The Stuff of Poetry
May, 1971
Language is a casualty of the 20th Century. All-purpose obscenity and mindless slang have become the favorite forms of verbal communication among the young; the bland terminology of bureaucracies has worked itself into the style of their elders; and political rhetoric, Nixonese, has never been drearier. A favorite cliché of the times is "those are only words, they don't mean anything." The keepers of the language, the poets, seem to be in hiding. There are those who insist that poetry isn't dead, that it is as strong as ever, that the Wordsworths of our time have been the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Such assertions prove only that precision in language is a dusty virtue; Dylan and the Beatles obviously have written songs. There may be something poetic in those songs, but what is the real measure? Who writes poems?
James Dickey won the National Book Award for his volume Buckdancer's Choice and shares with Robert Lowell the distinction of being one of the major American poets of his generation. But Dickey is clearly not a composite of those ambiguous qualities people associate with poets, while Lowell, thin, slightly frail, pinched and looking out on the world through a wounded-looking countenance, is perfect--just the right amount of dignity, scorn, hurt and withdrawal. Dickey, 48 years old, six feet, three inches and 215 pounds, his sandy, thinning hair brushed down and across his wide forehead and his impatient, heavy hands always moving in gesture or pure restlessness, looks like a football coach. But he is a poet; the football coach, Paul Dietzel--formerly of Louisiana State and Army, currently at the University of South Carolina--is building a house across the street from Dickey's. When he moves in, he and the poet will have a lot to talk about, because the poet was a football player once and there is a good measure of it left in him.
In fact, when Dickey entered Clemson University in 1942, football was his passion. He had starred as a high school halfback in Atlanta, his home town, and gone on to college to play more ball and study animal husbandry, wanting vaguely to be a veterinarian. He played well as a freshman, then left school for the War, joining the Army Air Corps, where his exceptional eyesight singled him out for training in night fighters.
Dickey came to literature during the War. On bleached-coral airstrips, he filled the hours of waiting by reading books from the Special Services libraries. As he read, he began to formulate a sort of aesthetic that united writers such as Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and James Agee, interpreting them as failed poets who were using prose for poetic effect. In damp tents, he read poetry seriously for the first time, going through anthologies, finding what he liked and trying to work out a theory to explain his preferences. And he started writing a little poetry himself.
The War ended and Dickey, with 100 combat missions flown through MacArthur's South Pacific campaign, the Philippines and Okinawa battles and the final B-29 raids over Japan, went home to go to school. The War is still with him 25 years later, in some of his best poetry:
And some technical-minded stranger with my handsIs sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light,Having potential fire under the undeodorized armsOf his wings, on thin bomb-shackles,The "tear-drop-shaped" 300-gallon droptanksFilled with napalm and gasoline.
He talks about it. Not the actual combat but the personal upheaval of going from his comfortable, predictable life into the chaos of military service, aviation and, (continued on page 230)Stuff of Poetry(continued from page 148) finally, battle. About what it was like to be stationed at some dusty Southwest air base, learning, with hundreds of strangers, how to fly treacherous military airplanes. And what that did to men--the way it forced them to become close to one another; to become buddies, but at the same time forced them to become hard, because there were so many who couldn't learn and washed out or were killed. Dickey says now, "The Army is the only place you'll hear somebody say 'I've got to go take care of my buddy.' You don't see that kind of affection between men anywhere else." He wants to write a novel about the experience of learning to fly.
When Dickey returned from the War with his new passion for literature, he wanted the school that could serve this part of him best and settled on Vanderbilt, whose English department has one of the oldest and sturdiest reputations of any Southern school's. He couldn't play football. A conference rule made transfers ineligible, so he tried track for his athletic release, running hurdles, a sport that he is clearly not built for but managed to master through characteristic perseverance. He was graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and earned a master's in one year. Then he went to Rice University (at that time Rice Institute) in Houston to teach English. One year later, he was back in uniform for Korea.
This time, there was not much combat and less of the camaraderie that he had found in his first hitch. He had married Maxine Syerson and had an infant child, Christopher. After training young pilots for a time, he was again released from active duty and he returned to Rice. The school didn't really want him back. Like most veterans, he wasn't especially awed by the academic world, and in the eyes of his superiors on the faculty, Dickey was brash, irreverent, insubordinate and drank too much. Two strained, uncomfortable years later, when he received a grant to write, he left.
The grant came from the Sewanee Review, where Dickey's first published poem, The Shark at the Window, had appeared in 1951. They paid him $27 for it. Now, in 1954, they were giving him $3500 so he could go off and write. He took his family to Cap d'Antibes and worked, and when the money ran out, he returned to the States and teaching, this time at the University of Florida.
One year later, impatient with the poverty of teaching and unwilling to undertake the long, dusty, scholarly route to a Ph.D. and the relative affluence of academic security--principally because the effort would divert his attention from the writing he was doing more and more of--he went to New York to find a job in order "to make some money for my family." For the next six years, he wrote advertising copy, first in Manhattan, then in his native Atlanta. He was good at writing and handling important accounts and began to make a lot of money. He laughs now about having written Coca-Cola jingles for spots starring Eddie Fisher. In 1960, when he was in his fifth year of advertising and making $50,000 a year, he published his first book of poems. Like most volumes of poetry, it didn't sell. But it marked a critical point in Dickey's life. He was 37; the demands of his position as creative director in a large Atlanta agency left him little time to write; and he had another son, Kevin, so the needs of his family were larger than ever. But he had published a volume of poems and had been publishing poems for ten years; he was writing advertising simply to make money.
