This review of the annual Advocate parody, which this year satirizes the Dial, was written for the Crimson by James H. Powers of the editorial staff of the Boston Globe.
The Advocate is "at it again".
Stealing a march on Lampy, it has undertaken, in the April number, just published, to shoot the darts of parody at "The Dial", with the result that "The Dial" is placed in much the same position as the gentleman who pulled his coat tails carefully apart and sat down upon a porcupine. For not since the famous Lampoon edition of "The Transcript" has a literary parody so gloriously funny appeared among the University undergraduate publications.
It is scandalously good, so good, in fact, that it should be read behind drawn shades and with a watcher posted outside on lookout for the police.
Parodying is Difficult Art
The art of genuine parody is a difficult business, as everyone knows who has ever bothered to make a few comparisons. No attempt is so beset with inveiglements to flat failure. The way is full of pitfalls, and flanked with ambushes--of ill temper, overstatement, and undue ambition to substitute mere "smartness" for humor. It is like baking a custard: too much heat in the oven fillips it to whey in a twinkling, and untutored carelessness withers all its delicious possibilities to stringy, unpalatable ruin. But blessed are they among a generation anhungered who know the true recipe and have acquired the knack of handling the heat.
The Advocate's "Dial" number will be worth keeping for the things it leaves unsaid as well as for those it has committed to print. All the familiar procession of "The Dial's" characteristics has been passed in review in the preparation of this frolic. Particularly its solemn and desperate determination to be ultra about everything--poetry, essays, short stories, Parisian correspondence, and contemporary art and letters.
That restless son of Harvard, Mr. E. E. Cummings, is travestied in a group of three poems which have fastened with a swoop and a whoop upon his startling technique. Mr. T. S. Eliot, too, appears here, under the thin disguise of T. S. Tellalot, and he, likewise, is turned upon the spit, crisply and with gusto.
Best of all, perhaps, is the inevitable takeoff on some of the new Mid-Western American realists in story writing, who have been courting precisely this bath of mirth for nearly four years. The execution is performed in a short story entitled "Anna's Ham". It is complete and pulverizing, and the more so because the tale in which the hideous deed is done is a first rate piece of story telling in itself, keenly alive, and crowded with imaginative touches. The thing is studded with gems of Rabelaisian understatement, and it moves with a gallop of rustic passion.
The "Book Reviews" and the Theatre and Art comment in the Advocate's "Dial" number march under the same umbrella of solemnity that covers the originals they imitate, but with this difference--the elf of the comic spirit is calmly wagging his ears over each and all.
