The Harvard Advocate

A lot of writing we see around Cambridge is the kind of writing you're talking about when someone comes up to you on the street and asks without interest how you reacted to L. Hugh Redundancy's latest work in The Advocate. You answer that it was just great, really fine, or you squiggle up your nose in an evasive act of disdain, depending of course whether, in the first case, you enjoy drinking an occasional glass of crisp refresher with Rendundancy, or, in the second, he takes your sister out to the movies on Saturday nights and you don't like his looks.

But once now and then a talent the size of Rene Tillich's stretches itself out across the lazy pages of The Advocate and you must read what he says because at last someone has something to say in addition to a machine to say it. His strong and careful outline of a fellow who "understands perfectly" the acquisition of "good seats in the orchestra right up with the best" is a gripper of which both he and The Advocate should be proud. And most of the Registration Issue seems good.

Tillich's story is called "Memory of the Morning After" and is about Louis Collin who never uses alcohol and carries a fresh pack of cigarettes because it is good psychology "to break the ice" when he meets people. Louis is a boy of modest origin and of modest imagination who in spite of such failings can perceive that the only way to get anywhere in the world is to snag the attention of the boss, to show him what a fellow with a genuine dose of ambition can really do.

Louis sells maps and when two customers suggest it would be a shame if the maps they buy get blown overboard from their cruiser. Louis manoeuvres himself into the position of being able to sell the men 50 copies of each map, should they desire. But of course Louis meets a girl, a girl who despite her great wealth and social advantage manages to show him sympathy because he is quite unlike anyone she has met before. Straining against their destinies--his to own a dozen sullen Manhattan towers by denial of himself, hers to marry the man she went to college to catch--they move to a furious climax where her hateful tease confronts his buried desire...and to their little death together.

In no sense is "Memory of A Morning After" a perfect story, in the J. Donald Adams sense. The opening scene in an Automat seems wholely unnecessary, if not downright impossible because Tillich introduces you to strangers whom, it later develops, Louis knows very well--and so it could hardly be the morning-after reminiscence. And a few annoying lapses into nicely written stream-of-consciousness, or whatever they're calling it these days, gives Louis credit for an imagination he doesn't have. And in relating a macabre story of a friend, Vera, the girl, says "he grinned and wandered off," which is one grin we doubt ever got grinned, as they say. But these quibbles are morning-after quibbles which any quick blue pencil could crunch.

The rest of the magazine is poetry, and of it I like Sandy Kaye's "Afternoon Thoughts in Delft" best. It is a simple and tranquil poem, the best kind, and Sandy Kaye's piece seems to have an uncommon fragility about it. A lady sits in a doorway of Vermeer's "Street in Delft," thinking of the quiet and the secure things she knows about her faded old home. The poem is the woman talking, and yet it is not the woman talking because her thought seems to transcend her feeling. Be sure to hunt up the print in the library if you like the poem.

Richard Sommer contributes two poems, one on the classical side which is not my side but which of course may bring something to some people, and the other about the St. Croix River. The St. Croix River must be a newsy place, for Richard Sommer has noticed a lot going on there and it is fun to read about it all. Thomas Whitebread writes amusingly of how bourbon may be put to good, if pragmatic, use in "The Use of Bourbon," which is all very well for them that can afford it and apparently he can't because it's clear poem. His other contribution, "Skeeter," seems a bit wordy but has some nice sounding words in it. A. Lowell Edmunds has written a sonnet which seems squeezed from somewhere.

The Advocate's cover looks like the cover of a high school geometry book, and The Advocate has seen fit to continue its policy of filling space with book reviews. I'll leave the review of the reviews to more trapezoidal minds than mine.