The Advocate

A glance at recent issues of another local magazine should have been enough to show the editors of the Advocate that only one good piece by one good writer is not enough to constitute a respectable issue. Such a glance evidently was not taken. For with the exception of its single solid offerings, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, by F. M. Kimball, the present issue slips downgrade as the reader works his way toward the back, reaching its literary nadir in an excerpt from a novel in progress entitled The Sons of Darkness.

But despite the disappointing calibre of the rest of the magazine, Kimball's story, also a fragment of a larger work, is an achievement of considerable stature. His subject is commonplace enough: the account of a misfit in a boys' school--this time a Jesuit Academy. But his insight and craftsmanship, together with a remarkable control of language, result in an intensely interesting piece of prose.

Immediately following the Kimball story is the best of the magazine's three unexciting poems, Letter, by Walter Kaiser. His poem has a delicate sensuality reminiscent of MacLeish, and Kaiser handles his images well. The two other pieces, The Bridgegroom, by Winifred Hare and The Promised End, by David Chandler do not measure up to it. Chandler has a pretty turn of vision, but his poem is vacuous.

Attempted naturalism is the issue's real downfall in S. W. Thompson's The Alcohol, and Eugene Higgins' excerpt from The Sons of Darkness. Thompson makes a stab at slipping a little social commentary into a picture of lower-class life, but defeats his own attempt at realism by a ludicrous overuse of profanity, bad grammar, and irrelevant detail. Higgins' story has little to recommend it. It is juvenile in its forced attention to detail and never really reaches the reader.

It would be unfair to classify Christopher Lasch's Christmas 1853 with either of the above, although it does not approach Kimball's work. In this deft psychological study of a young girl his juxtapositions of image and idea are sometimes very effective. On the whole the piece manages to create a mood, although it tends to leave the reader wavering between conviction and bewilderment.