[In the following essay, Hart addresses the problems in researching Dickey's life story, asserting that “nearly everything Dickey said about his life was an embroidery of fiction and fact.”]

When James Dickey died on January 19, 1997, most of the obituaries—from the six-column one in the New York Times to the shorter ones in Time and Newsweek—paid tribute to the big, life-loving, hard-drinking bard who had written the best-selling novel Deliverance. The eulogists pointed out that he had been a star college football player, a combat pilot with one hundred missions during World War II and the Korean War, an advertising executive for the Coca-Cola company, a tournament archer and expert bow-hunter, a National Book Award-winning poet, a poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, a popular professor, and an author of poetry books, coffee-table books, literary criticism, novels, and children's books. In Dickey's hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, David Kirby announced that “A boozy, bold ‘Dylan Thomas of the South,’” had died, and that Dickey had “staked out the position of premier tough-guy writer that Ernest Hemingway had held in the previous generation.” Kirby also contended that Dickey was an aesthete and impersonator in the tradition of Oscar Wilde.

During a memorial service at the University of South Carolina, the novelist Pat Conroy remarked on Dickey's personae and impersonations as well: “He tried to live a hundred lives and succeeded in living about 95 of them. No American life has been so restless in its pursuit of expertise in so many fields. A whole city of men lived in that vivid, restless country behind James Dickey's transfixing eyes.” Because Dickey aspired to be a Jeffersonian Renaissance man as much as a Rabelaisian hell-raiser, Conroy expressed sympathy for the recorder of his life: “Pity the biographer of James Dickey. If this biographer … gets all of the far-flung outrageous stories on paper, then the life of James Dickey will make Ernest Hemingway look like a florist from the Midwest. This is a promise, not a premise, a certainty, not a guess.” If Dickey had modeled his life on Hemingway's, he had also sought to outperform the great performer.

By the time of Dickey's death, at least six writers had proposed gathering “the far-flung outrageous stories” into a biography, but Dickey had declared as early as 1980 that he would authorize no biography. In interviews he allied himself with T. S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold in opposing such a book, and in private he did what he could to keep the biographical hounds off his trail. “No one will ever be able to reconstruct my life. It is more complicated and more unknowable than of Lawrence of Arabia,” he wrote in a journal published in 1971. If Dickey confounded researchers, he also courted them by saving almost every scrap of paper he wrote on and every scrap that was ever written to him. To make them accessible to the public, he began selling his papers to Washington University in 1964. In 1993 he sold so many letters, manuscripts, notebooks, military documents, teaching materials, appointment books, financial statements, and other records to Emory University that it took 233 boxes and about 100 feet of shelf space to contain all the material. About five years later, Emory bought many more papers that had been stored in Dickey's house when he died. Hundreds of his letters had already made their way to other archives around the country. In these various havens I have found lines of poetry Dickey scribbled on Applebee's napkins, a little book about toothpaste and toothbrushing he assembled when he was five years old, love letters he received from Atlanta girls when he was a teenager, his international Playboy key, and even a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser beer.

For all his half-hearted objections to potential biographers, Dickey loved to read biographies, and in his essays, most notably those he wrote on Lawrance Thompson's Robert Frost: The Early Years and Allan Seager's The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, he laid out a blueprint of the kind he most admired. In his review of Thompson's book, focusing on Frost the man versus Frost the myth, Dickey could have been addressing his own hagiographers when he cautioned Frost's: “‘Beloved’ is a term that must always be mistrusted when applied to artists, and particularly to poets. Poets are likely to be beloved for only a few of the right reasons, and for almost all the wrong ones: for saying things we want to hear, for furnishing us with an image of ourselves that we enjoy believing in, even for living for a long time in the public eye.” He praised Thompson for scrutinizing Frost with both approbation and disapproval: “As partial as it is [toward Frost], Dr. Thompson's account is yet the fully documented record of what Frost was like when he was not beloved: when he was, in fact, a fanatically selfish, egocentric, and at times dangerous man; was from the evidence, one of the least lovable figures in American literature. What we get from Dr. Thompson is the … construction of a complex mask, a persona, an invented personality that the world, following the man, was pleased, was overjoyed, finally, to take as an authentic identity, and whose main interest, biographically and humanly, comes from the fact that the mask is almost the diametrical opposite of the personality that lived in and motivated the man all his life.” Dickey concluded: “Looking back on Frost through the lens of Dr. Thompson's book, one finds it obvious that the mode, the manner in which a man lies, and what he lies about—these things and the form of his lies—are the main things to investigate in a poet's life and work.”

