SOURCE: Starr, William W. “Alnilam: James Dickey's Novel Explores Father and Son Relationships.” In The Voiced Connections of James Dickey: Interviews and Conversations, edited by Ronald Baughman, pp. 258-62. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, which was initially published in 1987, Starr considers the major thematic concerns of Dickey's Alnilam.]

James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, is definitely not another Deliverance, which created a storm of acclaim and readership when it appeared seventeen years ago.

But that's just fine with Dickey, author of two dozen literary works and holder of a host of prizes to go with them.

… The University of South Carolina poet-in-residence and a Columbian for nearly two decades said, “This is no Deliverance 2 or Son of Deliverance. I'm not going to do that kind of thing. People will just have to take it for what it is.”

And what Alnilam is—once the reader gets by a title that catches in the mouth—is a massive, ambitious, seriously focused novel that at times soars with the majesty and power of Dickey's imaginative writing. It deals with “big” issues: the nature and sources of power, leadership, faith, and the relationship between fathers and sons.

“I'm sixty-four now, and I figure I don't have infinite time left to me, so I wanted to get these things out and deal with them in the novel,” Dickey explained in an interview at his Lake Katherine home almost eleven months after a scary experience with brain surgery.

He had suffered severe headaches and vision problems for several months last year before doctors diagnosed a massive blood clot and ordered brain surgery. The June 30 operation followed within days of his becoming the first inductee in the new South Carolina Academy of Authors. Today, Dickey says his recovery is complete.

“I was going blind in my left eye,” Dickey recalled, perhaps with a touch of irony. The principal character in Alnilam—Frank Cahill—is a man who goes blind early in the novel.

“Cahill is an inarticulate, redneck carpenter, who acts only for himself,” Dickey said. And yet it is Cahill, and his determination to understand the son he never knew, who ultimately opens the doors for the exploration of large-scale, powerfully articulated themes in Alnilam.

Dickey's story is set in World War II. Cahill—who has become blind as a result of diabetes—and his ferocious dog, Zack, head for the small town of Peckover, N.C. That's the location of an Army Air Corps base where his son, Joel, apparently has died in a flight training accident.

Why Cahill is in Peckover is not clear—especially to him. For while Joel had listed him as next of kin, Cahill has never actually seen his son, having separated from the boy's mother at the time of Joel's birth.

Once at the base, Cahill talks with the officers and cadets who knew Joel. From them, he pieces together the story of his son's brilliant but oddly enigmatic and charismatic personality, and the mysterious and ultimately disturbing meaning of Alnilam.

The son's spellbinding, perhaps fanatical hold over his fellow cadets—even after his presumed death—is both puzzling and challenging to Cahill.

The father struggles to grasp the impact of Joel's continuing authority and relationship to his peers and those who commanded him. Readers who confront that same mystery may unravel the key to Alnilam as well, Dickey said.

“The nature of power, one man's power over another, is a very mysterious thing, and it has always fascinated me.

“It doesn't take a whole lot to exercise power over people. The leadership concept is varied, but there are certain similarities in all forms. One of those is that leaders possess a great deal of charisma, and the other is an enigmatic quality.”

The question for readers is why these young cadets act the way they do, even to the extent of forming a secret society (named Alnilam, after the central star in the belt of the constellation Orion) that could undermine the chain of command.

And why would they do that with no more apparent reason than their relationship with the charismatic, enigmatic Joel?

“The answer, of course, is that's exactly why they behave the way they do. And that's the core of Alnilam. If readers can get that, they have the central point of the novel,” said Dickey, who flew night fighter missions in the Pacific during World War II.

Many readers who come to Alnilam may not be prepared for what they find. The sprawling novel—nearly seven-hundred pages, more than twice as long as Deliverance—lacks that earlier work's sustained intensity. Alnilam is a “bigger” novel in every sense, however, in its heightened vision and profound thematic concepts.

It also features an audacious, dramatic typographical layout that may at once confuse, startle, and illuminate. Dickey calls it “my great experiment.”

In Alnilam, Dickey seeks to combine the inner vision of the blind man with the visible world of those around him—a James Joyce-like attempt to embrace the seen and the felt simultaneously. To convey that, a number of pages are split in parallel columns, the bold words on the left side embodying Cahill's sensations and the right side depicting what is actually happening in the sighted world.

“It's a double point of observation, internal and external vision,” Dickey said.

Some early readers of the novel have found it initially confusing but adapted to it. Others, including a reviewer in Publishers Weekly,¹ describe it as “merely awkward.”

