[In the following essay, Calhoun surveys the weakness in Dickey's Self-Interviews and The Eye-Beaters.]

James Dickey's first novel, Deliverance, was such a phenomenal success that anything else he produced in 1970 must by comparison seem rather neglected. Early last year he published his sixth volume of poems, a slim paperback with one of the most ungainly titles in the history of American publishing—The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy. Then just as the excitement over Deliverance was abating, a third 1970 volume, Self-Interviews, appeared, simpler in its title but unique in its conception. It seems that Dickey had agreed to expound via the tape recorder on a series of topics outlined for him by two young teachers, Barbara and James Reiss, who feel that they have midwifed something “neither quite like a typical tape-recorded interview nor autobiography” but rather “a new genre, the tape recorded self-interview.”

This new genre of the McLuhan era does have a much older literary antecedent which it may not quite equal for literary style or drama, the dialogue in which the writer creates two voices, one his, the other in opposition, in dialectical counterpoint. Dickey has used this form effectively in an essay on Randall Jarrell reprinted in Babel to Byzantium. Perhaps this kind of essay reveals more of a duality in Dickey as poet-critic and virile sophisticate than Self-Interviews, but with James Dickey as the protagonist the Reisses could hardly fail to produce a volume that is both entertaining and informative.

I would have to say, however, that, no matter how entertaining this spoken Dickeyese may be, the prose is not quite up to the standards of the essays in Dickey's volume of literary criticism, Babel to Byzantium, where Dickey's critical judgments are occasionally enlivened by a stylistic barb of true wit. Nothing comes across on the tape recorder to equal the preciseness of his epigram on the poetry of J. V. Cunningham.

Cunningham is a good, deliberately small and authentic poet, a man with tight lips, a good education and his own agonies. His handsome little book should be read, and above all by future Traditionalists and confessors; he is their man.

The microphone is also not quite conducive to audacious but carefully worded opening paragraphs like that with which Dickey began his essay on William Carlos Williams.

William Carlos Williams is now, dead, and that fact shakes one. Has any other poet in American history been so actually useful, usable, and influential? How many beginning writers took Williams as their model, were encouraged to write because … Well, if that is poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!

The only comparable passage that filters through the tape recorder to the pages of Self-Interviews is Dickey's account of a poem written in an advertising office and typed by a new secretary.

I wrote this poem “The Heaven of Animals” in an advertising office. I had a new secretary and I asked her to type it for me. She typed up the poem letter-perfect and brought it to me.

Then she asked, “What is it? What company does it go to?”

“This is a poem,” I said.

“It is?”

“Yes, it is, I hope.”

“What are we going to sell with it?” she asked.

“God,” I said, “We're going to sell God.”

“Does this go to a religious magazine or something?”

“No, I'm going to publish it in The New Yorker,” I told her.

And, as it happened, that's where it came out.

If Self-Interviews seldom equals the wit of Dickey's best critical prose, it has the true sound of Dickey speaking, a marvel in itself as anyone who has heard him read will testify; and it is a handbook of information about Dickey and his poems, compiled not by some assistant professor at a midwestern university but by the poet himself. Part one, “The Poet at Mid-Career,” provides details about Dickey's creative psyche from the first awakenings of his interests in poetry through the publication of Poems 1957-1967. Part two, “The Poem as Something That Matters,” consists of five sections, one each on Dickey's first five volumes of poetry. Dickey's critical pretensions are very modest. He makes it clear that he is not trying “to impose an official interpretation on the poems or “to preclude anybody else's interpretation. … I have been asked on this occasion, though, what my poems are supposed to be about from my standpoint and what I have tried to do in them.”

What is surprising is that Dickey's comments are not too surprising. Very little transpires which would show that his explicators have ever been dead wrong. Instead, in part one we have further evidence for what his critics have assumed all along. Dickey has “never been able to dissociate the poem from the poet.” He doesn't “believe in Eliot's theory of autotelic art.” He feels that the value of literature “must be maintained if we're going to have any humanity left at all.” He regards a poem as “that kind of personal connection of very disparate elements under the fusing heat of the poem's necessity.” He just doesn't “have beautiful Mozartian flights of the imagination.” He is not surprisingly “much more interested in a man's relationship to the God-made world, or the universe-made world, than to the man-made world.” He is drawn “to a philosopher like Heraclitus” and has as “personal heroes of the sensibility John Keats, James Agee, and Malcolm Lowry.” The last two items may be news.