In reviewing Seager's biography Dickey restated his position. Although he entitled his review “Roethke: The Greatest American Poet,” he was anything but fawning. He drew attention to Roethke's egotism, drinking, violence, and insanity; but his worst offense, according to Dickey, was his pathetically unbelievable lying, which Dickey witnessed on a trip to Seattle in 1963:

[Roethke] would enter into a long involved story about himself. “I used to spar with Steve Hamas,” he would say. I remember trying to remember who Steve Hamas was, and by the time I had faintly conjured up an American heavyweight who was knocked out by Max Schmeling, Roethke was glaring at me anxiously. “What the hell's wrong?” he said. “You think I'm a damned liar?”

I did indeed, but until he asked me, I thought he was just rambling on in the way of a man who did not intend for others to take him seriously. He seemed serious enough, for he developed the stories at great length, as though he had told them, to others or to himself, a good many times before.

Dickey fell into a bitter silence as he listened to Roethke's long-winded, self-centered tales. Although Roethke wanted him to corroborate the lies in order “to help protect him from his sense of inadequacy, his dissatisfaction with what he was as a man,” Dickey refused. “My own disappointment,” he remembered, “was not at all in the fact that Roethke lied, but in the obviousness and uncreativeness of the manner in which he did it. Lying of an inspired, habitual, inventive kind, given a personality, a form, and a rhythm, is mainly what poetry is, I have always believed. All art, as Picasso is reported to have said, is a lie that makes us see the truth.”

For Dickey, Roethke embodied his masterly lies in his poems, and while he commended Seager for explaining the biographical context—the “glass house”—in which the poems grew, he attacked those responsible for imposing limits on Seager's book. “Something is wrong here,” Dickey commented. “One senses too much of an effort to mitigate certain traits of Roethke's, particularly in regard to his relations with women. It may be argued that a number of people's feelings and privacy are being spared.” Because of Seager's reticence Dickey believed that “a whole—and very important—dimension of the subject has thereby been left out of account.” For those who preferred a whitewashed, mythic Roethke, Dickey had harsh words: “It is no good to assert, as some have done, that Roethke was a big lovable clumsy affectionate bear who just incidentally wrote wonderful poems. It is no good to insist that Seager show ‘the good times as well as the bad’ in anything like equal proportions; these are not the proportions of the man's life. The driving force of him was agony, and to know him we must know all the forms it took.” Dickey blamed Seager's reluctance to tell the whole truth on Roethke's wife, Beatrice, and attacked her for placing obstacles in Seager's way.

Writing a biography is a complex business, especially when your subject or your subject's family and friends are still alive. It was Oscar Wilde who noted that the biographer added one more fear to the prospect of death. Wilde also said that the great writer has many apostles, and usually it's Judas who writes the biography. In her book about the numerous problems facing Sylvia Plath's biographers, Janet Malcolm called the biographer a professional burglar. I would add to the list of epithets the name of Adam. Many biographers begin their perilous adventures in relative innocence—in an adorational Eden. Out of a fascination with their subject's writings, they want to pluck the apple that contains the secrets, or seeds, of their subject's life and art. Biographers quickly realize that there are some people who would rather they left the apple alone. Much biographical information, after all, is private knowledge, forbidden knowledge, harmful knowledge.

Out of my own enchantment with Dickey's early work and curiosity about his life, I wrote Dickey around 1992 that I planned to write his biography. He never responded, but mutual friends told me of his dismay. Over the next four years, partly because he realized I was persevering with my research, he warmed to the project. About a year before he died, a Dickey scholar, Gordon Van Ness, told me that Dickey wanted to speak to me. Since I had been working on the book for several years, and since I feared he might try to restrict or block it, I made my first phone call to his house with great trepidation. When I told him my name and where I was calling from, there was a pause, and then he nearly shrieked: “Henry Hart! That's not your name!” He made up a menacing name that sounded like a character's in The Godfather: “You're not Henry Hart. You're Henrico Corleone! You're a hit-man for the mafia!” (In two months, after telling me that he read Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan books as a boy, he signed some of his letters to me “Bolgani, the Gorilla,” presumably because Tarzan had killed the gorilla.) To my great relief, despite his discombobulating jokes that portrayed me as his executioner, Dickey expressed little animosity toward my project. But he obviously had worries, the main one being the way I would address the romanticized versions of his life that he had aired so free-spiritedly in conversations and publications.

