An excess of talent may sometimes be the curse of an undergraduate literary magazine. Often single pieces are noteworthy, but the magazine as a whole is formless and disjointed. This is because the editors have picked the best work with no thought for continuity or symmetry. Likewise, individual pieces may suffer from a great, unrestrained surge of creative talent.

But the November Advocate finally shows increased precision in the thankless matter of selection and editing. Fortunately, it also maintains a high level of writing. As a magazine it has balance and poise, and the writing shows the virtues of simplicity and restraint. It is a fine issue.

There are three short stories in this month's Advocate, and they are held together by each author's realization that there is an external world. This is more than gratifying at a time when one has come to expect only despairing, anguished echoes of the subconscious from Harvard authors. Yet in these three stories, men, machines, and especially nature are entities and not grotesque images in a perturbed mind. Each author, however, deals with these things through different sensual approaches. In the first story, it is mainly sound that describes the outside world; in the second, touch; and in the third, sight.

"Pepicelli," the first story, by James Buechler is written in the idiom of an Italian laborer. Had it been done poorly, the prose might have spoiled the treatment of a simple mind confronted by the mysterious, in this case a motorcycle. To Pepicelli, the machine becomes a sort of magic carpet or Genie, and escape from a stolid, unromantic wife. But the motorcycle is not only an escape, it is an end in itself, it becomes his mistress, and in the end it and Pepicelli disappear down the street, never to return.

For lack of any better adjective, "Pearl" is a tender story. Cynthia Rich has captured the speech of young and old with remarkable insight. An old nurse says, "I can hardly expect you to believe this, but until I was sixteen, I had hair just like Miss Pearl's. Yellow hair right down my back, and as fine . . ." In this piece touch is the contact with external force and beauty: the downiness of a dead bird's feathers, a young girl's long blonde hair, warm sunlight.

In "Secrets," a sensualist is unable to escape the reverie of past sights. Samuel Thompson has portrayed a lonely who hides among filmy dreams and natural beauty when faced with such realistic as the end of a love affair and a heart attack: "The snow was like clean white sand, warm smooth sand. Just like a South Sea island a warm small island with fine tan women. And it was so wonderfully, lazily warm. So warm on the island that some of the women didn't wear any clothes at the . . ."

The first of two poems in the issue, Alan R. Grossman's "The Sands of Paran" employs Old Testament imagery to describe the plight of a modern world which is the "I" in this poem. The solemn cadence of the meter lends to Grossman's piece a suitable gravity. In "Two Symbols of Reality," Peter Junger uses a sexton as the symbol of death's irony: "Proudly he seeds the rotting earth and plucks sweet fruits out of the mourner's dearth," And his priest who takes "all sins upon his head" seems to be the symbol of human compassion. As a whole, the poem resolves itself into a conflict between the spiritual and material, and Junger's conception of their different roles in death.

The Advocate has begun to write of life again, and not of depravity. It effects are arrived at not by obscenity or hopeless complexity, but by simplicity of stle and reliance on the basic figures of speech. Its prose writers in this issue are interested in vitality, not disease. And if the poets talk of death, it is not despairingly, but philosophically. With this issue the Advocate has defined the undergraduate literary magazine. It will be interesting to see if it forgets the definition.