- Summer Of Deliverance
- Christopher Dickey Summer Of Deliverance
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- Book Summer Of Deliverance
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Given all that, Summer of Deliverance is a surprisingly equable book. Christopher Dickey, who died July 16 at 68, never stoops to whining and never wraps himself in the shroud of the victim so common among today’s memoirists. The book, almost miraculously, winds up being a begrudged homage to a deeply flawed man, a hard-won reconciliation, a. This moving memoir by the famous poet's son pulls no punches: James Dickey was a hard-drinking, prevaricating braggart whose bad behavior destroyed his family. Even so, to Christopher Dickey he was 'father-poet-god' whom he loved in spite of his anger and bitterness. There was a reconciliation of sorts between Dickey and his son, Christopher (Innocent Blood, 1997, etc.), in the year or so.
Summer Of Deliverance
Lewis Medlock, Ed Gentry, Bobby Trippe and Drew Ballinger are businessmen from Atlanta. They decide to canoe down the river in North Georgia's remote wilderness before the fictional Cahulawassee River Valley is flooded by the construction of a dam. They are looking forward to seeing the area's unspoiled natural environment and expect the trip to be fun. Lewis is an experienced outdoorsman and takes on the leadership role and although Gentry is also a veteran of several trips he does not have Lewis's leadership skills or confidence. Trippe and Ballinger are first-time wilderness men.
The four travel in two cars, arriving on Friday afternoon at a poor Appalachian residential area close to the river. The people are clearly living in poverty. Lewis tries to find somebody who will drive their cars to a point at Aintry where they can pick them up on Sunday after their canoe trip. Ballinger has a guitar with him and engages a young boy who has a banjo in a friendly musical duel. The boy turns away when Ballinger tries to shake his hand.
The men travel the river in pairs but shortly the canoes are briefly separated when Gentry and Trippe encounter a pair of wild-looking hillbillies coming out of the woods wielding a shotgun. There is a verbal altercation then Trippe is forced to strip at gunpoint and his ear twisted to bring him to his knees. He is ordered to 'squeal like a pig' before being raped whilst Ed Gentry is tied to a tree and held at gunpoint by the second man.
Lewis hears the commotion and sneaks up and kills the rapist using an arrow from his bow. The other man escapes swiftly into the woods. Lewis and Drew briefly argue about informing the authorities about what has happened but the other men agree with Lewis who recommends burying the body and continuing as if nothing has happened. Bobby does not want anyone to know that he was raped and Lewis reasons that they would never get a fair trial and that a jury would be filled with locals, specifically the friends and relatives of the dead man. Ballinger is troubled by their decision and opposed the course of action the majority has agreed upon. The men continue on their trip but soon reach a stretch of rapids that are extremely dangerous. Gentry and Ballinger are in the lead canoe; Drew shakes his head and falls into the water. It is unclear whether this is deliberate.
After his fall into the river, the surviving men collide on the rocks and spill into the river. Lewis breaks his femur and the men all wash up onto the shoreline. Lewis believes that Ballinger was shot in the head causing his tumble into the rapids. Gentry climbs a nearby rock face to try to kill the other mountain man with his bow. He reaches the top and stays overnight. The following morning a mountain man appears on the cliff top with a rifle, looking down into the gorge where Lewis and Trippe are located. He looks similar to the mountain man who ran away from them but it is not made clear that this is the case. Gentry shoots and kills him but accidentally stabs himself with one of his own arrows in the process. Gentry and Trippe weigh the man's body down in the river to ensure it will never be found. When they find Ballinger's body further down the river they weigh him down in the same way.
When they finally reach the small town of Aintry they take Lewis to the hospital. They carefully concoct a story about Ballinger's death being an accident and lie to Sheriff Bullard in order to escape a possible double murder charge. The sheriff tells them one of the locals is missing, never returning from a hunting trip. He clearly does not believe their story but has no evidence that would allow him to arrest them so instead he tells them to never cone back. They readily agree to this and vow to keep their story of death and survival a secret. The final scene shows Gentry waking from a nightmare in which a dead man's hand slowly rises from the lake.
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
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.
Christopher Dickey Summer Of Deliverance
Will McIntyre/ People/ From 'Summer of Deliverance' |
| Christopher Dickey and his father, James Dickey, 1986 |
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.'
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 |
Book Summer Of Deliverance
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.
Book Summer Of Deliverance
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.
Father Chris Hickey Wiki
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.'