Although Dickey liked to ridicule T. S. Eliot's self-conscious aesthete, J. Alfred Prufrock, he shared Prufrock's need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” In an anecdote about his first poetry reading, which he said he had approached with diffidence and fear, he admitted in 1989: “The public image, whatever that may be, notwithstanding, I'm really a rather shy person. It made me very nervous to get up in front of even as few as ten or fifteen people. My wife noticed how nervous it was making me. We were on a relatively modest salary at the time at a small West Coast experimental school [Reed College, where he taught in 1963], and even though I got a couple of hundred dollars that we very much needed for a week's work, I just didn't know if it was worth what I was going through to get it.” Dickey finally told his wife that he would decline the offer to read at Oregon State. When she advised him to relax and just be himself on stage, he responded: “But what self, which one?” To mask his insecurities, he confessed that he “had to invent a self” and chose for his model the “big, strong, hard drinking, hard fighting” Ernest Hemingway. He added: “Nothing could be less characteristic of the true James Dickey, who is a timid, cowardly person.”

Right after telling this story to the interviewer, Ernest Suarez (and it was a story; he had given numerous poetry readings before teaching at Reed), he named Hemingway and T. E. Lawrence as the twentieth century's “two great invented selves, people who wished to become other than they really were and who wrote and acted out of the assumed personality.” He could also have included William Butler Yeats, who once argued: “All happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a rebirth as something not one's self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed. … The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat.” Like his self-conscious and self-inventing forebears, Dickey regularly chose to overcome disappointment and defeat by creating and then flaunting heroic masks. When he wrote that no biographer could do justice to his life because he was more complicated than Lawrence of Arabia, what he meant was that he wore more masks and played more roles than Lawrence. To close friends like Paula Goff he confided that he was “the sum of all the roles he played”—a sum that, presumably, no one would ever be able to tally.

On July 15, 1996, during my second phone conversation with Dickey, he again brought up the matter of lying. He wanted to know what I planned to call my biography. I said I might call it James Dickey: A Rage to Live after a couplet from Alexander Pope's “Epistle to a Lady” that he greatly admired: “You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, / And die of nothing but a Rage to live.” He thought for a moment, and then said: “No. Henry, we've got to shake them up out there. We've got to call it: James Dickey: The World as a Lie.” The title reminded me of a line from Schopenhauer quoted by one of Dickey's favorite writers, Joseph Campbell, in The Mythic Image. (I learned later that he had borrowed the phrase from the title of a poem by Paula Goff.) The world of time and space, Schopenhauer proposed, was “a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, in such a way that all the dream characters dream too.” What Dickey meant was what Schopenhauer meant: the world could be viewed as a dream or lie or invention—something created mysteriously and majestically out of the void—in which all the characters dreamed or lied, too. The Greek word behind poetry is poesis, “a making,” and Dickey implied that we all are poets or artist-gods making or “making-up” the world. With a childlike sense of wonder, as well as with the many sextants he bought as an adult, he obsessively contemplated the stars and cosmic origins. With his head in the heavens, he laughed like a mystic comedian at the mundane facts at his feet.

Nearly everything Dickey said about his life was an embroidery of fiction and fact. Trying to comprehend his penchant for tall tales and cavalier behavior, friends and foes alike attributed it to his southernness. “Most Southern literature comes right off the front porch,” Dickey once said. “[It arises from] people sitting and talking, long-windedly, but always willing to listen to each others' stories because they've all got good ones to tell.” Dickey's conviction that he was free to invent his past and future as he chose also had foreign sources—the existential writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In a televised conversation with Bill Moyers, Dickey once recalled listening with rapt attention to a Sorbonne lecture by Camus “about the Existentialist proposition that we no longer have any supernatural sanctions …, that man is essentially what he has made of himself. The famous Sartrian formula—Man is free to act, but he must act to be free—was pretty much the subject of that evening's lecture.” Skeptical of this libertarian position, Moyers asked Dickey if all acts were therefore permissible. Dickey fudged. It depended, he said, on the quality and quantity of the actions. On other occasions he boldly proclaimed that in a universe without traditional sanctions he, as a poet, could say, do, and make of himself whatever he pleased.

In his controversial endorsement of lying, Dickey found a sympathetic ally in Oscar Wilde, who bemoaned with his usual wit what he called the “decay of lying” in modern letters:

One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, a social pleasure. … Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion. … The fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute. Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models might grow into something really great and wonderful. But as a rule he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy … or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination.

Unleashing the imagination without concern for conventional truths or morals was a goal of fin-de-siècle aesthetes. It was also a goal of James Dickey.

