The Advocate

A short story called "Doggy" by Alan Berger and Arthur Freeman's poem, "Cambridge Seasonal," are the only items of interest in the current Advocate.

I am forming a society to foster the return of form and content to poetry ("Put the Sense back in Sensitivity" will be our slogan), and I shall nominate Arthur Freeman to charter membership. "Cambridge Seasonal" is an urbane, amusing, richly textured, and formal satire on Cambridge. The characters are old Cambridge ladies "in black woolens," young Cambridge lovers "who link, unlink, attach, detach," professors "with owlish eyes, benign white features, glossy skin, and crystal-clear clock-work within," a townie "with raw brown eyes, red hands, warts, weatherbeaten levis, and a real beery leer," and even a Radcliffe girl ("Something from Radcliffe cycles by"). And the consistently gentle tone and florid style of the speaker himself bespeak his own participation in "all that was lovely, false and weak." Some of Freeman's lines are gems; only once or twice does his language run away from him and lead an incommunicable life of its own. I offer as a prize my personal copy of Roget's Thesaurus to anyone who can tell me what kind of sky a "favrile sky" is.

Alan Berger's story, "Doggy," is a serious and powerful work. Insanity lies below the surface of the narrator's boyhood reminiscences about Doggy, the fat Jewish boy, the butt of all the gang's hostility in their parody of World War II movies. The emphasis in the story shifts from Doggy's role in the gang to Doggy's relationship with his mother, and finally to the mother herself. I hesitate to disclose any part of the carefully worked out plot with its sudden, horrible revelations, or to point out the occasional overly poetic verbosity which threatens the casual done of the story, in which nearly every detail carries weight.

The rest of the issue is devoted to a short story by Mary Hill Gilbert about an adolescent girl who, though inordinately fat, finds love, happiness, and security in a small Midwestern town, and a half dozen terribly sensitive poems about the transience of beauty, the best of which is the cover.