The Advocate

Three people come alive in the new Advocate: two drunk Canadian college students, and a tutor in Kirkland House.

The drunk Canadians are creations of T. D. Allman '66. The Dawn of the Super-Renaissance" rises on these two sinners as they sit in the wake of a wild party, reliving their amours. Each is a kind of narcissistic, overgrown adolescent, his dim emotions locked in his sensual tastes. The story is about the feelings that somehow force their way through the pair's collegiate preoccupations. Allman's prose plays over the senses without being heavy-handed. The story moves along rapidly, making graceful transitions between narrative and introspection. With the final knockout punch, feeling--as an emotion, as well as property of the nerves--dawns on "Billy Cool."

In Richard Tillinghast's poems, sense experience translates itself directly into emotion:

...I look down At the slum backyards frothed over with snow And think of the boy with the octopus brain Floating pale and wavy through The murky waters of Schopenhauer While your mother wheedled by the hour ...

In this poem, "The Beauty of the World," the speaker tries to come to terms with his memories of a boyhood friend. In the end he abandons the effort, and turns back to his private, violent dreams.

...Dry-humored friendships. Noble in reason, do not delight The sounding shark, a prince in his watery night.

This is an excellent poem, which a few fragments cannot adequately represent.

Three other skilled poets, Mary Ann Radner, David Chesire, and Tom Kirby-Smith, have made competent but uninspiring contributions. Kirby-Smith close translation of Bauderlaire's "Swan" is especially solid, but it remains foreign-sounding and a little stodgy when compared to Robert Lowell's "imitation" of the poem.

More of the other poems in this issue are no more than the sum of their parts. They strive too hard for effects, and seem to come from the poet's vocabulary instead of his experience. The most shameless specimen of this kind of bombast is Worth Long's "Hope Unborn." For example:

for in a wilderness of time blind bleak tomorrows blast away at unindentured hope

Robert Shaw gives us Caliban, "gaping with gross howls," Maeve Kinkead '68 sees "an ocean gone alizarin," and in Gavin Borden's poem, "An impartial breeze will window/cherished ashes from green, blown leaves." They manage to sound like poets, but the sound effects and tricky adjectives are stuck in for their own sakes, and not for the poem's.

Two other poets, Inez Hedges '68 and Timothy Mayo, hand little sentiments from cumbersome rhymes. Anne Gottlicb '67 does seem to have an honest purpose, but in trying to turn her idea into poetry, she ends up sounding like a little anthology of other poets.

Stuart Davis '66 is the best of these rhetoricians. In an extended word-play entitled "The White Horse" he coins some zippy phrases, such as

Now, so nude that your eyes quicken for ruth, the white horse, bawdy as the Apocalypse, tail a flame, his testicles asway, steps into his sunlight harness...

Playwright Thomas Babe, who fills most of thirteen pages in this Advocate, is said to be interested in form. Both he confines his interest to scene-sized packages, and one's final impression of his "Resistance" is one of forlorn people talking about themselves. This seems more like a prologue than a play.

I am half-convinced that Babe's heroine Pepper derives from Pippi Longstocking, the children's book tomboy who played hooky and didn't wash behind his ears. Neither Pepper nor her big brother Markie can find someone to love them, to make them believe it's worth growing up. Pepper faces down a grey-flannel husband and petty-bourgeois mother-in-law, befriends a looney, and runs off to Europe to find her brother, who carries the world's angst on his shoulders.

This kind of thematic material doesn't lend itself to irony. So even when Babe flirts with Ionesco in a scene where you can't tell who is the loony and who the patient, the whole thing floats on soap bubbles.

Critic Malcolm Cowley provides some humor, purring out cultured inanities at the behest of two student interviewers. To Cowley and his interviewers literature appears to be a collection of names and decades. In one daring tautology, Cowley concludes that the key to the Golden Twenties was that its writers "weren't burdened with all the rules and precepts and great examples that were more or less imposed on the writers who followed them."

Interviewer Stephen Saltonstall '67 reappears with a splenetic review of In Cold Blood, which he calls a True Detective "pimp-job."

Except for these last two items, there is a minimum of showing off in the new Advocate, and there are two excellent pieces of writing.