The Harvard Advocate begins its first issue with a dandy little story by Keith Lowe. New Day, as it is called, tells of the first day of Guinean independence as recorded by a semi-literate citizen who becomes a temporary constable to prevent riots during the country's first election. The plot is ingenious and very funny, but the great virtue of the piece lies in its marvelous prose. The narrator's naivete permits him to speak in wild, enthusiastic language, which sounds neither maudlin nor contrived: They crying no more blackman sweat to sweeten whiteman tea, no more for coolie to draw water to wash baccra foot. Sun come up to tell woman to tie her head and man to buckle his belt; to get ready to rule... The story is full of sun and bright colors and the narrator's simple diction makes the abundant sense-imagery all the more vivid: So I go down into that gully to make water, with the smell of cinnamon in the air and red flowers blooming and bursting before my eye. Lowe's fantastic prose is a pleasure to read; and all in all, New Day is certainly the most enjoyable piece the Advocate has printed in a long time.

William Kelly's The Bed is a longer and more pretentious piece, and it comes much closer to justifying its pretentions than either of Kelly's previous Advocate stories. As with Kelly's earlier works, it concerns a young boy (called Mr. Leland), his relations to his parents, and his reactions to a slightly alien world. The story is simple: the boy's father dies of tuberculosis, people come to condole, the mother ties together all of the father's belongings, including an expensive wooden bed, and burns them in back of the house.

Kelly's prose has tightened up a good deal since the appearance of The Poker Party; he has tamed his metaphors and come up with some fine images (his eyes bulged like tiny white balloons; the crown of the sun, burning into the top of the ridge like a match burning into the edge of a sheet of paper). There are still signs of roughness, however, and a profusion of commas and semi-colons in paragraphs where Kelly jams together various clauses in a weak imitation of Faulkner. In one place, near the beginning of the story, Kelly pictures the imagination of the little boy wandering from his father's bed to the various associations it suggests. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this excursion, except that Kelly has put it all into one very long, half-page sentence. Faulkner has made this technique work; Kelly, however, is not yet up to such a sophisticated maneuver, and the sentence is almost a total loss, producing a senseless jumble--if indeed it is read at all.

The stylistic excellences of this piece, however; far surpass its ineptitudes. The children's dialogue is superb, illustrating the mixture of sensitivity and incomprehension which comprise Mr. Leland's attitude toward his father's death. The piece is also constructed with obvious care--and it is this sort of care which has made this story so much better than its antecedent.

The other two pieces in this month's Advocate deserve less space, perhaps, than their predecessors, but various exigencies force them to get even less space than they deserve. Louisa Newlin has written a competent and interesting story--quite a good story, actually--about two young couples on a Mediterranean island; and Richard Sommer has written a long Prothalemion of some mark, whose convolutions cannot be explored.