His options were clear: settle into the comfortable pattern of upper-middle-class living or leave it and write poetry--risking the security of his family, for which he had gone into advertising in the first place. He talked it over with his wife, thought about it and, finally, quit his job. On the first morning of unemployment, he got up early and drove out to an archery range. It's one of his favorite diversions and he has, typically, made himself expert enough at it to win a number of trophies on the range and kill several deer in the woods. He remembers thinking as he walked the course that morning, alone, since all the other range members were at work, that he had done exactly the right thing. That there really had never been any possibility of his staying with advertising.
But it took some time for things to fall into place, for recognition, fame and money, things that never come to many poets, to start coming in. At one point he went on relief, and for the first few years traveled, giving readings wherever he was invited, sometimes for as little as $75 and a Greyhound bus ticket. He spent a year in Europe on a $5000 Guggenheim grant, then returned to the U. S. and took a succession of jobs as poet-in-residence at Reed College (1963-1964), San Fernando Valley State College (1964-1966) and the University of Wisconsin (1966). In 1966, he won the National Book Award, and the days of bus trips for $75 readings were over. Now he charges $3500, a figure he decided upon when he heard that it was what Al Capp demanded for his college appearances. "The poets of this country are going to get at least as much as the damn cartoonists, and I tell them to hold out for it like I do, because the colleges have got the damn dough. I'm not going to see the poets of my generation picked up cheap."
In 1966, he succeeded Stephen Spender as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and stayed until 1968, when he took his present job as poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. In 1970, at the age of 47, he had his year; a year that most poets only dream of.
That spring, Deliverance, his first novel, was published. It is the story of four middle-aged, middle-class men who are persuaded by the strongest and most daring of them to take a canoe trip down a wild, white-water Georgia river. Along the way, they encounter murder, sodomy, ambush and near drowning. It is, in Dickey's words, "a story about how decent men kill, about what a man will do when he has to do it to survive." The idea occurred to him in Europe and he spent seven years working with the book. The reviews were almost unanimously enthusiastic and the book stayed on the best-seller list, behind much slighter entries such as Love Story, for nearly the rest of the year.
Warner Bros. bought the movie rights and paid Dickey to do the screenplay. He wrote it in the late summer, after work was finished on his two other books published in 1970: One was Self-Interviews, an idea suggested to him in conversation with Norman Mailer. The other, a volume of poems, The Eye-beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, which appeared a month before Deliverance.
But it was Deliverance that made 1970 Dickey's year. The poetry had brought a measure of fame, status in the literary community and certainly an impressive amount of money. The simple, clear images and the sustained narrative sense that characterize his work made him into something of a "people's poet"--in the literary, not political, sense. Where other poets became more abstruse and flamboyant, he stayed with his effort to reach "deep clarity." But, in this age, a poet, no matter how well received or vigorously celebrated, can never achieve the broad fame or influence of a novelist.
However, the quieter success of his poetry over the years made Dickey into a unique first novelist. The money it means--at least $500,000--hasn't changed anything. He and Maxine still live in the house that is their 32nd of the 22-year marriage. The house would surprise those who have the talk-show image of Dickey. Situated on a man-made lake in the Columbia, South Carolina, suburbs, it is neither antebellum nor rural, but an attractive single-story building with perhaps a quarter acre of lawn, dotted by abrupt azaleas and slender pines. Bookshelves dominate the interior, which was done in restrained modern by an Atlanta decorator. On one wall of the living room, there is a portrait, a small water color by an Allegheny Airlines stewardess who fell some 5000 feet to her death when a door on her plane mysteriously flew open in mid-flight. The incident, reported in a small, straightforward column in The New York Times, inspired Falling, one of Dickey's longest, most imaginative and perhaps best poems. He moved the event over to the Midwest and had the girl fall several thousand feet, soaring through the night and its great luminous white clouds, taking her clothes off piece by piece so that she might live in some lyrical freedom through the fall that would kill her when it ended in a Kansas cornfield. After the poem appeared in The New Yorker, the painting arrived at Dickey's house. It was from a man who had been waiting for the girl at the end of that flight. The man wanted the poet to have it and the poem she had written in French beside it.
Just off the living room there is an office where Dickey replaced his old upright typewriter with a new electric because he thought the additional speed might help him through the accumulation of routine correspondence and paperwork. It is a tight room packed with guitars, bows, trophies, a record player and boxes of manuscripts and books. "I must do something about the chaos in my office," he says to himself in the journal he records into a dictaphone for his secretary, a student at the university, to clean-type onto onionskin and put carefully into a loose-leaf binder.
