It would seem fair to assume that no story or poem in which the reader does not know in some sense "what is happening" will appeal to that reader. Using this critical pretext, I can perhaps explain my intestinal reactions to the March edition of The Advocate, reactions which are on the whole negative.

The best story in the issue is, I think, Sallie Bingham's Winter Term. It is best because it is the most story, the least game or puzzle. It is not an exceptional story. It is neither subtle nor wise nor delicate nor beautiful nor revealing. It is both entertaining (because it is full of sex), and moving (because it is full of people). The people are not real, but they are infuriating. By the end of the story you are likely to be in a rage--perhaps at Miss Bingham, possibly at yourself, probably at the characters. But something will have happened, and that, for me, distinguishes her work from the rest of the issue. Perhaps I like it because she writes about Cambridge and uses the old familiar techniques with punctuation and grammar and "realistic" people, which require less reader effort than other approaches. Perhaps it is only that she writes directly about local sexual relations, which is diverting.

If Miss Bingham uses the dramatic technique, Jonathan Kozol does not, at least so far as I am concerned. I am quite sure that there is a plot in his novel, but it is not clear upon one reading, and that reading does not inspire another. There are striking passages in this phantasy of juveniles, and there are yards of obscure phrases and intentions just waiting for a clever explicator with a firm feeling for the Freudian groundrules.

But why anyone would care to elucidate, I cannot tell. When Dylan Thomas confused his audience he was lyrical enough to attract dramatic explicators. He also made a little sense on first reading. When Thomas described "a dingle starry" in Fern Hill, he had set it in the night, and the reader could see stars over the valley. But when Kozol writes of a "starry dingle" it is broad daylight, and indeed the whole phrase serves no apparent purpose in the story. I cannot resist the conclusion that Kozol is playing games with himself. And yet, discovering that the story was enthusiastically received by Professor MacLeish's writing course, I am also tempted to conclude that the whole dream is but a reflected vision of an English Sa meeting.

Bob Cumming's story of The Goodness of the Town has several virtues. He does not use verbal tricks. He is not impresed with his own prose. He has something to say. He says it. All of this is very reassuring in The Advocate. But I can only give a negative answer to the crucial question: "Does he say it well enough to move the reader?" There is really nothing wrong with this story, but nor is there enough right with it.

The poetry in this issue is hard to discuss. It is hard not only because poetry is always hard to discuss but because good poetry is hard to write. There is so little good poetry and so much bad poetry that every reviewer is inclined to view the extermination of poets as a public service. And yet an Advocate reader cannot help remembering that this poetry is well above the local average.

I resent anybody, including Kier Nash, writing a poem which does not contain its own "key." Poems about Thomas Mann's creations should be confined to the margins of his books. Yet, Nash's poem is the most lyrical work I have read in the Advocate in a long time. Tricks like "mild feet" or "hair lit to lightning" grate on the mind's eye, but most of the words do their work well.

Joe Poindexter's lines From The Sanatorium seem to be a beautiful sentence dropped at random in the middle of the Advocate. But then there is no super-abundance of beauty, even verbal beauty, in the Advocate, or elsewhere.

Mark Roskill's poem about Hadrian is straightforward but unconvincing. Its impact depends upon the reading of two words, "resurrect," and "facile," words which the poetic context does not define for me. As a result, the poem is, for me, an amusement.

Reading the Advocate is, then, to encounter a series of more or less unsuccessful experiments and attempts. The striking thing about the issue is, however, that the most successful work was the least daring. It seems to confirm the cliched contention that a new form will not create a new idea. It is not surprising that most undergraduates do not have very important or startling things to say, but it is discouraging that they will make such elaborate efforts to disguise this fact.