Deliverance’: A Dark Heart Still Beating

By DWIGHT GARNERdin

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On the page and off, James Dickey (1923-1997) was a maximalist. His roomy, loquacious poems spill down the page in a waterfall style and in a voice he called “country surrealism.” It makes sense that he called some of these poems “walls of words,” similar to the record producer Phil Spector’s echoing “wall of sound.” Dickey’s music, rougher and weirder than Mr. Spector’s, was similarly packed with reverb.

Associated Press

The poet and author James Dickey in 1990.

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Excerpt: 'Deliverance' Book Review: 'Deliverance' (March 27, 1970) Movie Overview: 'Deliverance'
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James Dickey, center, in a cameo as a sheriff, doing a scene with Jon Voight in “Deliverance.”

It’s odd, then, that Dickey is probably best remembered for a spare novel, one from which he stripped most of the poetry, pulling out the finer phrasings like weeds. That novel was his first, “Deliverance” (1970), a book that turns a youthful 40 this year. It’s a novel that I was happy to discover upon rereading it by a deep lake this summer — Dickey’s stuff is always best read beside a vaguely sinister body of water — has lost little of its sleekness or power. The book’s anniversary shouldn’t slip by unnoticed.
“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.
These days our culture takes these kinds of narratives, about masculine midlife longing and regret, and de-fangs them, turning them into films like “Wild Hogs,” the benign John Travolta motorcycle trip movie. The novelists who take us into the woods and wilds, Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane invaluably among them, bring along slapstick and irony as critical mosquito repellent. (Was it Robert Bly, in his “Iron John” phase, who made it impossible for American men to walk purposefully into a forest without feeling as if drums and self-awareness needed to be involved?)
In the 1990s novelists signed over the deed to the adventure story to their nonfiction brethren, and that decade brought us Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and Sebastian Junger’s “Perfect Storm.” The men of Generation X — the aging slackers in Sam Lipsyte’s recent novel, “The Ask,” and in the film “Greenberg” — have little wish to grow up at all, and should they have to, they’ll do it near gastropubs, art houses and public transportation.
Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in “Deliverance” meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters.
“Deliverance” had its moment. The book got ecstatic reviews; its author was interviewed on “Today.” “Deliverance” tangled on best-seller lists with “Love Story,” “The Godfather” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
It was an unsettling book that arrived, as if on cue, at an unsettled time. In its primitive violence readers caught echoes of Vietnam, the Sharon Tate murders, even of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In its elegiac lament for a disappearing river, the book chimed along with America’s budding environmental movement.
“Deliverance” caught a second wind in 1972, when John Boorman’s excellent film version opened. It starred Burt Reynolds at the peak of his physical grace, and Jon Voight, with Dickey in a memorable, leering cameo as a sheriff. Dickey wrote the film’s screenplay, hewing closely to his novel’s plot and dialogue. The movie’s most memorable phrase (“squeal like a pig”) was, however, a demented bit of improv.
No wallflower, Dickey reveled in the attention “Deliverance” brought him. But he feared that the novel’s success would overshadow his poetry, a form he took more seriously. He was right to worry. “Deliverance” has had a complicated afterlife.
In 1998 the editors of the Modern Library placed the novel at No. 42 on its list of the century’s 100 Best Novels in English. Last year, however, “Deliverance” got little traction in a survey of the best Southern novels of all time, undertaken by the literary magazine The Oxford American. (It tied for 24th with three other books.)
The novel has the primal witchery of “Lord of the Flies,” but attempts to teach it in classrooms have mostly been rebuffed: the novel’s homosexual rape scene, and its musky sexuality throughout, are too much for many. “Deliverance” has its detractors among Southerners, too, for its portrait of mountain people as toothless sociopaths. When he was governor of Georgia, the future United States senator Zell Miller placed it on his list of most hated books.
Dickey’s novel, like his poetry, has been in critical decline — unfortunately, I think — partly because of his excesses off the page, excesses carefully documented in Henry Hart’s fine biography “James Dickey: The World as a Lie” (2000). He’s been perceived as too studiedly macho, too careerist, a serial exaggerator if not an outright fabulist. (He radically embellished his flying record during World War II.) He slept with too many women; he drank oceanically.
“I am crazy about being drunk,” he wrote. “I like it like Patton liked war.”

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