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Dinty Big Jim Dickey and Nelson Algren’s
Shorts: Writers and the Imagined Life |
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Nelson Algren
answered my knock with a low, tired groan. “Hang on,” he eventually instructed through
a thick wooden door. “One minute.” April 1977. The Chicago Novelist was
visiting the Algren, author of novels like A Walk on the Wild Side and Man with a Golden Arm, winner of the
1950 National Book Award, had been called the best contemporary author after
William Faulkner. Hemingway himself had said that, so I knew it had to be
true. And Algren’s reputation extended beyond his
writing. He had made his name chronicling the seamier sides of Maybe we would search out Or perhaps, it occurred to me, we would simply screw the top
off a pint of rye and sit along the copper-colored Whatever happened, I knew it would be something. I was all anticipation. We have always done this to writers and probably always will. We
confuse authors with what they have written. We imagine the imagined life is
not imagined at all, and that what seems so real on the page must be real. It
must be. It must. I have seen this mistake made by college students. I have seen
this mistake made by the unsophisticated reader. I have seen it, just as
surely, from the sophisticated reader. And, yes, from other writers—people
who, if anyone should know better, should know better. The imagined life, if
imagined well enough, becomes somehow irresistible. Take James Dickey. I’ve just read Summer of
Deliverance, Christopher Dickey’s memoir of growing up the poet’s son. The
younger Dickey has constructed a potent memoir, one that is simultaneously
angry, loving, intimate, and odd. The book has many threads—Christopher
Dickey, to his credit, is not grinding an ax here, not
trying to settle a score by telling just his side of a story in a play for
sympathy. He is telling instead a complex story, one with various sides. A side that interests me very much is how James Dickey’s
imagined lives, those he constructed on and off the page, were
the seeds of tragedy. What we celebrate in Dickey the poet, Dickey the
novelist, Dickey the man of Yet he did it consciously, at times with calculation. Well before Dickey was any sort of a writer,
before he taught himself the writers’ skills and the simple but requisite
just-sit-in-the-chair-and-move-words-around discipline, he embraced the
notion that writers were somehow heightened individuals, somehow more vibrant
as people. “Most of us are cut from the same pattern, and, with minor
variation, have practically the same interests and aims in life,” Dickey
wrote in one of his earliest surviving pieces of writing, an essay for a college
composition course. He was in the Army Air Corps at the time, discovering
himself to be not much of a pilot or soldier. The essay was ostensibly about Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz cornetist, but in the passage quoted here, the young
Dickey was discussing Beethoven, Byron, Shelley as
well, dissecting what he thought could be found at the core of all great
artists. “But there are some,” he wrote, “yes, many, who by the very nature
of their own being, and by their particular talents, are destined to be singled
out from the many and live brilliant but somehow strangely distorted and
out-of-focus lives.” Dickey’s college theme, sent off to his mother with the proud
exclamation “I can write” attached by letter, turned out to be a prophecy. Dickey’s
own life would grow to be “strangely distorted and out of focus” over the
ensuing years, to a large extent because Dickey wished it to be so. He was a
brilliant man, a hard worker, a great reader, but that was not enough—Dickey
wanted a heightened life, one worthy of the legend he planned to become. After the war, newly married, Dickey took his wife and young
son to Cap d’Antibes, My wait in that hallway extended far beyond the one minute Algren had suggested. A grown man could have shaved and
dressed in the time I stood waiting. Probably, one did. When the heavy door eventually swung open, the man facing me
looked far older than the book jacket picture I had carefully scrutinized the
evening before. Algren was 68 by this time. His
green suit was worn, oversized, begging for a dry cleaner. He wore white
socks with brown shoes. His face was pale, his eyes slightly yellow, and he
needed a haircut. I’d expected movie star good looks. Gold watches and diamond
pinkie rings. An Italian suit at the very least. Sure I was disappointed. But looks can be deceiving, I reminded myself. Forgetting in the moment my carefully prepared introductory
speech, the one where I made it clear to him that I was something special,
not just some college kid escort but a college kid escort who was going to be
a real writer someday, I managed to utter a mere: “Hello, Mr. Algren.” Then: “What would you like to do, Mr. Algren?” My voice was chirpy, I think, rather than authoritative. Though
my goal was to appear both worldly and eager, I’m sure I came off as simply
silly. But I caught myself, remembered my purpose, and screwed up
enough nerve to speak a third time. I informed Algren
that I owned a car, and that we had the entire afternoon and early evening
free. Algren reached down, pulled up the
hand I had been too nervous to extend his way, and shook it firmly. “I want to buy underwear,” he told me. “Take me somewhere I
can buy some shorts.” For a moment, I just didn’t respond. Was he speaking in code? My
mind tried to put together underwear
with something daring and incorrigible, something more in keeping with the
world of Algren’s books. Maybe the underwear would
be ladies underwear, and still on the ladies? Does shorts mean something different
in Eventually, I managed a firm, “Excuse me?” “I need to go someplace and buy underwear. I don’t have a
single clean pair.” “Underwear, Mr. Algren?” “Shorts.” Dickey was not the man many of us suppose. “My father’s ideas of nature, for all that he wrote about it,
were mostly imagined from movies safely watched in air-conditioned theatres
or on living room televisions,” Christopher Dickey writes of the Deliverance author, the poet who
authored “ James Dickey took his son camping once, and
it was a sad comedy of blunders. He failed to bring the proper equipment, or
warm clothing, and either lost the eight-year-old at one point or got lost
himself. He later took up archery, rather ineptly. The only time James Dickey
