Gullible's Travels Thru Harvard

The primitivistic cover-figure from which Gullible's Travels Thru Harvard gains its basic nomenclature dominates and imbues this ambitiously conceived publication with an atavistic tendency parallel in some respects to practically nothing. Al Capp (and in many instances he must be considered the anti-Capp) prepares the reader for subsequent perusal by an explanatory letter in which he combines the fanciful and the mock satirical to introduce the two authors, Larry Levine and Phil Costello, both of whom are Harvard 3L.

Thus in the cover and in the Cappian introduction are contained those rudimentary tools, the machinery, with which we can in the most facile manner explore the themes of Gullible's Travels Thru Harvard (hereinafter referred to as gttf 1). Primitivism, atavism, satiricism, and fancifulism are the four poles about which we must revolve, slowly and steadfastly. Admittedly, such an approach requires a temporary spatial schizophrenia, there being only two poles per world in accepted naturalistic schematization. Never mind, because it we are to adopt this attitude, we must merely become a kind of eternally pendent deus ex machina, which many of our genre before us have done with considerable self-gratification and emolument.

gttf 1 abounds with humorous pen and ink sketches. In this particular it departs somewhat from its slightly older fraters, who rely only on the stanza arrangement of their verses to provide comic relief. I think it is enough to say that the primitivistic, etc., themes pervade these drawings, and to conclude from them that gttf 1 has not yet reached that pinnacle of sound literary achievement from which it may return to the cradle and proceed to make pictures of words.

The verse, however, which accompanies and gains substance or non-substance from the pictures deserves closer scrutiny. This verse appears in many cases within the sketch itself, in what may be described as either a cloud or a balloon. The opening lines create such a frenetic and frightening effect, that I will quote them out of context and with no possible frame of reference, as is the current predilection:

"Once each decade

A sinister figure

Emerges from the

Dark and musty cellar

Of the Harvard

Club, N.Y.C."

Here we see echoing juxtapositions of Yeats' "beast slouching toward Jerusalem," Blake's "Tiger," and the pioneer-figure, which by a number of double inversions, we may conclude to be John Harvard.

As we critics never have enough space to do justice to anything (justice, it must be remembered, is not in any way connected with judgment), I will quote one other brilliant passage from gttf 1, and hope that it will sufficiently arouse those sensibilities which are likely to be aroused. One line poems are always indicative of a fertile and creative mind, and the following is no exception."

"At Harvard, nearly everyone reads."

As with all recent literary endeavors, gttf 1 does not require criticism, but eight or nine or ten inches of review. To say that gttf 1 is not worth one dollar would be snide, but much worse, naive. No, gttf 1 is atavistic, primitivistic, fancifulistic, and satiristic. What more can one say?

First voice: "Samuel Johnson died in 1784."