17 Years After ‘Deliverance,’ Dickey Reaches to the Stars

On a heat-baked afternoon, James Dickey, novelist, poet, teacher and near-legendary Southern character, has just finished lunch in the shaded comfort of his lakeside home.

He is a large man--well over six feet and unashamedly overweight--and he strides down a corridor from the kitchen to shake hands, introducing himself with a fictitious name. He must know he is recognizable from his press photographs--he looks a bit like Orson Welles--but he laughs as he waits for the reaction to his trick.

Satisfied by this small bit of mischief, he surveys the first of two parallel living rooms and decides there is nowhere to sit among the stacks of books and what seems like a dozen folk guitars. So he shows the way to the alternative living room, less crowded with objects, except for a mammoth television set against the wall and an 8x11 framed photograph of himself on the coffee table.

Since the publication of his stunningly successful first novel, “Deliverance” (made into a film starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight) 17 years ago, the fiction-reading public has had an enforced rest from Dickey’s rash, exciting prose. But all the time, in the kind of suburban comfort from which Ed Gentry of “Deliverance” might have set out on his precarious search for salvation in the wilderness, Dickey has been planning his second assault on the novel.

Long-Awaited Novel

“Alnilam,” recently published by Doubleday ($19.95), at 683 pages, is the long-awaited result. Like its author, it is huge, unwieldly, ambitious, intriguing.

Whereas “Deliverance,” about a third the length of “Alnilam,” had the compressed shape of a product that Dickey--former advertising man that he is--meticulously shaped, “Alnilam” is closer, for better or worse, to the wild, poetic soul of the author himself. A sequel is planned, but Dickey, at 64, views “Alnilam” as the most substantial prose fiction effort of his life and is aware that it may encounter resistance from the public.

“People will inevitably say, ‘We’re disappointed. We liked “Deliverance” so much and this one is so different,’ ” he says in his Southern accent. Yet having had the stirrings of this novel on his mind for more than 30 years, and having reached literally to the stars for his inspiration (the flying sequences in the book are already famous), Dickey is convinced it will bring readers rewards.

Main Character Blind

They will have to work for them, but not nearly as hard as Dickey, who seemed determined to set himself a technical gantlet in this novel. The main character, Frank Cahill, is blind, providing the author with the doubly difficult task of imagining the world from the point of view of someone who cannot be sure of what he is perceiving. There have been novels with blind characters before--”La Symphonie Pastorale” by Andre Gide is a well-known example--but “Alnilam” may be the first adventure novel to have a blind protagonist.

“There’s a blind school that’s right down the street,” Dickey says. “I kept away from it because I wanted to make it all up and enter into (the world of the blind) not by any practical means but by an act of the imagination.”

The result is a virtuosic imaginative display that puts readers within Frank Cahill’s harrowing inner reality of intense waves of feeling and agonizing uncertainty. But this feat left Dickey with another technical problem: How was he going to keep readers informed of what was going on in the story, according to those who could see?

He hit upon a device that will irritate some readers, but interest others: Substantial chunks of the novel are told in parallel columns that split the pages in half. One

column records Cahill’s subjective point of view; the other column is the objective, third-person narration.

“Everybody devises their own way of reading (those sections),” Dickey says. “Which column they read first and so on. I think it gives another dimension to those parts of the novel where I use it.”

Dickey is clearly proud of his characterization of Cahill and talks of Cahill as though he lived. But Dickey insists, “I don’t have any more Frank Cahill in myself than I do a lot of other characters.

“Cahill’s dominant characteristic is his own sense of wishing to dominate, no matter what,” Dickey says, becoming roused in the description of his character. “He’s one of those people who does not exactly want to subjugate other people but to be the center, to be the focus of power, wherever he is.

“His will is tremendous. He can’t break his own will. It’s so strong that when he goes blind he’s immediately looking for a way for blindness to give him more power--not to diminish his power.”

Early Days of WWII

The novel is set in the early days of World War II. Cahill, a skilled carpenter who owns an amusement park in Atlanta, has gone recently blind as the result of diabetes.

At the beginning of the book, he learns of the death of his son, Joel--an aviator of near-mythical skill who names his father as next of kin though they have never met--in a flying accident at an Air Force training base in North Carolina.

As a result, the elder Cahill finds himself drawn to the air base to investigate his son’s accident, and in doing so, gradually discovers that his son had become the charismatic leader of a semi-mystical, militaristic cult called Alnilam (an Arabic word that means the central star in the constellation Orion, the warrior) that has ambitions toward nothing less than world domination.

Inevitably with such a plot, there has been talk of a film and negotiations are under way. “People keep saying that they see Gorge C. Scott in the role of Frank Cahill. But I’d also want to look at some others,” Dickey says. “ I’d want to look at Marlon Brando. I’d want to look at Gene Hackman.

“If I knew something like that (Alnilam) had happened when I was in the Air Corps,” says Dickey, who flew on more than 100 bombing missions during World War II, “I would be interested in it. And if they tapped me for inclusion in it, I would have joined just like that.” He snaps his fingers.

‘Creation of a Legend’

“The book is really about the creation of a legend, a legendary figure. Joel Cahill (seen only through the eyes of others in the novel) is one of these creatures that seems to come out of nowhere; he’s a creature of the air itself.” Yet the cadets and officers left behind after he disappears want to carry forth the aims of Alnilam.

“Someone said, ‘Well, why would these boys follow this guy who has only left them a legend of his own flying ability plus a number of scattered aphorisms and some ceremonials. And only the vaguest idea of where he intends to lead them?’ ”

That, Dickey says, is the point about charismatic leadership: in essence, it casts a spell. “Joel Cahill is able to excite their imagination and is a focus for their imaginative life.”

