James Dickey with Ernest Suarez (interview date August 1989)

SOURCE: "An Interview with James Dickey," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 117-32.

[In the following interview, conducted in August, 1989, Dickey discusses his work, his life, and his political and literary ideas.]

At the age of thirty-five, James Dickey, in the poem "The Other," wrote of building his body so as to "keep me dying / Years longer." When I arrived at his house on Lake Katherine in Columbia, South Carolina, on August 8, 1989, Dickey asserted, with both eagerness and desperation in his voice, "There is so much I can write, if life will give me the time." An acute awareness of mortality and of its counterpart—the desire to create the illusion that death can be conquered—is never far from the heart of Dickey's work, which is pervaded by thoughts of a brother who died before Dickey was born, the deaths of his parents and friends, the carnage he witnessed in World War II and the Korean War, and his own bouts with serious illnesses.

The death of Dickey's close friend Robert Penn Warren in October 1989 leaves Dickey as the last living member of a long line of influential poets to emerge from Vanderbilt University in the first half of this century. During his often spectacular and always controversial career, now in its fifth decade, Dickey's achievements have been recognized widely. He has won numerous prestigious awards, including the National Book Award, Poetry's Levinson Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Melville Cane Award, the Longview Foundation Prize, and the Vachel Lindsay Award. He has twice been named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and to the National Academy of Letters and Sciences. Dickey has written a dozen books of poetry, two novels, two books of criticism, and several acclaimed screenplays. He has held the chair of Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina since 1969 and has won several teaching awards. Despite these successes, Dickey remains convinced his best work is yet to come. In Dickey's work, death is combated—and courted—through action, and, at age sixty-seven, Dickey is still living and working at a vigorous pace, with an impressive new book of poems, The Eagle's Mile, ready for publication, another, Real God, Roll, well under way, and two novels, To the White Sea and Crux (a sequel to Alnilam) in progress.

This interview was conducted during my stay with Dickey in August 1989. Following an evening with the writer and his family in Columbia, he and I drove to his second home at Litchfield Plantation on Pawley's Island, where we remained for six days. A tranquil, remote, timeless atmosphere seeped from the lush grounds, a strangely meditative setting in which to interview a man whose art brims with vigor and sensation. With a tape recorder and a bottle of Wild Turkey to keep us company, we sat in the living room and talked, pausing occasionally to look out at a heron fly by or perch in a tree shrouded in Spanish moss. Though our nightly conversations sometimes continued hours into the early morning, Dickey was always up and striking the typewriter keys by seven or eight o'clock. On several occasions he bounded down the stairs to read me a scene or a line or a phrase that pleased him. Dickey is nothing if not passionate, engaged, and acutely aware of the possibilities life affords, as well as intensely disturbed—even insulted—at the loss of those possibilities when life ends.

[Suarez:] You began to compose the poems that appeared in your first book, Into the Stone, about the time you met Ezra Pound. What would you say you picked out from Pound?

[Dickey:] What I would call an extreme magical directness. That ability to take something which is factual and make a simple, highly imaginative statement out of it.

So you are specifying Pound's use of the image?

Yes, a very clear, concrete, simply stated and highly original, highly imaginative but simple quality. What I'm looking for in my own work more than anything else is a kind of deep simplicity. I was raised with the notion that as far as literary judgments are concerned, complexity is desirable. I. A. Richards or William Empson, for example, assert that more appetencies are satisfied with more economy by complexity. I don't think so. I like the thing that comes like a lightning flash, that is vivid and momentarily there and intense and unmistakable and doesn't require a great deal of ratiocination. When William Empson talks about a line of [William] Shakespeare's, like "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang," he goes into this long peroration of all the things the mind calls up by means of this image of the birds—the fact that real choirs require sitting in rows with their own wooden benches like the branch a bird sits on and this and that and the other. The ingenuity just to conjure all that up is wonderful, but I get none of that at all—none of it, and I don't want it. The point is that criticism can proliferate endlessly on the slightest text, or sometimes, by theorizing endlessly, even on no text at all. Unlike most people I know, I like to read boring books, and I've never read a more boring book than Empson's Structure of Complex Words. It's extremely boring, and yet he is a brilliant man, and he says some good things that even I can assimilate every now and then. But to spend one's life doing that, or being in an area where that sort of activity is of a great deal of importance, is not to my liking at all. Thank God I'm at the age now where I don't have to give lip service to anything. If my opinions are those of an aging jerk, then so be it!

