Opening Up the Advocate

It used to be that reading the Advocate was an exercise in awe and disappointment. It had a bigger reputation than it could live up to partly because Advocate editors liked to tout the names of former contributors who escaped undergraduate awkwardness and secured niches in various literary pantheons. At times the magazine seemed a testing ground for the efforts of cliquish students who aspired--under the direction of Robert Lowell--toward the techniques of Pound and Eliot. At best much of the material printed was imposingly academic in the Pound-Eliot tradition--and all too often, doctrinaire in approach and discouragingly pretentious.

Now, the editors are trying something that is (for them) new, and if the latest issue is full of only weak-to-fair material, it's at least comforting to know that it is becoming what any college literary magazine--even Harvard's--is best suited to be: an open vehicle for presenting the best of student art, photography and writing, whatever circle it may come from. Now the Advocate has opened the door to its sanctum, and its only a matter of time before whatever talent it can summon will be welcomed.

Even an open door can't conjure up talented guests from nowhere. English poetry has fallen on hard times; blame it on the century, on education, on lack of discipline, on lack of interest, but the fact remains that not much good poetry is being written, and not much of the Advocate's wide-ranging selection is good. Lucien Styrk's "The Unknown Neighbor" is only one example of verse that gets by only by not trying very hard. When a poem looks only like a carefully written sentence chopped up into verses, it's clearly written with a misunderstanding of what makes poetry. "The Unknown Neighbor" is an effectively elegaic recollection with an unnecessary stinger for a last line; it's the most obvious example in the Advocate of a style of would-be poetry that suffers less from a misuse of form--unlimited possibilities of word-clash and harmony--than it does from an unwillingness to consider form at all

The free-wheeling styles of many of the pieces in the special poetry supplement of local poets don't quite make up for their generally skimpy substance. Louis Reed's rock-lyric, "Sweet Jane," begs for music, but it might not bear too many listenings. Elizabeth Fenton's "More Rain", on the other hand, is a list of the conditions of a strained relationship that builds an undertone of anguish by effectively calculated repetition and an ironic sense of restraint.

One poem in the Advocate collection stands out as a bright example of intention happily wedded to execution: Jean Boudin's "Checkers." On one level it is a word-game played in nonsense verse with a vivaciously comic sense for awkward syntax and incongruous internal rhyme. Boudin writes for the ear at least as well as she writes for the eye. And her sense of nonsense saves the radical political themes of the poem from didacticism. An attempt at high seriousness would blunt the sting of the poem's political barbs, but irreverence sharpens them with a fitting context. A poet who can build an atmosphere of emotion in three short lines of a stanza, and then juxtapose two words in a way that completes the emotional setting while slyly turning against it, is a poet to be admired. In one stanza of "Checkers," Boudin does just that:

Clouds black crowds shouting no

in a crowded theater

you are radical revolution

saltpetre romantic

H. Michael Levenson's critical essay treats the experimental work of three contemporary authors in a very experimental way. "The Short Fiction of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover" is a subject few critics would take on without assurance of enough room for extensive textual justification and a good deal of hedging; Levenson's short essay on the "self-vivisection" of these three writers in search of a sensibility uses brief quotations to launch his fast-paced, nine-part analysis. The spirit of the essay is apt, but the dialectic Levenson sets up between the styles of this new fiction and the conventional style of the old is tentative and needs a more complete working out of the basis for contrast.

Easily the most impressive contribution to the magazine is Chuck Sabel's Play Without Passion, a deft, academic's treatment of the last years in the life of George Buchner, the 19th century German playwright who presaged the emotionally charged theater of the Expressionist school.

Buchner died at the age of 24, leaving only two complete plays and fragments of a third play and a novel. His writings were almost incidental to his career as both medical student and hesitant revolutionary during the student movement of the 1830's. But his plays have survived, and Sabel revives Buchner very much in the context of the personal philosophy that the plays express. In fact, the playwright is cast in a role much like that of the hero in his greatest play, Danton's Death. Sabel's Buchner is, like Buchner's Danton, a passive hero in a play that creates no huge dramatic conflicts. Restrained from political action not by an intellectual's fear of soiling his hands, but rather by a prophetic sense of the futility of voluntary action against the crushing power of irrational history--Buchner watches himself as he is swept along to a senseless, inevitable death. Sabel's treatment of the playwright is, strangely enough, almost entirely appropriate to historical fact, and a paradigm for the present as well. The two-act-play is skillfully consistent and well-knit, but its concentration of wit and the abruptness of scene-changes could only confuse an audience. Some plays are meant to be read rather than produced: that granted, Sabel's Play...is an admirable work.

About two-thirds of the contributors to this double-edition of the Advocate are Harvard students; almost all the contributors are local talent. It is an abrupt departure from the more common Advocate practice of importing names to the table of contents from out of state--or from masthead. The artistic format has been changing too; no longer depending on a staid layout, the editors are exploring the potentials of graphics. If the Advocate's innovations can stimulate better contributors as well as more contributions, it may find itself rivalling, for the first time, its old reputation.