He likes the house and would rather spend his time there than anyplace else. When he travels, a lot of the house goes along. He has a six- and a 12-string guitar with him when he's waiting in hotel rooms to appear on talk shows or perform some other ritual for his publisher's publicity department. When a visitor appears, Dickey will ask if he likes country music. If the answer is yes, or better, an informed yes, he'll open one of the two cases and play--very intense, very methodical and quite good. But he would rather be at home, where he can listen to the records of Mike Russo, a young sign painter from Portland, Oregon, who plays a fine Leadbelly 12-string; Dickey wants him for the sound track of Deliverance. Then he will very patiently imitate each lick, practicing until he has it down well enough to do it with confidence the next time there are people around. At home, if the day is nice and he feels like it, he crowds his large frame into his dirty blue XK-E, his head nearly touching the roof and his shoulders cramped almost as if he were back in the tiny bubble of a fighter aircraft, and drives out of town about 15 miles to a fieldarchery range set in the slash-pine-and-palmetto country around Columbia.
After he parks the car, he puts on a camouflage bush hat with the brim pinned up on the sides, cowboy-style, then carefully snaps on the polished-leather wrist and finger guards, loops his belt through a small conical quiver that holds six or seven pencil-thick aluminum arrows, stabilized by four bright-orange feathers, picks up the varnished-fiberglass bow and walks to the first of 14 targets. The range is designed to give hunters a sense of the adjustments they must make for distance, each lane carved through varying distances of the pines and scrub oaks to a paper target stapled against a stack of hay bales. Dickey toes the tin-can top that marks the shooter's spot and carefully seats his arrow. Then he takes a long, audible breath, pushes the bow out, holding it with the thumb and first two fingers of his large, heavily knuckled left hand and draws the resinous string back with three fingers of his right hand until the curled thumb rests along his cheekbone. He holds the 45 pounds of tension for a few seconds, the muscles along his arm taut and straining, while he adjusts his aim. Then he releases and the arrow leaps to a trajectory that is as undeviating as a taut wire and pierces the target and hay bales with an almost silent impact, sometimes going all the way through.
As soon as the arrow is in flight, Dickey exhales with either a satisfied sort of grunt or an "Oh goddamn it, Jim!" He knows where it is going. Out of a possible 280, he usually scores above 200. He makes truly fine scores some days, but his style is not that of an expert archer. He doesn't make one sweeping motion and release at the end of it, seemingly without aiming, the way many of the best archers do. He relies on his strength to hold the bow at maximum tension, while he deliberately lines up his shot. It is not an instinctive or rhythmic process and, by the last five targets, he is sweating with the exertion, but still just as methodical. Along the way, he stops to watch a huge black-and-yellow butterfly dart and hover through the dusty, pine-scented air or gaze at the oversized pine cones cluttered beneath one grove of trees. He even detours slightly to a spot where he once saw a big rattlesnake, hoping for another look.
On his way home from the range, Dickey sometimes stops for a beer at a little bait shop. It is the kind of store that you see along two-lane highways just outside of towns throughout the South. There are tin signs advertising night crawlers, crickets and minnows hung on the walls and two gas pumps out front, the paint fading and chipped from their rounded surfaces until, to tourists who are trying to get through to Florida, they look like antiques. Inside, there is all manner of fishing equipment: long, gnarled cane poles leaning in a corner, Styrofoam ice chests and metal minnow buckets stacked against a wall, and unlikely imitations of minnows, insects and frogs spread inside glass display cases. The low, plywood ceiling is covered with cellophane-wrapped plastic worms, some so long and brightly colored they look like exotic Asian snakes. There must be 5000 differently designed and colored worms hung from this ceiling and, between sips of his beer, Dickey walks under them with his head tilted back marveling at the sight. He likes to bring out-of-town friends along to look at this curiosity.
After the archery, he works with weights, chin-up bars and tension devices to keep his body in the kind of shape men 20 years younger can admire, although he is a few pounds above his old playing weight and worries about it. After that, some guitar playing and sometimes even a four-mile run around the lake; then he showers, has a drink and lunches with his wife. On pleasant days, they eat on the patio overlooking the lake. In the afternoons, he drives off to the college for his classes or works in the cluttered office dictating letters, reading poetry--often in Italian, French, Spanish or German--or writing. He may nap before supper. At night, there are often parties in Columbia with neighbors, associates at the University or people who simply think he might make an interesting guest. He still finds himself occasionally cornered at these events by indignant women who want to know why he wrote such a "dirty book." He answers, "I wanted to tell the truth." Usually, he is a delightful guest, who talks with the professors, lawyers, architects and businessmen about the possibility of trouble on the campus or about the university basketball coach Frank McGuire's great team (almost all New York Catholics) or with the wives about how lovely they look and how their children are doing at school. A lot of his life in Columbia seems held over from the patterns of his advertising days in Atlanta: active, suburban and focused on his family. Looking at that life, its quiet order, one wonders. He clearly likes it, since he has the money and adaptability to do whatever else would seem better. But reading the poetry and some of the exhilarating passages in Deliverance, you can easily imagine that, as he sits in his comfortable house, looking out at Lake Katherine ringed by other comfortable houses with their trim lawns and straight pines and crisscrossed by an occasional speedboat towing water skiers, he must long for something else, something less comfortable, something that is even a little dangerous. He must get that feeling particularly in the evenings, when he's having a drink after working and he can hear, coming from Fort Jackson across the lake, the sound of basic trainees counting cadence as they return from another sweaty day on a rifle or grenade range, an exhausting day that has moved them one more closer to war. That sound must haunt him even more than he has written:
But every night I sleep assuredThat the drums are going To reach me at dawn like lightWhere I live, and my heart, my blood, and my family will assembleFour barely livable counts. Dismissed,Personnel. The sun is clearOf Basic Training. This time, this Is my war and where in God'sName did it start? In peace, two, three, four:In peace peace peace peace
One two
In sleep.
