Word: dickey
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Happily, the lapse is short. Dickey's narrative, like the inexorable river, soon reasserts itself, rolling the reader and Dickey's survivors back to their own comfy suburban world...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...