Can you think of any of your own poems where you use the Poundian conception of the image?

Yes, though you can't tell where Pound's or Eliot's influence is going to be. It takes place on such a subliminal level that you can never really say that this is directly influenced by one or the other. I think Pound's influence is deeper and more pervasive than anything I can directly lay a finger on. But I can pick out a number of lines of mine that have the kind of simplicity, the imaginative simplicity, that I learned more from Pound than from anyone else. One is from "Drinking from a Helmet," where the soldier picks up the dead soldier's helmet, which is filled with water, and looks inside it. He says, "I drank with the timing of rust." I could look through my work and show you plenty of places where I think that happens.

I think that this conception of the image is the very core of your work.

That's the guts of it for me. The image and the dramatic development—the dramatic aspect of what is actually going on in the poem. I think that too much poetry is being written about trivialities, with the attempt to pump up the triviality into something of consequence. But a triviality is a triviality. One gets a little tired of Blake seeing heaven in a wild flower and eternity in a grain of sand. That is all very well for [William] Blake and very well for some poets some of the time, but not for all poets all of the time. When Adrienne Rich gives an account of a cockroach in a kitchen cupboard, it's interesting momentarily, but one doesn't really in one's heart believe it's that important.

Much of your poetry involves transcending the mundane world. Do you see yourself as a visionary poet?

Well, one doesn't like to make such wild claims as that, but any original insight that any poet has is in a sense a vision. But in the sense that Blake is a visionary poet, I'm not at all. I don't really believe that I can see God sitting up in that tree yonder, you know. Or any of the things, any of the visions that Blake said he saw or claimed to see. I'm sure he did. I hope he did. I would like to see something like that. Somebody said to Blake, "Now when you look at the sun do you see a disc about the size of a florin?" Blake said, "No, I see a great multitude of the heavenly hosts singing hosannas unto the most high." Now, I don't see that when I see the sun. It would be great if I did, but a visionary poet in that sense, I'm not.

You place great emphasis on the poet as a "maker."

Yes, I do. That's something I firmly believe in.

In what sense do you see the poet as a "maker"? What consequences does "making" have for the world at large?

I don't know how the world is affected by it. I don't know because in some sense it's biblical. The Bible is always talking about the Lord working in mysterious ways. So does poetry, and you can't chart those. I. A. Richards talks about appetency and about this response or that response called forth by these words and so on. That is an attempt to make a scientific discipline of something that is profoundly unscientific. Poetry is not really subject to such investigation beyond a certain very rigid border. For example, if in a poem I mentioned the word "tree," what would you see? What would that call up in your mind? What is your tree?

An oak.

Wrong. Because the only tree, the archetypal, the Platonic tree, is definitely a pine tree. You bring your life to the image, to create the image that the word suggests, and nothing can legislate that.

Robert Lowell's poetry is interesting because he is a powerful, tearing writer. I mean he can write like a streak, and all that desperate neuroticism has infinite ramifications. He can do a lot with it, but ultimately it comes back to him and his situation in life—his condition, his personality. And it is no good to say that Lowell takes on all this agony and grief for all of us. He does not take it on for all of us. He takes it on for himself; it is his life. It is not the life of twentieth-century humankind. It's his personal life, and too much of that is wearing. You're asked to give too much credence to it.

How would you say your work differs from that?

I'd like to think that it differs from it in opening out rather than closing down on the pinpoint of one person. I like to give. As I once said in an essay on Ted Roethke—he does this kind of opening out—if you have heard wind, you have heard Roethke's wind, but because you know about Roethke's wind, the wind he has put down in words, the wind to you has another dimension—something creative and positive that accrues to you. You are deepened and expanded because of the words.

In "Approaching Prayer" you write that "reason" must be slain for vision to occur. Is that essential?

Well, I don't know if it is essential or not. But I think that there are certain circumstances in a person's experience where it is better to participate in the experience by means of simple gut reactions and not through reasoning. Not through intellectualization about the experience but to just be in it and feel what you honestly feel as a response. That is essentially what I mean.