• • •
His subdued and carefully ordered life is at odds with his reputation. To many, he is a sort of Hemingway who writes poetry, a big, hard-living man, more at home in the woods than anyplace else, who looks at both life and the woods as challenges, contests where strength and will are all. And there is something to it. He remembers the discipline of his football coaches as something essential to his later life. He has a clear idea of failure and says the word with a sort of loathing. There is a strong sense of Nietzsche in Deliverance, a belief in the strength and power that come to men who cultivate the animal and violent parts of themselves.
The primitive aspect of his poetry, his Hemingway image, the "men alone" construction of Deliverance and the sodomy scene in the novel have all given ammunition to those who label Dickey a latent homosexual. Refuting that charge, when it is based on subtleties in your writing, is almost as hard as proving evolution to a fundamentalist preacher, so Dickey doesn't bother. When one reviewer focused on the theme in his review of Deliverance, Dickey's only response was an exasperated, "I knew one of 'em would do it. I sure did." He finds the current obsession with homosexuality distasteful and socially crippling. "I think it's important for men to admire other men. I enjoy the company of men. Some of the finest times of my life have been spent in the company of men. But if you throw your arm around another man's shoulder as a gesture of affection, you're spotted as a queer. It's stupid."
Critic Benjamin DeMott was more generous in his review of Deliverance, taking Dickey to task not for some presumed psychological displacement but for the size of his appetites. In a long piece in the Saturday Review called "The 'More Life' School and James Dickey." DeMott worked over both the novel and the poetry and concluded that the scope of Dickey's vision was impossibly vast and intense and that it therefore failed artistically. (From Dickey's own journal, there is this: "What I wish for man is a much greater elasticity, a much greater accessibility to experience and fewer pre-conceptions.") Dickey sneers at DeMott's review. "What the hell's wrong with more life? Does old Benjy want less life?"
Some of the writers Dickey admires most wanted too much life. Agee, Wolfe and Hart Crane consumed themselves, but their ruined lives yielded great art and Dickey seems to drive himself as hard as they did. Every now and then, a rumor will circulate around New York that he is in bad health. Like Agee, Wolfe and Crane, he can drink. He knows it and seems a little curious about it:
"I have always felt that I could drink with most men, but I could not stay with Hart Crane's alcoholic consumption for half an hour, much less the days on end he kept it up. That kind of thing is beyond my temperament. I can drink probably more than most people, and probably do, but I am not really a very good madman. I guess I will last longer that way. Or I hope so, at any rate."
Beyond the fact that Dickey has lived longer than these writers and is healthy, there is a sense of order and control in his life that they did not have. He seems more exuberant than obsessed. When he is home, his life is quiet and, in a way, routine; away, he goes to parties and spends afternoons drinking and talking with friends. He picks up his reputation then.
At some point, the image of Dickey as a hell-raiser and ex-athlete greedy for life becomes political, and it is disturbing to him. Some critics and intellectuals have called him a reactionary, an ultra-right-winger, even though Dickey encouraged Eugeue McCarthy in his Presidential effort and the men became friends. But his friendships are certainly no key to his politics, if, indeed, he has any. Both William F. Buckley, Jr., and Willie Morris are his close friends. Morris is originally from Mississippi but has left that state and its politics way behind, an odyssey he describes movingly in North Toward Home; under his regime, Harper's has gone fashionably left, yet Dickey thinks that it is one of the finest magazines around and contributes to it frequently. While he has never written for National Review, the conservative journal edited and published by Buckley, the Dickeys and Buckleys are warm friends and reciprocate house visits. After the publication of Deliverance, a New York editor commented that there are two things in the world that you simply don't do: "Debate publicly with William F. Buckley or go fast-water canoeing with James Dickey." Both of them follow this sage advice. But Dickey does a great imitation of Buckley. He has a fine mimetic flair and uses it on characters as diverse as George Wallace, Marlon Brando and Georgia sheriffs. His crowd stopper is, of all things, a razor back hog. He can draw his big shoulders into a tight droop, thrust his broad forehead out and begin bobbing and snorting until he actually does resemble an old razorback. His sheriff is even more convincing: The narrowed eyes, pinched mouth, clipped and menacing speech and Dickey's own bulk are all perfect. To some people, it seems too good to be pure imitation.
