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James (Lafayette) Dickey (1923-1997) | |
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American poet, novelist, critic, athlete, and hunter with bow and arrow, best-known from the novel Deliverance (1970), an adventure story of four businessmen canoeing down a dangerous river in rural Georgia. However, James Dickey's dominant medium was poetry, not bestselling fiction. He maintained that poetry should be concerned with basic emotions. "The poet is not trying the tell the truth. He's trying to make it." Particularly interested in hunting and the outdoors, Dickey came close to Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. During WWII, Dickey flew combat missions in the Pacific Theater. It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling up and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north. Lewis' hand took a pencil and marked out a small strong X in a place where some of the green bled away and the paper changed with high ground, and began to work downstream, northeast to southeast through the printed woods. I watched the hand rather than the location, for it seemed to have power over the terrain, and when it stopped for Lewis' voice to explain something, it was as though all streams everywhere quit running, hanging silently where they were to let the point be made. (from Deliverance by James Dickey, New York: Dell, 1970, p. 7) James Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift. She was the daughter of a Confederate captain and founder the Swift's Southern Specif company, which produced a drink called SSS Tonic. Dickey's father was a lawyer, "the grand old man of American cockfighting," as Dickey once said. His family were Union sympathizes, but took no part in the Civil War. Before he was born, Dickey's older brother had died from meningitis. As a child, Dickey was small and self-absorbed. Growing up,
Dickey became tall and physically fit young man primarily interested in
sports. He also read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books and Kenneth
Robeson's Doc Savage. At Clemson College, South Carolina, Dickey
played football. Later he gave promise of an athletic career at
Vanderbilt University: he won the Tennessee state championship in the
one-hundred-and-twenty-yard hurdles. In 1942 Dickey
interrupted his education to join the air force. He served as
a radio intercept officer with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron;
the pilot that he frequently rode with was Earl E. Bradley. Dickey flew
more than 100 combat missions. Poetry reached him occasionally in unexpected ways. In Okinawa he found a copy of the poems
of W.B. Yeats on the road – it was from the island library, which had
been destroyed by the October hurricane. He kept it. With little experience of formal poetics, Dickey began to write verse in the late 1940s. At North Fulton High School in Atlanta Dickey had read Byron and Shelley, but he really got interested in poetry in the Air Force. During the long streches after activity, he read Conrad Aiken's Collected Poems and Louis Untermeyer's Modern American & British Poets. Returning to the United States in 1946, Dickey went to Vanderbilt
University on the GI Bill,
earning his M.A. degree for a thesis on Herman Melville's poetry. In
1948 he married Maxine Syerson; they had two sons, Christopher and Kevin. Dickey's first poems
were published in The Sewance Review. When the
Korean War broke out, Dickey served as a training officer in the Air
Force in the South. However, he never went to Korea. (James
Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart, 2001, p. 160). Dickey himself claimed, that he dropped napalm over Korea. Dickey taught for a year at the University of Florida, but academic career did not attract him. Moreover, he stirred up kalabalik by reading his poem 'The Father's Body' (1956), in which a boy watches his father taking a shower. The poems was considered obscene by a group of women writers. Dickey refused to apologize, but resigned instead. His career took a new direction: he started to work as an advertising copy writer for McCann-Erickson in New York. From Atlanta's Lill er, Neal, Battle & Lindsey he moved into an executive post at Burke Dowling Adams. Into the Stone (1960), Dickey's first collection of poetry, explored death and renewal - themes in which he returned in the subsequent works. After Drowning With Others (1962) Dickey sold his Atlanta house, and went with his family to Europe for nine months. Most of the poems of Helmets (1964) were written in Italy, France, and Germany. Dickey fourth book of verse, Buckdancer's Choice, won in 1965 the National Book Award. This collection was constructed from missions of bombers ('The Fire Bombing'), suffering, and moments of compassion. In the title work the poet listens to the sounds of her mother dying of breathless angina: "Yet still found breath enough / To whistle up in my head / A sight like a one-man band, / Freed black, with cymbals at heel, / An ex-slave who thrivingly danced / To the ring of his own clashing light." The Zodiac (1976) was a long poem in 12 parts. The
title work of the Strenght of Fields was written for
President Carter's inauguration. Its other poems dealt with the
masculine aggressiveness and exhilaration of sports. Puella (1982)
described a girls's coming of age. Among Dickey's most often
anthologized works is 'Falling,' which records the steam-of-conscious
sensations of an airline stewardess as she falls to her death from a
plane. Before thudding into a midwestern cornfield, she
takes off her clothes, piece by piece. "She would rather be found naked
in a cornfield than in an airline uniform. So she takes off everything,
is clean, purely desirable, purely woman, and dies in that way." (Self-Interviews by James Dickey, 1970, p. 174) From 1966 to 1968 Dickey served as a poetry
consultant to the Library of Congress.When his work started to gain
recognition, Dickey established himself as a full-time writer. He also
had posts as a teacher and
writer-in-residence at a number of U.S. colleges and universities,
including the San Fernando State College, "one of those Californian
schools that yesterday was a potato patch and today has twenty thousand
students," as Dickey said. (Self-Interviews, p. 49)
However, Dickey never thought of being a teacher, who incidentally
writes, but vice-versa. Dickey was known for his outspoken criticism of his colleagues - he called Robert Frost a "super-jerk" and Edmund Wilson "a tiresome kind of old literary hack," and Robert Lowell was "doomed to be just another example of the brilliant, pampered American poet who spends the rest of his life, after the initial success, trying to progress and keeps falling down and down." (Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, edited by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, 1999, p. 128) Allen Ginsberg's Howl he defined as "the skin of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent who had discovered that machine civilization has no interest in his having read Blake." (James Dickey in Sewanee Review, Summer 1957) These