Earlier you mentioned a conversation you had with Yvor Winters many years ago where he called you an Emersonian because of your emphasis on directly experiencing things. Winters was very wary of that Emersonian doctrine.

I don't remember the conversation perfectly, but it seems to me he said something about my being essentially an American decadent romantic poet following [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. Yes, he was wary of Emersonianism. I hate to use such a loaded word, but Winters was a fascistic type who believed in order and the establishment of very rigid standards, largely determined by him. This is the stuff of dictators, is it not? To him I would compare a critic who is more flexible and who is willing to be wrong, like Randall Jarrell or John Berryman—somebody who is willing to say, "I thought this last year, but I've changed my mind." I've changed my mind many times, and I think that is a privilege. If you lock yourself into your own doctrines, then you lose the flexibility of the moment to moment ability to respond.

Is that why you think Emerson was a greater man than [Henry David] Thoreau?

I think he is because he opens up more territory than Thoreau. Thoreau is too much of a doctrine giver. Emerson is a presenter of possibilities. I like that.

Which, as you have expressed, is essentially the poetic enterprise.

It would seem to me to be so. Opening up possibilities. Thoreau is too concerned with laying down the law about everything. Thoreau says some good things. That people lead lives of quiet desperation. Things about stepping to a different drummer. These are wonderful statements, great stuff. But honest reaction to experience, intuitive reaction—nothing is of greater consequence than that. Emerson had a curious relationship to religion, although he was at one point a Unitarian minister. His idea was that you could have a direct line to God. That you don't have to go through the church or follow any dogma. That God comes straight to you like a ray of light—and so do you to Him. I think that is fine. I don't believe it. I would like to believe it, and I'm glad somebody said it. I'm glad he said it.

What do you believe? Do you believe there is any moral force governing the universe?

No, I don't believe in that at all. I'm writing a long poem now, Real God, Roll, where a father watches his son pumping iron and exercising on the beach, and he feels it's all part of the whole thing, of the real god. The waves coming in, his death, his father's death, the son's physique are all part of the whole thing. The real god is what causes everything to exist, like the laws of motion. The humanization of God in the Bible I find absurd. I love the Bible like I love Greek mythology, though Greek mythology is far more imaginative than the Bible is.

In your war poems, like "The Performance" or "Between Two Prisoners," you never seem to take sides or make moral judgments.

I suppose in those poems there is an implicit moral stance, I guess you could say. Obviously, I don't think it is right for the Japanese to behead Don Armstrong, who was my best friend. Obviously, I'm against it. Anybody would be. Or in "The Fire Bombing," which is based on a kind of paradox based on the sense of power one has as a pilot of an aircrew dropping bombs. This is a sense of power a person can otherwise never experience. Of course this sensation is humanly reprehensible, but so are many of the human emotions that one has. Judged by the general standard, such emotions are reprehensible, but they do happen, and that is the feeling. Then you come back from a war you won, and you're a civilian, and you begin to think about the implications of what you actually did do when you experienced this sense of power and remoteness and godlike vision. And you think of the exercise of authority via the machine that your own government has put at your disposal to do exactly what you did with it. Then you have a family yourself, and you think about those people twenty, thirty, forty years ago—I was dropping those bombs on them, on some of them. Suppose somebody did that to me? It was no different to them. All of that went into "The Fire Bombing."

Yet some people at the time, the mid-to-late sixties, did not read the poem as an antiwar poem.

Well, you do yourself a disservice if you blink the real implications of a situation like that. It is a poem about the guilt at the inability to feel guilty because you have not only proved yourself a patriot but something of a hero. You've been given medals for doing this. Your country has honored you—but there are those doubts that stay with you. You feel as a family man what all those unseen, forever unseen, people felt that you dropped those bombs on. You did it. The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn't seem so at the time.

The poem ends with the narrator still unable to imagine "nothing not as American as / I am, and proud of it." What do you see as the meaning of those lines?