When he is with people, he would rather do his mimicry or talk from his encyclopedic knowledge of literature than get into politics. When the conversation does turn to national events or personalities, he becomes silent and restless, begins looking around the room as if he were considering escape. In fact, his primary response to the whole subject is boredom. The unimaginative and brutally tiresome language of politics must be too much for a poet to bear. He probably supported McCarthy because he thought it would be nice to have a poet instead of a rancher in the White House. Whatever his politics, he does not sign petitions or actively campaign or do any of the other things the committed literati do. When he capitalizes on his success, it is not for the sake of crusading.
He loves to be recognized for his genius and, when he is, he gives a good show. When he reads, his patrician Southern accent builds and flows through the narrative and hovers carefully over the gems of revelation; he reads his poems the way old Southern preachers read the Gospel, always with reverence, sometimes with renewed awe--the message lives--and always with an eye to the unenlightened, since no routine delivery will move their spirits, and to let them go away unchanged is to fail in the eyes of either God or muse. The spirit of evangelism moves him in the classroom as well and he is remembered by his students as one of the most provocative teachers they have ever encountered. Atlanta has heard one of his great readings--three years ago at an arts festival--and some of his great teaching, in a seminar at Georgia Tech.
I was with Dickey when he recently returned to Atlanta for a cocktail party held in his honor at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center, sponsored by Contempora, a literary magazine published in the city. The party was on a Monday, but Dickey wanted to get down to Atlanta early to do some shopping with his son for his 12th birthday and to see friends and family, including his seriously ill father. After the party, there would be time to do some canoeing with his friends Lewis King and Al Braselton, identified in the dedication of Deliverance as "companions." He decided to leave Columbia around noon Saturday. That morning, we had breakfast on the patio. Table conversation with Dickey ranges unpredictably over any number of subjects, some as close as his preference in directors for the movie of Deliverance--at this point, the Irishman, John Boor-man--others as remote as this morning's topic: pre-Socratic philosophy. He says in his journal:
The pre-Socratic philosophers have always fascinated me enormously. What must it have been like to be a thinker in those days, when men really did have the illusion that the whole composition could be reduced to one or two elements: when men really did think that they could find the answer: the answer, the only one?
We talked and the conversation grew more animated, Dickey was making sweeping gestures with his knife and fork, then he abruptly left the table and returned with Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. When he sat back down, he leafed quickly through the book until he found the passage on William James's pragmatism he wanted and read it aloud, savoring Russell's sarcasm: "But this is only a form of the subjectivist madness that is characteristic of modern philosophy." He looked up grinning and said, "Subjectivist madness, that's really awfully good, you know." He punctuates a lot of his declarations with "you know," but it is a conscious question with him; he expects you to answer it; he wants to make sure you appreciate things as much as he does. He is a great sharer.
After breakfast, he worked for a couple of hours, then packed his bags and loaded them in his wife's station wagon. She drove; Dickey, his mother-in-law, Kevin and I were passengers.
He travels impatiently. First, he crosses and recrosses his legs, then he tries to sleep, sometimes he talks and eventually he and Kevin sing jingles from his advertising days. This trip was mercifully brief and he was cheerful when he checked in--with a collection of luggage that included two guitars, a hunting bow with broadhead arrows attached in a bow quiver, half a dozen suitcases and a shopping bag of liquor--at the new, garishly elegant Regency Hyatt House, which is built around a courtyard, with blue elevators looking like the bubbles of Portuguese men-of-war rising up 23 floors above the lobby. He talked with the bellhop about the guitar, found out he was working his way through college and gave him a big tip, then settled into the room. Later in the evening, the editor of Contempora, Paula Putney, an attractive, eager woman, her husband and another couple, friends of theirs, arrived at the hotel for drinks and dinner. Before dinner, Dickey played the guitar, basking for 30 minutes or so in the appreciation of his guests.
The next afternoon, Lewis King came by the hotel. He and Dickey talked for an hour or so about the canoe trip King had set up for Tuesday. King is the model for half of the Lewis Medlock character in Deliverance, the man of incredible strength and drive who convinces the others to take the canoe trip. King has the spirit and the "striking blue eyes" of the fictional character, but not the physique--that is Dickey's. King is lithe, wiry, with the body of a fine tennis player. In fact, he had just returned from a tournament in Puerto Rico, where he had made the semifinals. As he and Dickey talked, drinking Scotch from hotel-bathroom glasses, it sounded like dialog from the book and Dickey would interrupt, smiling, from time to time to say, "I seem to have read it all somewhere before," sliding his tongue almost erotically over each word.
That night, there was a family dinner at his brother's house. Tom Dickey and a friend arrived late. They had been down around the Florida line looking for Civil War projectiles. He is expert in the field of Civil War ordnance; he has written a book on the subject and accumulated a museum of relics from that conflict that includes about three tons of unexploded shells piled in his basement. Tom's car had broken down somewhere around Jacksonville, so they rode the bus back to Atlanta and walked into the dinner party about an hour late. He carried a pillow case that held a "Yankee hundred-pounder" that he showed to the assembled guests before he retired with the friend to his workshop to compare notes, leaving the shell on the living-room floor. Everybody except Tom's wife, Pasty, a beautiful, slender gray-haired woman, who paints, writes and complains unconvincingly about her eccentric husband, thought it was all very funny.
