[In the following review, Johnson asserts that Dickey's To the White Sea "is less ambitious and in some ways less accomplished than his previous novels."]

Only a handful of writers have managed to excel at both poetry and the novel. The fiction of major poets—Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, for example—is often simply an autobiographical coda to their collected poems; and while such tireless novelists as John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates write an abundant quantity of poetry as well, the results are decidedly minor, at least when compared to their most important achievements in fiction.

Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Robert Penn Warren are among the select group of writers who have produced, in both forms, undeniably first-rate work, and to this short list many critics would add the name of James Dickey. Long acknowledged as one of our finest contemporary poets, with Deliverance Dickey produced one of the most celebrated novels of its decade. Although his hefty second novel, Alnilam, garnered a mixed response, its ambitious scope and often dazzling use of language furthered his reputation as a novelist of considerable powers.

Dickey's new work of fiction, To the White Sea, probably will not harm that reputation, though it is less ambitious and in some ways less accomplished than his previous novels. The first-person account of an U.S. Army Air Force gunner forced to parachute into Japan during World War II, this book has the structure and pacing of an extended short story. It features a relatively meager plot, virtually no dialogue and a technique that depends largely on such poetic devices as symbolism and tone rather than the more prosaic conventions of narrative fiction.

To the White Sea does, however, have its antecedents in the novel form. The story of one man confronting an alien environment, it occasionally recalls such epics of survival as [Daniel] Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Dickey's story, however, lacks the human element provided in that novel by the appearance of Friday; here the focus is almost exclusively on the hero, Muldrow, who gradually becomes one with his increasingly primitive surroundings.

Muldrow is an intriguing character, though few readers will find him sympathetic. Unreflective, wholly self-centered, he undertakes a violent journey out of war-ravaged Tokyo and toward Japan's northern wilderness. Along the way, he commits a series of killings: A woman who recognizes his nationality is quickly knifed to death; he shoots one man for his clothes, stabs another for his shoes.

Proceeding northward, Muldrow becomes a human chameleon: "If I took my time—and I had plenty of it—I should be able to fit the color of some of my situations—hillsides, fields, woods—and tune to them: tune myself to them by color."

But as he relishes the sensation of becoming one with nature, human beings keep getting in the way. Soon after he enters a populated valley, an old woman sees him: "I had the knife through her before she could even blink, and then pulled it out and put it through her again."

Dickey makes clear that Muldrow's conscience, his sense of human compassion, is not merely suspended because of the exigencies of war and survival; rather, he seems from the beginning a man without pity, a natural predator who has always been myopically focused on gratifying his own needs.

Even for an American male in the 1940s, Muldrow is notably sexist and racist. He recalls his American girlfriend, "a college girl from Kansas…. She was a good enough girl in some ways, strong and smart, with calves like a couple of kegs." As for the Japanese, they "love machinery, and they try their damnedest to be like white people, especially Americans. If it weren't for us they wouldn't have any factories, any cars, much less any airplanes."

Dickey's hero, and occasionally even his prose style, is clearly derived from Hemingway. Muldrow's identification with primitive nature comes directly out of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, and his clashes with other people recall the self-centered, ironic posturing of other Hemingway heroes.

What is original in To the White Sea, however, is the intimate identification with natural creatures, a theme that often marks Dickey's poetry as well. Thus Muldrow's admiration for the fish he catches and eats along the way:

A fish's eye cuts things into clean outlines and then lets them go back to being dim when he's through with them, when he goes on past. And there's always the feeling of slotting through, but you never touch the sides of the slot. As I say, there are a lot of good things about it, but hard to talk about.

The farther Muldrow progresses into the wilderness, the more his experiences seem a pleasure rather than a hardship. At one point he realizes he is "having fun": "There was no friend anywhere, only thousands of people who wanted to cut off my head, castrate me, do anything they could to me. But fun it was, anyway." He looks forward to his final trek up into the rugged mountain country "like I was going on a vacation."

Eventually the reader loses count of the people, mostly civilians, whom Muldrow runs through with his knife; he is no more bothered by these killings than are the predatory fisher martens and other wild creatures he admires so much in the Japanese wilderness. And unlike Crusoe, he never feels any longing for human companionship. Instead, he relishes his increasing primitivism ("Don't let anybody ever tell you blood is not good to drink").

Muldrow's final surge into the wilderness gives the poet in Dickey an opportunity for some climactic, apocalyptic passages of searing beauty. By the time it concludes, however, To the White Sea has ceased to be a novel, just as Muldrow is no longer a "character." The book has become a prose poem, celebrating the darker side of man in nature, with Muldrow as its disembodied lyric voice.

Any reader approaching To the White Sea in the hope of finding a traditional war story or an adventure novel will be sharply disappointed. But the book will surely please admirers of Dickey's poetry and of his harsh, unsettling vision of natural savagery.