The Advocate

The new, jumbo-size Advocate (dated April, 1961) has finally lumbered its way to the newsstands. If a certain amount of deadweight had been lopped off before publication, it might have been a truly fine issue. As it is, this number still surpasses the quality of any other in at least a year.

Unfortunately, the lead story by Luanne Evans may keep may readers from going on. Old Revenge is all about an old Southern family that has lost just about everything but its Honor, its beautiful women, and its Mammy. I need hardly summarize the plot, since most of you already have guessed that the daughter falls in love with a rich, vigorous man from the North, but loses him when he visits the old plantation, sees the rotting oaks along the driveway, and realizes that he can never compete with the Past.

Not only is Miss Evans' subject impossibly hackneyed, but her prose style inclines toward marathon sentences that restate the same southern cliche again and again. The heroine of the story sums it up quite well: "Words, ...so many words, too many words to breathe easily."

Jeremy Johnson clears the air with his three highly sophisticated and competent poems. Deceptively light, his witty lines trip along with a simplicity that is as delightful as it, is difficult to effect. Here is a quatrain from Philosopher's Song:

Who is this woman? What is here?

Why is she now a drudge?

God! How the snows of yesteryear

Are suddenly made sludge!

David Berman's rather bulky portfolio of verse represents no appreciable growth in technique or feeling over his last published collection. Verbal pretension and technical sloppiness clutter passage after passage. Berman's poetry has the appearance of craftsmanship, but the shimmer of alliteration and assonance disguises a formless ooze of lush words.

It is interesting to compare these poems on a purely technical basis with one by Stephen Sandy a few pages later. In To H.B., Berman ends the first four lines with near-rhymes: said, bad; trite, it. Then, he finishes the section with two other rhyme schemes, each different. The result is confusion which pretends to complexity.

Sandy's poem (Part I) uses no straightforward stanza scheme. Instead, words of related sound appear in the same line quite consistently. "Now they palaver on forever" is a good line in its own right, and it has the further virtue of participating in the structure of the poem. Berman, on the other hand, inserts the following couplet in the midst of conventionally rhymed lines: "The thirst for melted fire that you had/Locked in you like the blueness of you blood."

Sandy commands his words without succumbing to the charm of the charm of their sound. He merges emotion and form with a tact that unfolds a whole lifetime by indirection.

David Landon's work is uneven, but promising. Debutante, the most successful of his four poems, contains fresh imagery, such as: "a snicker of knives, like ripped silk," and avoids mistakes like: "the golden barbers of his soul." The latter comes from a piece of Landon's entitled Letter He Would Send To His Sweetie If He Were Chinese.

John Wilmerding' contributes a short poem notable for its intricacy more than its beauty. Richard Sommer's work has neither of these qualities.

Concluding the magazine is a review by Maurice Z. Shroder of Robert Lowell's translation of Phedre. Shroder discusses the book with knowledge and obvious sympathy for the problems of the translator.

Be warned, however, that this review may have the ulterior purpose of softening up the Advocate's readership for the next issue, in which Robert Lowell and other recognized writers will end the magazine's amateur status. This plan seems especially unfortunate in view of the present issue's improved quality.