Again the aged eagle stretches its wings, but barely manages to get off the ground. It could have used a little more (so to speak) of this man's gift and that man's scope.

The issue opens with a drama by David Cole, En Croisade--the winner of an enterprise called "the first annual ADVOCATE-HDC playwrighting (sic) contest." Mr. Cole has evidently decided that the stage is eminently suited to flippant dialectic: his play does not have characters, but rather attitudes, few actions of the body, but many intricate actions of the soul. This sort of mental horseplay does not necessarily doom a literary effort, but in Mr. Cole's case the tone is annoyingly didactic, the intention overly profound--and the results predictably dull.

Four characters, bound for Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, constitute Mr. Cole's instruments in his tussle with the fates. The Bishop expresses a worldly skepticism; the Merchant an enthusiastic nihilism; the Baron is the only truly faithful mortal of the bunch; and the Angel, determined but confused, finally tumbles into the water instead of soaring into the Christian empyrean. Mr. Cole tries to make his characters palatable by casting a thin gauze of mockery over the entire apparatus. This technique, though well handled, fails to disguise the essential fatuity of his conception, for though the play is witty in spots it could never hold an audience past the first couple of pages. Mr. Cole presumes that the reader (or hearer) is interested in the results of his philosophical speculations--a presumption which, in this case, is over-weening to say the least.

It is a pity that Mr. Cole did not turn his mind to something which more satisfactorily suited the dramatic form; for the reader of En Croisade encounters numerous admirable passages. Mr. Cole's style is tight yet colorful; many of his lines are actually funny, and others would be if they were spoken by skillful actors. He is also able to devise elegant metaphors without causing embarrassment. Mr. Cole could have written something much better than En Croisade, and doubtless sometime will.

The Advocate also contains the various poems that habitually collect toward the end of the issue. Jeremy Johnston's poem, the first of these, is the only excellent piece in the entire issue: Mr. Johnston uses the ballad form, which he handles so adroitly, to express something darker than the fancies of his earlier work. His poem is an extended metaphor, illustrating the sophisticated command of language and ironic use of rhyme which has previously engaged the attention of this reviewer. It is a great pleasure to see someone write about a highly personal subject with detachment, eschewing the offensive gurgle which so many Cambridge writers mistake for the plainsong of genius.

Anne Miner's timothy in love is much better than her last published work; Deborah Eibel's Elderly Hostess reads like a vaguely interesting passage of prose chopped up and strung down the page in small pieces (like the tail of a kite); David Berman's Meletus in the Provinces evinces a competence which is entirely devoid of charm or excitement.

One cannot hope to turn again from this magazine without a much needed comment on the book reviews. The Advocate's remarks on Starbuck's Bone Thoughts and Updike's Rabbit, Run indulge in uninteresting and solecistic analyses of form. A most interesting example of galloping ineptitude includes the following sentence, whose prose more or less captures the spirit of all the Advocate critics: "Right or wrong, we are all like Rabbit, but only Rabbit runs, not escaping, though there is that too, an element of panic in his flight, but towards an impossible freedom and meaning, which, if captured, would cut through the sticky tangle of life."

But the Advocate's conclusions are even more annoying (if possible) than its sticky old tangle of a prose style. Both reviewers insist that their writers discuss "the meaning of life" and maintain "a faith in man"--two mental gumdrops which never fail to sustain the mind and sweeten the soul of the incompent critic.