Father and son reunion

An unsparing, but not unforgiving, account of James Dickey: poet, Southerner - and parent

Author: By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 9, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

What the two men turn out to have in common, however, goes beyond their National Book Awards and contributions to the pages of The New Yorker, the magazine that helped build their reputations. Each also wrote a breakthrough novel in his 40s that irrevocably reshaped his career. Cheever's coup was "The Wapshot Scandal," which when published in 1957 confirmed the suspicion that his genius was not limited to the short-story genre. In 1970, Dickey produced "Deliverance," a savage, novel-length tale of four suburban men navigating the backwaters and backwoods of rural Georgia. The book was made into a popular -- and even more savage -- movie a year later, catapulting Dickey to widespread fame and the covers of several national magazines.

And the parallels hardly end there. Cheever and Dickey both took their families to Italy at pivotal moments in their careers, where each would recharge his creative batteries and, momentarily at least, escape whatever private demons pursued him. Both Dickey and Cheever were prodigiously self-destructive alcoholics and, to be charitable about it, marginally functional family men. Cheever veered off into bisexuality, Dickey into compulsive womanizing (he once claimed to have bedded a thousand women), yet the carnage visited on wives and children is depressingly the same; while Cheever's marriage managed somehow to survive, Dickey's first wife apparently drank herself to death in despair over her husband's many affairs.

Finally, both writers produced offspring who grew up to be writers themselves and who, in the shadows of their fathers' deaths, memorialized the relationship in memoirs that separated truth from fiction, man from myth. Susan Cheever's "Home Before Dark" shocked a lot of Cheever readers when it appeared in 1984, two years after her father died. Christopher Dickey's "Summer of Deliverance," which appears less than two years after James Dickey's passing, may not have the same shock value, but only because the Era of Pathography is firmly upon us. Or, alternatively, because many of us who followed Dickey's career reasonably closely have less reason to be surprised. (I heard Dickey read publicly on two occasions: at Harvard in 1970, when he was drunk enough to make you notice his behavior more than his verse; and in Washington, D.C., in 1977, at President Carter's pre-inaugural soiree at the Kennedy Center, an event described briefly in this book, which to this day remains one of the most breathtaking displays of public inebriation I have ever witnessed.) Christopher Dickey's is certainly as unsparing and honest a book as Susan Cheever's, with a similarly uplifting message of redemption and reconciliation. Dickey, the Paris bureau chief for Newsweek, is also a crackerjack reporter and savvy writer -- his previous books include a novel and two volumes of war reportage -- who in no sense is unequal to this difficult and psychologically delicate task.

The book opens in 1994, with James Dickey 71 and severely ill from alcoholic hepatitis, a disease with a mortality rate of 80 percent. Father and son have barely seen or spoken to each other in 20 years. It has been two decades as well since Maxine Dickey, Chris's mother, died. Within weeks of her death, Dickey had remarried, to a much younger woman with whom he later had a daughter. His two sons read about the wedding in People magazine. Fury at his father and competition with his legacy have driven Chris, the older son, to seek peace among the world's hottest war zones: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon. His father's second wife, Deborah, is lost in a war zone of her own, one consisting of drug addiction and mental illness. There is evidence that she has brutally assaulted her husband on more than one occasion. Into this Dante-esque setup wanders the prodigal son.

"I thought that I could save my father's life," Chris Dickey writes, having found the poet frail but sober and nursing a powerful thirst to live. "We both saw that we had been given this tremendous gift: the chance to set everything right."

From that departure point, the two undertake a remarkable journey together back through time and memory. The opening chapters jump-cut cinematically between biography and memoir, a fitting device not only because James Dickey loved movies but because he also liked to embellish his own resume (the decorated World War II radar operator, for instance, insisted on passing himself off as a decorated fighter pilot). From his early struggles as a poet and teacher, and having cut short a burgeoning career as an advertising copywriter, Dickey makes his mark with dazzling collections of verse like "Buckdancer's Choice" and "Helmets." Then comes "Deliverance," and everything disreputable about Dickey -- the drinking, the boorish narcissism, the petty cruelties -- become magnified by the lens of Hollywood.

"James Dickey had not made this movie, he had let it make him," the son observes, having worked as an extra on the set alongside director John Boorman and the film's stars, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty.

Although shooed off the set by Boorman, James Dickey returns to play a memorable cameo as a small-town sheriff. During the filming, meanwhile, a series of disasters and near-tragedies befell the cast and crew. It was, Chris Dickey writes, "like the whole film was becoming some kind of macho gamble in which each man was out to prove he could take the risks the characters were running, characters that James Dickey had only imagined."

"Deliverance" was a turning point for both Dickeys, the son suggests. Chris, who married when he was 18, began living a "pale, strained imitation" of his father's life, drinking heavily and conducting what he calls "guilt-ridden affairs." His father's adulteries became more brazen, his own marriage more transparently a sham. By 1977, Chris had left his wife and found a new home at The Washington Post. The more distance he put between himself and his father, the more he found his own richly expressive voice.

It is a voice put to fine use in "Summer of Deliverance," as unsentimental a father-son memoir as one can imagine. James Dickey may have died a broken man, but he fixed something important before he died. He was given a tremendous opportunity to get at least one thing right. By the evidence of this book, he succeeded, too.