Albin Krebs (obituary date 21 January 1997)

SOURCE: "James Dickey, Two-Fisted Poet and the Author of Deliverance, is Dead at 73," in The New York Times, January 21, 1997, p. C27.

[In the following obituary, Krebs presents a detailed review of Dickey's life and career.]

James Dickey, one of the nation's most distinguished modern poets and a critic, lecturer and teacher perhaps best known for his rugged novel Deliverance, died on Sunday in Columbia, S.C. He was 73.

He died of complications of lung disease, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Dickey, a big, sprawling, life-loving, hard-drinking man once described as "a bare-chested bard," was a prolific poet whose work was admired for its "intense clarity," its "joyous imagination" and its "courageous tenderness."

His poems often sang the praises of fighter pilots, football players and backwoods Southerners, but, as one critic put it, they were also "deceptively simple metaphysical poems that search the lakes and trees and workday fragments of his experience for a clue to the meaning of existence."

In addition to books of essays and what he called self-interviews, Mr. Dickey turned out some 20 volumes of poetry, many of them vividly muscular and passionate, almost always composed in a solidly purposeful English. He avoided the affected, and he celebrated the ordinary along with the sublime. His collection Buckdancer's Choice received the National Book Award for poetry in 1968.

There were few subjects Mr. Dickey would not tackle. In 1966, for example, he covered the launching of the Apollo 7 spacecraft for Life magazine and, while other journalists concentrated on the blastoff's scientific implications, he stressed the human drama:

      as they plunge with all of us—up from the
      flame-trench, up from the Launch Umbilic Tower,
      up from the elk and the butterfly, up from
      the meadows and rivers and mountains and the beds
      of wives into the universal cavern, into the
      mathematical abyss, to find us—and return,
      to tell us what we will be.

In 1970, after working seven years at it, Mr. Dickey finally published his first novel, Deliverance, a gripping, thrilling and highly praised account of a harrowing, disastrous canoe trip four friends take down a rolling north Georgia river.

The book was a best seller, and the 1972 film based on it, for which Mr. Dickey supplied the screenplay, was one of the most popular of its decade. The film starred Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds, and Mr. Dickey, already known for his several other talents, appeared in the featured role of the portly sheriff.

In 1977 Mr. Dickey was asked by his fellow Georgian, Jimmy Carter, to compose a poem for Mr. Carter's Presidential Inauguration. The poet read the work "The Strength of Fields" at the Inaugural gala, speaking in sonorous tones of "the profound, unstoppable craving of nations" that was part of the challenge facing Mr. Carter.

The poet was the winner of many awards, including Sewanee Review and Guggenheim fellowships for study and travel in Europe and the Longview, Vachel Lindsay and Melville Cane Awards for poetry.

James Dickey was born in an Atlanta suburb on Feb. 2, 1923, the son of Eugene and Maibelle Swift Dickey. His father was a lawyer fond of reading to his son, with rich rhetorical flourishes, the speeches of Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century agnostic orator who relished personal confrontations with the fundamentalist preachers of his day.

Although the younger Dickey was more interested in sports at the time, his father's admiring readings of the Ingersoll speeches must have influenced him, for he was to be known in later years as an eloquent college lecturer and gifted reader of his own poetry.

Starting with his freshman year at Clemson College, where he was a varsity wingback on the football team, Mr. Dickey showed a fondness for risk and action, taking up canoeing, archery, weight lifting and other sports, all of which would interest him for the rest of his life. He also became an excellent guitarist and played a passable banjo.

He quit college after a year, in 1942, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and volunteered for the 418th Night Fighter Squadron, for which he flew more than 100 missions in the Pacific theater of operations.

He later wrote often about his war experiences, for example in "The Firebombing," the opening poem in his 1966 collection, Buckdancer's Choice. The poem read in part:

       Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit
       And some technical-minded stranger with my hands
       Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light,
       Having potential fire under the undeodorized arms
       Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles,
       The "tear-drop-shaped" 300-gallon drop-tanks
       Filled with napalm and gasoline.

Mr. Dickey found combat "viscerally exhilarating," he said, "like being on a big football team you knew was going to win." Yet his experiences in World War II, and when he was recalled to duty in the Korean War, taught him, he said, that life must be savored. "I look on existence from the standpoint of a survivor," he said.

It was while trying to bridge the gaps of wartime boredom that Mr. Dickey turned toward "tinkering" with literature, he said. "At first I spent most of my time writing erotic love letters to girls back in Atlanta and Montgomery," he said later. "I guess I started being a writer the day I found myself thinking, 'Gosh, that's pretty good,' instead of, 'That ought to knock her dead.'"

And so, at wartime base libraries, Mr. Dickey began a mission of self-teaching. "I sensed immediately that writers like [William] Faulkner or [Thomas] Wolfe had a different orientation with language than, say, [W. Somerset] Maugham. I kept looking for writers who had this thing. [Herman] Melville, James Agee. I felt writers like this were sort of failed poets but were trying to use prose for higher things. I thought that was the direction to go. I began reading anthologies of poetry."

It finally struck him, Mr. Dickey said, that "I had as much claim to saying or writing about my existence as anyone else had. I was just as much alive in my own way and if I did make my life speak, the possibilities of poetry were just as great as they were with [John] Donne or [John] Keats or Shelley."

After World War II, Mr. Dickey majored in English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and, as a track star, won the Tennessee state championship in the 120-yard high hurdles. He graduated magna cum laude in 1949 and earned his master's degree the following year.

