Advocate' Centennial Anthology: A Mere Curiosity Proving Most Young Writers Are Thieves or Bores

Reading the Advocate Anthology is like re-reading your freshman Gen Ed papers three years later; it simply embarrasses you. The best work is outrageously derivative; you suffer for Thomas Huxley or H.L. Mencken or Henry Miller or whoever was being imitated. The worst causes real anguish; only Harvard undergraduates could write so much oddly-arranged verse with obscure Latin titles or such dogged, tedious, unknowingly funny short stories.

And only a Harvard audience could swallow the editor's assumption that the literary trends of the past century have had their gestation in the Square. You have to love Harvard to like this book. It strings together 150 selections from the Advocate's first hundred years, most of which lead you to believe that undergraduate writers are either inept thieves or self-conscious bores. Editor Jonathan Culler has attempted to justify each inclusion by fitting it into the Advocate's labored, changing definition of itself or by showing that the piece demonstrates the impact of belles-lettres on Harvard. Only the real chauvinist, the Harvard grad who moved only as far away as Brattle St., could care.

Pas Au Courant

Because Advocate writers have imitated all of literati for the past hunters, Culler has tried to tell the magazine's history by tracing the impact of literary innovations on undergraduate writers. This kind of literary history is absurd, because, although Harvard undergraduates are imitative, they are not au courant. Usually the Advocate was reactionary and rejected new kinds of expression until they had received world approbation. The Advocate ignored Eliot, Pound, and Cummings until 1930, considering itself "the heroic defender of an unchanging literary standard." It's just now warming up to Ginsberg and the Dionysion-Apollonian poetry squabble.

Reading the names in the table of contents could convince a reader that what's happened in literature in the past century has happened here. The truth is that the famous who stream in and out of Cambridge seldom grew to greatness here, but Cullers' introduction is dedicated to the other proposition. Again, he's writing for the chauvinists, who will also be amused by the inside story of the Advocate's self-definition. The magazine that was conceived as a college newspaper and published polemics on compulsory chapel, college cheers, and Walt Whitman (all re-printed here) has also considered itself a literary magazine, a gathering place for Cambridge literati, a political forum, and a socially-exclusive club. Culler includes all the anecdotes about the magazine's clandestine establishment, its raucous anniversary parties, its scrapes with the Cambridge authorities and Massachusetts censors.

It's difficult to figure out why the Advocate is publishing this anthology. Does the magazine want to show off the best pieces it has published? Does it want to demonstrate how four generations of Harvard undergraduates took to literary experimentation? Does it want to present curiosities, like Wallace Stevens' writing iambic tetrameter or Henry Miller's early prurient scatology?

Curiosity

I would bet on the last. This anthology is one long, heavy, awkwardly put-together Curiosity. Admittedly, reading the lyrics of young T.S. Eliot '10--already slightly bored, effete, with allusions to classical figures and scenes--is a "critic's delight," as Culler claims. The careful reader will find parallels with "Prufrock" in "Spleen," written when Eliot was 22:

Sunday; this satisfied procession

Of definitely Sunday faces;

Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces

In repetition that displaces

Your mental self-possession

By this unwarranted digression.

But most of the other selections are not of such universal interest. The Advocate prides itself on having had contributions from Eliot, E. A. Robinson '95, Wallace Stevens '01, John Reed '10, both Roosevelts, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. '38, and practically every other graduate whose name is familiar. But, distinguished names aside, the writing is pathetic. John Reed may be appreciated for Ten Days that Shook the World, but is admiration for him and interest in his work supposed to stretch to include the poems about seagulls written when he was 18 years old?

Bernstein and Schlesinger

Culler is too often guilty of simply showing off the great names, when the pieces written by these men would probably embarrass them today. Leonard Bernstein '39 wrote music columns for the Advocate, so Culler has included one of them in which Bernstein knocked Columbia Records; he was given to college boy chattiness, concluding paragraphs with phrases like "end of tirade" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contributed political analyses, so a piece predicting a Republican comeback in 1940 has been re-printed. Presumably, the reader is supposed to be delighted with this gentle irony, amused by a posterior knowledge of the quirks of fate and history.

Unknowns

The most ironic thing about the anthology is that the best selections were written by people you never heard of. Howard Nemerov '41, who teaches at Bennington, wrote genuinely evocative prose as an undergraduate; in "The Native in the World," he indulges in self-examination and self-pity which is utterly unsophisticated by most standards. His hero, John Bradshaw, has become a drug addict, sleeps 20 hours at one time, and is convinced that

. . .there was a way to drink seriously, and a way not to drink seriously. Of three years at Harvard he had spent the last two learning the former, and was glad to distinguish himself from many of his acquaintances whose drinking was of the rowdy-up-and-puke sort.

The self-consciousness may pain you, but Bradshaw's flounderings and dependence on his friends are honest, simply-expressed, and hauntingly realistic.

The Advocate officers have come to frown on such lack of sophistication as they occupy themselves with the wider literary world. In the last decade, its editors have written foppish editorials scorning the semi-autobiographical short stories produced in undergraduate writing courses. One such editorial, by Robert P. Fichter '60, mocks the "Harvard sex story" genre of the 1950's; he contends that the familiar locales of these stories--Widener, the Waldorf, the banks of the Charles, a fifth floor in Lowell--have been played out. But "Winter Term," by Sallie Bingham '58, is like Nemerov's stories: perceptive, caring, indelible.

The magazine, its editors make clear, no longer publishes make clear, no longer publishes the stuff produced in English C; consequently it no longer publishes much written by undergraduates. Convinced that its readers want commentary on every literary experiment and personality, the Advocate of the 1950's and 60's has printed Gregory Corso, Stephen Spender, Richard Wilbur, William Burroughs, dialogs with Brother Antoninus, and commentaries on Stevens, Faulkner, and Robert Lowell.

The post-Hiroshima anthology selections written by students are mostly imitations of these people. Culler, in his introduction, makes much of the polished, professional techniques of these contemporary writers; they are professional, I guess, because they don't use much punctuation and their characters have unreal names like Cherub and Pixie.

Two Shoddy Genres

Only a few young writers--Miss Bingham, Nemerov, Margaret Hambrecht, Sidney Goldfarb '64--have written here with originality or freshness. While Advocate editors have become more aware of the professionals writing today, its writers have confined themselves to two shoddy genres developed by the New Yorker: the "my childhood with snakes in Ceylon" and the "my coming of age in squalid surroundings" genres. Advocate poets not only write imitation Ginsberg and pseudo-Lowell these days; they all write about pigeons.

Culler's introduction hints that the anthology is a Curiosity, published for the intimate Harvard family. Most people wouldn't buy it if just any Joe were writing about "football at other colleges," but it's Theodore Roosevelt sizing up the Ivy League. Therefore, the book, a real cocktail party conversation piece, will end up on innumerable coffee tables. But it should be kept within the family. The outside world should never find out that Harvard College didn't teach its distinguished graduates everything they know. The Advocate Centennial Anthology ought only to be sold sub rosa during Commencement Week.