The Advocate

A garish if attractive cover conceals another issue of the Advocate. Inside come three stories, three poems, two reviews, and two line drawings, all, in the recent Advocate tradition, a little more or less than competent.

The major virtue of this issue is that the editors have resisted the temptation to pad a thin issue with bad material. All of the stories are competently written, but none of the authors seem to have any more pressing concern than telling a sensual tale, which means that the reader can put down the issue on any particular sentence without feeling the slightest regret, but that, on the other hand, he may pick it up again without severe foreboding.

The best piece is, naturally, at the beginning, and is hopefully entitled Renascence. E.C. Davidson shows he is a student of A.J. Guerard, but not too much so. His on-shore variation on The Old Man and the Sea creates, more than any of the other stories, a mood and a character which blend into suspense verging on horror, and is thus the only piece which can claim to draw its reader onward. Yet it achieves this only in the narrative. The technical ease of "how to catch a shark" seems to suit the author and the protagonist, which the stream of consciousness soliloquy at the beginning certainly does not. If Davidson can find a tale which talks through its own logic instead of requiring attempts to explain outside the narrative, he may well become a really successful story-teller. At present, however, his story compels you to read until, arriving at the end, you find that there is nothing there but supper.

Orgel's three poems are echoes of other poets, other places and times, and other-worldly concerns, all turning on well-formed words. The poet's experiments in mood, meter, and word are seemingly unrelated, however, both to each other and to the reader, so that each aspect, while often interesting in itself, never becomes related to a complete poem. Typical of this difficulty is the use of an off-beat second line in what should seemingly be a regular ballad form. The variation is intriguing, but it does not help the overall effect.

"Beauty and the Beast" is a story about a hairy Havana high school senior who doesn't fit into the group, goes to bed with a prostitute, and finds that the socially acceptable fairy queen of the high school is neither off-beat nor a prostitute. The author, Robert Grindell, is another smooth writer, but his plot lacks both unity and message. He handles sex well, but his characters are not up to the experience, shadowy sketches whom he seems only to have met, never to have known. The hero's hairiness is, like much of the characterization, inadequate. Yet where characterization is needed, Grindell writes, "I will not attempt to describe the beauty of the girl whom I shall call Carol Ann Paterson." As a result, she never becomes a girl, but only a vivacious sweet young thing.

Sallie Bingham writes another story well. It seems mostly to concern the proper behavior for a sensitive personality. A sensitive personality should collect faces, consider herself introspectively, be socially useful, and go to bed with a dentist. She will then be prepared to add a new link to her chain of experience.

Abel Erelong is a not very clever pseudonym for a not very clever poem about Celia and Sweeney, who should be left to Mr. Eliot. "Robert Johnston publishes an in memoriam for the passing of the 3rd Avenue El," according to the notes.

By far the most successful pieces in the issue are the two reviews. Apparently undergraduates in general and The Advocate in particular find criticism a simpler task than creation. This is not, however, to suggest that criticism should consume more space, but rather, that their editors should apply their critical standards to the material they publish. There is no shortage of undergraduate prose technicians, and many of them are writing for The Advocate. If the editors can convince these craftsmen that their work should say something, that it is not absolutely essential to be so divorced from the subject as not to give a damn about it, and that it is not necessary for a young writer to limit himself to microscopic themes, they will render a service not only to the hesitant authors but the too often yawning public. It is good to be able to say that this issue contains nothing very bad, but it would be far better to say that it contained one piece which at least tried to be good.