You are a patriot. You have fought in a war. You have fought for freedom and risked your life not once but many times for the cause of peace and freedom. It might be a Pax Americana, like the Pax Romana, the Roman peace—imposed peace by force of arms. In other words, you be peaceful or we will blow your heads off. In our times we will atomic bomb you. Even if that is the case, still peace is peace. If you have a home in the suburbs and a lawn to cut, you are able to have it because forty years ago you had to do something else when the world's historical situation called for it. And you're not ashamed of it no matter who says what. Suppose we hadn't stood against [Adolf] Hitler? We would be in a different world.

What other historical events do you see as most significant for American culture?

I'm not a historian; I'm just an ordinary citizen. But I suppose since the Second World War the whole concept of limited war, like Korea and Vietnam, has been the most important thing, because the balance of world power is involved. One hundred and fifty years ago a guy named Karl Marx wrote a treatise on economics based on the Hegelian dialectic. I don't mean to be so academic, but—and this is changing—the world has been largely divided in two because of economic and political doctrines. We're on the side of freedom, but for us freedom means capitalism. They are on the side—you can't say oppression but that's what is the result of it—of, theoretically at least, equal distribution. The state dictating everything, including salaries, living quarters, food rationing, and the rest of it. Marx says everything is determined by the economic situation—everything, even the quality of the mind. I don't think so. I think capitalism and democracy enable you to have more of that elusive quality called "freedom" in your life.

You wrote an overtly political essay, "Notes on the Decline of Outrage," which involved the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King [Jr.] quoted from the end of that essay in his speeches—that for white southerners "it can be a greater thing than the South has ever done" to discover that blacks are out "unknown brothers." That was written back in the 1950s, which as far as the civil rights movement was concerned was practically prehistory. I took an awful lot of flak for that. I didn't get a job I wanted with an advertising agency in Atlanta because the people were so rabidly pro-Southern and antiblack. I came out for black citizens and said that if it took repudiating part of my so-called Southern heritage in order for blacks to have an equal chance, I would do it—and I advised other people to do it also.

Racism has ruined so many people's lives, white and black. Donald Davidson was one of my teachers at Vanderbilt. Davidson was a remarkable man. He was in many ways one of the most humane, sensitive, and caring persons I ever knew—and intelligent, too. He was a man who had great gifts but who ruined his life—especially the latter part of his life, which should have been the most productive—over the question of racism. You could not imagine that a sensitive and retiring and responsible man like Don Davidson could have these fanatical beliefs about blacks. He actually deeply believed that the Caucasian race was demonstrably superior to the Negro race, and that the laws and ethos and mores of society should reflect that. He thought the laws shouldn't militate against blacks—although that is inevitably the result of Don Davidson's ideas—but that these divisions should be recognized, to use a favorite phrase of his, "for what they are." Now, he wasn't anyone who wanted to go out and lynch people or anything like that. His beliefs were quite sincere. He was in many ways a brilliant guy and a wonderful teacher. He had a great ability to communicate one on one with a student. He had scholarly knowledge and was quite a good poet—much better than he has ever been given credit for being. He was overshadowed by [John Crowe] Ransom and [Allen] Tate, and especially by Warren. He was in many ways a very worthy person, but you could not get him on the subject of race, or allow him to get on the subject of race, without everything degenerating. It just went bad, and when it went bad you didn't want to be around him. He ended up allying himself with all these "white citizens" councils and the most dubious kinds of redneck racist groups. He spent his time and energy doing that; it was a terrible mistake.

What prompted you to write the essay?

I wanted to write it. It seemed necessary. Louis Rubin was putting together an anthology of essays, South, and asked me to do something—anything that I wanted to do—and I chose to write about the racial situation in the South.

Why didn't you do anything like that again?

Because I would then seem to be trading on it. I made all the statements I wanted to make there, and if people wanted to know my opinion about the subject, they could go there.

You were later involved in and helped write speeches for both Eugene McCarthy's and Jimmy Carter's political campaigns. What prompted your involvement?

When I was in Washington, as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Eugene McCarthy became my closest friend. I felt he was a political leader that this country hardly deserved because he had a tremendous commitment to the life of the mind—especially to poetry. He was a poet himself, and some of his things are not bad. I became devoted to him: his cause seemed right because he wanted to end the Vietnam War and was a positive politician. He didn't just condemn, but said we have to go forward—that we're going to upgrade the whole national sensibility so that people can live more and have more of themselves. I loved the man. I think he stood for the right things. I wish he had become president.

