Word: dickey
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...serene illusion. The tawny-green South Carolina marsh spread for a mile, hiding the waterway so that only decks and sails were visible. Playing off the seen against the unseen is one of the tricks of the writing trade and of particular current interest to James Dickey, whose second work of fiction relies heavily on the uncanny perceptions of a blind...
Alnilam is, as its dust jacket proclaims, a "novel by the author of Deliverance," the 1970 best seller that launched Dickey out of poetry circles and into the celebrity void. He was good, fast-drying copy. Big and burly as a stereotypical Southern sheriff (a role he played in the movie of Deliverance), he strummed a guitar, partied hard and shot at deer with a bow and arrow. His collection of poems, Buckdancer's Choice, won a 1966 National Book Award, but he was also a member of the warrior class, having flown Black Widow night fighters against the Japanese...
...romantic killer is not an image that Dickey, 64, now cares to perpetuate. Sipping milk on a Sullivan's Island porch a few miles outside Charleston, he tells of blood on the brain that threatened his life last year and required surgery that left a dent in his skull. He talks of hanging up his hunting weapons and of resisting the temptations that caused Hemingway's slippage from art to publicity. "The work is the im-paw-dent thing," he says. "That's all that's going to be left. Otherwise it's just a faded photograph album with...
This is not to say Dickey avoids taking care of publishing business. Earlier on the day of the grass-borne boats, he and his wife Debba, 35, and daughter Bronwen, 6, drove down to Charleston from Columbia, where the writer is what he calls a "schoolteacher" at the University of South Carolina. (Dickey has the knack of making modesty seem epic.) His destination was Chapter Two, a bookstore where he was scheduled to sign copies of Alnilam. It was not the impersonal ritual that authors usually endure. Dickey greeted customers and actively solicited their patronage. The result, according to Owner...
...notion of 50 readers swinging in hammocks is hard to resist. At nearly 700 pages, Alnilam is a book for a long, hot summer. "I've tried to do for the air what Melville did for water," says Dickey with a laugh that deflects the seriousness of his novel. It is a euphonious mystery story set at a U.S. Army Air Corps training base during the 1940s. Flying, in the mechanical as well as transcendental sense, is basic to the action, which is surprisingly abundant for a book that is shaped by poetic impulses rather than plot...