One of the most beautiful tributes ever made by one writer to another was the one that Jim Dickey wrote upon the death of Truman Capote.1 It could only have been written by a man who, like Jim, knew firsthand of the hard work, the anguish, but also of the final exaltation of the artist's calling. I wish I had the time, and also the gift, to be able to pay such homage to my friend Jim, but I hope these few hasty words will in some way express my admiration for the poet who was the laureate of his generation. I come from the same generation—the generation of World War II—and Jim and I were both born in the South; our Southern upbringing in the years of the Great Depression and our experience in uniform during the war helped weld our companionship.
Jim was Southern to his fingertips but he was of that category, richly endowed with humanity and learning, that always confounds Northerners. Willie Morris is fond of telling the story of a taxi ride he made, with Jim and another Southerner, from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan. The taxi was driven by a beetlebrowed type who thought the Dixie accents from the backseat gave him the license to erupt in a tirade against black people. For a long while the three riders listened to this racist diatribe, until at last Jim, exasperated beyond endurance, leaned forward and said: “Shut up! We don't need advice from an amateur bigot.”
What Jim had seen and suffered during the war was, like his Southernness, a determining element in much of what he wrote, and I began to understand this part of him back in the early 1970s, when he lived near me for part of a summer on Martha's Vineyard. It was the summer just before the release of that very fine movie Deliverance, and Jim was on a perpetual high, quite aware that he was on the verge of a rare happening, that of an author of an exceptional novel seeing an exceptional movie made of it. As everyone in the world knows, Jim loved the bottle—and so did I in those days—and we would hit the tennis court at ten in the morning, falsely emboldened by (I shudder at the recollection) a pitcher of dry martinis. After these disastrous games we'd sit on my front porch, and it was there that he told me something about his life in the Air Force. He spoke of fear, and of the exquisite fragility and vulnerability of the men who flew those planes, and as he told me of those things I began to see how Deliverance, which I had so admired as a novel, was in a sense an allegory of fear and survival: of innocent and well-meaning men, set upon by forces of inexplicable evil, who nonetheless come through by the skin of their teeth. An awareness of life's sweetness, which we cling to despite preposterous hazards, is at the heart of Jim's writing.
Jim was rambunctiously and vigorously alive to a degree I've rarely known in anyone. His energy carried over into his prose and, perhaps most significantly, into the best of his poetry, which will surely live as long as that of any poet of his time. His personal excesses and abuses upon himself were the result of journeying to dark places that others have shunned, and having the need to find the solace of oblivion. What one must remember about James Dickey are his words, words that will forever sing:
My green, graceful bones fill the air
With sleeping birds. Alone, alone
And with them I move gently.
I move at the heart of the world.
[Tribute read at a memorial service for Dickey at the University of South Carolina, February 14, 1997. Previously unpublished.]