Since the November issue of the Advocate does not in the least resemble the works of Ronald Firbank or an old copy (c. 1916) of Harper's Bazaar, it is not open to the charge of preciousness that has been directed against the magazine from time to time. Actually it was never clear that this charge, although easy to make, derived from any very firm idea of what the undergraduate contributions should be like. Apprentice writers have a good deal to do, and very little experience yet available for expression. They need a free medium in which they have scope simply as the young to annoy by being clever and seriously as craftsmen to invent, explore, and anticipate. Those who have been unhappy about the undergraduate work in the Advocate presumably would not prefer disadvantageous competition with the commercial magazines or the kind of local-color article on Radcliffe that graced the Progressive a couple of years ago.

To my mind the selection of stories for this issue even errs in the direction of material too clearly viewed and soberly treated. Robert Clurman develops skillfully a conventional genre comedy of a Mexican priest's misadventure with a pattern of simple reversal for its form. Bowden Broadwater's "A Rat in Her Arras," in the vein of "The Little Foxes," is a series, but not a climax, of frustrated family plottings. Although long, the story has more complications than it can particularize, and is somewhat burdened by direct exposition. Both Mr. Broadwater and Mr. Clurman, however, can realize the words and moods of alien characters with perceptive imagination.

W. Rodes Arnold's "Blast of the March Wind" is a simple and deeply felt picture of failure and bereavement, inconclusive but richly detailed. Only the Harry Brown story, a not quite "New Yorkerish" piece about a blonde and her husband in a tourist cabin, is unsatisfactory. All the stories, then, have it in common to be on a high technical level, to be not particularly "contemporary" in interest, and to seem not to deal with material that comes very close to the writer as person.

The verse, highly accomplished throughout, is more personal and lyric and, though not intrinsically better than the stories, is much more exciting formally. The most ambitious is Dunstan Thompson's "Memorare." A little over-insistent and even incoherent in its syntax, it is an intricately graceful and deeply moving poem. Only in "Memorare" incidentally, except for the advertisements, is there any reference to the war. Mr. Thompson also contributes the only characteristically youthful note to the issue in his arrogant review of "What Are Years" by Marianne Moore, in which he pours bitter scorn, inappropriate and incommensurate for its object, upon Miss Moore for producing the kind of poetry she has been producing for the past twenty years, and upon T. S. Eliot for liking it. Robert Gorham Davis,   Briggs-Copeland Faculty Instructor in English Composition.