Dickey considered his long novel, Alnilam, his most significant work partly because it was to be his most extensive exploration of the imagination's ability to transform facts into captivating lies. The two main characters, Frank and Joel Cahill, reinvent the world in ways Dickey espoused. In a lengthy abstract for the novel and its projected sequel, Crux Australis, Dickey wrote of his alter-ego Joel:

He evidently has some notion of a society which he calls “circulatory,” or “cyclic.” The society would depend very heavily on role-playing and lying. Joel believes that lying exercises the creative and imaginative faculties, and, when indulged in on either an individual or a group basis, raises the consciousness of the party or parties concerned. The process is what Joel calls “continuous invention,” and he believes, apparently, that such systematic practice of fabrication will create a new human world and the transfigured world of the human ability to fabricate. There is a kind of sketchy notion to the effect that there will be “truth areas,” where empirical fact is rigorously adhered to and communicated truthfully. This is the area that will enable the state to function. All the citizens are indoctrinated both to truth and invention, so that they can be circulated in and out of both areas, as the state desires. It might even be a kind of law that one must spend equal time in both, or perhaps more time in the “invention area” than in the “truth area,” but surely, some time in both. The real basis for the mind or imagination of the state will be in the invention area, where people are constantly exercising their creative abilities by making up stories about themselves, about their neighbors, about anything and everything there is. People would soon learn to live with this, Joel says, exploit it, and rejoice in it. It is a kind of freedom human beings have never before had on a large-scale, systematic basis. There might be a kind of hierarchy of lying here where one class of “inventors” would be compelled to enter the truth area or indicate by some sign or other, in case vital or necessary information was required, that this was indeed truth. The rest could be lies, but the highest group of all, the group that corresponds to the philosopher-kings or sages are those that need make no sign as to whether what they say is true or whether it is fantasy. These are the master inventors, and the state reveres them.

Joel's conception of utopia turns Plato's Republic, with its truth-telling philosopher-kings, on its head. “What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er,” Dickey would say with John Keats, “delights the camelion Poet.”

For Dickey the world was a theater in which he bestowed upon his multitudinous selves the costumes and actions of high or low drama. In his poems he often wrote about kings, and in his life he played mad or bad or good king with equal gusto. When asked what Dickey was really like, a friend from his advertising years, Al Braselton, answered: “Which Dickey?” He professed to know four Dickeys—Jamey, Jim, James, and Jimbo: “Jamey, the nickname he was given by his family in early childhood, is the Proust-like preternaturally-aware poetic sensibility who misses nothing and remembers everything.” Jim is “the friend and good companion,” who is embarrassed by Jamey's sensitivity and determined to avoid all literary affection. James is “the writer … who keeps himself in a most secretive manner.” Jimbo is “the celebrity,” the larger-than-life figure out to prove to a culture biased against poets that he is no “sissy.” As if to outdo his friend's assessment, Dickey usually boasted that he had a whole troupe of personae. “Everyone is several Walter Mittys,” he told an interviewer in 1967. To another interviewer he confided: “Everybody has in himself a saint, a murderer, a pervert, a monster, a good husband, a scoutmaster, a provider, a businessman, a shrewd horse trader, a hopeless aesthete. … There are all kinds of contradictory selves. Essentially, the most exciting thing for a writer, especially a young writer, is to get as many of these energized as he can, to let the monster speak as well as let the prospective husband speak.” Assessing Dickey's contradictions, his sister-in-law, Patsy, once wrote: “Jim created James, the mad nobleman living in an impenetrable fortress of legend. Then with Viking ruthlessness, with outrageous pleasure, James slew Jim, the man who could create life in stone. Then there was only James Dickey.”

Everyone who followed literature after World War II heard stories about Dickey's outrageous and even unlawful behavior. To a certain extent he emulated his peers who suffered from what he called “the occupational hazards” of poetry—alcoholism, mania, suicide, and depression. Referring to Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath (as he often referred to Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz, and Weldon Kees), he told a Playboy interviewer in 1973:

I think there is a terrible danger in the over-cultivation of one's sensibilities, and that's what poets are forced to do in order to be poets. You will find that poets, almost without exception, are cast into the most abject despair over things that wouldn't bother an ordinary person at all. Living with such an exacerbating mind and sensibility gets to be something that one cannot bear any longer. In order to create poetry, you make a monster out of your own mind. You can't get rid of him. He stays right with you every minute. Every minute of every day and every night. He produces terrible things—nightmare after nightmare. I'm subject to having them no less than any of the rest of them. But I don't fool myself. I know what's doing it. Writers start out taking something to aid the monster, to give them the poetry. Poets use alcohol, or any other kind of stimulant, to aid and abet this process, then eventually take refuge in the alcohol to help get rid of it. But by that time the monster is so highly developed he cannot be got rid of.