Jimmy Carter I loved because of the morality factor. I think he is a very kind man. Who else could have achieved the peace he helped manage to establish—even if some of it was just temporary—in the Middle East? We were really not that close, although I spoke at his inauguration.

Although you worked for McCarthy in the sixties, you never wrote any anti-Vietnam poetry. What are your thoughts on the protests that were going on in the sixties?

Well, man is a political animal. As far as it concerns the poets and writers involved in sixties protests, I would say two different aspects should probably be considered. First are the poets and writers who were acting as outraged citizens, who felt that Vietnam was a tragic mistake for this country and wished to speak out. All of that is really good, even noble. The other thing is the poets and writers who seized on this political and national crisis to aggrandize themselves because they could not earn recognition by means of their talent. You get up on the podium and start spouting forgettable poetry in the name of the cause. Poetry against death. How can anyone be pro death? It's against slaughter; it's against the killing of women and children by fire bombing and so on. How can't you be against that? You're stacking the hand like a card game, stacking your hand in your favor. Who would be in favor of the slaughter of women and children? And yet the poetry that resulted from it is dead before it hits the page. It's topical, and when the historic occasion that called it forth has passed, so has the poetry. It's easy, it's wonderful, it's inspiring to have all the right opinions—and to put down words on a page that capitalize on those opinions, that identify you as being a right guy because you're against death. You're against torture—but that is just another version of being in favor of mom's apple pie.

What do you think is the relationship between poetry and culture?

I would pin it down to our time because I'm functioning in our time. I don't know what it is in the various eras of history. Our age, the age of Marshall McLuhan, is an age dominated by the media. McLuhan believes that print will eventually be superseded by TV, and that words will no longer be printed but that there will only be spoken words, and that they will only be apprehensible by means of personal communication and by means of the electronic media, and that on that basis we'll all be together in the global village. I think the poet needs to stand forthrightly against that notion because words themselves have enormous potency. Language is the greatest gift that mankind has ever received or has given to itself. Language has made everything else possible. One generation can build on the discoveries of the previous one. This makes libraries possible, and all the information that you need to know to build rockets, conquer cancer and polio, and so on. Language makes it possible for all the professions and the arts to go forward. Language. The word. In the beginning was the Logos. The most mysterious statement of human history is "In the beginning was the word"—not the thing—the word, Logos. The supreme custodian of the word, the one who uses it with the most eloquence, the most meaning, the most consequentiality, is the poet. The poet is the one who has the most command of the word and of all strata and substrata of language, of all meanings and all connotations. There is something in the human soul that will respond to that kind of use of language because it is our most precious gift. There is something that will respond to it no matter how rudimentary the intellect of the responding person. Through such use words can reach a person in a way that is particularly intimate and individual. My main disappointment in this culture that I live in is the low level of sensibility. D. H. Lawrence says somewhere, "I will show you how not to be a dead man in life." Too many of us approximate the state of being dead in life, and the more mechanized a culture becomes, the more mechanical the people become. I believe there is value in feelings and in responsiveness and in the contribution of the imagination to those things. So many of our students are brainwashed. They don't give a shit—that's a favorite expression of our time. "I don't know about you, but I don't give a shit." And they don't. But I do give a shit. I don't want to "come off of it," I want to get on with it.

Do you feel that in other eras people did "give a shit"? In the sixties, for instance?

Yes, especially in the sixties. That shows us that there is an underlying stream of available emotion that simply needs a channel. In that era the energy was funneled into social protest. In my novel Alnilam, all Joel Cahill has to do is appear and all that loose, wandering emotion in the young people focuses on him, and he becomes their channel. That is what made John F. Kennedy, for example, or Hitler, for that matter. These leaders provide people's suppressed emotions with an image, a channel, to focus on. We all need that, and it is very inspiring in the case of great leaders and very terrifying in the case of sinister leaders. Leaders like Hitler, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon tap in on the same kind of emotion that enables someone like [Abraham] Lincoln or [George] Washington or [Thomas] Jefferson to be a leader. There is a charismatic quality in the leaders who are focused on that is indigenous to them.

