Summer Of Deliverance

James Dickey's son, Christopher Dickey, wrote in his memoir about the film production, Summer of Deliverance, that because Boorman had rewritten so much dialogue for the scene one of the crewmen suggested that Beatty's character should just 'squeal like a pig'. SUMMER OF DELIVERANCE. A Memoir of Father and Son. By Christopher Dickey. Simon & Schuster. Here are two ways to read the title of Christopher Dickey's racking yet.

August 30, 1998

Liar and SonChristopher Dickey discovers the difference between the world as it was and the world as James Dickey said it was.Related Links

Audio Special: James Dickey reads from his poetry and 'Deliverance' at the 92nd St. Y, March 8, 1971

Featured Subject: James Dickey, with news and reviews from the archives of The New York Times

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Reviews 'Summer of Deliverance' (August 10, 1998)

By DAVID KIRBY

SUMMER OF DELIVERANCE
A Memoir of Father and Son.
By Christopher Dickey.
Illustrated. 287 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $24.

he plane crashes, but someone climbs out of the wreckage. Smiling and waving, he walks toward you, and you think you know who it is. Then the plane crashes again, and the nightmare starts over. That's what it's like to read 'Summer of Deliverance,' and one imagines what life must have been like that for its author, son of this country's most outrageous literary showman, the brilliant and erratic James Dickey.

Dickey was never a pilot in the Pacific during World War II, although he told everyone he had been. Christopher Dickey was nearly 30 before he learned that his father had been a radar operator, or 'intercept officer.' He'd won five bronze stars over the course of 38 combat missions -- but as the No. 2 man on the plane, not the one at the controls. Such exaggeration is not unusual, as anyone who grew up around an Air Force base knows. Apparently the war was won without navigators, tail gunners, and so on -- everyone was a pilot in those days. Besides, this kind of embellishment is very close to what takes place in art. As Nietzsche remarked, 'No true artist will tolerate for one minute the world as it is,' a credo Dickey, who is perhaps best known for his novel 'Deliverance' but was also the author of some 20 volumes of poetry, observed every time he wrote.

In 'The Performance,' one of his most widely anthologized poems, Dickey describes the crash landing of a highspirited American pilot named Don Armstrong and his capture and beheading by the Japanese. Just before the decapitation, the Armstrong of the poem astonishes his executioners by performing a perfect handstand and then kneeling to accept death with dignity.

In actuality, Christopher Dickey writes in 'Summer of Deliverance,' Don Armstrong died in the crash. It was his intercept officer, Jim Lally, who was beheaded, though in the poem he has been given not only another man's identity but a promotion as well. In poetry as in life, if you're not a pilot, you don't count.

But such changes are nothing more than the artist's legerdemain. What makes this angry, affectionate memoir both gut-wrenching and hypnotic is a deeper, more horrifying lie at its core -- the lie that was James Dickey's entire life and that consisted not of a single falsehood but of thousands of little daily distortions and contrivances and outright fabrications. Some were harmless, many hurtful, others deadly. At one point, the son writes, 'My father had begun to make himself up.' In every sense except the artistic one, it seems, James Dickey never told the truth at all.

Will McIntyre/ People/ From 'Summer of Deliverance'

Christopher Dickey and his father, James Dickey, 1986

Anyone who lived in the South in the first half of this century remembers both the emphasis on masculinity -- the brawling, the liquor, the hasty sex -- and the phony behavior that resulted from trying to meet standards one wasn't all that interested in living up to in the first place. Moreover, James Dickey lived among a cast of eccentrics who must have fueled his imagination, from his grandmother's second husband, Mr. Huntley, who was known by his surname and liked to play the zither naked, to his own brother Tom, who dug up Southern battlefields in order to collect hundreds of artillery projectiles, including some 1ive unexploded shells. ('You know, I do worry sometimes.' Tom said. 'If this house ever caught on fire, you'd hear the last shots fired in the Civil War.')

But there was more to James Dickey's fabulation than a regional disposition toward exaggeration. Like the poet, the good ol' boy is expected to lie, but what kind of father swears his 8-year-old son to secrecy and then tells him of a clandestine and, as it turns out, wholly invented first marriage to an Australian woman he'd met during the war, who, he said, died of blood poisoning? Years later, when Christopher Dickey asks what the woman's name was, James says he made the story up, and when the son asks why, the father says, 'Just to do it.'

