'Everyone's Notion of a Poet"

THEY hate to see him leave a party --not that it happens very often. "Take one with you, Jim!" someone shouts, and the big man rises and knocks one back in one gulp. "I just did," he says, and leaves his admirers gaping. James Dickey is everyone's notion of a poet: part Proteus, part Puck. People marvel at how much liquor he can hold, but he wonders why he can't drink as much as Hart Crane. Others are awestruck that he writes poems, criticism and fiction. He frets that he cannot paint.

He will get to that, though. His early idol was the late James Agee, a writer who threw his talent away like a man feeding hens, but Dickey has carefully harnessed his considerable gifts. Even so, he gnaws on his will power with exhortations in his daily journals:

"Do something about the German language."

"Try to get out at least three or four letters a day. Or five. There is no telling what that extra letter might bring into being."

"I must do something about the chaos in my office."

There is no evidence of chaos around Dickey, only unmistakable signs of a man who knows himself well, likes to stretch himself at least as far as his limits and intends to have some reserves left to buttress the extensions. Dickey's house on a man-made lake in Columbia, S.C., which he shares with his wife and younger son, is a pleasant, orderly place that shows the number of things the owner cares deeply about. In his study are eight guitars --six and twelve string, silk and steel and bronze string --that Dickey plays a couple of hours a day, practicing, improvising, adapting hymns to New Orleans rhythms. Near them are other stringed instruments--Dickey's ten polished wood bows. He walks 28-target archery field ranges the way his contemporaries tramp golf courses.

Dickey has always sought risk and action, first as varsity wingback at Clemson, later as a night-fighter pilot who flew more than 100 missions in World War II and Korea. He was a thriving advertising executive, but he gradually came to realize that he was "living half a life." At 38, he dropped his successful career to become a fledgling poet. "It was desperation," he recalls. "So I went on relief and got a Guggenheim." After some lean times, six volumes of verse and several short-term teaching stints, he finally settled in 1968 at the University of South Carolina. The money ($26,000) and the instant tenure were right. So was the proximity to his beloved wilderness, "a subject of endless interest and rejoicing to me" and the main source of his poetry and fiction.

Dickey approaches teaching with a combination of energy and detachment. His creative-writing students are advised to tune into their recalcitrant unconsciousness, or the "celestial wireless" as Dickey calls it. He recently hammered away at his modern-poetry students for most of an hour about Emily Dickinson's obsession with death. When not one of them could see that the house with "the cornice but a mound" in "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" was a grave, he remained undepressed. The class left bright-eyed and exalted by his performance.

Dickey's poetic sensibility, he admits, was the main problem in writing Deliverance. "I wanted to write simple, imaginative prose that did not strain for metaphorical brilliance," he explains. "I'm tired of reading novels in which nothing happens. Books like that are really rehearsals for some imagined literary display. I spent time taking things out of my prose." His own book came hard. Separating words from rhythm, he says, was like "putting on a wooden overcoat." Dickey worked at it on and off for seven years. Though he has doubts about writing another, financially he can have no regrets. Book clubs, movie and paperback contracts already assure him of something like half a million dollars. At that, Deliverance is only one of four Dickey books that will be published in 1970. They include a new volume of poems, a journal and a series of self-interviews.

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