Summer 'Advocate'

Surely someone at Harvard can write. The college is full of kooks and wits and beats. One of them must be unhinged or inspired enough to invent a plot or evoke a mood. There must be somebody with the gift or the application to produce, if not a polished work, at least an interesting failure. But if so, he's not submitting his stuff to the Advocate.

In the summer issue there are four creditable pieces--one by Desmond O'Grady, an Irish poet who lived. in Adams House last year, the others by recent graduates, Robert Dawson, Frederick Fields and George D. Horowitz. And these three probably only seem as good as they do by contrast with the rest of the material in the magazine.

Horowitz's "A La Tarde Tourmalina" is a genuinely enjoyable story. The ending is a bit abrupt--an apparent icebox devours the narrator--and there isn't exactly a plot, but several incidents and patches of conversation are quite amusing. Two of the characters--a handsome, passionless perfectionist and his beautiful, passionless mistress--seem rather familiar, but the other two are engaging. The writing is generally vigorous, at times excellent.

Field's "Seraglio" isn't particularly good, but it's fun to read. Even when the narrator gets morassed in Truth, the prose is crisp: "my reason had long since flown the strict cage of its criteria." And though the connection between the incidents is obscure, they are strikingly recounted.

The other two stories are a chore to read. In "In the Autumn the Boy" Gail Borden develops a cumbersome word-joining technique to describe in nine pages what would have been vivider in one: "Crippled vision blurs, shuffles sideways, sees what seems caught form crushed within heathaze..."

In "The Ball," George A. K. Armah describes a little boy who disobeys his mother once, is punished, and is puzzled by life. That's all. Within fifteen lines the style varies from "Behind the soft sweetness of the aaahh there is hidden a mighty pain which will not be satisfied until the sea has exacted its vengeance," to "It was not that his mother was cruel or anything like that."

If a poem has got to be obscure, it should at least repay close analysis. Dawson's "The Pigeon Roof" does. It becomes evident, if one struggles with the disconnected sentences, that the narrator a) hates pigeons, b) once started a forest fire, c) had a friend who was a better poet who almost got killed when they were swimming in an irrigation ditch, but who recovered only to die on a golf course while the narrator was either on a hill behind a drive-in movie with a girl or on a barren shore, d) that the friend had started writing bad poems while in the hospital anyway, and e) that the narrator has had some connection with California migrant workers. But the chronology and emotional connections are hopelessly muddled.

The other student poems are generally clearer, but so slight as to be almost non-existent. The sentence, "The bright sun of dance makes no/moon of him, he receives the light/an asteroid past Pluto," which appears in Gavin Borden's "Marriage," must rank as the least happy of the issue.