James Dickey: The World as a Lie [Hardcover]

Henry Hart (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312203209 | ISBN-13: 978-0312203207 | Publication Date: April 2000 | Edition: 1st

A fascinating biography of one of the most popular, colorful, and notorious American poets of our century.

The legendary Southern poet James Dickey never shied away from cultivating a heroic mystique. Like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway, he earned a reputation as a sportsman, boozer, war hero, and womanizer as well as a great poet, novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. But James Dickey made lying both a literary strategy and a protective camouflage; even his family and closest friends failed to distinguish between the mythical James Dickey and the actual man. Henry Hart sees lying as the central theme to Dickey's life; and in this authoritative, immensely entertaining biography he delves deep behind Dickey's many masks. Letters, anecdotes, tall tales and true ones, as well as the reluctant but finally candid cooperation of Dickey himself animate Hart's narration of a remarkable life.

Readers of Dickey's National Book Award-winning poetry, his bestselling novel Deliverance, and anyone who witnessed his electrifying readings of his work will savor this book.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

According to this assiduously researched bio, James Dickey (1923--1997), in the unfortunate tradition of poseur-poets with invented selves who sustain their facades with drink, plunged from dazzling promise to alcoholic decline. Few contemporary biographies have so exhaustively and graphically evoked the rise and self-destruction of a literary reputation. Yet the reader puts down Hart's frankly detailed tome wondering whether the author of Deliverance (1970) was worth the years spent tracking down what Hart depicts as his obsessive lying, his compulsive philandering, his exploitation of intimates, his spiral downward from postmodernist highflier to pathetic wreck. Hart, a poet and literary critic at the College of William and Mary, has produced a page-turner that compels because of the relentlessness of its dissection rather than by any grace of style. Whether anything will survive of Dickey's large literary output is more difficult to assess from this account, as relatively little of his prose or verse is quoted for analysis. Instead, Hart relies on Dickey's swaggering interviews and the many people who were mesmerized by his personality or injured by his abuse. As the poet slowly disintegrates, the impact is less tragic than pathetic. In Deliverance, Hart writes, the narrator "continually debates whether he should tell a story or tell the truth." Dickey apparently had no such qualms. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. (Mar.) FYI: Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, was reviewed in Forecasts, Oct. 25, 1999.

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Like Faulkner before him, James Dickey used a series of lies to construct a public persona of swaggering athletic and sexual prowess, sporting bravado, and military achievement. In exhausting detail, Hart (The James Dickey Reader) traces Dickey's life from his birth in Atlanta in 1923 to his death in 1997. Using letters, journals, and conversations with friends and family, Hart chronicles Dickey's years at Vanderbilt and in the Air Force--where, contrary to his own statements, he never became a fighter pilot--his work as a copywriter, his years as a teacher, and his meteoric rise and calamitous fall as a writer. After a brilliant achievement in his early poetry, Dickey reached his zenith with Deliverance in 1972. Then he descended into an alcoholic inferno and a violence-filled second marriage. Although Hart demonstrates that Dickey was one of the greatest men of letters of the 20th century, this book is an example of the excesses of contemporary literary biography. Do we really need to know what Dickey ate on a particular night in London? Still, this book is destined to become the standard Dickey biography. Recommended for all libraries.
-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312203209
• ISBN-13: 978-0312203207
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.6 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #282,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Record for the Ages, June 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Hardcover)

For all his faults, James Dickey was a writer of extraordinary power and gifts. He redefined nature poetry and wrote of the outdoors with savage beauty. His reputation is in partial eclipse right now, but that is surely a temporary situation. No writer of his importance can stay buried for long. That said, Dickey was, in addition to being a genius, a scoundrel. Certainly not the first literary genius to push the envelope of misbehavior, but he ranks with the best of them. This outstanding biography by Henry Hart has received some potshots from critics for focusing much attention on Dickey's scandalous side. Well, sorry, Dickey's scandalous side was immense and to downplay it would have been intellectually weak. And, sorry again, but dishonesty on the scale Dickey publicly displayed can't simply be excused as a byproduct of "creative temperament." Hart's book is spectacular in the depth of its research, and yet the writing is so strong that the book never bogs down. In the end, once the anger of Dickeyites has subsided, this biography will emerge as the standard Dickey biography, all the more valuable for its unflinching honesty. It's an outstanding portrait of a complex man.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining and well-informed biography, July 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Hardcover)

Henry Hart is himself a talented and resourceful poet, and his writing abilities are fully on display in this beautifully paced and elegantly written biography of an important American poet. The story of Dickey's various forms of sly promotion and self-deceit -- on various levels of consciousness -- is aptly told by Hart, with a wry detachment that seems well-suited to the subject. He is generous in his descriptions of Dickey's achievements as a poet and novelist, and he understands the tragedy of Dickey's precipitous decline, brought on by alcohol and other forms of self-abuse. This is among the finest biographies I have read: a brilliant and thoroughly fascinating work of scholarship and narration.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Entirely Absorbing Read, July 10, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Hardcover)

Hart has produced an entirely absorbing read on one of the true tragic geniuses in American letters. Adopting a dispassionate tone reminiscent of Joesph Mitchell's legendary New Yorker "profiles," Hart deftly leaves all the gallows humor and domestic melodrama to Dickey, which the subject proves eminently capable of providing. I've noticed some reviewers protest that the author dwells too long on the poet's vices. This strikes me as akin to complaining that an otherwise cheerful biography of Richard Nixon devotes too many pages to the gloomy and tedious Watergate scandal. Dickey was a true rake who wreaked havoc on the lives around him. Hart removes the shroud of celebrity and reveals a troubled human being, one whose place in the Western literary canon cannot be challenged.