The Harvard Advocate

Although neither my judgement nor my memory is infallible, I figure I can say without fear of self-contradiction that the Winter Issue of The Advocate is quite the worst I have ever read.

Except for the usual contributions of two or three poets who flirt with the editors only when deadline nears, the issue reveals the vanity, the affectation, and finally, the vacancy in talent of those who put it out.

The magazine is an ingenious conglomeration--from the the heavy stylization of Edgar de Bresson's "A Chapter From A Novel," a stylization which seems remarkably successful in its design to obscure the fact that he has nothing to say, to a condescending essay on the local literary scene by Lowell Edmunds, who apparently has no conspicuous desire to report accurately. And there is "A Preposition," by Kurt Blankmeyer, chiefly distinguished by its first sentence, 596 words long, and also by its incomprehensibility.

The Advocate has a number of interesting critical tenets. To qualify as an Advocate editor, a young man chooses as parents second-generation nouveaux, preferably the youngest and thus farthest removed progeny of a robber baron. After acquiring a Swiss governess and later a secondary school education in Paris, our critic purchases four pin-stripe suits of recognized quality (perhaps also a pipe), adopts his middle name for use colloquially (reserving his first initial as a prefix to his universally respected signature), and enters Harvard. Once here, he soon verses himself in Henry James, and obtains a lock of hair from the cranium of F. L. Seidel, himself a great Advocate critic a couple of years ago, a man than which there was no meaner Martini mixer. Experience becomes instinct, and criticism is much easier than it looks: reject stories written by those who are not your friends, particularly unwashed people; accept stories containing delectable bons mots in foreign languages, the more exotic the better. How to pick poetry is a more complex problem: obey your nose and judge the poet on the basis of his fragrance.

Following these simple rules, the editors managed to put the current issue together despite a paucity of material. M. de Bresson, not long ago named as The Advocate's leader, really didn't need anyone to size him up, cleverly tossed in the requisite bons mots and deliciously designated one of his characters "Fabrice." (Who could ever forget La Chartreuse de Parme!) That the piece was a hopeless tangle of words strewn in a thousand directions, indeed, that few could or would understand its nineteenth century affectations, mattered little. There was a beauty in words.

Edmunds apparently tries to make a fair assessment of local literary life. But to compare i.e., The Cambridge Review to a student who flunked out in boredom is to forget the fact that, faced with the possibility of passing it on to incompetents, i.e.'s editors decided to kill it, believing an honorable death preferable to the senility they saw on The Advocate. And to say that The Editor is on probation and that Audience is a junior Phi Beta Kappa is to play with words. Edmunds says that because Identity is published by an offset process, the success of the printing job depends on the poet's typewriter; if he studied printing, and that would be a very good place for The Advocate to start, he would learn that the poems of Identity are not typed by each poet's own machine, but rather, by the people who put out the sheet. He blames the CRIMSON for censuring the "little" magazines, "simply by reason of their appearance." A quick check through our files reveals the "little magazines" around the Square have a pretty good critical win-loss record, a better batting average, indeed, than some people feel they should have. Finally Edmunds seems to take great hope in a perhaps-mythical magazine called General Babo's Gazette and Carburator (sic), which has some of the finest unconscious press agents in town. He notes that perhaps General Babo will get a critical panning because of "the inevitable weaknesses of its contents." Can he suggest some more virtuous grounds on which to criticize a magazine?

Poets Stephen Sandy and Sandy Kaye again contribute some of their dependable work. It's unfortunate we've used all our space for lesser men--yet everyone knows a Volkswagen can find a parking place where no Edsel dares to tread.