Bernstein and Schlesinger
Culler is too often guilty of simply showing off the great names, when the pieces written by these men would probably embarrass them today. Leonard Bernstein '39 wrote music columns for the Advocate, so Culler has included one of them in which Bernstein knocked Columbia Records; he was given to college boy chattiness, concluding paragraphs with phrases like "end of tirade" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contributed political analyses, so a piece predicting a Republican comeback in 1940 has been re-printed. Presumably, the reader is supposed to be delighted with this gentle irony, amused by a posterior knowledge of the quirks of fate and history.
Unknowns
The most ironic thing about the anthology is that the best selections were written by people you never heard of. Howard Nemerov '41, who teaches at Bennington, wrote genuinely evocative prose as an undergraduate; in "The Native in the World," he indulges in self-examination and self-pity which is utterly unsophisticated by most standards. His hero, John Bradshaw, has become a drug addict, sleeps 20 hours at one time, and is convinced that
. . .there was a way to drink seriously, and a way not to drink seriously. Of three years at Harvard he had spent the last two learning the former, and was glad to distinguish himself from many of his acquaintances whose drinking was of the rowdy-up-and-puke sort.
The self-consciousness may pain you, but Bradshaw's flounderings and dependence on his friends are honest, simply-expressed, and hauntingly realistic.
The Advocate officers have come to frown on such lack of sophistication as they occupy themselves with the wider literary world. In the last decade, its editors have written foppish editorials scorning the semi-autobiographical short stories produced in undergraduate writing courses. One such editorial, by Robert P. Fichter '60, mocks the "Harvard sex story" genre of the 1950's; he contends that the familiar locales of these stories--Widener, the Waldorf, the banks of the Charles, a fifth floor in Lowell--have been played out. But "Winter Term," by Sallie Bingham '58, is like Nemerov's stories: perceptive, caring, indelible.
The magazine, its editors make clear, no longer publishes make clear, no longer publishes the stuff produced in English C; consequently it no longer publishes much written by undergraduates. Convinced that its readers want commentary on every literary experiment and personality, the Advocate of the 1950's and 60's has printed Gregory Corso, Stephen Spender, Richard Wilbur, William Burroughs, dialogs with Brother Antoninus, and commentaries on Stevens, Faulkner, and Robert Lowell.
The post-Hiroshima anthology selections written by students are mostly imitations of these people. Culler, in his introduction, makes much of the polished, professional techniques of these contemporary writers; they are professional, I guess, because they don't use much punctuation and their characters have unreal names like Cherub and Pixie.
Two Shoddy Genres
Only a few young writers--Miss Bingham, Nemerov, Margaret Hambrecht, Sidney Goldfarb '64--have written here with originality or freshness. While Advocate editors have become more aware of the professionals writing today, its writers have confined themselves to two shoddy genres developed by the New Yorker: the "my childhood with snakes in Ceylon" and the "my coming of age in squalid surroundings" genres. Advocate poets not only write imitation Ginsberg and pseudo-Lowell these days; they all write about pigeons.
Culler's introduction hints that the anthology is a Curiosity, published for the intimate Harvard family. Most people wouldn't buy it if just any Joe were writing about "football at other colleges," but it's Theodore Roosevelt sizing up the Ivy League. Therefore, the book, a real cocktail party conversation piece, will end up on innumerable coffee tables. But it should be kept within the family. The outside world should never find out that Harvard College didn't teach its distinguished graduates everything they know. The Advocate Centennial Anthology ought only to be sold sub rosa during Commencement Week.