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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 his novel DELIVERANCE (1970), an adventure story of four businessmen canoeing down a dangerous river in rural Georgia. The trip becomes a nightmare of survival. 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." In his interest in hunting and the outdoors, Dickey came close to Ernest Hemingway. As a pilot, Dickey flew more that 100 missions in WW II and the Korean conflict, --'Funny thing about up younder,' he said. 'The whole thing's different. I mean the whole way of taking life and the terms you take it on.' James Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, Eugene, was a lawyer and "the grand old man of American cockfighting," as Dickey later said. In high school and at Clemson College Dickey played football and gave promise of an athletic career. In 1942 he interrupted his education and joined the air force. Dickey served as a radio intercept officer; the pilot that he frequently rode with was Earl E. Bradley. During this period Dickey started to read poetry. He claimed that he "eased into poetry" during an artillery attack in the South Pacific. Dickey continued to study literature, earning his M.A. degree from Vanderbilt University in 1950. But academic career did not attract him. When the Korean War broke out, Dickey served as a training officer in the Air Force. After the war he worked as a teacher and from 1956 to 1959 he was as an advertising copy writer for McCann-Erickson in New York. 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. His first book, INTO THE STONE, was published in 1960. The tightly constructed poems explored death and renewal - themes in which he returned in the subsequent works. Dickey wrote of conflicts between human beings and nature, fertility, and primeval instincts. His fourth collection of verse, BUCKDANCER'S CHOICE, won in 1965 the National Book Award. In its poems Dickey formed from horrifying missions of bombers and reminiscences of war powerful pictures of human 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 STRENGTH 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. Dickey devoted himself entirely to writing when his poetry started to gain recognition. He also worked as a teacher and writer-in-residence at a number of U.S. colleges and universities, among others at the University of South Carolina. From 1966 to 1968 he served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Dickey was known for his outspoken criticism of his colleagues - he called Robert Frost a "super-jerk", Edmund Wilson is "a tiresome kind of old literary hack," and Robert Lowell "seems 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." These and other attacks were a part of Dickey's public image. "Humility is not my forte," he once confessed. "I much more easily run to arrogance and insolence." In the 1970s Dickey published little. Among his publications from this period are the autobiographical works SELF-INTERVIEWS (1970) and JERICHO: THE SOUTH BEHELD (1974). His first wife, Gwendolyn Leege, whom he had married in the early forties, died in 1976 - she had become an alcoholic - and in the same year he married one of his students, Deborah Dodson; they had one daughter. Deborah once confessed that they rarely made love. Dickey was an associate editor of the Esquire magazine and Sewanee Review in the early 1970s, and advisory editor of Shenandoah literary review. Among his several awards were Guggenheim fellowship (1962), National Book award (1966), American Academy grant (1966), and Médicis prize (1971). Dickey also received honorary degrees from 13 American universities. Deliverance was an immediate best-seller, but 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 counrty lawmen, and return home. The film ends with Ed's nightmarish vision of a dead man rising his hand out of a lake. Dickey's works include some 30 collections of poems, several collections of essays and three novels. He died on January 19, 1997. His last novel was TO THE WHITE SEA (1993). The 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. 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, ed. by 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 by Christopher Dickey (1998) - See also WW II pilots who became writers: 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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