James Dickey

Abstract

The death of James Dickey brings quietus to of the most frolicsome and gifted figures on the literary scene. There are writers--Robert Penn Warren is an example, and Peter Taylor--who make their personalities known mainly through their work, and whose activities, careers, and associations are not notably showy. Others transform themselves into public personalities; their doings become known to many, and they take delight in acting out roles. There can be little doubt about which category Jim Dickey fitted; he played the part of Performing Poet with a flamboyance that a Gabriele D'Annunzio or a Dylan Thomas would have admired. Jim's way of approaching the job was as a Good Old Boy. He was the Poet as He--Man. Like not a few good twentieth-century Southern writers, he felt it necessary to stress his non-literary origins. Just as a certain Mississippi artist liked to pose as a plain old country boy who didn't know about all this cerebral stuff and who just happened to write The Sound and the Fury, so Jim presented himself as ex-football star, outdoorsman, hunter with bow and arrow, and folk minstrel. Like Faulkner, too, he appears to have contrived a war record for himself, though unlike the Sole Owner and Proprietor of Yoknapatawpha he would seem not to have become embarrassed in later life at having done so. What is certain is that it did not rest comfortably on Jim when young to be thought of by his contemporaries as coming from a well-to-do family or as possessing poetic sensibilities. Just as Walt Whitman desired to appear as one of the roughs, so Jim's preferred style was as of the Buckhead Boys from north Atlanta, who played football and hung out in Tyree's Pool Room. And after he had begun to establish himself in literary circles as the extraordinarily gifted poet that he was, he continued to find the role of bard-sportsman-lothario congenial to his nature. One remembers him as he made his appearances, hefty, affable, wearing that flat-domed, sombrero-style headgear, guitar case in hand. A master platform performer, when he gave his reading he was Just Plain Jim Dickey. Nor was it all merely show; for he was amiable and gregarious, he did like to hunt and fish, he was athletic, and he could and did soak up the potables. When Fred Chappell penned his witty terza rima parody in Midquest, depicting Casanova, Byron, and the Poet in the Cowboy Hat as the featured attractions in the Second Circle of the Inferno, he was not just Whistling Dixie, as they say. On Jim's frequent forays off the reservation he pulled out all the stops. Few are the veterans of the academic poetry circuit without Jim Dickey stories to recount. It will not do to claim the critical equivalent of the Fifth Amendment and insist that none of this is relevant to the reading of the work itself. For not only does a writer's literary persona, as communicated to readers, stimulate an interest in biography as an extension of the reader's imaginative experience of the literary text, but the literary writings of this brilliant man are animated with precisely the tensions that so marked his life. No future biographer who would understand the prose and poetry can sidestep Jim's extravagances. These must be confronted. At the same time, however, it must not be forgotten that while there have been many, many persons with comparable records in extra-curricular attainment, only such person composed the poems of Drowning With Others (1962) or The Central Motion (1983). Sombrero or not, this was no mere poseur, no Joaquim Miller playing the Wild Westerner for the Londoners. When he wrote poems this man threw everything he was into the work, and his engagement with his chosen art was whole--souled and intricate. The late poem entitled False Youth: Autumn: Clothes of the Age, published in The Strength of Fields (1979), is about as masterful a presentation of the central polarity in Jim's life and work as might ask. …