Part two is of greater use to students of Dickey's poems. It is informative and useful and often good reading, even if Dickey fails to evoke any sense of a critical recreation of the creative process as Stephen Spender did in “The Making of a Poem” and Allen Tate did in his essay on his own “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Some reviewers have complained that Dickey reveals himself very cautiously, giving his reader “a routine milking of the glands” rather than the “total act of the body” that he feels meaningful communication should involve. I would not call Self-Interviews or anything that James Dickey's imagination produces routine, but the reader may well feel that the Dickey he encounters here is the public Dickey speaking on the level of good conversation and that the voice of the inner man is not heard.

The passage in Self-Interviews that best provides a lead for a description of The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy is Dickey's comment on his poem “The Lifeguard” from his early volume, Drowning With Others.

Allen Tate once said that he thought of his poems as commentaries on those human situations from which there was no escape. “The Lifeguard” is my idea of a poem about one of those human situations from which there is no escape.

There are seventeen poems in The Eye-Beaters. An even dozen are concerned with situations from which there is no escape—aging, illness, and death; and it is these poems which have attracted the attention of the reviewers. This part of Dickey's book seems to be his “no exit,” that is, (if Dickey will pardon the trite phrase) his most existential volume.

Dickey has indicated in a recent interview that he is pleased with The Eye-Beaters, regarding it as perhaps his most successful single volume. His reviewers have not been exactly unanimous in their agreement with Dickey's judgment. Some have objected to it on thematic grounds, feeling that Dickey at his best is a poetic celebrant of the life force and that he cannot handle darker themes as successfully. Other critics have found a falling off in style. Dickey, the poet of “open forms,” has not quite successfully mated the freedom of his split line with the discipline of more nearly regular stanzaic forms, etc. Critics always seem to voice a feeling of having been betrayed when poets change a successful style or theme.

There is some truth to these charges, however, and I must agree partially with the complaints about Dickey's style. Dickey is a bit too often both rhetorical and commonplace. I do not detect the note of hysteria that the ears of some critics have caught, but I was bothered by an overuse of rhetorical devices which tend to make Dickey sound somewhat melodramatic. Several of Dickey's poems in this volume bear a heavy freight of interjections (“Ah, it was then, Chris,” etc.) and apostrophes (“O son,” “O Chris,” “O parents,” “O justice scales”) as well as rhetorical questions. Occasionally—and only occasionally—Dickey sounds like Randall Jarrell, who was a bit too fond of such devices.

In fact, it seems that stylistically Dickey is heading in two opposite directions in this volume. In a poem like “The Eye-Beaters” he seems to be moving impressively ahead, even beyond the “big forms” of his earlier poems, toward archetypal images; whereas in other poems he seems to revert to the direct statements of his early poems and to come up with something too commonplace.

… Not bad! I always knew it would have to be
                                        somewhere around
The house …

(“Diabetes, I”)

… I'm going in Tyree's toilet
and pull down my pants and take a shit.

(“Looking for the Buckhead Boys”)

When he touches on his illnesses, real and imaginary, his style suggests that of Robert Lowell in Life Studies rather than the expansive imagination of James Dickey evident in his previous volumes.

My eyes are green as lettuce with my diet,
                    My weight is down. …

(“Under Buzzards”)

But in spite of such tatters in his poetic garments James Dickey is still a very fine poet, and his most recent volume of poetry does not represent as abrupt a change in his style or thematics as some of his reviewers have assumed or as my few examples might have suggested. A central concern of Dickey's poetry has always been contact with the Other, represented variously as animalistic natural forces, the dead, Being itself.

In his first volume, Into the Stone, death is regarded as a change of being, not a thing to be feared; and the dead are accessible through the imagination. An exchange of being with the dead is a part of Dickey's obsession to understand through an act of faith in his imagination events which reason alone cannot comprehend. In Drowning with Others this “way of exchange” is a chief preoccupation of Dickey's, but here he seems for the first time reluctant to commune with the dead, and the exchange is predominantly with vital animal forces. In his next volume, Helmets, even the communion with the Other has become suspect as something only temporary and even potentially dangerous, since the persona may lose power as well as gain it. In Buckdancer's Choice there are, for the first time, unsuccessful attempts at communion. In one of the finest poems in the volume, “The Firebombing,” Dickey tries to transpose himself from his airplane down to the destruction he is creating below. This time, however, his imagination is incapable of penetrating such barriers as the aesthetic distance created by the space barrier, the beauty of the flight, and peacetime, middle-class comfort.