In a notebook, James Dickey wrote once that 'the poet is one who, because he cannot love, imagines what it would be like if he could.' But there were more facets to Dickey's persona than that of the imaginary lover -- it's as though his entire self were invented every day, first methodically and then, when his drinking got out of control, haphazardly.

Following a tour through Wisconsin in 1964-65, Dickey wrote a barely fictionalized story called 'Barnstorming for Poetry' about his two selves, the wild man on the road and the dutiful family member at home. The tension between the two selves would finally collapse -- notably in one of the ugliest scenes in the book, in which a sniggering Dickey recites a tell-all poem called 'Adultery' before an audience at Rice University that includes not only Christopher and his younger brother, Kevin, but also Maxine Dickey, their mother.

Dickey was an enthusiastic father who encouraged his children, set high standards for them and earned their love. But as a husband, he had a penchant for mutual destruction. Like her husband, Maxine Dickey became an alcoholic, and bled to death at 50 when the veins in her esophagus ruptured. Within weeks, Dickey married a woman who later pleaded guilty to injecting cocaine in a deserted house with a stranger. On another occasion, she beat Dickey so savagely that he had to undergo surgery, or so the poet claimed. (Medical evidence suggests that, at least this once, he was not exaggerating.)

Anyone who still thinks alcoholism is arty or amusing need only read how the adult Christopher finds his dad passed out in a hotel room. He wakes to ask where he is, giggling, crying, mumbling, shouting that no one loves him, talking about movies he's seen, then breaking off repeatedly to re-enact his first wife's recent death. ' 'She exploded in my arms,' he said, and started to imitate her voice. 'Oh, Jim, oh, Jim, help me, help me, oh oh oh aghhhh.' He pretended to throw up blood, the way she had. 'Buckets of it,' he said.'

Audio Special: James Dickey

Chris was 'always a very strange and enigmatic boy to me because he still had almost no sense of humor even as a 6 year-old and no capacity for play. . . . I would play madly with his electric trains and it didn't seem to mean a thing to him.' -- from James Dickey at the 92nd St. Y

Eventually, Dickey became so sick that he had to stop drinking altogether. The title of the book refers to the last months of his life, when Christopher, now the Paris bureau chief for Newsweek and the author of three books of his own, was able at last to talk honestly and openly with the sober but dying James, whose life ended on Jan. 19, 1997.

The title, of course, also refers to the other 'Deliverance,' the best-selling novel about four Atlanta businessmen fighting for their lives in the Georgia wilderness. When 'Deliverance' was made into a movie, Dickey wrote the screenplay, but the Hollywood glitter and dazzle turned the already unstable writer into first into a parody of the picking-and-singing, drinking-and-whoring man of letters and then into a bore.

The director, John Boorman, banned Dickey from the set because he bothered Burt Reynolds and the other actors, though later he was cast as the sheriff in one of the movie's final scenes. Fittingly, Dickey the actor portrays Dickey the man to a T: big, menacing, insecure in a genteel way, careful with words as he asks the three terrified men who are trying to hide their friend's death, 'How come you boys to have four life jackets?'

James Dickey was already acclaimed as a groundbreaking poet, one of this century's finest, though by this time his talents had drifted away on a flood of whisky. 'Summer of Deliverance' contains more sex and violence and alcohol and celebrity high jinks than a year's worth of tabloids. But it contains poetry, too, and a father-son conflict worthy of the pen of a Sophocles. Christopher Dickey wrote this book, but in a sense it is his father's final novel. The landscape described in it is evershifting and perilous. Like a downed pilot in hostile territory or a city boy on a rough Georgia river, its protagonist makes his way in bewilderment and terror and fury to understanding and ease and, one imagines still, to the sleep of troubled dreams.

David Kirby is the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida State University and is currently on sabbatical in Paris. His forthcoming book of poems is called 'My Twentieth Century.'

Booknotes

1998-10-18T20:00:29-04:00https://images.c-span.org/Files/28f/112317-m.jpgChristopher Dickey discussed his book, [Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of
Father and Son], published by Simon and Schuster. The book had originally begun as description of the making of the movie of his father, James Dickey’s, novel Deliverance, but grew into a detailed description of his conflict with his father and their reconciliation.

Christopher Dickey discussed his book, [Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son], published by Simon and Schuster. The book had… read more

Christopher Dickey discussed his book, [Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of

Father and Son], published by Simon and Schuster. The book had originally begun as description of the making of the movie of his father, James Dickey’s, novel Deliverance, but grew into a detailed description of his conflict with his father and their reconciliation. close

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