Tom almost made the 1948 Olympic team as a middle-distance runner, losing out in the finals. He still has the body of a dash man and you get the feeling that, except for his hobby--which has had him sneaking around national monuments with mine detectors late at night, once taking fire from a zealous park guard--he has never really cared about much else in life the way he cared about running track. He is one of those genial, ambitionless men who never get ulcers or find themselves overweight, think life is enormously amusing and can tell great, funny stories, usually making themselves the fool. The brothers enjoy each other, telling the stories, jokes and lies, and remembering old moments of athletic glory or complaining about wives or talking casually about the strange paths the lives of two ordinary Southern brothers have taken--writing and keeping the archives of artillery.
The dinner went well, except for one bad moment, when Dickey agreed to give a short interview to a young girl who had somehow found out where he was and phoned. Maxine was furious, but the crisis passed when the girl arrived, asking not for an interview but for Dickey to read her poems. He begged off politely, observing after the girl left, "I'm not a literary agent." He runs into this sort of thing frequently, just as any famous writer does. He tries to answer all the mail--except letters asking him "how to break into the poetry market"--and to give all the interviews he can. It can be vastly inconvenient, but he tolerates it. "I don't want to be a shrinking violet."
With a National Book Award in poetry, the possibility of another and a Pulitzer for the novel, and the other awards he has accumulated, he doesn't need--in any psychological sense--the attention of young girls who write bad poetry or of professors or even of the people in Atlanta who were giving the cocktail party in his honor. He had just come off a long promotional tour for the novel, the surest device for killing a writer's love of attention, and could be forgiven if he turned even his friends down. But he wanted to make the trip, so after spending the next day with his son, he and his wife drove to the Arts Center at six o'clock for the party. Dickey's friends Braselton and King were there, along with a number of influential Atlantans, including Mayor Sam Massell. There were two bars and a large table of hors d'oeuvres; it was a quiet, gracious party, nobody appearing particularly concerned with Dickey, which seemed to suit him as he moved easily around the big room, introducing himself to people or talking with old friends. About an hour into the party, Paula Putney began moving everybody toward one corner, where Massell stood with the plaque he was giving Dickey. When things quieted, the mayor talked--a brisk little speech full of one-liners, beginning with something like, "I'm not used to speaking before large crowds." It was one of those slick political speeches that has everybody laughing and liking the speaker for his manifest qualities of wit and humility. A tough act to follow.
Dickey stood awkwardly, grinning and looking at the floor, while the guests clapped, then he raised his head and began speaking in a soft, hesitant voice: "On these occasions, it's always in order to thank your wife, friends, family and everyone else for making it all possible. That's all very nice." Then an almost sinister pause, and I thought that he might be ready to say something ugly. But he went on: "So I'd like to accept this in the name of the Atlanta writers and artists because I come from among them." That got a bigger hand than any of the mayor's one-liners.
At dawn the next morning, Al Braselton picked us up at the hotel. We drove through the empty streets to King's house, where we put his two canoes--a battered 13-foot Grumman and a newer 17-foot Aluma Craft--on the two car tops. On the way out of town, we stopped for breakfast at a small café, picking up a couple of six-packs of beer at the nextdoor grocery; this trip was more for pleasure than danger. We made one more stop on the two-hour drive north, this time for spare paddles, since they are easily lost or broken in fast water. As we approached the launching site for the trip, we got onto narrow, two-lane roads, cut through the exposed red clay of the Georgia hills. Roads like this used to cause a tremendous erosion problem, and engineers and farmers tried for years to find a satisfactory way to heal the barren gashes bulldozers left behind for the rains to gulley and wear down. The "solution" they found, perhaps 20 years ago, was kudzu, a waxy green ivy-like plant from Japan that will grow in almost any kind of soil, and it was planted along roadsides all over the South. But kudzu has its drawbacks, the most serious being that it grows almost malignantly--up telephone poles, around fences, across roads, even over buildings. People say that it will someday literally "cover the South." It is also fine cover for snakes, a real problem for farmers whose livestock wander into its tangles. One of Dickey's early poems is about kudzu and the grotesque meetings that occur when farmers turn pigs loose in verdant mattings of the vine. The pigs are too tough and fat to be hurt by the serpents' bites and, as they feed on the plant, there is squealing, snorting and thrashing mixed with the frantic writhing of the snakes as they are stomped to death. It is a savage, primitive sight that Dickey renders perfectly. When he is driving with a guest or stranger and see the vine growing on the roadside, Dickey will quietly tell him, "It's worth your life to walk in there. So many snakes."
We turned off the kudzu-bordered road, down a rough dirt trail that ended on a quiet bend in the river, took the canoe off Braselton's car, put it in King's station wagon and crowded in with it, going back up the main road to a spot five or six miles upstream. We launched the canoes near an old, one-room store that had rusty tin soft-drink signs and peeling cardboard snuff advertisements covering its outside walls. An old, short, toothless woman gave us permission to park the car there, saying, "Lots of fellas leaves their cars here, you go right on." It was Dickey's first time on the water in ten years.