Aside from such a leader's charismatic quality, do you feel that the moral underpinnings of the leader's message are arbitrary? Do you think that a negative leader like Hitler is just as likely to be focused on as a more positive figure?

I don't think these things are completely arbitrary. For instance, one thing these matters depend on is the historical situation at the time. But it does also depend on something that is basically fundamental in human nature that wants such things to happen. The reason that the people join the Alnilam conspiracy, that the plotters join up with Joel Cahill, is that they believe that he is initiating them into an elite which everyone wants to be in. It is like a college fraternity. A college fraternity is not based on what the word "fraternity" suggests; it is not based on brotherhood and inclusion but on exclusion.

Earlier you made the statement that you felt World War II was the last just war America was involved in. Why do you feel that way?

There was no enemy or villain in the Vietnam or Korean war—no enemy as profoundly evil as Hitler. The supposed villain was collectivism. The communist state. But that doesn't have the solidity of an actual figure like Hitler. The baleful fascination of that guy—I don't think it will ever diminish. There are people in this country right now who are worshipers of Hitler. People don't only worship him because of his political and military deeds, but because he represented some kind of mystical force that only occasionally shows itself. People, the human race, want some kind of inspired, charismatic leader. Whether it's Alexander the Great, Caesar, Frederick II, Napoleon, Hitler, John F. Kennedy, or Joel Cahill, it satisfies some deep hunger in people that somebody has got hold of a truth and a way of life that they themselves cannot command.

Tell me more about that idea in the context of Alnilam.

Joel Cahill is that kind of a figure. Joel is the young college-boy mystic raised to the nth power. He is a genius in an airplane. Even the instructors are afraid to fly with him because he's so much better than they are. They don't want to be humiliated by this guy who seems to have been born not in an airplane but as an airplane. The whole mysticism of the air, of flight, gives credence and weight to his political feelings. He's someone everyone remembers. He is a [Arthur] Rimbaud or [Percy Bysshe] Shelley of the air. A Jesus Christ or Messiah figure that one would follow to the grave because one's whole existence is justified by contact with this extraordinary person.

How does this relate to the things you say about poetry and the creative act in the novel?

I think the power of the word is great. Poetry makes plenty happen. In Alnilam the figure of Joel Cahill has a powerful effect on people. Not only on people who love him and follow him, but also on the people who hate him but can't ignore him. Part of his power is based on language. When he has the Alnilam plotters recite the lines from Shelley about the young charioteers drinking the wind of their own speed, the effect is hypnotic. This effect on the followers of Joel Cahill is made possible by means of language. "Drinking the wind of their own speed / And seeing nothing but the keen stars, / They all pass onward." It's the power of the words. Poetry is the ultimate; it has a powerful effect on people. It can have a satirical effect. Look at [Alexander] Pope. Pope says, "I stood aghast to see / They were not afraid of God, but afraid of me." Now this is power. [W. H.] Auden be damned. This is power. Part of Joel's power comes from the word, from language itself.

You equate Joel Cahill with Shelley at some points in the novel.

Yes, I do. Shelley is the ultimate beatnik. What a mind! What a mind! I wish I liked his poetry better. I keep reading Shelley, but there are only a few lines of Shelley's that I really care for. He is wonderful on the effects of the ephemeral qualities of air and light. The great type of Shelley image is that of a sunrise over the mountains.

But it's Shelley's personality that most interests you.

I love Shelley because he represents an extreme, like Joel Cahill represents an extreme. He's the ultimate youthful idealist with a great mind, completely unorthodox.

Yet he also has a potentially destructive side. I'm thinking of Joel Cahill.

Yes, there is also that side of him, as well. He is an overreacher.

How does this relate to our culture?

