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A good Dickey is hard to find

One of my favorite moments in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction comes at the grisly finale to “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The Misfit has just killed a grandmother in cold blood, prompting his cohort to note: “She was a talker, wasn’t she?”

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

After finishing Henry Hart’s impressive biography “James Dickey: The World as a Lie,” it strikes me that Dickey had a lot in common with that grandmother.

The truth, no matter how painful, dangerous or even mundane, is often a terrible thing to confront. The only way some people can grapple with it is when their very existence is at stake.

The Dickey in Hart’s biography is a brilliant poet with a remarkable mind. He’s also a bloviating racist misogynist alcoholic asshole who lives a life of lies.

The daring fighter pilot?

Lie.

The rugged outdoorsman?

Lie.

The gifted athlete?

Lie.

It takes a brush with death to force him, like the grandmother, to start rethinking the world of lies he inhabits.

Hart notes that Frank Zoretich (who happens to be a longtime friend of mine) interviewed Dickey shortly after a major surgery that put a considerable scare into Big Jim.

“Nobody who’s come back to life can have greater incentive to enjoy just getting out into the sunlight, just walking around talking to people,” Dickey tells Zoretich. He also starts to tell the truth. He concedes he’s not the rugged outdoorsman he claims to be. He starts to deconstruct the “Hemmingwayesque myths” he wrapped himself in.

But it lasts only a short time. Once the gun is no longer pointed at him, Dickey pretty much returns to his lying. Hart argues much of it is by design. And clearly it is. Dickey sees the poet as a godlike force that creates reality rather than just reflecting it. He sees no problem in creating a gumbo of reality, fantasy, myth and fabrication in his art and in his life. But by the end of the biography, it’s clear this is more a compulsion than some sort of artistic Tao. Dickey’s a liar. Plain and simple.

Hart doesn’t flinch from showing us a Dickey that could give Mel Gibson a run for his money when it comes to racist and anti-Semitic rants. But he tends to downplay it, claiming it was for shock value more than echoing core beliefs. Bullshit. Having an African-American maid who likes you doesn’t exonerate you for repeatedly making statements like this one (which he said in front of one of his classes):

“Don’t you agree that niggers smell worse than we do?”

There is a good Dickey. The one who was a gifted and supportive teacher. The man who wrote Deliverance. The poet who carved words into something that could leave the reader overwhelmed and breathless. But that Dickey proves difficult to find in Hart’s book.

Related:

  • An interview I did with Dickey in the late ’80s. Part 1. Part 2.
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Assorted Bob Paddle Bob Top Bob Transcendental Bob Uncategorized

Nuns with paddles

Lake Loudon sunriseIt’s so dark I don’t see the nun buoy until I’m a few feet away. How odd. The red, nun-shaped marker on Parks Bend conjures an instant flashback to angry Sister Mary Library chasing me and Doug Hamilton around book shelves with a paddle, hoping to put a hurtin’ on us after we’d glued alarm clocks under all the library tables at St. Anselm High School. The clocks were set to go off at 2 minute intervals. Sister Mary Library turned her wrath toward me and Doug as the library erupted into something akin to the beginning of Pink Floyd’s “Time.” I guess our howls of laughter gave us away.

I paddle past Sister Mary Library, crossing the main channel of Fort Loudon and pointing my bow downstream.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been out before sunrise. Giant fish, veritable leviathans, loll along the surface of the water and slip back into its blackness. I wonder what type of fish they are, rising slowly to greet the day. My nifty new head lamp reflects off the Steeler-gold kayak. I’m hoping it will stop me from becoming a speed bump for bass boats. But this morning, there are very few boats out as the sun starts to chase  blackness to silhouette. A Chris-Craft yacht lumbers down the main channel at idle speed, perhaps heading up to Knoxville to join the Vol Navy for tomorrow’s game. Its wake adds a bit of roll to my forward motion.

I pass a pair of bass fishermen, the first boat I’ve seen since the Chris-Craft.

“How many horsepower is that thing?” the angler asks, shaking his head as I paddle past.

“One. Barely,” I tell him. “I promise I’ll watch my wake.”

We laugh. I continue.

Herons watch warily from their perches on the shore, some brave enough to hold their ground, most lurching skyward in a series of croaks, leaving occasional dimples on water grazed by wings struggling to be airborne. An osprey’s white belly flashes overhead. A kingfisher cackles in the pines lining the shore.

When I reach the osprey nest at the mile 604 daymark, I look longingly at the Loudon Lock and Dam, another mile or two downstream. I’ve wanted to get that far for as long as I’ve been paddling Loudon. But this isn’t the morning to do that. It’s time to turn the kayak. Head back across the main channel to the north shore and make my way back to Duck Cove. That will give me a 12..5-mile dose of morning bliss.

Squinting into the risen sun, I paddle with aching arms.  I think about James Dickey’s “Deliverance,” which I’ve been re-reading and re-watching for reasons that I’m not completely in tune with. I’m not thinking about purty mouths or piggies squealing. I’m thinking about the book’s core themes. The impending harnessing of something wild. A raging river that’s about to be tamed behind a dam, just as this lake was when TVA  impounded it in the 1940s. And how this middle-age kayaker makes his way past lakefront fortress estates where fat suburban Labradors pant from bush to bush, futilely trying to mark the world in fits of canine conquest.

Google Earth/GPS of my route:

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Books

Deliverance turns 40

Nice piece in the New York Times about Deliverance’s 40th anniversary. I had the pleasure of interviewing James Dickey in the late ’80s when I was reviewing his novel Alnilam. Fascinating guy.

Deliverance is one of the few movies I’ve seen that rivals the intensity of the book, though I still vastly prefer the novel. Might be because Dickey wrote the screenplay for the movie. I remember talking to Dickey about the music in Deliverance. At the time, he was having major health problems, and we talked about his stubborn insistence on not going “gentle into that good night,” which now seems odd given his dislike of Dylan Thomas. I’m also a major fan of his poetry.

Do yourself a favor. Pick up a copy of Deliverance and re-read it. Or discover it new. And then pick up a copy of Buckdancer’s Choice to sample his poetry. Despite his many flaws, Dickey was a literary giant in my eyes.