The Advocate

In a particularly unvisited corner of the Lowell House Library (right between Sibley's Harvard Graduates and A History of the Hasty Pudding Club) I recently happened upon a volume called Verses from the Harvard Advocate, 1876. I regret the impossibility of reproducing this charming collection here for it is impossible to describe, in mere prose, the delightful abandon of The Other Young Man--A Class Day Romance or the stern moral of The Knobby Sophomore. There are witty tours de force, such as The Episode, (It was the plump conductor,/On the Friday-night last car,/Who told the tale I now rehearse,/When proffered a cigar.) For more substantial fare, the reader might prefer A Yarn, which contains such stanzas as the following: For six long weeks we drifted on, we had nor food nor water; /We ate the cook, we ate the mate, we ate the captain's daughter./The sails grew mould overhead--ha! ha! the fishes laughed,--/We broke into the medicine chest, and all its contents quaffed. Thus the Advocate 85 years ago.

Those who have discerned a frivolous irrelevancy in the preceding paragraph will be heartened to hear that I will now comment upon the issue of the Advocate whose red and lavender cover shimmers on Cambridge news-stands. While the 1876 collection gave rise to unallayed pleasure, perusal of its descendant was attended by a palpable malaise, varied only by sharp twinges of pain. In the first place, it seems inexcusable for the Advocate to print the work of a professional poet, Pulitzer Prize winner, Peter Viereck. In addition, the piece itself (scene 9 of a new play) is a clearly inferior piece of bald social criticism. Mr. Viereck affects an intentionally vulgar idiom, contrasting exaggerated modern speech with the play's Classical framework. Yet he lacks the touch that makes intentional vulgarity effective, and so produces an intricate sort of unintentional vulgarity.

The rest (including the absurdities of the allegory) I leave to professional critics who will have had the tedious advantage of having read the other eight scenes.

Carter Wilson's short story, Love Children, is the least pretentious piece in the Advocate (no great feat). There are certain moments in which his characters seem to approach credibility. Mr. Wilson, however, was rather premature in submitting this story, and the Advocate has done him a positive disservice in printing it. Anyone who could write "Harry was a painter, his group was excited and wild, so Jody never fit in there," needs training in the fundamentals of English syntax, and greatly sharpened sensitivity in the semi-circular canals.

The poetry of David Berman presents a different sort of problem. He has been very careful in writing his frankly revealing lyrics, and yet his work indicates nothing more than a sort of flat competence, as though he were writing transitions for a long, long narrative poem. Even Mr. Berman's emotional first person poems have few lines which tempt the reader to stop and read them over again aloud. His persistent awkwardness in phrasing is well illustrated by the following passage from Song of a Traveller: Spring, which in Philadelphia is wild./Is not in Boston yet. Like a stubborn child/Who will not curtsey to the lady she thinks a witch,/Spring cowers in Boston's doorway to stamp and bitch...

Inexorably my mind returns to those delicious poems our spiritual ancestors wrote in the sunny sixties of the last century. What a salubrious lesson for their progeny, Mr. Berman and Mr. Viereck, what a whole new world of literary endeavor. For, believe it or not, those knobby sophomores and other young men reserved something, did not toss out their inmost thoughts untempered, without discretion or taste.

I do not intend to come out in favor of inspired doggerel. But I do mean to say that the success of crudely adorned social judgment and artless personal revelation depends upon the intrinsic worth of the revelation and the judgment.

This is a problem that each reader must solve himself. I doubt, in this case that he will have much trouble in so doing.