There is something about the excessive that appeals to people. Excess. As Oscar Wilde, a favorite of mine, says, nothing succeeds like excess. You look at movements—like the John Birch Society. Who is John Birch? Nobody knows that much about John Birch—and nobody gives a shit. He was a martyr—a martyr like John Kennedy. He has that charisma that comes down through successive generations. He becomes a legend. The greatest of legends in Western culture is who? Jesus. Now, I was talking to Jesus the other day. He's a very good fellow—sympathetic, interesting, and something of a philosopher. But Jesus Christ had only the simplest of doctrines! The Bible is a desperate attempt by the human race, which is a product of the animal world. A dead dog crushed on the highway has the same organs as you. It's got a heart, liver, kidneys, bowels, all that. It's no different from you. All the difference is that you have evolved into something that can think of and conceive of the idea of God. A dog can't do that. If I had a dog who had the notion of God, I would fall to my knees and worship. Well, the dog does not have the concept of God. We have the concept of God. Genesis says God formed people in his own image. But it's actually the reverse of what Genesis says: we have formed God in our own image. As Russell says, if horses had gods, the gods would look like horses.

Joel Cahill speaks in parables. He talks about precision mysticism. What the hell does that mean? You don't know what it means, and in the novel it's not explained. Yet I intended to implant that in the reader's mind. Precision mysticism. When you relate that to an airplane engine and to Joel's relationship to flight, it takes on another meaning, but you're never able to understand exactly what. The Alnilam plotters think it's something that may be beyond anything that they have ever been able to perceive. That's the fascination of Joel Cahill. He's able to formulate these weird, strange, provocative, evocative notions. And he can get up there in an airplane and prove them—or what he does in an aircraft seems, to the Alnilam fliers, to bear out everything he talks about.

Does Joel have a specific political position?

No—only one statement. He says to his followers, We're going to make it like it should have been at the beginning. But you don't know what that is. He talks about existence as seen from an aircraft, the great blue field and the purple haze and so on. My point here is, that if you have somebody as charismatic as Joel Cahill, his followers follow him toward his ultimate goal not despite the fact it's vague, but because it's vague. It's like Tertullian's proof of God. He says, I don't believe in God's existence despite the fact that it's absurd; I believe it because it is absurd. The more vague and problematical the end of the Alnilam plot, the more fanatical the followers become.

Let's switch gears. In your work you place great emphasis on the "creative lie," creating an illusion that becomes, in your words, "better than the truth." Can you relate this notion to the creation of your public personality?

I think I can. When we were out on the west coast, a university, I believe it was Oregon State, offered me one hundred dollars to read some of my poetry. My wife, Maxine, told me, "Jim, we need the money, so you have to do it." At the time I didn't even know if I had enough poetry to give an hour-long program. Although I had been a teacher, the idea of getting up to read my own stuff in front of all those people seemed unthinkable. But Maxine insisted. She said, "Jim, you get out there and you do this. Those people at Oregon State want to hear what you have to say." Well, this was a monstrosity to me. I couldn't imagine getting up there. I told her I would be paralyzed with stage fright and self-consciousness. She told me, "If you are a teacher and can get up in front of your class every day, you can get up in front of an audience. Just get up there and be yourself." Which sounded fine to me until I began thinking, "Yeah, but what self, which one?" I had to invent a self. The twentieth century has produced two great invented selves, people who wished to become other than they really were and who wrote and acted out of the assumed personality. The first is T. E. Lawrence, who was a timid fellow who became a superman in warfare because he willed the personality that he wished to be. Instead of being a little, weak guy he became a military genius and a wonderful writer. But the self he was writing out of was not his real personality. The other person I think of is [Ernest] Hemingway. The real Hemingway was not the public Hemingway. The assumed personality. I have a great deal of that.

In what ways?

Because I'm essentially a coward, so therefore I flew with the night fighters in the Pacific, or in football I hit the guy especially hard because essentially I was afraid of him. I think you must turn these things to your favor.

How does this work for you poetically?

Essentially I was a timid, Ernest Dahlson type—a "days of wine and roses," decadent, late-romantic poet—so therefore I go for force and vigor. And it works. My assumed personality is working for me just as much as Lawrence's worked for him or Hemingway's worked for him.

Characterize that assumed personality for me.

That is easy to do. Very easy. All I have to do is turn it back to you and ask what you have heard about me. That's the assumed personality: big, strong, hard drinking, hard fighting. Nothing could be less characteristic of the true James Dickey, who is a timid, cowardly person.

I don't think many people would agree with you there.

Well, maybe not, but you can't fool yourself, so you spend your life fooling yourself. The self that you fool yourself into is the one that functions. Isn't that so?