Then there was an English teaching job at Rice Institute, and the call back to duty in the Korean War, during which he had sold his first poem, "Shark in the Window," to The Sewanee Review for $28.50. In 1954 the magazine awarded him a $3,500 fellowship, which gave him a year of writing in Europe.

Back home, Mr. Dickey, who had married Maxine Syerson in 1948 and become the father of two sons, Christopher and Kevin, found it difficult supporting a family as a teacher at the University of Florida.

He went to work for the McCann-Erickson advertising agency in Manhattan, leaving behind his poetry to praise in prose the glories of Coca-Cola. He was to remain in advertising, writing copy about fertilizer, potato chips and air travel for nearly six years, confining his poetry writing to evenings and weekends.

Into the Stone and Other Poems, Mr. Dickey's first collection, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1960. (Some poems had already appeared in magazines like The New Yorker and Harper's.)

"It is when he yokes the natural and the mechanical, the antipodes of our folklore, he really sings," wrote the critic Geoffrey A. Wolff. "In this he resembles Hart Crane: wedding the machine to the natural, taking all things for what they are and explaining their shapes and motives."

As he grew more successful in advertising, working for agencies in New York and Atlanta, Mr. Dickey said, he realized he was "living half a life," stealing time for poetry. He was also feeling guilty, looking on advertising as a corrupter of the values of both its creators and the public. "I knew how to manipulate those poor sheep," he said, "but the fact I felt that way about them was an indication of my own corruption."

In 1961, Mr. Dickey chucked it all, went on welfare briefly, then received a $5,000 Guggenheim grant and sold his home in Atlanta. After spending a year in Italy, he was for the next few years poet in residence at Reed College in Portland, Ore.; San Fernando Valley State College in Los Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin. He also published volumes of poetry in 1962 (Drowning With Others) and in 1964 (Helmets, Two Poems in the Air).

He also published a selection of his critical essays, The Suspect in Poetry, in which Mr. Dickey ventured some ornery judgments. He classified John Milton, for example, among "the great stuffed goats of English literature," showed scant enthusiasm for Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and dismissed altogether such contemporaries as Allen Ginsberg.

In 1966 Mr. Dickey succeeded Stephen Spender as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress and held the post—at the time, the rough American equivalent of Britain's poet laureate—for two years. He enlivened the library with his unbridled opinions, as illustrated at a news conference in which he described Dylan Thomas's poetry reading style as "too actorish," called Theodore Roethke "immensely superior to any other poet we have in this country," denounced the Beat poets as "awful, ludicrously inept, hopelessly bad" and pronounced Vietnam War protest poems mere "tracts—messages with a capital 'M,' propaganda."

Mr. Dickey finally settled, in 1968, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he was poet in residence and a professor of English. A popular teacher who dressed habitually in blue jeans, he became locally renowned for his epic capacity for consuming liquor and attracting the attention of women. He liked to advise his creative-writing students to tune into their recalcitrant unconsciousness or, as he put it, the "celestial wireless."

His favorite pastime was archery, a sport in which he excelled and which figured prominently in the plot of Deliverance.

Mr. Dickey said writing that novel was one of the most challenging experiences of his life. He admitted that his poetic sensibility was his main problem with the book.

"I wanted to write imaginative prose that did not strain for metaphorical brilliance," he said, "I spent time taking things out of my prose." The book came hard, he added, because separating words from rhythm was like "putting on a wooden overcoat."

He succeeded in delivering straightforward prose, though it carried strongly poetic overtones. Mr. Dickey's poetry, on the other hand, like that of many of his contemporaries, often appeared to be a typographer's nightmare. Reviewing his collection The Strength of Fields, in The New York Times Book Review in 1980, the critic Paul Zweig wrote admiringly:

The poems in James Dickey's new book float down over-wide pages, contract to a single word, lapse into italics, skip over blank intervals. They are like richly modulated hollers, a sort of rough, American-style bel canto advertising its freedom from the constraints of ordinary language. Dickey's style is so personal, his rhythms so willfully eccentric, that the poems seem to swell up and overflow like that oldest of American art forms, the boast. Dickey is crowing, flooding his subjects with sheer style.

Mr. Dickey's favorite themes were commonplace: the tongue-in-cheek poems, poems about fighter pilots and about his experiences in World War II, the animal poems, those about death and grief, and those about bow-and-arrow hunters and football players and running marathons.

In "For the Death of Vince Lombardi," which immortalized the storied football coach, Mr. Dickey, with great relish, extolled the game for its "aggression meanness deception delight in giving pain to others," with such wholeheartedness that the game seems to stand for the onslaught of life itself. The poem reads in part:

     Around your bed the knocked-out teeth like hail pebbles
     Rattle down miles of adhesive tape from hands and ankles
     Writhe in the room like vines, gallons of sweat blaze in buckets
     In the corners the blue and yellow bruises
     Make one vast sunset around you.

Among Mr. Dickey's volumes of poems were Drowning with Others, The Eye-Beaters, The Zodiac, Scion, Puella and The Central Motion. His critical works included Babel to Byzantium and Sorties.

Mr. Dickey's first wife, Maxine, died in 1976, and two months later he married Deborah Dodson, who was one of his students. He is survived by his wife; two sons, Kevin and Christopher, from his first marriage, and a daughter, Bronwen Elaine.