While Dickey seemed bent on outmonstering his fellow monsters, he also subscribed to the notion that poetry is an act of redemption and atonement. He transgressed knowing that his sins would inspire poems, that he could purge his sins and gain forgiveness through writing. If he pledged his soul to the devil, he believed that in return he would acquire Faustian power. He justified the hazards of poetry-writing by saying that “the moments of intensity which do lead to delight and joy and fulfillment are so much better than those that other people have.”

One of the insidious effects of alcoholism on writers is the way it can dissipate creative and critical faculties while bolstering delusions of greatness. Dickey's literary career reached its zenith in the 1960s and early 1970s—before alcohol and other forces eroded his judgment. The poet and editor Peter Davison summed up the critical consensus in an Atlantic Monthly essay in 1967 when he argued that, of all the contemporary poets, only Robert Lowell and James Dickey deserved the title major. During this period Dickey became a literary celebrity. Life and Time published profiles of his life. He appeared on the Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, and Dick Cavett shows. He could count as friends such writers and politicians as William Styron, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, William F. Buckley, Jimmy Carter, and Eugene McCarthy. He commanded the highest fees of any poet on the reading circuit; and, like Dylan Thomas before him, he titillated, scandalized, and mesmerized his audiences. For the poet who aspired to be a notorious poet maudit or the Roaring Boy alcohol was an enabling tonic. About Dickey's drinking the poet Richard Wilbur observed:

Especially among Southern writers, after a little Daniel's or Dickel, one hears Jim Dickey stories having to do with outrageous and alcoholic behavior at this place or that. I have seen a bit of such behavior, and have heard tell of it from people who do not fabricate or embellish. It seems to me that I understand … what goes on in Jim at such times: an impatience with the correct and civilized self, a wish to be unbounded. Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer's fictional heroes, often feel challenged to do precisely the wrong thing, and I suspect that Jim has sometimes said to himself, “What is the worst thing I could say or do at this moment?” There is a relation, I think, between the breaking-out character of some of his actions and the breaking-out character of some of the poems we published [at Wesleyan University Press] during Jim's days with Wesleyan: certain poems seem to violate the poet's own sense of the normal and possible, offering preternatural events not as truths but as exciting fabrications.

If alcohol fueled Dickey's engines during the 1960s, helping him become one of the most sensational performers on the poetry circuit, during the 1970s many critics felt those engines were spinning out of control.

With every advancing year Dickey liked to say that he was the oldest adolescent alive, and those who witnessed his bad behavior at poetry readings agreed. On these occasions the Dionysian boy usurped the throne from the Apollonian adult. Although he was famous, fame did little to appease his vanity and ambition. He lied and cavorted out of a desperate need for love, even while recognizing that his monstrous conduct repelled people as often as it entranced them. Adulation from those who enjoyed his flouting of taboos was a balm to his conscience. Gradually, however, his Dionysian and Faustian excesses estranged his family and friends, especially after the death of his first wife, Maxine. Dickey's son, Chris, has told the story of family suffering in his memoir, Summer of Deliverance.

James Dickey's bibulous exploits were not his whole life, even though, as Dickey said of Roethke's agonies, they came to dominate it. While Dickey could be cruel and egocentric to the point of solipsism, he could also be a sensitive, understanding, and hilarious companion. Of the many eminent poets from his generation who taught in universities, he was one of the most charismatic and encouraging, as almost all his students attest. His unaffected manner could make the shyest admirer feel at ease, just as his curiosity and empathy could make the same person feel that whatever he or she had to say was eminently important. He could be extraordinarily generous to beginning writers. Barnstorming around the country to read to the humblest community-college or high-school audience, he was a hugely successful ambassador for poetry, and by insisting on high reading fees he helped other poets as well as himself. His vast knowledge of literature, which his memory kept at the tip of his tongue, had few rivals among writers of any age. While his detractors were legion, few could deny the uniqueness and sheer fecundity of his talent.

James Dickey's story, like Jay Gatsby's, was in some respects a quintessential American tragedy. Both men kicked free of judicious restraints in pursuing their dreams of wealth, fame, and romance. Dickey's quest for “something commensurate to [Gatsby's] capacity for wonder” led inevitably to a pitiful denouement. It is no wonder that as an old man reflecting soberly on his life, Dickey identified himself with Gatsby and Fitzgerald in the poem “Entering Scott's Night,” which the New Yorker published shortly after Dickey died. The books he published in the 1960s and early 70s ensure Dickey a place among the exemplary ghosts in Fitzgerald's night. The books that followed, while demonstrating a noble willingness to take risks with different genres and styles, are testaments to the cautionary tale of flawed genius that was James Dickey's life.