The Harvard 'Advocate'

Despite a shortage of fiction and a surplus of silly gimmicks, the April Advocate is one of the most substantial issues in recent years.

In trying to puff a little breadth into its pages, the Advocate has gone heavily into orbit. It owes almost all of its prose to Mao Tse-tung, the adolescent Henry Miller, and the Phyllis Anderson Award drama competition. Much of its poetry comes from people outside the College. This wholesale borrowing gives the magazine a good variety of pieces, but some of it seems frivolous, and the table of contents still shows several discouraging vacuums. There is only one short story, one review, and nary a satire or a critical essay.

The best selections in the Advocate are written by its most common class of contributors--students. While the novelties turn out mediocre, pieces by Robert Grenier, Mary Ann Radner and George Teter carry the magazine. Perennially cursed by its inability to ferret out competent student writers, the Advocate has found several of them for the April issue. And to bust the in-group myth, only three are members of the staff.

The Advocate is long on poets, and the best of them is Robert Grenier. In "The Minnesota Soldiers Home in August" and in translations of three poems by the German writer George Trakl, Grenier coaxes beautiful phonetic effects out of his descriptive language. Rhythmic vowel sounds and alliteration echo through his lines; Consonants roll melodically within his words:

Golden, the fire flares up

about the nation

Over blackish cliffs, dead-

drunk, crashes

the luminous tornado

the blue comber of

the glacier. . . .

Grenier's linguistic skill runs deeper than assembling musical combinations of tones and letters. He uses the combinations to construct vivid visual and emotional scenes. "Grodek" pictures a battlefield strewn with casualties, among which a nurse walks "to greet the ghosts of heroes, bleeding heads."

Seven poems by Mary Ann Radner form a spectrum that stretches from "Resurrections" and "Primavera" down to "The Bear" a pointless apostrophe to the spirit of a hunting trophy. Although Miss Radner does not have Grenier's ornate gift for charming physical images out of language, she has a fine descriptive touch and makes complex, moving verse out a simple words. With strong, majestic lines Jon as and Lazarus tell the stories of their reawakenings in "Resurrections." In "Primavera" Miss Radner uses an unusual pattern of repeated words to achieve a methodical, stately rhythm.

If the Advocate has a short story in must be "Intimacy" by George Teter, but the designation is debatable. The action takes places in the memory and fancy of a drowsy, musing passenger on a ramshackle Greyhound crossing the Rockies. A girl lies "well-wedged" against him in the sweaty bus, and as they travel toward California he slowly loses her, in muddled, morbid imaginings, to "a hardfaced fellow with protuberant eyes" sitting across the aisle. Metaphors incubate by the dozen in Teter's fecund prose, sometimes overgrowing it altogether. But Teter's style is more inventive and exuberant than turgid. For instance: "If the bus weren't mounting she'd drop on the floor, restribute burst like a sack of seeds, sprout into wakefulness..."

Most of the selections by poets Richard Eberhart and Stephen Sandy are disappointingly shallow and listless, with the exception of Sandy's comic verses entitled "The Sultan Wears a Crimson Turban." John Allman's poem, full of mellow nostalgia for "childhood and the family," get ponderously explicit in spots:

Three leaves, on a twig from a branch

are sticking out the winter. They look like

a vulture. How could leaves tell us of death...

Wanting short stories, the Advocate has found an excellent substitute in scenes from two plays. "Treason at West Point" by James Culpepper, the Phyllis Anderson Award Play of 1965, bears a rather disconcerting resemblance to Shaw's "Devils Disciple," and perhaps for that reason it makes entertaining reading. The two scenes printed in the Advocate bristle a bit too thickly with jocular repartee, and they race like a mounted Paul Revere--outdistancing, at times, his characters' motives for acting as they do. Culpepper's play is all animation and exclamation unwilling to sit still long enough to attend to subtle character studies.

In wit and dramatic technique "Treason at West Point" shrivels somewhat when set beside the play that took second prize in the Anderson Award competition, "The Reprisal." Mark Bramhall, an Osbornian iconoclast, puts a reckless, sensuous man into the collar of a divinity student, then sticks both man and collar in one corner of a writhing triangle. The dialogue blazes with violent, staccato speeches as David, the protagonist, banters and bickers with his mistress and the good girl in the piece. Occasionally the sarcasm and the yelling get childishly out of hand, but as a whole the drama is exciting, exhausting, and superb.