Regardless of the reaction to such techniques, the novel is getting a big publicity push from Doubleday. The huge New York-based publishing house is issuing Alnilam in a substantial first printing of 100,000 copies later this month, and reportedly is spending six figures for promotion.

There's plenty of talk, but no details, about movie rights.

And since Dickey is a national literary figure, he's in demand for interviews by major publications in advance of the book's official release date.

Dickey, who has seldom shied from publicity, seems to relish the experience and is eager to talk about the novel.

He said he isn't concerned that some readers will find Alnilam a little tougher going than Deliverance.

“A writer has to go with his imagination,” he said. “You're not really an artist if you try to give the people what they want. Because most of the time they don't know what they want until they get it.”

Sometimes that applies to the author as well, for Dickey has worked at the idea of Alnilam off and on for thirty-seven years, trying to get it in the shape he wanted.

“I wrote it at intermittent times going back to 1950. I started when I was teaching at Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Texas. I remember I went out on the grassy part of campus and opened a brand new notebooklike ledger because I once heard Thomas Wolfe wrote in those. I had bought one figuring what worked for him might work for me,” Dickey told a Doubleday interviewer.

“I was writing a lot of poetry at that time, not very good poetry, so I put the novel aside. I took it up again when I lived in the south of France in 1954, but the story wasn't clear in my mind. I only knew it had to do with a man who lost his son in a training accident in the early days of World War II. But after I wrote about his journey to this small town where the air base was I didn't know what would happen. But I kept my notes, and eventually the story began to develop and I finished it in early 1986.”

In its final form—incomplete portions were published twice in Esquire² magazine, the first in 1976—Dickey's novel examines the shape of relationships between fathers and sons, but with a twist.

Usually it is the son who comes to an understanding of himself through an exploration of the father's life. In Alnilam, the father discovers the truth about his son.

“But also I like to hint in a couple of places that the son is trying in his own way to bring his father to him. So the novel may be seen in some ways as a reciprocal search under the strangest of circumstances,” Dickey said.

“Also, it's hinted that the son has been trying to figure out ways to come in contact with the father he has never seen, because, after all, the son might not be dead. He's been in a crash, but his body has never been found.”

Early readers of the novel seem in agreement that Alnilam contains some of Dickey's finest prose ever.

Always a poet first, Dickey evokes his poetic foundations strongly throughout the novel, particularly in his writing about the blind man's world and the grandeur and heart-pounding excitement of flight.

“I have tried to give strong emphasis to the mystique of flying,” he said. “I try to give the reader the physical sensation of flying on the human body. Being on a jet is like being in a hotel lobby twenty-thousand feet up. But in one of those small trainers you truly get a sense of being precariously sustained in another element, the air, that you're not supposed to be in, and yet one in which you have some kind of control over.”

Dickey's editors at Doubleday—he's had seven during the creation of Alnilam—have been unstinting in their expressions of support and praise for the novel. And Dickey is grateful for their counsel in the editing process.

But he also made it clear that the direction and style is his and his alone—and it has always been that way.

He cited an incident in the late 1960s when he had completed the manuscript of Deliverance, and confronted the editor-in-chief at his publishing house, then Houghton Mifflin.

“He read the cliff-climbing episode in the novel and told me he thought it was entirely too long, that it shouldn't be more than one page. I said um-hum not very enthusiastically. And he said of course maybe I'd like to talk to another editor about it, although it's rare for a first-time novelist not to accept the advice of an editor-in-chief.

“Anyway, I went to see the other editor, who was younger, and he read it and told me the cliff-climbing scene couldn't possibly be cut, in fact it ought to be even longer. I told him ‘Now you're talking!’ and that's the way we left it.”

Dickey said he is prepared for the public's and critics' verdicts on Alnilam, but he seems comfortable with his accomplishment. It is a work that extends his imaginative novelistic craft into new dimensions, and he's eager to get out and talk with readers about their reactions.

“I'm not going to tell people exactly what it means. I don't write deliberately to provoke mystery, but I do try to invest my stories and poems with many layers of meanings. Each reader can find his own, make his own interpretation. That's what's really important about a novel or a poem: what you can take from it.”

Notes

1. 231 (17 April 1987), 65.

2. “Cahill Is Blind,” Esquire, 85 (February 1976), 67-69, 139-144, 146; “The Captains,” Esquire, 107 (April 1987), 176-178, 181-182, 185-186.