and other attacks were a part of Dickey's public image. "Humility is
not my forte," he declared. "I much more easily run to arrogance
and insolence." ('Books of the Times; One Poet's Prosaic Correspondence' by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, Dec. 10, 1999) His first writer friend was Flannery O'Connor. When
delivering a lecture in 1988 at the first Flannery O'Connor
Writer's Forum at Georgia College, Dickey said that her novels lacked
"staying power," and she had a "very narrow compass and a very limited
subject matter." In the 1970s Dickey published little fiction. He was an associate editor of the Esquire magazine
and Sewanee Review, and advisory editor of Shenandoah literary
review. Major works from
this period are the autobiographical Self-Interviews, and the coffee table art books, Jericho:
The South Beheld (1974) and God's Images (1977). Dickey's wife died in 1976 - Maxine had become an alcoholic, which Christopher Dickey blamed his father for. "He
belittled and betrayed her, humiliated her and forgot about her, then
watched her over the course of a few years quietly, relentlessly poison
herself with the whisky she had at her right hand all day long every
day until she died, bloated, her liver hardening and the veins in her
esophagus erupting, bleeding to death at the age of fifty." (Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son by
Christopher Dickey, 1998, p. 13) Not even six weeks after Maxine's death, Dickey married one of his students, Deborah Dodson. They had one daughter, Bronwen. Deborah once confessed that they rarely made love. At Aspen's Writers' Conference Dickey met a Texan woman, with whom he had an erratic reletionship for about a decade. At one point Dickey dreamed of running her cattle ranch. While visiting New York, he introduced her to Jackie Onassis. Dickey was six feet three inches tall and massively built. He exercised with weight, was a proficient archer, and loved hunting. A member of the Cherokee Bowmen Club, he made trips to the Piedmont National Wildlife Refugee in Juliette, Georgia. "I like to be out there with the wild animals in the situation they understand the best, which is that of life and death." (James Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart, 2001, p. 218) Dickey was an expert in all kinds of hunting weapons. Some time after the appearance of Deliverance he published in Esquire instructions for rattlesnake hunting with a homemade blowgun. Deliverance could be compared with William Golding's Lord
of the Flies
(1954); they both aim to answer the same fundamental
questions about human nature. Although the book was an immediate
best-seller, it was coldly received by some academic critics. The story
sends four businessmen on a canoe trip on the wild Cahulawassee River,
soon to be damned. Ed, the first-person narrator, is an advertising
man; a profession that has no use in the nature. On the second day Ed
and Bobby meet to local men. One of them sodomizes Bobby and is killed
by Lewis, a bow-hunter and survivalist. Drew, a sales supervisor,
topples from the lead canoe and is lost. Lewis breaks his thighbone. Ed
kills the man who has been following the group, and plans to shoot them
all. Ed, Bobby, and Lewis descend the river, manage to hide the events
of the trip from a country lawmen, and return home. "Deliverance is a good novel, but strangely incomplete. Most books get reduced when they're adapted into movies. But Deliverance benefits from its cinematic transformation." (Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino, 2022, p. 83) John
Boorman's screen version from 1972, starring Burt Reynolds (Lewis
Medlock), John Voight (Ed Gentry), Ned Beatty (Bobby Trippe), and Ronny
Cox (Drew Ballinger), ends with Ed's nightmarish vision of a dead man
rising his
hand out of a lake. Both in the book and the film, the major
theme is the clash between civilization and nature, but the book ends
with
Ed's deeper understanding of himself and the wild nature. Ed attains
the union with the river:
"The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to
me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever
had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, there it ran as though
immortality. I could feel it—I can feel it—on different places on my
body. It pleases me in some curious way that the river does not exist,
and that I have it. In me it still is, and will be until I die, green,
rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beutiful beyond reality. I had a friend
there who in a way had died for me, and my enemy was there." (Ibid., pp. 233-234) Dickey's works include some 30 collections of poems, several
collections of essays, and three novels. He died on January 19, 1997.
His final novel was To the White Sea (1993),
which drew together themes from his previous poems and novels. This war
story depicted an American bomber pilot Muldrow on his bloody journey
from Tokyo through Japan during the World War II. Muldrow has been
raised as a hunter in Alaska, and after he is shot down on a bombing
mission, he heads for Hokkaido, Japan's northern island, his frozen
sanctuary. At the end, as he dies, he metamorphoses into a
spirit of the snow and cold. To the White Sea was
met with harsh reviews. Dickey sold the rights of the novel to
Universal Studios. David Peoples, who had cowritten Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and also had scripted Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), wrote a draft of a script. Brad Pitt was cast in the role of the pilot. The project was eventually aborted. For further reading: The New Poets by M.L. Rosenthal (1967); Understanding James Dickey by Ronald Baughman (1985); James Dickey by Richard J. Calhoun (1983); The Imagination as Glory, edited B. Weigl, T.R. Hummer (1984); James Dickey: A Descriptive Bibliography by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1990); Critical Essays on James Dickey by Robert Kirschten (1994); Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son by Christopher Dickey (1998); James Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart (2001); The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1942-1969 by Gordon Van Ness (2003); The Way We Read James Dickey: Critical Approaches for the Twenty-first Century by William B. Thesing and Theda Wrede (2009); The Ecological Poetics of James Dickey: A Study in How Landscape Shapes the Being of Man by Sue Brannan Walker (2013); Clairvoyant with Hunger: Essays on James Dickey, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, etc., by Laurence Lieberman (2016) - See: Joseph Heller, who flew 60 combat missions in WW II and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who disappeared in 1994 in flight over Mediterranean. Note: Dickey's son Christopher also became a writer. Selected works:
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