He had been away from Atlanta and the friends he did that sort of thing with for all those years, though King had invited him down for some trips during that time. The travel couldn't have been a problem to a man who moves around as much as Dickey does. But he was working on Deliverance then. As the book began to evolve, his respect for the river must have grown, until it became something real and genuinely treacherous in the way most of the rivers he and his friends handled were not (although they have had some bad times). Just as Faulkner must have been a recluse as much out of a reluctance--as well as out of his renowned misanthropy--to see the real world he had taken and transformed through his imagination into a mythical county, a county he really lived in and didn't want tarnished or upset by any damn reality, Dickey must have been obsessed with his own imaginary river for most of those ten years:
But the sound was changing, getting deeper and more massively frantic and authoritative. It was the old sound, but it was also new, it was a fuller one even than the reverberations off the walls, with their overtones and undertones; it was like a ground-bass that was made of all the sounds of the river we'd heard since we'd been on it. God, God, I thought, I know what it is. If it's a falls we're gone.
The previous Sunday, when Lew King came by the hotel, he told Dickey that he had found the perfect spot for filming Deliverance. Every detail was there. In fact, he was a little suspicious that Dickey might have been there once; it was just too good.
We unloaded the canoes and carried them awkwardly down the steep, crumbling clay bank to the river, quiet, almost placid here; its unrippled surface covered by a thin, dusty coat of yellow pollen. Long crooked branches hung out over the banks, shielding the water from the August sun that would soon drench the red Georgia hills in a stolid, gripping wave of heat. King and Braselton took the smaller canoe and the lead, paddling effortlessly down to the first wide bend. Dickey and I followed. He was in the rear, in control of our course. We had his bow, with edged hunting arrows attached, a couple of extra paddles, flotation cushions and a six-pack of beer in the canoe. For the first quarter of a mile or so, the river moved tranquilly, the quiet black water broken only by an occasional boulder or jagged branch weaving irregularly above its own reflection. Dickey yelled to King, "Is this all there is to it? I thought you had some good water for us!" King assured Dickey, "It gets better up ahead." We paddled and sipped beer.
As we came around a wide, shady bend, there was a noise like a long breeze that held and grew until we had to shout above it. Coming out of the bend, the river straightened and was broken by an island. To the right, there was a 40-yard swath of white water piling over and spilling around gray rocks, thundering until every other sound was over-whelmed. Along the left, a thin channel ran through more white water, a ragged, deep-green slot, where the current boiled and surged against rocks or bank, then found its way back into the swift cut. King and Braselton lined up to try it. They shot downstream, close to the shore and were almost to the comparative quiet of a pool below when they lost it. The bow caught a rock on the right border of the channel and the stern swung quickly around; when the canoe was almost perfectly broadside to the current, it went over. Dickey and I were following too closely, and as we went past the overturned canoe, we also veered around broadside and went over. There were four of us, two canoes full of water--weighing almost half a ton each and moving as fast as the current--plus eight paddles, four cushions, two six-packs of beer, Dickey's bow and arrows, and assorted sunglasses, hats and notebooks tossing around in the water. King seized the bow and one of the six-packs. The rest of us recovered paddles and cushions and whatever else we could grab. We stood chest-deep in the cool, rushing water, trying to steady the canoes and ourselves against the fast current that pushed the water around us and drove the heavy, half-sunken craft away from our grip.
We got the canoes into shallow water, dumped out the water, reloaded and walked them to a quieter spot to start over. King was worried about the hunting arrows Dickey carried in his quiver. "Jim, you better get rid of those damn broadheads, they could hurt somebody." They were covered by a plastic guard and Dickey said they were OK, so we went on.
As we pushed off, Dickey shouted, "Look at that!" We all turned. Dickey was waving his paddle toward the section of water we had just come through: the island with the fast water on both its sides; the slate gray that broke the white, frothy surface; the woods, maple, gum, oak and an occasional looming, almost blue, pine. Dickey hollered, "Just look at that. Goddamn it, I wrote the right book."
The water is low in August and at the next two rapids, we had to get out and drag the canoes across the shallow gravel bottom of the river. Then we came to a wide arc, shallow rapids that ran from the left bank almost all the way across the river. There was no right bank, only a huge boulder that rose 20 feet out of the water. It was deep enough for the canoes, but the passage ran at almost a perfect right angle to the river's course until it reached the rock. Then it turned out abruptly, so that the course we had to steer was shaped almost like a boomerang. King and Braselton made it to the rock, but couldn't pivot fast enough and went over. They were waiting just below the angle for us. Dickey and I didn't do any better. King went after our lost gear and, when he handed the bow back, the hunting arrows were gone. Two target arrows were still in the bow quiver and King just said, "No, I didn't throw those broadheads away."
We had good water for the next mile or so: rapids that were deep enough to shoot or deep channels so close to the bank that we had to push springy branches away from our faces. As we ran downstream, Dickey steadying the canoe while I stood to pick a course, the sun dried our clothes and burned our skin. King and Braselton had worked ahead and were out of sight when we came back into deep, almost still water. We paddled slowly, watching the banks and enjoying the rest. The woods grew all the way to the bank--dense, shady and obscure. Quiet except for the occasional singing of an invisible bird. Dickey recited some of the descriptive passages from Deliverance and repeated something he had said before, when talking about the book: "Out here, you really are on your own. You could break your leg or be bitten by a snake and it would be hours before you could get help. You'd have to do what you could for yourself."
