The Ecstasy of James Dickey

by Donn Cooper

His intimates and apologists liked to talk about the real James Dickey–fortunate son of Buckhead, mollycoddled introvert, intuitive teacher, and sensitive genius. Most people, instead, witnessed the evil doppelganger Jimbo. A creature of carnal appetites disproportionate even to his 6'3" frame, he reveled in shock and scandal, in sauntering over to the dean’s wife and asserting his droit d’ ecrivian right to a quickie. As a character Jimbo had limited range, lettered redneck or great, countrified Id. For both sexes the latter was a harrowing encounter on the reading circuit, a drawling and crapulent incubus that, outside of groupie meets fish, could put Led Zeppelin to shame.

Jimbo’s supersized persona compensated for James’s self-consciousness and public discomfort. Dickey submerged what he felt were connotations of effeminacy inherent to being a poet by playing a distorted imago of his father, a modernized Rooney Lee, new and improved with co-eds and amphetamines. His bombast and manufactured egotism grew out of another professional insecurity as well. Being an unacknowledged legislator of the world was hardly reward for an American poet in the second half of the twentieth century. Shelley’s term “unacknowledged” didn’t sit well, especially in America, especially where fame means success. Through his boorish antics Dickey, in part, was trying to cement his spot on Mount Parnassus, albeit per the ignominious route of celebrity.

Naturally, he seized the opportunity to play the sheriff in Deliverance. Celluloid would transmit him to a popular market untouched by any contemporary poet. Robert Lowell wasn’t about to take Life Studies to Hollywood. Plus, Dickey could reprise his easy role of Jimbo, this time in law enforcement uniform. But there was a hiccup on that second point. The sheriff’s not Buford T. Pusser, just some dude with the biggest stick in the room. By his second and final scene, it’s evident that weariness is an active agent in his psyche. Either he understands the complex and perverse nature of backwoods justice, or he’s just exhausted, an impotent satrap: tired of overseeing the civil erasure of Aintry, defeated by the unstoppable hand of Progress. “I’d kinda like to see this town die peaceful,” he tells the Atlantans. There will be utter quietude once his bailiwick rests at the bottom of the power company’s reservoir.

Dickey’s performance is credible, not because it’s good but because it’s true. On the one hand, the sheriff is staring down a possible homicide sans a corpse; on the other, with the damming of the river, he faces a situation that’s literally overwhelming. The sum of it leaves him presiding over the total affair with little more than shuffling and awkwardness. And awkwardness is exactly what Dickey as an actor brings to the table. He’s clearly not comfortable with the mechanics of filming, with knowing how much to modulate his voice, pause for effect, or “act.” You can see the stiffness in his shoulders and back and Jon Voight waiting patiently for him to finish his heavy-breathing at the riverside. More than that, by playing a character the very opposite of Jimbo, Dickey is thrown from his chosen macho persona and returned to his private, diffident real self. It’s something like inverse ecstasy–an out-of-body, out-of-body experience for a bonafide headcase–from the retiring poet to the domineering faux hick and back to the native spirit again.

When John Boorman comments that Dickey brings a certain veracity to the screen, it seems the director hits an unintended mark, one far more personal than he could have imagined. For that sense of fumbling and vulnerability embodied by the sheriff is precisely James Dickey’s.

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