The chief interest of the April number of the Advocate is in the generous selection it prints from the Harvard entries in the annual Story Magazine contest. Of these I liked Mr. Wenzel's "Journey to Shreveport" best. It is a more brutal and masculine rendering of the situation in Josephine Johnson's "Nigger Honeymoon," with the shock of full awareness reserved until the end. Although Mr. Wenzel makes good use of the excitement of his material, his story derives its value from his ability to observe, and from a sense of country passed through and the things people say and the disturbing fact that it is also completely American to be like Charlie and the Kid.

The prize-winner, "The End of It," by Cavish Lewis, is talented and cleanly written, but runs a little thin toward the end. I found myself not caring very much whether the wanderer Morris with the deep-down eyes, who stood for integrity and adventure to the grocer's daughter, did or did not take advantage of her admiration to seduce her in his hall bed-room.

Two More Stories

In "Wall Around a Pool," by Philip Brooks, the characters are of a somewhat higher social class (Harvard and Radcliffe, tall French windows, Atlantic Monthly) but they face a similar decision. Here we are permitted to observe the event. Unfortunately "Wall Around a Pool" is less simply written than the others. The hero's though-stream is tainted with literature, and his phrases sometimes suggest the love-pulps. "You could neck her and yammer love between her teeth and all the time her mind would be skating on that little pool." The heroine talks in the early Noel Coward-Philip Barry manner that used to be known as brittle. The fourth in this group, "Hike in the Spring," by Mr. Clurman, winner last year of the national contest, is well conceived, but not quite successful in making the references to the step-mother give intensity to the accident that befalls the two brothers in the woods.

Of Academic Ritual

The leading article by Porter Sargent emphasizing, which may possibly be worth doing, the commercial and reactionary character of the revival in recent decades of academic ritual, diploma fetichism, etc. Mr. Sargent swells his argument with some anthropological and Veblenist observations that need not be taken too seriously. The verse in this issue is good, particularly a lyric evidence of Marvin Barrett's remarkable feeling for phrase and imagery. In David Parry's translation--at least it says it is--from the Welsh, the orthography is antique, with u in place of v and vice versa. Elsewhere in the issue are a good many other curious spellings, but they come from much too careless proof reading.

There are too many brief reviews. I feel it would be better for the reader, at least, if there were only one or two, with the reviewer given space to move around in and to argue his points. Harry Brown is confused by T. S. Eliot's last play, and waits for elucidation by "such people as Mr. Ransom or Mr. Tate or Mr. Blackmur."