Bramhall excels with dialogue, but he has a problem with his premise. Why the collar? Why is David a divinity student? At one point his mistress asks him, "Isn't that why I disgust you--because I keep dragging you down to earth . . . because I know you're anything but a saint?" Yet David seems firmly earthbound from the beginning, a man clearly cut out to rip the cloth rather than to wear it. By making him an aspirant for the pulpit, Bramhall turns David into a blunt tool for tedious bludgeoning of religion, superflous to plot and good taste alike.

The gimmicks in the Advocate help diversify the contents of the magazine but add little substance. Any of them might have been conveniently omitted. After a paragraph or two the article by Mao ceases to amuse. Five early lyrics by Wallace Stevens seem to be an oblique (and unnecessary) apology for the poetry in the rest of the Advocate. Since the collegiate Stevens was still an amateur, we are urged to be more tolerant of undergraduates writing in our own day. Actually the poems prove only that Stevens' style changed a lot later on, and got a lot better.

"Glittering Pie," the overpublicized piece by Henry Miller that caused the banning of the October 1935 Advocate, purports to be a letter from a jaded young expatriate lewdly effervescing in New York. His comments and "funny experiences" constitute an offhand critique of American civilization and the bittersweet futility of being alive. Miller is airy, a bit decadent, worth reprinting but certainly not worth censoring.

I have enough faith in the Advocate to believe that it will print any masterpiece or worthwhile literary experiment that is submitted to it. Since there aren't many signs of genius or pathbreaking in the latest issue, I conclude that the Eliots and Updykes in the College are hoarding their treasures. Even without them the April Advocate has climbed into that critical limbo of "honest," "promising" work that looks like it's improving.

Most of the selections by poets Richard Eberhart and Stephen Sandy are disappointingly shallow and listless, with the exception of Sandy's comic verses entitled "The Sultan Wears a Crimson Turban." John Allman's poem, full of mellow nostalgia for "childhood and the family," get ponderously explicit in spots:

Three leaves, on a twig from a branch

are sticking out the winter. They look like

a vulture. How could leaves tell us of death...

Wanting short stories, the Advocate has found an excellent substitute in scenes from two plays. "Treason at West Point" by James Culpepper, the Phyllis Anderson Award Play of 1965, bears a rather disconcerting resemblance to Shaw's "Devils Disciple," and perhaps for that reason it makes entertaining reading. The two scenes printed in the Advocate bristle a bit too thickly with jocular repartee, and they race like a mounted Paul Revere--outdistancing, at times, his characters' motives for acting as they do. Culpepper's play is all animation and exclamation unwilling to sit still long enough to attend to subtle character studies.

In wit and dramatic technique "Treason at West Point" shrivels somewhat when set beside the play that took second prize in the Anderson Award competition, "The Reprisal." Mark Bramhall, an Osbornian iconoclast, puts a reckless, sensuous man into the collar of a divinity student, then sticks both man and collar in one corner of a writhing triangle. The dialogue blazes with violent, staccato speeches as David, the protagonist, banters and bickers with his mistress and the good girl in the piece. Occasionally the sarcasm and the yelling get childishly out of hand, but as a whole the drama is exciting, exhausting, and superb.

Bramhall excels with dialogue, but he has a problem with his premise. Why the collar? Why is David a divinity student? At one point his mistress asks him, "Isn't that why I disgust you--because I keep dragging you down to earth . . . because I know you're anything but a saint?" Yet David seems firmly earthbound from the beginning, a man clearly cut out to rip the cloth rather than to wear it. By making him an aspirant for the pulpit, Bramhall turns David into a blunt tool for tedious bludgeoning of religion, superflous to plot and good taste alike.

The gimmicks in the Advocate help diversify the contents of the magazine but add little substance. Any of them might have been conveniently omitted. After a paragraph or two the article by Mao ceases to amuse. Five early lyrics by Wallace Stevens seem to be an oblique (and unnecessary) apology for the poetry in the rest of the Advocate. Since the collegiate Stevens was still an amateur, we are urged to be more tolerant of undergraduates writing in our own day. Actually the poems prove only that Stevens' style changed a lot later on, and got a lot better.

"Glittering Pie," the overpublicized piece by Henry Miller that caused the banning of the October 1935 Advocate, purports to be a letter from a jaded young expatriate lewdly effervescing in New York. His comments and "funny experiences" constitute an offhand critique of American civilization and the bittersweet futility of being alive. Miller is airy, a bit decadent, worth reprinting but certainly not worth censoring.

I have enough faith in the Advocate to believe that it will print any masterpiece or worthwhile literary experiment that is submitted to it. Since there aren't many signs of genius or pathbreaking in the latest issue, I conclude that the Eliots and Updykes in the College are hoarding their treasures. Even without them the April Advocate has climbed into that critical limbo of "honest," "promising" work that looks like it's improving.