In the “Falling” section of Poems 1957-1967 there is a further stage in Dickey's movement away from a concern with vital forces to the threat of destructive forces. Here he becomes concerned with the problem of how to face death and other threats to vitality and with the resources and rituals the merely human being has to draw on in such encounters. In the title poem “Falling,” an airline hostess falling to her death realizes under the extreme pressures of her contracted life-span that the only possibility of transcendence lies in making her death a mystery for the farm boys below. Consequently, she affirms her life at the very moment of her death, stripping herself naked and preparing her body for the last fatal and sacrificial reunion with the fertile earth. She discovers within herself a resource which permits transcendence.

In another poem, “Power and Light,” there is a suggestion that the pole climber represents a new concept that Dickey has of the poet, in that he is able to find the sources of his power—his ability to make connections for “the ghostly mouths” carried over the lines—underground, in the silent dark of his basement. Dickey seems to suggest that the “secret” of existence that he has been pursuing comes from a confrontation not with the natural world but with the “dark” of one's own death. A key passage in the poem seems to look back toward his earliest personal poems and ahead to new directions.

… Years in the family dark have made me good
At this                    nothing else is so good                    pure fires of the Self
Rise crooning in lively blackness. …

In Self-Interviews Dickey provides further evidence of continuity by confirming what his reviewers have always known, that there is a connection between the chronology of his poems and that of his life. In The Eye-Beaters the reader encounters a person who is aware that his own youth is gone, that his life-space, like that of the air hostess in “Falling,” has narrowed. “Two Poems of Going Home” invokes rather effectively the inmost secret fears of a middle-aged man who finds only memories left at the locale of his youth.

                              … Why does the Keeper go blind
With sunset? The mad, weeping Keeper who can't keep
A God-damned thing          who knows he can't keep everything
Or anything alive:           none of his rooms, his people
                              His past, his youth, himself,
                         But cannot let them die? …

(“Living There”)

“The Cancer Match” uses that prerogative of the poet that Dickey describes in Self-Interviews of lying convincingly and projects a fatal illness.

                                   I see now the delights
                              Of being let “come home”
From the hospital.
                                   Night!
                                        I don't have all the time
                              In the world, but I have all night.
                         I have space for me and my house,
                              And I have cancer and whiskey
                                   In a lovely relation.

In Self-Interviews Dickey describes his celebration of life forces in his earlier poems as the reaction of a survivor of two very destructive wars. Rather than hysteria, the emotions that make themselves known to the reader in the poems of The Eye-Beaters are gratitude at having survived so far the destructive forces of nature and praise of the courage to take risks as a means of coping with the fear of death.

In the poem “The Eye-Beaters” Dickey implies the new poetics of the present volume. The poet must describe encounters with the most basic life experiences, including destructive as well as life-giving forces. He must see the image of the blind children as archetypal and imagine the reason for the children beating their eyes.

                              Therapists, I admit it; it helps me to think
That they can give themselves, like God from their scabby fists,
                                                  the original
Images of mankind: …

In The Eye-Beaters, consequently, Dickey presents situations, real and imaginary, where his persona is faced with the fear of death. He must imagine ways to cope with this fear. One solution, already indicated, is to take risks. In “Giving a Son to the Sea,” the father urges his son to take to the sea to affirm life even though the sea may swallow him up. In “Under Buzzards,” the diabetic drinks the beer that could kill him.

At any rate, Dickey makes it clear that the reality of death must be confronted. In “Looking Up the Buckhead Boys,” the poet feels the compulsion to look into his school yearbook of more than thirty years before—“The Book of the Dead”—and to go out to face what has happened to the “Buckhead Boys.” Like some of his reviewers, I regret the loss of those powerful notes of Dickey's celebration of life; every poet today must have his existential volume, and, for better or worse, this is Dickey's. Here he seems to be attempting to say that a confrontation with death and its associated destructive forces (aging, disease, violence, and madness) may lead to fear but it may also lead to a realization of and an appreciation of the value of life. It should be noted that the volume includes a unique and almost semi-official celebration of the courage to take risks. Dickey reprints opposite a black, blank page the two poems from Life Magazine in honor of the Apollo astronauts who first walked on the dead surfaces of the moon and, from that perspective, appreciated in the black sky of the universe the blue life-light of their own planet.

                              … To complete the curve          to come back
Singing with procedure          back through the last dark
                         Of the moon, past the dim ritual
Random stones of oblivion, and through the blinding edge
                              Of moonlight into the sun
                                   And behold
                         The blue planet steeped in its dream
                    Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with
                                   The only love.