Reading the Advocate Anthology is like re-reading your freshman Gen Ed papers three years later; it simply embarrasses you. The best work is outrageously derivative; you suffer for Thomas Huxley or H.L. Mencken or Henry Miller or whoever was being imitated. The worst causes real anguish; only Harvard undergraduates could write so much oddly-arranged verse with obscure Latin titles or such dogged, tedious, unknowingly funny short stories.

And only a Harvard audience could swallow the editor's assumption that the literary trends of the past century have had their gestation in the Square. You have to love Harvard to like this book. It strings together 150 selections from the Advocate's first hundred years, most of which lead you to believe that undergraduate writers are either inept thieves or self-conscious bores. Editor Jonathan Culler has attempted to justify each inclusion by fitting it into the Advocate's labored, changing definition of itself or by showing that the piece demonstrates the impact of belles-lettres on Harvard. Only the real chauvinist, the Harvard grad who moved only as far away as Brattle St., could care.

Pas Au Courant

Because Advocate writers have imitated all of literati for the past hunters, Culler has tried to tell the magazine's history by tracing the impact of literary innovations on undergraduate writers. This kind of literary history is absurd, because, although Harvard undergraduates are imitative, they are not au courant. Usually the Advocate was reactionary and rejected new kinds of expression until they had received world approbation. The Advocate ignored Eliot, Pound, and Cummings until 1930, considering itself "the heroic defender of an unchanging literary standard." It's just now warming up to Ginsberg and the Dionysion-Apollonian poetry squabble.

Reading the names in the table of contents could convince a reader that what's happened in literature in the past century has happened here. The truth is that the famous who stream in and out of Cambridge seldom grew to greatness here, but Cullers' introduction is dedicated to the other proposition. Again, he's writing for the chauvinists, who will also be amused by the inside story of the Advocate's self-definition. The magazine that was conceived as a college newspaper and published polemics on compulsory chapel, college cheers, and Walt Whitman (all re-printed here) has also considered itself a literary magazine, a gathering place for Cambridge literati, a political forum, and a socially-exclusive club. Culler includes all the anecdotes about the magazine's clandestine establishment, its raucous anniversary parties, its scrapes with the Cambridge authorities and Massachusetts censors.

It's difficult to figure out why the Advocate is publishing this anthology. Does the magazine want to show off the best pieces it has published? Does it want to demonstrate how four generations of Harvard undergraduates took to literary experimentation? Does it want to present curiosities, like Wallace Stevens' writing iambic tetrameter or Henry Miller's early prurient scatology?

Curiosity

I would bet on the last. This anthology is one long, heavy, awkwardly put-together Curiosity. Admittedly, reading the lyrics of young T.S. Eliot '10--already slightly bored, effete, with allusions to classical figures and scenes--is a "critic's delight," as Culler claims. The careful reader will find parallels with "Prufrock" in "Spleen," written when Eliot was 22:

Sunday; this satisfied procession

Of definitely Sunday faces;

Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces

In repetition that displaces

Your mental self-possession

By this unwarranted digression.

But most of the other selections are not of such universal interest. The Advocate prides itself on having had contributions from Eliot, E. A. Robinson '95, Wallace Stevens '01, John Reed '10, both Roosevelts, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. '38, and practically every other graduate whose name is familiar. But, distinguished names aside, the writing is pathetic. John Reed may be appreciated for Ten Days that Shook the World, but is admiration for him and interest in his work supposed to stretch to include the poems about seagulls written when he was 18 years old?