Crux : The Letters of James Dickey

Rating:
Summary: Personal Snippets of a Great Poet
Review: First off, a disclaimer: I knew Dickey personally toward the end of his life. I met him once (in 1991) and talked to him on the phone every now and again after that. He was out of sorts much of the time, and not much of a conversationalist. But occassionally he would be on the upswing and revert to his old self. He loved the title of my first, unpublished novel, Seamarks, and used to always tell me "I'm on yo' side son!"-So, I suppose all this biases me, though I'm not sure in which direction, because I haven't sorted out my feelings toward this great man of letters, old enough to be my father or grandfather, who encouraged my efforts as a literary artist during the past decade. I truly don't like that this book was published, as is, so soon after his death. It doesn't take the shrewdest person in the world to figure out that the editors were trying to capitalize on his death while he was still fresh in the ground. I don't know how they selected which letters to publish. But I don't like whatever methods they employed. The letters just don't cohere like they should.-It seems to me, truth be told, that there wasn't much method or forethought; more a rush to publish what looked passable as a chronological sequence of some of his correspondence.-Such is the posthumous fate of a great artist. I made it a point to get to know Dickey because I thought, and still think, him to be the last truly geat poet alive. It just happened that he lived in Columbia, a two hour drive from my native Greenville.-Dickey was the last poet that I know of in the tradition of the visionaries of the early 19th Century. Though he would deny this at times, his son's memoir has him comparing himself to Shelley just before his death.-Also, the great English writer Malcolm Lowry had a TREMENDOUS influence on him, as the letter recounting Dickey's visit to his grave shows. Dickey was always recommending Lowry's works to me (particularly Lunar Caustic, an out-of-print autobiographical work regarding Lowry's stay in New York's Bellevue psychiatric hospital for alcoholism treatment.) - I'd already discovered Lowry years ago and read just about every word written by him three times over. - Chris Dickey may or may not know this, but those lines his father quotes from Goethe at the end of the book (attributing them to his mother) are from one of the three opening quotations to Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano. The point of all this emphasis on Dickey's debt to Lowry is that Lowry was one of the last in the same tradition. I'm just making my case. I think the earliest letters in this selection the best. I got a particular thrill of how taken he was with the now forgotten English poet Ernest Dowson. I was mentioning poets I liked when I met him in '91 (He was not in a particularly good mood, by the way.)and he kept stoliidly shaking his head and saying "never heard of him." But when I mentioned Dowson, he perked up, and a twinkle glimmered briefly in his eyes. Dowson drank himself to death in his early thirties, the victim of unrequited love, among other things...What Dowson, Lowry, Shelley and Dickey all have in common is that they viewed their roles as writers as seers, visionaries and prophets who, through their work, brought what others could not feel or see into the written word, and thus into the worlds of others less gifted....This is Dickey at his best, and this is why his letters are worth reading, to understand how such a person recognizes such a gift and evolves into a human being capable of expressing unparalleled beauty and unworldliness. I would, however, recommend that the reader wait upon a more comprehensive, less higgeldy-piggeldy collection of his letters. In the meantime, this one will have to do of course. Dickey could also be a monstrous jerk, as those of you who've read Hart's bio, The World as a Lie, know all too well. Hart did a great job, by the way, and I don't have the same reservations about his bio as I do about the publication of these letters. But buy this book anyway and read it. There aren't any poets like Dickey around anymore, and such a man's letters are worth reading...Although, who knows, maybe there are some left in this sound bite world of Oprah Winfrey show poetry. If you find one let me know, it will be like catching a falling star...My apologies to John Donne.

Rating:
Summary: Personal Snippets of a Great Poet
Review: First off, a disclaimer: I knew Dickey personally toward the end of his life. I met him once (in 1991) and talked to him on the phone every now and again after that. He was out of sorts much of the time, and not much of a conversationalist. But occassionally he would be on the upswing and revert to his old self. He loved the title of my first, unpublished novel, Seamarks, and used to always tell me "I'm on yo' side son!"-So, I suppose all this biases me, though I'm not sure in which direction, because I haven't sorted out my feelings toward this great man of letters, old enough to be my father or grandfather, who encouraged my efforts as a literary artist during the past decade. I truly don't like that this book was published, as is, so soon after his death. It doesn't take the shrewdest person in the world to figure out that the editors were trying to capitalize on his death while he was still fresh in the ground. I don't know how they selected which letters to publish. But I don't like whatever methods they employed. The letters just don't cohere like they should.-It seems to me, truth be told, that there wasn't much method or forethought; more a rush to publish what looked passable as a chronological sequence of some of his correspondence.-Such is the posthumous fate of a great artist. I made it a point to get to know Dickey because I thought, and still think, him to be the last truly geat poet alive. It just happened that he lived in Columbia, a two hour drive from my native Greenville.-Dickey was the last poet that I know of in the tradition of the visionaries of the early 19th Century. Though he would deny this at times, his son's memoir has him comparing himself to Shelley just before his death.-Also, the great English writer Malcolm Lowry had a TREMENDOUS influence on him, as the letter recounting Dickey's visit to his grave shows. Dickey was always recommending Lowry's works to me (particularly Lunar Caustic, an out-of-print autobiographical work regarding Lowry's stay in New York's Bellevue psychiatric hospital for alcoholism treatment.) - I'd already discovered Lowry years ago and read just about every word written by him three times over. - Chris Dickey may or may not know this, but those lines his father quotes from Goethe at the end of the book (attributing them to his mother) are from one of the three opening quotations to Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano. The point of all this emphasis on Dickey's debt to Lowry is that Lowry was one of the last in the same tradition. I'm just making my case. I think the earliest letters in this selection the best. I got a particular thrill of how taken he was with the now forgotten English poet Ernest Dowson. I was mentioning poets I liked when I met him in '91 (He was not in a particularly good mood, by the way.)and he kept stoliidly shaking his head and saying "never heard of him." But when I mentioned Dowson, he perked up, and a twinkle glimmered briefly in his eyes. Dowson drank himself to death in his early thirties, the victim of unrequited love, among other things...What Dowson, Lowry, Shelley and Dickey all have in common is that they viewed their roles as writers as seers, visionaries and prophets who, through their work, brought what others could not feel or see into the written word, and thus into the worlds of others less gifted....This is Dickey at his best, and this is why his letters are worth reading, to understand how such a person recognizes such a gift and evolves into a human being capable of expressing unparalleled beauty and unworldliness. I would, however, recommend that the reader wait upon a more comprehensive, less higgeldy-piggeldy collection of his letters. In the meantime, this one will have to do of course. Dickey could also be a monstrous jerk, as those of you who've read Hart's bio, The World as a Lie, know all too well. Hart did a great job, by the way, and I don't have the same reservations about his bio as I do about the publication of these letters. But buy this book anyway and read it. There aren't any poets like Dickey around anymore, and such a man's letters are worth reading...Although, who knows, maybe there are some left in this sound bite world of Oprah Winfrey show poetry. If you find one let me know, it will be like catching a falling star...My apologies to John Donne.

Rating:
Summary: A superbly written and candidly presented autobiography.
Review: Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman edit Crux: The Letters Of James Dickey, an excellent autobiography which provides a rich collection of works from 1943-1997. Dickey's extensive letters to literary correspondents from John Berryman to Ezra Pound and Anne Sexton are gathered together in a presentation recommended for any with an interest in Dickey's varied works.