We came around a bend and saw Braselton holding his canoe up against the bank, while King swam out in the middle of the river. As I leaned forward for balance, Dickey stripped to join him. They swam for 15 minutes or so, diving and treading water while they talked, two naked men, cooling off in a deep spot on the Chattahoochee River in the middle of a hot summer day. As we began downstream again, King promised that the best water was just ahead.
King and Braselton called this familiar section of the river Maladroit Point. For almost half a mile, it was fast and shallow. Through the middle, broken ridges of rock rose high enough to make the water impassable, but there was a channel that ran up against the bank, turned out into the river, then back again, made another journey to the bank, then shot back out to a steep, narrow-throated falls. King and Braselton did everything right, keeping the canoe lined up with the current, moving slightly faster than the river in order to maintain steerage. They accelerated in the trough along the bank, slipped out toward the river's center, heeled quickly around as the channel changed direction again and finally turned one last time and with a rush went through the spray of the slender, boulder-lined four-foot drop into the quiet water below. It was the first time in four trips that they had made it through there. We followed and after hanging up on one of the shallow gravel beds, stayed with the flow, kept the right speed and balance and aimed directly at the narrow drop. We went through quickly, but as the bow went over, the water in the bottom of the canoe sloshed forward; it was enough weight to drive the bow under and we slowly submerged. From then on, the trip was pleasantly uneventful.
For the last half mile or so, the water was still and, as we idled downstream, dipping our paddles into the pale-green water, Dickey would shout from time to time: "When I get back to that ho-tel, I'm going to drink about five hundred double mahtinis!" Then he'd laugh. Early in the afternoon, soaked and dried several times, shins and elbows rubbed and skinned against flat river rocks, shoulders aching from carrying and paddling the canoes, we reached the bridge above the spot where we had left Braselton's car. After picking up the other car, loading the gear and shopping at the old woman's store, we sat in the sun and ate an improvised "seafood dinner": sardines, crackers, salted peanuts and Pepsi Cola from cans, then drove back to Lew King's house.
Joan King had a dinner party planned for that night and didn't want her thirsty male guests fooling around in the liquor cabinet before they cleaned up and changed. Dickey moaned and pleaded with enough charm to make her relent. As we stood around the kitchen mixing drinks, he left for a minute and returned with an open anthology of his poems. He read from it in a careful, low voice:
And there is another stone, thatboiled with white,Where Braselton and I clung andfoughtWith our own canoeThat flung us in the rapids we hadriddenSo that it might turn and take onA ton of mountain water
And swing and bear down throughthe flying cloudOf foam upon our violent rockAnd pin us there.With our backs to the wall of thatboulder,We yelled and kept it off us as wecould,Broke both paddles,
Then wedged it with the paddlestumps up overThe rock till the hull split, and itleapt and fellInto the after fall.In life preservers we whirled ourselves awayAnd floated aimlessly down intocalm waterTurning like objects.
Taking the drinks into the living room, we settled into chairs and sofas, sitting comfortably for the first time since dawn. Weariness helped the Scotch along as the friends talked, running that and other rivers again, rebuilding each event, polishing them to sustain the excitement or expand the humor until they were perfect. They talked about poets and Al Braselton recited some Dylan Thomas--imitating that poet's reading style almost perfectly. Dickey said that he had read some of Thomas' stuff when he first started traveling to the colleges, almost ten years before, but that he had given it up because "you can't beat that act." Then they talked about the filming of Deliverance, about the right actor for each part, about the location. Then back to that day's trip. And others.
Dickey was clearly at his best with men he liked and admired, having shared something with them that made the drinking and reminiscing not merely justified but necessary. He never changed from the nylon flight suit he wars for canoeing--"dries out fast." When the guests began arriving--all old friends--he retold the story of the day's trip, teasing the women by adding details from Deliverance. He played the guitar with Roger Williams, former Atlanta bureau chief for Time, who had taken a leave to free-lance and was currently working on a book about Julian Bond. They worked against each other on Wildwood Flower--both play the guitar competitively--but it was understood and friendly. Braselton played a 12-string and did a verse or two from Talkin' Liberal Blues, a satire he wrote. After dinner, Dickey, tired and still in the flight suit, went back to the hotel. He was leaving the next day. We said goodbye outside his door.
• • •
Jim Dickey would be an extraordinary man even if he still wrote advertising. He is a former fighter pilot who hunts deer with a bow, challenges fast water in a canoe, lifts weights as vigorously as a 20-year-old, drives a sports car and reads and speaks five languages. He is entertaining; he can take the most significant accomplishment and reduce it to something routine. "I've done my obligation to those prose boys," he'll say of Deliverance. He can play the mountain man or the reluctant intellectual who doesn't want to have one goddamn thing to do with all this highbrow stuff, and at the same time, review books for the Sewanee Review. All that can be noted, retold and dramatized on book jackets. But the part of the man that doesn't lend itself to cryptic anecdotage, to easy comparisons with Hemingway or to facile psychological interpretation is the most important. And that all happens when he goes into his office and sits down, alone with the English language.
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