Issue 65, Spring 1976
In 1960, when he was thirty-seven—an age at which most men have abandoned pretenses at having creative gifts—James Dickey published his first book of poetry, Into the Stone, a Scribner's Poets of Today volume that he shared with two other unknown poets, Paris Leary and Jon Swan. In the years since, Dickey has become one of the most powerful voices in American poetry.
But, ironically, it was fiction, not poetry, that made Dickey's name a household word. After toying with Deliverance for nearly ten years, he finished it in a great thrust of energy in 1969. Those who knew Dickey closely, however, were aware that Deliverance, while a publishing phenomenon, was not the center of his creative objective. He once remarked to a student, “The Eye-Beaters is worth a hundred Deliverances.”
This interview took place in Dickey's Lake Katherine home in Columbia, South Carolina. It was recorded in three sessions (two in May 1972 and one in May 1974) in his huge den with an inch-thick gray carpet and an appropriate wall of books. Dickey, a large, bearish man, has a voice to match. Throughout the tapings he poised on his chair's edge, sucking air through his teeth in anger at incompetent poets, and often shaking with laughter at good one-liners. On the first day he wore a pink shirt with French cuffs; the next sessions found him garbed in jackets and pants of leather or suede. After each day's taping, Dickey played the guitar, took his interviewer canoeing, or demonstrated his skill with the bow and arrow. He is adroit with all three, perhaps excelling on the six-string. He has contributed numerous guitar tapes to the Library of Congress in addition to providing some of the music for Deliverance.
This fall, his long poem, The Zodiac, will be published, followed by his second novel, Alnilam.
INTERVIEWER
You have said you got where you are today, an established poet and novelist, “the hardest way possible, unsolicited manuscripts.” Can you tell us about it?
DICKEY
It was very difficult to do; I didn't have any precedent; I didn't know any writers, editors, publishers, or agents. They might have been in the outer part of the solar system as far as I was concerned. I just knew that I liked to write and I had some ideas that I thought might work out as poems. So I wrote them, then sent them around. As they say, I could have papered my bedroom wall with the rejections.
I began to send stuff out when I was at Vanderbilt, and the only way that I knew where to send anything was to go into the stacks of the library and get a magazine out that I admired, like the Sewanee Review, and get the address off the masthead and send the poem to the guy who was the editor at that address. I sent poems in and I kept getting back these form rejections. In 1948 or 1949 I remember with what wonder I saw true human handwriting on the rejection slip. It said, “Not bad.”
INTERVIEWER
What made you decide to commit yourself to writing?
DICKEY
Like most American writers I kind of backed into it. I liked poetry; I liked to read it. I'm the kind of person who can't be interested in a thing without wanting to see if I can't get out there and do a little of it myself. If I see somebody shooting arrows, I want to get a bow and see if I can shoot some myself.
INTERVIEWER
Did the legendary Vanderbilt crowd have much effect on you?
DICKEY
There is no sense in which it could be said that I was a latter-day Fugitive or Agrarian. But Donald Davidson was my teacher,* and he's the single best teacher that I've ever had with the possible exception of Monroe Spears. He made poetry and intellectual life important; all you had to do was walk into his classroom and you knew you were in the presence of some important spirit. I got interested in anthropology, astronomy, the kind of thing that Donald Davidson stood for. But the whole Vanderbilt ethos and Agrarianism and cultural pluralism were just academic subjects to me. I'm much more interested in them now than when I was in the milieu that produced them.
INTERVIEWER
What did you do when you graduated?
DICKEY
I took an M.A. in 1950 and became an instructor in technical English and report writing at what was then called Rice Institute in Houston, Texas, but almost immediately after my appointment I went off to the Korean War.**
INTERVIEWER
When did you get into the advertising business?
DICKEY
A few years after the war—1956, and I stayed in it until 1961. I worked with three different agencies—first I was with McCann-Erickson, on the Coca-Cola account, where I was known not as Jungle Jim, but as Jingle Jim. I then moved to Atlanta and worked with an agency called Liller Neal and Battle, where I worked on fertilizer accounts, mainly. Also banks and Pimento products. I then took a position as creative director and vice president of an Atlanta agency called Burke Dowling Adams, where I engineered the advertising campaign dealing with the awarding of the transcontinental run by Delta to the West Coast. Now, in connection with my film work, I fly that airline all the time.
INTERVIEWER
How important was your work to you? Do you regret leaving it?
DICKEY
No. I'm glad I left it. But if I had four or five different lives, or the proverbial nine lives, I would like to spend one of them in business. It's a fascinating and exciting way to live. It's very frustrating; it's got its hang-ups; it's a man-killing pace; and it's tremendously difficult. But I love business people and I met some really terrific people whom otherwise I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have had any relationship to them unless that were the relationship: making deals, working with them on their problems, and selling their products. I enjoyed it. There's something about the nine-to-five existence and the five-thirty cocktails after work on Friday afternoons and talking over the problems of the week with your buddies who are working on the same problems that's really kind of nice. I remember it with affection and with a certain amount of gratitude. Nevertheless, I don't have that many lives. I have only one, so when it was time for me to leave, I left.
INTERVIEWER
What were you writing during your business period?
DICKEY
I wrote my whole first book, Into the Stone, on company time. I had a typewriter and I had a bunch of ads stacked up in those famous brown envelopes with work orders on them. When I had a minute or two, I'd throw a poem into the typewriter and try to work out a line or get a transition from one stanza to the next. But the business world gives you almost no time to do anything but business. You are selling your soul to the devil all day and trying to buy it back at night. This can work out fine for a while, but after that the tensions and the difficulties begin to mount up and you see that you are going to have to make a choice. This took place with me after about five and a half or six years.
INTERVIEWER
What made you decide to make your final commitment to writing, to say, “This is it, I am leaving”?
DICKEY
Age. I knew I couldn't have it both ways much longer, and as they say in the pro football games or basketball games on Sunday afternoons, “The clock is running.” I didn't have that much time. I needed a lot more time to do my work and not their work. And there is also the feeling of spending your substance, your vital substance, on something that is really not that important—of giving the best of yourself, every day, to selling soda pop. You just don't want to let yourself go that easily. You can't. Or I couldn't, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think in some ways it is a commitment to a kind of artificial moral order?
DICKEY
Well, if you work for the Coca-Cola Company, the first thing you're told is how many people's jobs and lives depend on the drink and how old and venerable and honorable the company is, that the pension plans are good, the medical plans are good, and so on. But after all, it's only soda pop, and you're quite sure in the end that you don't want to spend your vital substance on something that's not any more important than a soft drink. If you go with the Coca-Cola Company, Pepsi-Cola, RC, or any of them, you enlist yourself in a war that was going on before you were born, and will go on after you die. It's a little bit—I hate to drag this in—like Vietnam. You fight limited engagements in limited areas and nobody ever wins.