Customer Reviews

James Dickey: The World as a Lie

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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.

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.

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.

In the introduction to "the James Dickey reader," which he edited, Henry Hart states poetically, "Like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Dickey erected a mansion that will endure in our collective memory, but one made of books rather than expensive stones." And in the introduction to his biography of James Dickey, Hart tells us how the subtitle, "The World as a Lie," was arrived at and of Dickey's rough equating of creative enterprise with lying. This is heady stuff, for certain, and Hart does the job of piercing through the philosophical (or anti-philosophical) haze and into the actual stuff or harder reality of James Dickey's life. Throughout the biography, Hart has the humorist's knack for letting what's funny show itself, while taking seriously what should be taken seriously. Hart's own unpretentious style moves neatly through a complex and at times outlandish subject, namely, Dickey. A worthwhile subject (Dickey) gets the good fortune of an equally gifted biographer and editor (Hart).

Some reviewers have expressed their concern and dissatisfaction with Hart's concern or possible over-concern with the lies that surrounded Dickey's life. The truth is in the poems and in Dickey's own personal statements. Dickey's poems are narratives mixing both autobiographical and fantastical details; some of which Dickey appropriated from other people's lives. Dickey's public life was a collection of stories...lies. Hart puts the focus of his biography on these lies, because they were so bound up with Dickey's actual life. In his 'Self Interviews,' Dickey himself describes his fascination with lying, both in art and in life. He felt that the poet and artist had the right to lie. If Dickey had not made such a big deal about lying throughout his life, then Hart's biography might seem overkill. But, seeing as Dickey was an admitted liar, provacateur and even suggested the title for the book (which serves as a great justification for the focus of the book), I feel the biography paints a wonderful portrait of a wonderful writer. Hart does not set out to smash the image of Dickey, but to illustrate the different perspectives of the poet's life. Aside from this, the work is beautifully written and the drama of Dickey's life provides ample subject matter for the reader looking for adventure.

I would recommend this book to both Dickey's fans and detractors as a substantial work of literature.

James Dickey was a figure of vast contradicitons. In this thoroughly researched biography, Henry Hart explores the life and the fictive sources for his creative gift. Far more than an account of dates and events, Hart offers readers a highly perceptive thesis about the sources of Dickey's own creativity that at one and the same time explains a great deal about his gifts even as it also explains the wreckage of his private life. These were not separate spheres to be kept forever in neatly contained boxes. Rather his propensity for the creative possibility of the lie facilitated his strongest writing even as it left a trail of wreckage in his own life and the lives of those who loved him best. This is an important biography that will not likely be replaced.

Author Henry Hart has created a mammoth biography about one of the finest poets America produced in the 20th Century. Drawing from an exhaustive resevoir of interviews, anecdotal illuminations, criticisms and Dickey's work itself, Hart has painstakingly researched the life of a man who barricaded himself inside a fortress of glorious self-promotion.

By all accounts, the difficult Dickey loved the accolades and trappings of fame and worked extremely hard to promote his finely crafted poetry by painting himself as both the uber wilderness alpha male as well as the backwoods red neck. Following in the self mythologing traditions of Hemingway and others, Dickey, a former advertising executive knew how to market a product and became his greatest pitchman. Exploiting America's love of the violent pioneer, he quickly confused fact with reality. For underneath all the bluff, bluster and macho posings,there lay a sensitive, cultured aesthete who favored the creature comforts of the upper middle class.

Much to Hart's credit, he always keeps rightly focused on both Dickey's fine literary output as well as his highly respected career as a college professor. Despite all of Dickey's claims to the contrary, Hart reminds us that here was first rate literary critic and devoted instructor. Hart takes the position that in many respects Dickey became America's answer to Dylan Thomas.

THE WORLD AS A LIE, paints a compelling portrait of an often abrasive, but always fascinating artist. This is a great literary biography. A must read for all Dickey fans.

What a wonderful biography of James Dickey. I knew Dickey slightly during his tenure at the University of South Carolina, interviewed him once and knew him to be all Hart says -- mercurial, brilliant and the consummate actor. Hart's biography of this amazing man and incredible poet is a real page-turner; don't miss it!

I was Jim's pilot in WWII and was astounded by some of his "recollections", but, then, does an auther have to (or should he) tell the truth? His job is creating images.

The intriguing thing about Dickey's lies was that he didn't need to lie. He was a man of massive and varied achievements who lied about his achievements. He had flown, as navigator, on 38 missions over Japanese held territory. He was an accomplished musician and athlete, an expert on French literature, a major poet and a major best-selling novelist.
Hart does not quite give us the answer to the puzzle, and perhaps none is possible. It is an old theory (one often used to explain Hemmingway) that the jock who exaggerates his masculinity is reacting against a fear of effeminacy. Some of Dickey's life, and much of his work fits in with that theory. Simple alchohol and a writer's fertile imagination account for a lot.
At 751 pages I found it rather too long and felt about it the way Samuel Johnson felt about Paradise Lost. There are a lot of day-by-day passages about where Dickey was on what particular date that I found mind-numbing, but I suppose the conscientious writer of what will probably be the only biography had to pack everything in.
The book is an interesting source of information about the literary scene of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Hart seems familiar with the life and work of practically every English language poet of those eras
He is evidently less familiar with the Greek iambic poets; a scurrilous and quarrelsome bunch. He misattributes the only well-known quotation from their best-known member, Archilochus of Paros (a touchy man who lied about his war record and abused women).
One of Dickey's many skills was as a navigator. He liked to use a sextant. I wonder if his services should have been called upon by the captain of the ship that took him to Europe when "On February 13 Dickey watched the New York skyline recede behind the gray waters of Long Island Sound." (But perhaps he enjoyed the extra ride up the East River).