University of Virginia Library

'Unicorn': Pop Culture Invades Rural Simplicity

By Daniel Albright
Special to the Cavalier Daily

—Ed.)

Sometimes a college literary
magazine is little more than a
toddler's miscellany, but I am
pleased to report that the March
1971 issue of Unicorn contains
much that is imaginative, much that
is sophisticated. You might not be
sorry if you read it. In some ways
universities are fairly homogeneous,
independent of geography; but
Unicorn is very much a Southern
effort, and each writer seems to
adapt differently to the mingling of
the Southern sensibility with
university culture.

The most regional piece of
fiction in this issue is Bill
Hamilton's "Sebastian Turner ad
the Act of God," but into the
ordinary purple of the landscape
prose a television camera crew has
crazily intruded, for no other
purpose than to feel campy
emotions at a quaintness which
conceals mystery. The story is
overwritten; the author takes too
many potshots at similes; but the
intrusion of a jangling pop culture
into rural simplicity is perhaps the
archetypal theme of the magazine.

Tintinnabulation

The strangest piece of fiction
here is Patrick Frank's essay,
"Intimations of the Second
Coming." If it is an essay, it is the
most innocent essay ever written.
Its innocence is miraculous; but it is
in fact a nineteenth-century
oratorical hallucination about Jerry
Rubin, that thermonuclear
anarchist, coming to liberate all the
happy darkies of Charlottesville, to
put acid in the Rivanna and blow
the minds of Mr. Jefferson's
gentlemen. To portray this event,
nay, say rather phenomenon of
nature, Mr. Frank has taken his pen
against a sea of troubles with
mighty gush of the richest,
funkiest, most extravagant, most
tintinnabulation, most adjectival
prose I have seen in years, prose full
of archaisms, rhetorical
embellishments of every sort, even
allusions to the bard and other
masters of yore. It is really
wonderful.

Less Exhilaration

Next to this anything seems a
decline in exhilaration. Dave
Baron's "The Calvin Coolidge
Electric Dance Band Rag, and
Further Laments" is highly
competent, skillful, but the
insensitivity of the upper
bourgeoisie is no longer the most
fruitful theme in fiction; indeed the
daiquiri should be retired, as the
martini was long ago, to a special
niche in the short story Hall of
Fame. Still, the tact, the
obliqueness, with which Mr. Baron
presents the crisis in the life of the
young protagonist is commendable.

Terry Jackson's "Myself and
Others" is, finally, the last step in
the line away from Virginia soil
towards city life; it has all the
paraphernalia of the super-modern
short story, the passive,
dehumanized hero, surreal pettiness
impossible deformities of
contemporary things, pregnant
nonsense; but even its ingenuity
seems somewhat derivative.

Talented Poets

The poetry is the best part of
the magazine, and in the poetry the
trend is from apocalyptic fat to
physical lean. Kerney Rhoden's
"The Renaissance" is impressive in
its intellectual vivacity; it is
probably the most ambitious work
in Unicorn, although one's
enjoyment of its imaginativeness is
rather reduced by a certain loose,
indulgent style, an attempt to write
in the grand manner which
occasionally sounds too much like
the mannerisms of grand poets.
Also, Mr. Rhoden's conception of
"The Renaissance" is very baroque.
Jeff Dalke's poems try to present
complex emotions in simple
language, but I wish he had made
the language still simpler; in any
case, "Winter Song" is the work of
a talented young poet.

Cohesive Poetry

I feel that the poems of Mary
North, Paul Breslin, and Neal
Snidow are somewhat cohesive,
perhaps because they are all
students of Alan Williamson. Their
poems are spare, restrained, and
extraordinarily intense; they all
suggest violence under superb
control; they all have sinew. Mrs.
North's poem projects strong
emotions onto a landscape, until at
last the human image is imprinted,
"Tattooed," to the environment;
this poem is, I think, the finest
literary effort in the magazine. Paul
Breslin's "The Fall of the Han"
works backward beautifully to a
simplicity of desolation; and Neal
Snidow's "Sunday in the Country"
presents the superficialalities of life,
minute details, brand names even,
in astonishing density and
precision, as a means of suggesting
the point-blank perilousness of
country, human, life.

The art work in this issue seems
too frail to bear-criticism, although
Mary Garber's drawing on the back
cover has a certain charm.