MILLER FINDS BALANCE IN CURRENT ADVOCATE

The following review of the June issue of the Harvard Advocate was written for the Crimson by P. G. E. Miller, tutor in the department of History and Literature.

The editors of the present issue of The Harvard Advocate have striven, as good editors always should, to produce a well balanced issue. And as far as the amount of pagination devoted to the various branches of literature is concerned, they have succeeded. Prose fiction is represented by three stories, criticism by a note on James Branch Cabell, an editorial and three book reviews, and poetry by two items.

The stories seem to me competent and workmanlike. Robert Hatch's "The Lord's Annointed" takes us into the Burnt Over Counties of Upper New York sometime in the revivalistic nineteenth century; there are several seemingly authentic notes of the frontier scene, although the romantic elopement of the lovers, calling to my mind, for no apparent reason, the fleeing lovers of Keats' "St. Agnes Eve", somewhat vitiates the realistic elements.

"A Sentimental Journey"

Mr. Donaldson's "A Sentimental Journey" is a clever bit, in which smart young people talk of serious matters obliquely; the brilliance of their conversation is scintillating and altogether impossible, but it makes good reading. Mr. Swain's "Young Emile Chadwick" presents a variation or two on the O. Henry formula, and the reader struggles to accept the formula so that he may enjoy the effect.

The ubiquitous depression may be teaching the young men a new wisdom, or it may be simply that styles are changing, but the two critical notes of the issue contain a pronounced dissent from the worship of yesterday's literary deities. The author of the current editorial has made the immense discov- ery that "violence can be a vogue and, like all vogues, presently become outworn." Therefore, O'Neill, Jeffers, and Faulkner are each awarded a great big question mark. Regardless of what posterity will ultimately decide to be the permanent value of these authors, I cannot help feeling that such an editorial at this particular moment is a sign of health,--or else of some healthy influences. But Mr. Blanc awards to James Branch Cabell something far less equivocal than an interrogation mark. In fact, he pushes him into a rear seat with so ungentlemanly a shove that it almost becomes a punch below the belt. It was not very long ago, was it, that the hall-mark of the sophisticated undergraduate was an intimate acquaintance with "Jurgen"? Sic transit.

Imitation of Byron

Poetry is represented in this issue by a competent sonnet of Sherman Conrad's, and then by a thing called "Opening of A Long Poem (Maybe)" by James Agee. Over this entry the well laid schemes of apportionment went to pieces, and any editor might well wonder what to do with the remainder of a magazine which had decided to risk publication of Mr. Agee's opus. The poem is frankly an imitation--I will not say a copy--of Byron's "Don Juan", using the same verse form and employing the same tricks and devices.

If Byron had never written I should be tempted to say to Mr. Agee what Emerson, in an unguarded moment of enthusiasm, said to Whitman. Since, however, Byron has written, I can only say that Mr. Agee has deliberately invited comparison, and that he does not come off at all badly from the ordeal. And in case I haven't made my point clear, I hasten to add that this is intended to be very high praise. Certain it is, the poem blows through the pages of "The Advocate" with so authentic and Rabelaisian a gusto as nearly crinkles its decorous pages, and you will search far to find poetry as good as the last nine stanzas. There are numerous dangers in doing something so palpably in the manner of an illustrious predecessor, dangers of which I suspect Mr. Agee is quite aware, yet I for one sincerely and devoutly hope that the parenthetical "maybe" of the present title will not remain too permanent a feature therein