ON THE SHELF

Neither the war nor the paper shortage have yet touched the Harvard Advocate, and the December issue, despite its grimmer gray exterior, presents the old material in the old way with only a touch less than its usual technical excellence. Marvin Barertt's lead story, "Home Life," is a particularly skillful sketch of a degenerate family, and its distilled essence of moral and physical decay, engenedered, by apparently objective description of voluptuous decadence, savors strongly of the works of William Faulkner. Unfortunately, however, the author has little of Faulkner's control or understanding of the literary dynamite with which he is playing, and the result is the technically polished yet emotionally impotent quality which characterizes so much of the Advocate's imitative "modern" material.

Robert Clurman's "First Voyage" is a clumsily conceived and haltingly executed tale of character conflict among four neurotic sailors. Containing a few excellent descriptive passages; it fails generally to get anything across, for psychological drama is fostered by change and development in the characters and mood which here remain static. The motivating secrets with which the men enter upon the scene are still secrets when they leave, and the reader refuses to absorb the mood when he cannot understand its source. This morbid flavor of the 'twenties, without the disillusioned bitterness toward mankind which produced it, is meaningless.

The last two stories have more direction for they deal with objective problems which their authors can understand and control. While their issues may seem trivial and dated, it is refreshing to find that ideas as well as "atmospheres" haunt the minds of the Mt. Auburn Street coterie. "Roll Your Own," Cecil Schneer's first contribution to the Advocate, is a somewhat overlong tale of a mortgage foreclosure, but it contains some unusually well conceived characters, ably portrayed by dialogue and incident. Harold Smith's "Boy Wanted" though the slightest of these stories in stature, succeeds the best. Here, for the first time, there is an integration of plot and mood, action and description. The simple story of the employer and the boy and the job is not new, and there is a clumsy ambiguity in motivation, but, on the whole, the tale is handled with a skillful restraint and subtlety so that the reader feels the author to be completely in control of his medium. Not original enough to be important, the story satisfies, for the author knows personally the material with which he deals.

In the poetry corner John Malcolm Brinnin's "John the Baptist" stands out as the most original and forceful. Technically modern, yet with a stability and poise which characterizes too little Advocate poetry, this piece achieves a balance between the verbose complexities of Dunstan Thompson and the simple triteness of Bruce Phemister whose poems also appear in this issue. Not to be forgotten is Robert Hillyer's "Fantasy," a bit of skillfully unimportant frou-frou, but delightful.

The copy, as a whole is below par, and yet not enough so for its deficiencies to be charged off to profit and loss. The faults of the issue are the faults of every issue, only slightly exaggerated. Somehow the Advocate has cut itself off from the wealth of original creative writing done at Harvard. Its material maintains technical excellence, but it is too strictly limited by techniques fashioned by post-war writers for problems which have little meaning today. There is original talent at Harvard: it remains for the Advocate to find it.