The James Dickey Reader - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684864355 ISBN 13: 9780684864358

Verlag: Atria, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

This collection of James Dickey's poems and prose includes choice selections of the author's poetry, fiction, and essays, as well as some early unpublished poetry and excerpts from his unfinished novel Crux. Organized chronologically by genre, this is the definitive collection of works by one of the twentieth century's most important talents.

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James Dickey published fifteen books of poetry, four collections of essays, four coffee-table books, three novels, and one screenplay. His book of poetry Buckdancer's Choice received the National Book Award, the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award, and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His bestselling first novel, Deliverance, was made into a movie. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was Poet-in-Residence and First Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina from 1969 until his death in 1997.

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Introduction

Most people know James Dickey as the imposing, slow-talking Southern sheriff in the film version of his bestselling novel Deliverance. For his detractors -- and there were vociferous ones by the time the film appeared in 1972 -- his role confirmed their perception of Dickey as a Southerner who stood up for the savage ways of the hinterland rather than the progressive ideals of the city. Dickey's role as Sheriff Bullard, which he had asked to play while working on the screenplay for Warner Brothers, provides a clue to the drama and the dramatis personae of his life. Born on Groundhog's Day in 1923 to a mother who identified with the Atlanta aristocracy and to a father who identified with its opposite -- the north Georgia outback -- Dickey was torn from the start. In Bullard, Dickey found a compatible as well as comic alter ego to express his sense of family divisions. Bullard, after all, is bipartisan, a mediator between the mountain folk who want bloody revenge and the city folk who simply want to return to the safety of their homes in Atlanta.

Dickey's famous peer and rival, Robert Lowell, once confessed in a poem: "Everything I do / is only (only) a mix of mother and father, / no matter how unlike they were" ("Mother," History, 115). Dickey could have said the same about himself. His mother, Maibelle Swift, was the privileged daughter of Charles Swift, a captain in the Confederate army who amassed a small fortune as the founder of the Atlanta-based Swift Southern Specific company, which made a tonic not unlike the original Coca-Cola. Like Margaret Mitchell, Maibelle Swift went to Washington Seminary, a finishing school for young women in Atlanta's social register, and then to Brenau College, where her main interests were writing, painting, and singing. As a mother of three children she was frail, but she was not the invalid with angina pectoris that her son claimed. Two bouts of rheumatic fever had left her with a leaky valve in her heart. She finally died of cancer at the age of eighty-nine.

Dickey's father, Eugene, hailed from Yankee sympathizers in north Georgia's mountainous Fannin County -- a fact that did not sit well with Maibelle's family. Eugene played football, ran track, and studied law at Georgia Tech and Mercer College, but after marrying the wealthy Maibelle in 1910, he devoted most of his energy to the illegal sport of cockfighting. For the rest of his life he was a lawyer by name, but a cockfighter, gambler, and real-estate investor by desire.

As a boy, Jim Dickey found his father's blood sport repulsive. Sensitive, quiet, and shy, he was more interested in books than gaffed roosters. He constantly demanded that his private nursemaid or his mother read to him. According to his sister: "He was born with a book in his hand" (Interview, February 14, 1997). When he learned to read and write on his own, he started to "make" books. At the age of five he wrote, illustrated, and bound a slim volume about personal hygiene -- toothbrushing -- complete with cutout pictures of Forhan's toothpaste and a calendar to keep track of his brushing. Entitled You and Yourself, the book adumbrated his work as an advertising copywriter in the late 1950s and his autobiographical Self-Interviews composed in the late 1960s. At the age of six he wrote a more ambitious book -- a five-page fantasy about himself as a combat pilot. He called it The Life of James Dickey and filled it with crayon drawings of planes. His introspection and his fantasies -- especially of himself as a war pilot -- were ingrained from the start.

One of the catalysts for Dickey's writing career was the death of his brother, Eugene, on April 4, 1921. Even though it occurred two years before he was born, it convinced Dickey that he was a substitute who had to excel in all endeavors to prove worthy of his parents' love. Imagining that his mother suffered from angina, he decided that she never would have given birth to him if his brother had lived. His life depended on his brother's death. According to his fantasy, Eugene had marie the supreme sacrifice so that he could exist. If he felt guilt about supplanting Eugene, he felt anger about being supplanted by his other brother, Tom, who was born in 1925. Tom effortlessly won his parents' and everyone else's approval with his athleticism and easygoing disposition. As his middle name, Swift, suggested, he was a runner with phenomenal speed. In high school he broke records, in college became the third-highest point scorer in the Southeastern Conference, and in 1948 qualified for the Olympic tryouts, failing to make the team because of leg injuries. To satisfy his parents' conflicting ideals, which spanned business, art, soldiering, athletics, and the outdoors, the fiercely competitive Jim tried to excel in all fields. When he failed, he resorted to self-aggrandizing fantasies to compensate.

Dickey's success as a mature writer lay in his ability to universalize his private fantasies by imposing on them the archetypal shapes of myths. In the 1940s and 1950s, he gravitated toward what Joseph Campbell, borrowing a phrase from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, called the "monomyth." In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which Dickey read as a Vanderbilt student, Campbell argued: "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation -- initiation -- return" (30). Dickey always attributed the plot of Deliverance, in which four men depart from the safety of their homeground, suffer initiations and trials in the wilderness, and return home with lessons learned, to Campbell's mythic formula. His other two novels traced similar mythic journeys, as did many of his major poems. Even his coffee-table and children's books drew on rites of passage and circular quests.

Dickey's literary career reached its zenith in the 1960s and early 1970s. Having received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, in 1966 he won a National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice. The poet and editor Peter Davison summed up the critical consensus in his 1967 Atlantic Monthly essay "The Difficulties of Being Major." Using criteria articulated by Auden, he argued that only Robert Lowell and James Dickey could be considered major poets: "If American poetry needs a champion for the new generation, Dickey's power and ambition may supply the need. His archetypal concerns are universal to all languages....His sense of urgency is overwhelming" (October 1967, 121). During this period, younger poets such as Dave Smith and Henry Taylor tried both to emulate and to break free from Dickey's enchanting style. Universities clamored for him to read. He demanded and often got the highest fees of any poet on the reading circuit, and, like Dylan Thomas before him, whether sober or drunk he dazzled his audiences.

In-his life and writings Dickey struggled to embody those attributes he deemed quintessentially American. In North Fulton High School and Clemson A&M College he played football and ran track. He desperately wanted to be a World War II pilot. After he washed out of pilot training at a base in Camden, South Carolina, he could never quite accept his new classification as a radar observer or the number of his missions in the Pacific -- thirty-eight. After returning from the Philippines and Japan and transferring to Vanderbilt, he proved his mettle as a student by graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors. During his senior year, he married Maxine Webster Syerson, a gracious, attractive woman who worked for American Airlines in Nashville. He spent one more year at Vanderbilt getting his master's degree (he wrote a thesis on Melville's poetry), and then in 1950 got a job teaching English at Rice Institute in Texas. He left to serve as an Air Force radar instructor...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684864355
• ISBN 13: 9780684864358
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Herausgeber: Hart Henry
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande