the newsstand today. For simplification, magazines can be classified under the headings of (1) Women's, (2) Men's, and (3) Scholars'. The first two classes can each be subdivided into Type A and Type B. In the Women's "A" category are such well-known publications as True Romances and True Confessions. The "true" fiction in them seldom lives up to the tantalizing possibilities suggested by such titles as "I Left My Husband for a Violent Lover" or "Papa Never Told Me the Terrible Truth." These magazines have a reputation for being immoral. But to achieve immorality, people must be convincingly wicked and enjoy it! Here, however, the girls are invariably forced into evil against their pure wills by demons who are modeled after notorious stereotypes and are merely ridiculous. If the reader has a high school diploma, he will surely find himself laughing at the ludicrous plots and gasping over the hilarious illustrations. The overblown sex could only excite the groping, inexperienced adolescent. And it is difficult to sympathize with a girl who has been hideously tattooed "with the sort of pictures usually seen on restroom walls" by a husband she most willingly married and supported. As well as being written in solid cliches and having laughable plots and stereotype characters, these stories attempt to cover material normally developed in a full length novel. Anyone who takes them seriously is either a very tired and bored housewife of questionable intelligence or an adolescent who thinks she is educating herself. She'd probably learn more from reading the walls in public washrooms. Fiction for the bored and tired male can be found in magazines such as Saga and Argosy. Saga's "The Killer Prison" is an example of the man-triumphant- over-nature idea typical of the magazines in the Men's "A" category. Here the brawny American adventurer, Durant, and the brainy Spanish master thief, Merida, succeed in making an escape from an impregnable Spanish prison. Though the escape is effected by Merida's intelligence, it fails him in the final taxing swim to freedom, and Durant's sheer animal strength makes him the sole survivor. Durant is 42 and still going strong. Thus the balding reader, resting this magazine on his paunch, feels his muscles actually hardening with age. His hero is the man with "screaming muscles" who proves it's brawn over brains when it really counts. And the fiction in these magazines scores with the brainless ones. In Women's "B" division, such magazines as McCalls and Cosmopolitan offer escape fiction on a higher level. It is written with polish and varnished to a high glitter of wit. A busy housewife does not want to read a story which requires that she analyze the characters and solve their problems herself. In stories such as McCalls,' "The Trouble With Anchovies," the characters are not very complex and their problems are interesting but easily resolved in the happy ending. Here, a clowning young man named Dink (believe it or not) is the distress of the serious career 10 woman he is avidly courting. But eventually he convinces her that she "swallowed an overdose of adulthood," and she agrees to marry him and abandon herself to a life of childish glee. Hopefully, this will make the housewife feel she is being rescued from the weighty world of responsible adulthood and credit McCalls with taking five years off her age. Cosmopolitan's fiction is geared more toward the open-minded career girls and newlyweds. As in McCalls, the characters are a stereotype of the kind of people the readers are or would like to be. The writing style is even more sophisticated than in older women's magazines, for it strives to be in tune with the free love songs of today. In "Money," the heroine is an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old woman who realizes too late that she has everything but love. But the pat advice this and other similar stories offer seem to be more in the interest of increasing magazine sales by appealing to a wider audience. The time comes when you should stop making money and let him make it for you both, they say. Then you can read our other story especially for the struggling newlyweds. All this conforms to a very slick storyline formula, but offers little in the way of original intellectual stimulation. While the fiction in Men's "B" magazines such as Esquire and Playboy is also concerned with upholding a certain image, the quality of their fiction is usually superior to that of the Women's. This can be attributed, in part, to the more accomplished writers whose efforts appear in these magazines. Furthermore, their readers are supposedly an intellectually aware group who welcome more substantial, thought-provoking literature than their harried wives or fashionable girl friends. Donald Harrington's story in Esquire, "A Second Chance," illustrates the importance of allowing the reader to perceive and interpret the meaning through the thoughts and behavior of the characters. The main character is portrayed well as he grapples with very real problems. We can all identify with him when he realizes that much of life has passed him by, and he reflects over "the mysteries of youth, the failure of intellect, and the brief lifespan of dreams." A story by Irwin Shaw in Playboy has some of this significance and quality of writing. But perhaps because it is written about and for handsome, rich young cadabouts, Shaw puts over his meaning with annoying and obvious direct references to insure that the preoccupied reader doesn't give up on the story in favor of the easily understood colored illustrations further on. Though the characters and their situations are presented with clarity, the story is often spoiled by being too obvious in intent. However, this seems to be Playboy's policy in every aspect. With the Scholarly periodicals represented by Harpers and Atlantic, we come to the most prestigous magazines. Only top quality fiction appears in these publications. There may be a differing of opinion as to just what the best current fiction is-and certainly it depends upon one's criteria. Doubtless, the avid fan of True Story would have little regard for writing which he could hardly begin to comprehend! But if we can judge fiction by the amount of praise and respect it receives from noteworthy critics and connoisseurs of literature, and by the limited number of appreciative souls who subscribe to the publications in which it appears, then Harpers and Atlantic are certainly on top of the magazine stack. Harpers offers the works of such well-known authors as John Updike, whose story, "Your Lover Just Called," is typical of the stark realism that is the "right" style of expression in every creative field these days, painting notwithstanding. Atlantic specializes in recognizing exceptional writers who have probably been bombarding editors with manuscripts which always come back accompanied by a note saying, "Your story is good, but we're afraid we can't use it." Escape fiction may have its merits in lifting the reader from the doldrums of his little life and helping him to forget his problems. But serious fiction attempts to help him understand his problems so he can rid himself of them and the waste of time and money on fiction which merely offers temporary relief. 11