The Advocate

The November Advocate closes with an aimless apologia which shrilly proclaims that young writers exist in the world, admits they don't go to Harvard, and wishes they would get in touch with the Advocate. The editors complain that: (1) potential contributors would rather shoot for big money from national magazines than write for local audiences, and (2) talent, like nature, can't be forced -- no one can squeeze pieces out of writers when they're doing things like picketing the White House.

The Advocate has quite a bit to be neurotic about. The November number is scrawny and bleak. It has twenty-eight straight pages of existential lamentations, with ads for variety. No doubt, as the Advocate claims, "the best 'young' writing being done in the community will stand comparison with the work of the more nearly established"; but it's a sorry thing that the magazine has to depend so much on the "community." The current number boasts only three writers from Harvard or the 'Cliffe. The Advocate will continue to lean on post-B.A. literati as long as undergraduates don't bother to contribute.

But the editors protest too much. Their latest offering is not an embarrassment. This time there are no gimmicks, no reprints of the adolescent Wallace Stevens. And quite a bit of talent has returned from the recent past. At least people like Dawson and Meyers wail their angst tolerably well.

Although Robert Dawson ignores regular metres, his sounds and images form gracefully ordered verse. Color motifs and imperfect, desultory rhymes help to hold his stanzas together. In place of extended metaphor Dawson uses sharp, emphatic verbs to pin down the sensations of a tragicomic family trip.

Shoehorned in Grant's back seat,

we grabbled my grandma's girlhood. Betty was six ...

she tagged the rearview window ledge and ducked

in grandpa's Merc, which quavered like a bat ahead of us

Poet Gerald Meyers strives for a precision and a richness of diction that tends to disturb the flow of his lines. Wordy images help to convey complex impressions of "Benton Harbor," but at the same time they mince his stanzas into goulashes of striking sentences and phrases. But the infection is local. At the poem's end he serenades his subject with moving simplicity:

... child of the evening,

heir of the slowly moving

twilight and wandering star that comes to charm

the day and sun away, to sketch in silver

a solitary yacht, tacking down the river.

There's some other poetry too. Marianne Moore's "In Lieu of the Lyre" is a parody of Cambridge pedantry, I think. Doris Fendel ponders the elusive essence of a marriage partnership in "Prothalamium," without encouraging results:

There is no game.

Instead there is only being, being only

That which I am in you and you in me.

It is necessary only to agree.

Thus we are free.

Her "Roundel," in contrast, is tightly structured and musical.

Working with terse, ironic images, Sidney Goldfarb probes the crushing finality of death, a "salvation" that enters

In an iron uniform

With a cloth badge.

The Advocate's prose drought continues. Gerald Hillman sets up a psychotic counterpart between the colloquial jabberings of an Italian family and the stilted quarrel of a couple who live upstairs. All this either occurs in or comments on the passive consciousness of Willy, the title character, who has been nudged over some brink by the death of a woman named Anita. "Reality is reality, it's essential," says Mr. White, one of the upstairs wranglers. But Willy's reality rushes chaotically into his mind, scrambled and unpunctuated, hinting at a story line that never fully materializes. Hillman's attempted humor does not click, as witness

... He was obliged to report to her that the

character of little Victor, child so carefully

hewn from her illustrious shank, was analogous to acne painted like dimples.

His profundities are, frankly, over my head.

"Icarus" by Stephen Saltonstall is a novel about a sorely put-upon young man. The Advocate limits itself to excerpts. The hero ricochets helplessly from one bum rap to another, in a "world we perceive too well." His mother suckles ciggies, his father strangles cats. All the absurdities of life pass before him after a bicycle spill knocks him out cold. Sometimes Saltonstall's descriptive passages relieve the self-consciousness of his story; more often they compound it.

The last piece of fiction, "The Sentimental Journey of Arthur Friedberg," is simply clumsy and banal. David Ansen blows a paragraph of dull theme into several pages of dull plot.

It's all right to be alienated. But the Advocate's monotonous avant garde anomie turns away fellow-travelers as well as Philistines. The trick is to be artistic, and occasionally to snap out of it. Most of the pieces in the Advocate do not heighten or clarify what they talk about, nor do they entertain. They either grab the reader by the intellect and dare him to interpret them, or they flirt ambiguously with him. Too often the Advocate's authors "confound obscurity of expression with the expression of obscurity," as Poe put it. A good poem should sound good the first time around -- but it's entirely possible to slide through this whole magazine without being moved or interested enough by anything to want to understand it. If an Advocate writer stands silent on a peak in Darien, he usually stands there alone, while the public sticks to Chem 20 in the foothills far below.

And the poems and stories are too much alike. Almost all of them share the same cold-blooded, Absurdist detachment. The magazine needs some comedy, some non-In point of view, as much as it needs more polished and more comprehensible artists. In coming issues the Advocate should shove the mutant crab off its cover.