was in a canoe, as far as his son knows, ended with one of James Dickey’s
drinking buddies nearly killed, and the canoe busted on a stretch of Coosawattee rapids. I make these points not because Dickey was a fraud, not
because he had any obligation to be anything like the character Burt Reynolds
portrayed in the movie, but because I was so taken off guard when I learned
the truth. I’ll bet many who read Summer
of Deliverance were equally surprised. A writer lives off his or her imagination, and often the
greatest activity of a writer’s life occurs all above the neck. Often, in
fact, a writer’s life is a dreary life, alone in a room with coffee, writer’s
block, and insecurity, banging away at unresponsive keys, stubborn sentences. But readers seem invariably to want a different image—to have
our writers wrestling sailfish off the coast of Algren and I set
off, on foot, for a Woolworth’s 5 & 10 that morning. As we ambled along “Are we close?” he asked after about five minutes. “Just one more block.” This seemed to please him, and he smiled slightly the rest of
the walk. We entered Woolworth’s, which was very much like entering the
past. The store was on its last legs, dimly lit, poorly
staffed, an eager candidate for urban renewal. We stepped down three short
steps to the retail area, and the Famous American Novelist snatched the first
package of men’s shorts he saw. Three white boxers, about a 36 waist. I hung back, embarrassed, not wanting anyone to connect me
with the old man. “Now take me home,” he said. We retraced our steps briskly, me holding in my disappointment
and Algren hugging his little bag of shorts. But
along the way, scanning the businesses lining Forbes, Algren
spotted Frankie Gustine’s, a smoky tavern named for a former Pirates
infielder. Algren suddenly wanted a drink. A
martini, he told me. So we went in. I asked for a beer. “Bring the boy a martini too,” Algren
ordered the bartender. “Excuse me?” I asked again, but no one was listening, least of
all the fellow behind the bar, who seemed to sense immediately that this was
not some old man with a Woolworth’s bag full of boxers, but a man of some
consequence and gravity. When the drinks came, in tall-stemmed, chilled glasses, Algren showed his first real interest in me. “You had one
of these before?” he asked. “No,” I said. He seemed inordinately fascinated with this idea, the boy and
his first martini, and eyed me closely while I sipped, demanded to know my
reaction immediately. I lied and said the drink was good, though in truth it tasted
like vinegar and urine. I regret to this day that I didn’t tell him that. He
might have laughed. We had two martinis each, and Algren lectured me on why a martini was the proper thing
to drink. His reasoning had to do with the seriousness of drinking. A real
drink was a real drink, while a beer was just water with a little bit of
booze mixed in. “You look like an amateur,” he warned me. I was, and mostly we sat in silence, studying the back of the
bar. There wasn’t much a man like Algren could
possibly want to know about a green college writer, and I, so disappointed,
could no longer imagine what questions I might ask him. Dickey, unlike some writers, was fully complicit in creating
his own legend, almost calculating at points. He posed for bravado magazine
photos, allowed, or encouraged, writers to exaggerate his prowess at various
sports. “THE STUFF OF POETRY,” Playboy’s
headline writers crowed in 1971, is “a little guitar picking, fast-water
canoeing, booze, archery, and weight lifting.” Somehow they left “a love of
language and a careful eye” off the list. They ignored the countless hours
Dickey spent hunched over a page. James Dickey coined the term “Barnstorming for Poetry” to
describe his approach to being a touring guest writer. Christopher Dickey
writes of his father’s nervousness and hesitation early on when asked to read
his own work, in front of an audience. The poet’s wife, mainly because the
family needed money, encouraged her husband: “Now, you go up there, Jim. Now
you go up there and be yourself.” Dickey told his
son many years later that he had some trouble following his wife’s advice. “Be
myself. Yeah. But which one? I never did figure that out completely.” What Dickey did figure out was that audiences would love him
all the more if he were bombastic, barnstorming, outrageous.
He was macho if he thought the audience wanted a Poet as He-Man. He chased
women if they wanted Poet as Scamp. He drank way too much, to the point where
audiences seemed disappointed if he approached the lectern sober. Christopher Dickey guesses that people wanted “to be in touch
with Jim Dickey’s effusive, effulgent, half-mad energy. They wanted him to
dare to do the things they would never do, and maybe make them dare a little
more, too. So they would drink with him until he was falling down drunk,
hoping he would say something brilliant, or outrageous, knowing they could
say to themselves and others that they’d lifted a glass—a lot of glasses—with
Big Jim Dickey. And they would watch him move in on a woman, any woman, in a
crowd, and wish they had the balls to do that. Or wish that they were the
woman.” “They seduced him,” Christopher Dickey writes, “with his own
show.” I lifted a glass, two glasses, with Nelson Algren,
but after that he said, “Finished.” So we exited the bar and walked back toward his room, slightly
drunk. I was slightly drunk, that is. I don’t know about Algren.
His step had slowed some, he was still quiet, but he was probably fine. I followed him into the Webster Hall lobby, up the elevator, then stood outside the big wooden door again. He shook my
hand, assured me he would find his way to the student union that evening
entirely on his own. I was about to go, but he had some trouble
with the key and the lock. My hand was steadier, so I opened the door for
him, watched his back as he ambled into the surprisingly small and shabby
room. I remember feeling embarrassed that we had put him there. A remarkable
man like this deserves a nicer room. And a better escort. And someone with a
better sense of what he might need. He was not the man I had imagined he
would be. He was just a writer of enormous talent. After the door was opened, Algren
turned my way one last time. “Thanks,” he said, “I had a good time.” He was across the room, undressing for his nap, before I even
shut the door. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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