The Sins of the Father

By LANCE MORROW

Saints aspire to simplicity. On the other hand, writers who drink too much sometimes like to think of themselves as complicated. "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, "is a man's life"--meaning that the most complicated subject he knew was himself. Complexity is a sort of macho/metaphysical burden. But maybe the smokescreen of the "complicated" is also the beginning of the storyteller's art. ("Bill! Bill Faulkner, where have you been for the last three days?" "It's a complicated story, dear.")

"Complicated" appears in a blurb on the jacket of Summer of Deliverance (Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $24), Christopher Dickey's loving, ruthless portrait of his father, the poet-novelist James Dickey. In the blurb, the novelist Pat Conroy writes, "If there ever lived a more complicated father, husband, and writer than James Dickey, I have not heard of him."

But you come away from Summer of Deliverance thinking that the really complicated business here was not so much James Dickey's life (he died in early 1997 at the age of 73) as his son's effort--tender, scathing, forgiving--to sort it out. Christopher Dickey begins the book, "My father was a great poet, a famous novelist, a powerful intellect, and a son of a bitch I hated."

The market is somewhat overstocked with confessional memoirs at the moment, but the younger Dickey, who is Paris bureau chief for Newsweek, writes with a fine complexity, acquired the hard way, by experience with a self-absorbed father, a mother who was herself alcoholic and a family drama that descended, from time to time, to the gothically dysfunctional. After Christopher's mother died of cancer at age 50, the widowed poet waited just two months before marrying a former student of his, almost 30 years his junior. In 1991 the local newspaper reported that she was caught injecting cocaine in an abandoned house with a stranger and given two year's probation for possession. The hunter-athlete-poet told his son he was afraid she might kill him.

Toward the end of James Dickey's life, after his liver had sent in its formal resignation (in the form of alcoholic hepatitis), he quit drinking and--though a ruin of a man, hardly able to take 10 steps without collapsing into a chair--blossomed forth with an extraordinary intellectual radiance and simplicity. He displayed as never before a splendid gift for conversation, for friendship (I knew him a little), for teaching (he was a professor for years at the University of South Carolina) and for fatherhood. It was in that last period--his once massive and muscular body shrunken, gasping for breath because of a fibrosis of the lungs--that James and Christopher Dickey drew together after years of estrangement and that Christopher began writing Summer of Deliverance.

James Dickey, a gifted and original poet, came from a somewhat alcoholic family in north Georgia; a lot of himself, for much of his life, he simply invented--a fact that would be hard on his biographer-son. "I knew," writes Christopher, "that parts of the stories my father had told me about being a college football star and a pilot in World War II were not true." The poet had a fine record with 38 combat missions in the Pacific, but in the retelling he loved to slip over into make-believe. Such fabrication can be deliciously complicated, if you're good at it. He made up stories about himself (a wartime marriage in Australia, for example) "just to do it. I felt it helped me as a writer--to imagine the situation," he later told his son.

Dickey's fame as a virile, risk-taking Southern poet grew through the '60s, when he was at the top of his game. LIFE celebrated this "athlete, pilot, ad man, and fresh, emerging literary voice." The Atlantic Monthly chose him as a successor to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. In 1970, Dickey published his first novel, Deliverance, which became an immediate best seller and was made into a movie the following summer, starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight. According to Christopher, it was the success of Deliverance that tipped his father over into deepening alcoholism and self-parody as "the pickin' and singin', drinkin' and whorin' regional poet." Christopher Dickey remarks with sad accuracy, "He was so much better than that."

He was. Just before he died, Jim Dickey gave a poetry class at his home, which the University of South Carolina tape-recorded. It was a brilliant, wistful valedictory performance. Poets, he said, "are secondary creators. We take God's universe and make it over our way." So perhaps creation is a dynastic self-renewal, and the son, Christopher Dickey, has remade the universe yet again.