On the Shelf

There is nothing in the current issue of the Advocate to write home about, but on the other hand there is nothing really depressingly bad in it--on the whole it is probably the best-balanced, most consistently interesting issue of the year.

The three short stories could stand as ideals for Advocate stories. They are all limited in scope and written in simple language, but within their limitations they are well-handled and they have many excellent passages. The best of the three is "A Thousand Miles Away," by Charles Flood--a simple but effective story of a woman who recalls an old love affair from the midst of her happily married life. Billy Joyner's "Dark Faces" is not I think, up to the very high standard of his first two Advocate stories, but is still an excellent atmosphere piece about the South of 1864. Finally, George Kelly's "Summer's End," a study of the different feelings members of a family have toward the domineering father, is marred by character cliches, though it is not a bad story.

The poetry is more varied in quality. Donald Hall's Garrison Prize winner, "A Face in the Mirror," is a delightful little piece--one of the best of its sort I have ever seen in the Advocate, and the best poem of Hall's that I have read. Another selection from Hall's winning entry in the Garrison contest, called "Afternoon," struck me as dull and stereotyped (the scene is an amusement park closed for the winter). Charles Neuhauser's "Seascape with Salvage Barge" is a rich brew of imagery, alliteration, and studied rhyming. It is easily the best poem in the issue, though I must own a weakness for Hall's "A Face in the Mirror." Lyon Phelps has a Garrison Honorable Mention, "In the Morning, After an Ice Storm," which is weakened by a self-consciously chatty manner ("Of course, an ice storm/ just doesn't happen every weekday..."), and doesn't quite come off. Finally Charles Enright's "For Hastings" is a competent elegy that sounds too much like so many other elegies to be very good.

The book reviews present a different problem: Advocate reviewers, it seems, are all boy-geniuses who have read (at the age of twenty, say) at least as much as Mr. Eliot has and are even more eager than he to demonstrate their erudition. The reviews in this issue, especially one by Walter Kaiser '54, are too virtuosic to have much value as criticism, though I'm sure that all three of the reviewers are indeed talented and widely-read. Mr. Kaiser is a writer of some force and his criticism appears to be sound but he needs a dose of Fowler's "Modern English Usage"; I do not challenge his right to use an obscure word like "susurrus" (though he will be losing readers by doing so) but I do ask that he not use it in a phrase like "the not-so-faint susurrus of hosannahs," which makes a mockery out of the English language. He might renounce exclamation points and obscure Latin quotations, too, while he is about it. This petulance must not be taken to mean that the current reviews are poor jobs. On the contrary, they seem quite intelligent. All they needed was stern editing.

In closing I must compliment the Advocate business board for procuring a lush three page Anti-Vivisection advertisement (which must have done the coffers a lot of good through it rather disfigures the back pages of the magazine). Perhaps the editors will use the profits to hire a professional proof-reader next year.