Dickey should know, as an expert caster of spells himself. Few novels in recent years have had a more compelling story line than “Deliverance”--which bore the reader along, like its four adventurers, propelled down the white water of the fateful Georgia River, on an unstoppable current of prose.

He-Men Hitting Targets

Power, in essence, is what interests Dickey--an exclusively masculine type of power, related, he admits, to the Hemingway fictional tradition of he-men hitting targets, felling game and, if necessary, other men. When first published, “Deliverance” was thought shocking for its cool depiction of the suburban man rapidly descending to primitive, even savage, depths of himself.

“It’s profoundly evil but also profoundly attractive,” Dickey says of the plot of “Deliverance.” “That is to a certain type of person,” he adds.

“I like writing about extremists. I do. There’s a strange fascination that one can feel in regard to figures like Joel Cahill or Frank Cahill or Lewis Medlock in “Deliverance.” You may hate him, but you also figure that he may be on to a secret that you don’t know.”

Dickey, well-known for transfixing his audience during poetry readings, is in full verbal flight. But he pauses for a minute to go into the next room and get one of his folk guitars. He stands with his foot on the coffee table, plucking out the melody of “Duelling Banjos,” the musical theme he devised from folk tunes for “Deliverance.” The conversation has become a bit like the music in which Dickey embellishes the melody a little more extravagantly, a little more quickly, with a little more flair each time.

An Excellent Teacher

For all his fighting talk, he is, on first meeting, a nice, apparently gentle man. For all the emphasis in his work on the male ego, he is known to be an excellent teacher (he is a professor at the University of South Carolina) who listens and learns from his students. And popular as he is as an action novelist, in literary circles James Dickey is as known for his prize-winning poetry (he won the National Book Award for “Buckdancer’s Choice” in 1966) more than his prose.

Dickey married for the second time, a former student, Deborah, in 1976, after his first wife died. He is a devoted father of his 6-year-old daughter, Brownen.

As he talks, the air conditioner fends off the pressing heat of the afternoon. A housekeeper ambles quietly along the corridor. Outside the semi-transparent curtains, the calm surface of Lake Katherine is still. In such a setting, Dickey seems like a lion beginning to rest after a long and profitable hunting career.

“I’m not that much of a man of action,” he confesses. “I made the mistake of letting the press, in connection with “Deliverance,” present me as some kind of Hemingwayesque character, which I’m definitely not.

‘Creature of War Years’

“I’m a creature of the war years,” he says. “I think my whole generation, at least the ones that were in conflict, have the same thing. It sort of made you view existence from the standpoint of the survivor.”

Dickey flew bombing missions in the Pacific during World War II in which it was his job--as intercept officer, seated behind the pilot--to find the target.

“Have you seen the movie ‘Platoon’?” he asks. “Well it’s pretty gruesome for most people. But I’ve seen things in Okinawa and the Philippines that would make that look like a tea party.

“When you’re in a war, you develop a very great callousness so that the sight of mutilated people, whether they’re allies or enemies, does not have the effect on you that it did when you first saw it.”

Dickey’s novels are concerned with physical action rather than moral resolution, a state of affairs that hasn’t always pleased the critics. Excitement and drama rule the day. Even in his poetry--where he is brilliant at evoking the acutely memorable scene--he shows rather than tells. He doesn’t believe it is his job to tell the reader what is right and wrong. “That’s up to him,” Dickey says.

‘Endless Source of Images’

“I have an endless source of fictional images that come to me out of pulp fiction--what I would ordinarily call ‘bad books,’ adventure books.

“I read constantly. But I get tired of sublimity, and masterpieces bore me. I don’t care for Jane Austen much. I’ve plowed through most of her things at one time or another, but I’m suspicious of people who are Jane Austen nuts.

“And George Eliot. How many characters in George Eliot do you remember? But she can write, that gal. Although that incessant moralizing gets to you after awhile.”

The sin of tedious sermonizing is one that Dickey hopes he will never commit.

Despite protests to the contrary, he gives the impression that he is the possessor or victim of a Dionysian personality that has led him, painfully at times, through dark avenues of dangerous pleasure. “I have been drunk, more or less, for about the last 25 years,” he said in one of his published confessions some years ago. Friends reported a man who literally drank with both hands.

But, Dickey says, all that has changed now. He is older; he has been ill and had a serious operation, and has been sobered by it. “I don’t drink anything now, except Coca-Cola,” he says.

‘What the Monsters Know’

He once wrote, “I know what the monsters know,” and he is aware of the forces that he believes have lead so many contemporary American poets to commit suicide. “I have to keep a very strong check on excessive sensitivity. I have to pull it in because I overreact, violently, as violently as anybody has since maybe Thomas Wolfe. In my own mental processes; the way I feel.”

“Alnilam” has already been praised by critics for its poetic, almost mystical descriptions of flying. In those central scenes, Dickey the poet and Dickey the author of prose have melded into one writer. “I wanted to restore to people the sense of bodily flight--of being sustained in an element that you wouldn’t think would be capable of doing it. In those little Stillmans and PT17s you get a great deal of intimacy with the air; you get the exhilaration of being sustained, only just barely, coupled with danger. A character in the novel says the next step is to learn to fly without the airplane. Hah! An editor said he’d be fascinated to read the next section in which that’s explained!”

In places, “Alnilam” takes off into the world of dramatic thrills where James Dickey seems most himself. He might have cared, in the past, that he has been criticized for excess in that direction--but not enough to stop him going into dangerous territory again.

“I’ve done what I set out to do: I’ve climbed up Parnassus, the poet’s mountain, on my hands and knees, and now that I’m standing up on it, I want to see if I can FLY!” says James Dickey, with a roar.