The Harvard Advocate

Advocate readers will be pleased to find that, at least as far as the prose goes, the November issue is a bit above average. If none of the stories has a consummate finish, all of them have some very interesting facets. The most intriguing piece is a fragment from a novel by Peter Heliczer, the story of a young man with a slightly pedantic turn. Heliczer's use of lower case letters in the e e cummings fashion seems at first merely designed to prove that the author is "modern," and that there is something strange about his story. As one reads, however, he finds that Heliczer's lower case letters and unusual punctuation serve a good purpose--they give the whole story an aspect of abstraction which is effectively balanced by the warm and realistic sketching of his characters, largely through details of their conversion. Heliczer's strange form, in fact, seems almost necessary to counter the realistic detail of the young pedant, his acid girl, and their combined sensuality. Heliczer's narrative style is light and lucid, and his humor does not obstruct the seriousness of the piece as a whole.

Paula Budlong again presents one of her sketches of human irrationality, the theme this time being an old maid's hatred of her father and the responsibility of caring for him. The story is not very complex, not, in fact, as complex as her previously published ghoulish stories. From the first, one knows the inevitable result of her plot, but, as in Gide's Immoralist, this element of inexorability adds in power what it takes away in dramatic tension. Miss Budlong uses her details well and her narrative is clear, with the exception of an unintentionally misleading last paragraph.

A story of marriage and birth in college by John Pope handles with some subtlety the ambivalent emotions of a young man whose envy of a married roomate's security alternates with his pity of the trapped spouse. Pope manages to give his story a pervading atmosphere of pregnancy, domesticity, and security. Unfortunately, however, this profusion of warmth carries over a little too much into the narrator's thoughts--he, in short, becomes rather gooey. One cannot criticize Pope for not conforming in an age of understatement, but it seems that his story might have been more effective if, especially in the first part, he had toned down his narrator's agitation just a bit.

Although skillfully executed, Sallie Bingham's story about a devout Roman Catholic practising Christian Science somehow lacks interest. The Advocate's fragments of Professor Whitman's translation of The Alcestis, with their alliteration and charming metre, seem very well done. Aside from this, however, this issue's poetry is unexciting. Paul Flanigan has written a "pretty" sonnet, expressing Keatsian sentiments with rather abstract words. There is also another of Andre Gregory's hoaxes. This one is about a sea-walnut. John Ratte's cover is, as usual, architectural.