are sticking out the winter. They look like
a vulture. How could leaves tell us of death...
Wanting short stories, the Advocate has found an excellent substitute in scenes from two plays. "Treason at West Point" by James Culpepper, the Phyllis Anderson Award Play of 1965, bears a rather disconcerting resemblance to Shaw's "Devils Disciple," and perhaps for that reason it makes entertaining reading. The two scenes printed in the Advocate bristle a bit too thickly with jocular repartee, and they race like a mounted Paul Revere--outdistancing, at times, his characters' motives for acting as they do. Culpepper's play is all animation and exclamation unwilling to sit still long enough to attend to subtle character studies.
In wit and dramatic technique "Treason at West Point" shrivels somewhat when set beside the play that took second prize in the Anderson Award competition, "The Reprisal." Mark Bramhall, an Osbornian iconoclast, puts a reckless, sensuous man into the collar of a divinity student, then sticks both man and collar in one corner of a writhing triangle. The dialogue blazes with violent, staccato speeches as David, the protagonist, banters and bickers with his mistress and the good girl in the piece. Occasionally the sarcasm and the yelling get childishly out of hand, but as a whole the drama is exciting, exhausting, and superb.
Bramhall excels with dialogue, but he has a problem with his premise. Why the collar? Why is David a divinity student? At one point his mistress asks him, "Isn't that why I disgust you--because I keep dragging you down to earth . . . because I know you're anything but a saint?" Yet David seems firmly earthbound from the beginning, a man clearly cut out to rip the cloth rather than to wear it. By making him an aspirant for the pulpit, Bramhall turns David into a blunt tool for tedious bludgeoning of religion, superflous to plot and good taste alike.
The gimmicks in the Advocate help diversify the contents of the magazine but add little substance. Any of them might have been conveniently omitted. After a paragraph or two the article by Mao ceases to amuse. Five early lyrics by Wallace Stevens seem to be an oblique (and unnecessary) apology for the poetry in the rest of the Advocate. Since the collegiate Stevens was still an amateur, we are urged to be more tolerant of undergraduates writing in our own day. Actually the poems prove only that Stevens' style changed a lot later on, and got a lot better.
"Glittering Pie," the overpublicized piece by Henry Miller that caused the banning of the October 1935 Advocate, purports to be a letter from a jaded young expatriate lewdly effervescing in New York. His comments and "funny experiences" constitute an offhand critique of American civilization and the bittersweet futility of being alive. Miller is airy, a bit decadent, worth reprinting but certainly not worth censoring.
I have enough faith in the Advocate to believe that it will print any masterpiece or worthwhile literary experiment that is submitted to it. Since there aren't many signs of genius or pathbreaking in the latest issue, I conclude that the Eliots and Updykes in the College are hoarding their treasures. Even without them the April Advocate has climbed into that critical limbo of "honest," "promising" work that looks like it's improving.