the harvard advocate

What Thou Lovest Well Remains:
A Short and Selective Historical Note on the Advocate

The Advocate has one of the richest histories of any college literary magazine in the country, and it certainly has the longest. It is -- we are -- the oldest continuously published college literary magazine in the country. The magazine (published then in newspaper format) was founded by Charles S. Gage and William G. Peckham, class of '67 both, in 1866 and, except for a hiatus during the last years of World War II, it has found its way into the hearts and minds or -- failing that -- onto the coffee tables and bathroom floors of readers ever since. But the Advocate was lucky to survive a year.

Its precursor, the Collegian, had hardly drawn breath enough to pronouce an attack on mandatory chapel attendance before the faculty -- scandalized, no doubt, by a certain freedom of thought at a university -- had the publication closed. The Pegasus (as it were) which rose from the ashes retained, however, the Collegian's motto: Dulce est Periculum -- Sweet is Danger. Not so sweet, though, that the Advocate's stance was not cautious with regard to faculty decisions during its first few numbers. By the time the editors were demanding coeduction at Harvard -- "Alumni! the task is yours! See that this criminal exclusiveness is eradicated" -- the magazine had attracted the formidable support of James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and its life was less precarious.

In fact, healthy Mother Advocate was spawning. In 1873 she ceased to be Harvard's only publication, and the Crimson (nee Magenta, of all infelicitous things; A Quarter of an Hour, anyone?) was founded. And in 1876, some members of the Advocate defected -- or, if you prefer, left -- to form the Lampoon. The advent of these two new publications relieved us of the need (in the first case) to carry football scores and (in the second case) to be funny; now dour black-clad cigarette smokers could forever rule the roost. Or the Sanctum, rather, as the big room on the top floor of 21st South St. is known. By the 1880's the Advocate had devoted itself to essays, fiction, and poetry, and could now attain its destiny.

Destiny had (and has, we hope; we believe; coffee-crazed at the lap-top, typing at 2 a.m., through a haze of obscene fantasies of fame, we pray) quite a roll-call to run through. Theodore Roosevelt edited the magazine in 1880. E.A. Robinson, Wallace Stevens, e e cummings, and T.S. Eliot all published their undergraduate poetry here. Before the Second World War, undergrads who worked on the Advocate included Malcolm Cowley, James Agee, Robert Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein. James Laughlin (who got into trouble with local police for publishing a racy story by Henry Miller; but the venal pigs were bought off with tickets to the Harvard-Yale hockey game) and, last, littlest (what is he, like 5'4"?) but not least, Norman Mailer. Contributors in these days included Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Archibald MacLeish. In its tradition of publishing "the juvenilia of the great," the post-war Advocate has published undergraduate work by Richard Wilbur, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Frank O'Hara, Harold Brodkey, Jonathan Kozol, and others whose fame or undeserved obscurity awaits them still. During the same time, contributors from outside the Square included Adrienne Rich (the first woman to publish regularly in our pages), John Hawkes, Howard Nemerov, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Tom Wolfe, James Atlas, and one Sallie Bingam (another apparently famous person whose name, like several others above, means nothing to me) whose story "Winter Term," a tale of steamy romance between undergraduate lovers, established a genre, the Harvard Square Sex Story, which, alas, has not run its course yet. (Not that you can't make a career out of this sort of thing; see Harold Brodkey's "Innocence.")

It's both heartening and daunting to seek out the work of these people in the back issues which line our walls. Wallace Stevens' work -- which became so great -- begins so slight. John Ashbery's work -- which became so great -- began so great. Both phenomena are suprising in their way.

As various as the people who've published in the Advocate have been the phases the magazine's gone through, from T.S. Eliot to us, from Theodore Roosevelt's attack on pacifism to the Maoist and Trotskyite noises editors made in the 60s. As a Pegasus recalled in our centenary edition, "The Advocate has been a record of football scores; a caterer to old, impecunious Cambridge ladies [who live in furnished souls]; a moinitor of intra-mural scandal; a register of literary tastes which have often lagged twenty years behind the fact; a club; a wet-nurse and house-marm for febrile poets; a victim of Comstockery; a proponent of literary freedom; an organ of responsible criticism; a ghost; a myth; a great organic zilch . . . ."

The Advocate's rich and strange history of industry, inspiration, and foolishness ought to serve as a springboard, not a shackle, as we plan to renovate the building, expand our subscription base, hold a benefit, solicit short features from writers more famous than you or I, and to keep at the old ageless tasks -- soliciting, discussing, and choosing work; editing, designing, and publishing the magazine; holding readings and parties; selling ads and writing reviews -- which have served us, looking back, fairly well.