A PROPHETIC DELVER

By LANCE MORROW

I died, you know," James Dickey was saying, nine months ago. "I flat-lined! I heard the doctor say, 'My God, we lost him!'... But ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away."

The poet, on that occasion, came back from the dead. He thought it was a hell of a thing to have flown over such enemy territory and survived. He told me about it in a tone suggesting both comic metaphysical adventure and a reverent terror. He'd (temporarily) flown away from death, in maybe the way he had made it back from night bombing missions as a pilot in World War II.

But over the past couple of years, Dickey's big Southern boy-outdoorsman's frame (he used to look like a football coach or like the Georgia sheriff he played in the movie version of his novel Deliverance) had collapsed into a 73-year-old ruin, his flesh slack over the armature of bone, the lungs and liver a disaster. He had his oxygen tank wheeled into the classroom when he taught poetry each week at his beloved University of South Carolina. His eyes, behind big, smudged glasses, would wander in a haunted way. His mind, however, remained a miracle of clarity, discernment, tender mischief and phenomenal memory.

I saw Dickey one Sunday afternoon in November, when my wife Susan and I spent five hours at his house on Lake Katherine in Columbia, South Carolina. He sat in a big chair in his living room, surrounded by a kind of fortress of his favorite books, hundreds of them, arranged in crenellated battlements around his chair so that he could reach out to find old friends--poets, novelists, historians, essayists. He seemed to remember everything he had ever read and recited long passages to us. He took the consolations of literature, gathering to himself in a near death inventory the writers he had loved.

His voice proclaimed the shimmeringly intelligent performer who lived on in the ruins. After declaiming a piece of writing he liked, he'd say, "That's goooooood, isn't it?"--the drawn-out Southern goooooood being a favorable verdict that may also have been applied, in his earlier years, to certain sour-mash bourbons and, it must be said, to women he admired with what was sometimes an obnoxious ardor.

Dickey showed me the thick text on celestial navigation from a correspondence course he had proudly passed. A huge-screen television, set on mute, played pro-football games as we talked. He had his cordless phone beside him. His son Christopher, a Newsweek correspondent, called from Paris. Jim worried and fussed about Christopher's going down to Africa on assignment, thinking it might be dangerous. He had another son, Kevin, and a daughter, Bronwen. Later in the afternoon, out of nowhere, Dickey said with sudden intensity, "God, I do love my children!"

His poetry is not much read today. Perhaps almost no one's is. Dickey was a celebrity once, in the 1960s, when poets (e.g., Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg) could still command a modest fame. In 1966 Dickey won the National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice. Readers made a connection between Vietnam and his poem The Firebombing, which recorded an ex-pilot's agony as, 20 years after World War II, he meditated on the holocaust he had dropped upon Japan: "...when those on earth/ Die there is not even sound; one is cool and enthralled in the cockpit/ Turned blue by the power of beauty/ ...this detachment/ The honored aesthetic evil..." Dickey took on a passing Hollywood glamour in the '70s, when Deliverance became a best seller and Burt Reynolds starred in the movie.

Dickey was never enrolled in the obedience school of political correctness. He came from an earlier time, and anyway, his profoundly masculine imagination had a luminous, incorruptible autonomy. You may pick up traces of Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane--or Theodore Roethke, who was one of Dickey's favorites. But Dickey was himself--a now and then wild American, good at putting his own myths in motion and intoxicated by the English language. English professors called him "Orphic" or "Delphic," a prophetic delver, with an eye for nature and, interestingly, for the sometimes violent meanings of machines (cars, fighter planes). At his best, in the poems he wrote from the late '50s to the early '70s, he produced work of a virile and transformative splendor.

Over the Christmas holiday, Dickey told a friend, Ward Briggs, a classics professor at the University of South Carolina, "I had a dream last night. I was back in high school playing football. I scored three touchdowns, including the winning touchdown, and I ended up with the most beautiful girl in the school. I said to her, 'This is the most wonderful day of my life. Too bad it's only a dream.' And she said, 'Yes, but in the dream it's real.'" One night, near the end, Briggs whispered in Dickey's ear, "In the dream it's real." The poet squeezed Briggs' hand and said, "I know it is." Two nights later, early last week, Jim Dickey died for good.