Product Description

James Dickey was a great poet, a legend of the reading circuit, and -- after the best-selling Deliverance and its celebrated movie version -- a celebrity. This rich collection, reaching from 1943 to his death in 1997, and from a fledgling poet to an ailing man of letters, constitutes a vibrant short course in literature and poetry since World War II. From a 1959 letter: "For a long time I have been trying to do two things in poetry, both of which I have been told I should not do. The first is to get away, by whatever means, from the idea of a poem as objet d'art. . . . The other is to be able to make statements, one after the other: this happens, this happens, then this happens. To go with all this, I have also been trying to assert connections in nature where none exist: to make the world do what I say, rather than what it actually does." Matthew J. Bruccoli, James Dickey's literary personal representative, notes in his introduction: "The letters assembled in this volume represent perhaps twenty percent of James Dickey's located correspondence. The double rationale for selection was first to document the growth of a major writer -- how a scarcely educated jock discovered that he possessed genius and that writing was the only thing that counted -- then, second, to document the ways he fulfilled his genius and advanced his career. . . . The best letters here are the ones about writing . . . his correspondence documents the accuracy of his critical judgments." Dickey's correspondents include John Berryman, Harold Bloom, Philip Booth, Richard Howard, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Mark Strand, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright. Entertaining and erudite, these letters reveal the fierce, complicated literary intellect of the man John Updike called "the high-flyer of American poets."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1812523 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-26
• Released on: 1999-10-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Dickey's indefatigable editor and friend, and senior compiler of his letters, Bruccoli "disapproved of his conduct and celebrated his genius." Whatever that conduct was, it rarely emerges from these letters. Dickey (1923-1997) "deliberately promoted and exaggerated his several reputationsAgenius, drinker, woodsman, athleteAuntil the legends took over after [the novel] Deliverance." Not a biography in letters, Crux is, after the early family letters, some later ones to a son and to (or about) his second wife, a selected professional correspondence. When Dickey's first wife dies, in October 1976, and he remarries two months later, we are greeted by a gap from August 1976 to August 1977. What we do have, however, are pages of literary politics, self-seeking, currying favor and attacking writers unworthy of his good words. Nabokov is "tiresome and disgusting... with a built-in intellectual smirk." Frost is "that super-jerk." If all poetry, he says, were like that of Wallace Stevens, "I would have no interest in the subject." Anne Sexton is derided for "continual pushiness." John Hollander is "a literary pimp and time-server." Robert Lowell, whom Dickey will butter up later, is "just another example of the brilliant, pampered American poet who spends the rest of his life, after the initial success, trying to progress and keeps falling down and down." Despite some praise of contemporaries and some steadfast loyalties, Dickey is largely a sour novice. Pathos enters when his second wife becomes "all but comatose with cocaine and heroin," and he struggles to write amid "a maelstrom of misfortunes." The letters end abruptly with a friend's funeral and Dickey's warmth of feeling toward him, but the personality evoked by the letters is generally unlovely. 20 b&w photographs not seen by PW. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The late Dickey's drunken public antics, his braggadocio about his athletic prowess, and his violence-filled second marriage are the stuff of legend by now. Yet Dickey's letters reveal a man consumed by his passion for language and life. Editors Bruccoli and Baughman (coeditors of the letters of Nabokov and Fitzgerald) here collect about 20 percent of the late poet's known correspondence. The collection traces Dickey's career from his undergraduate years at Vanderbilt to his final days in Litchfield Beach, SC, where he wrote every day ensconced in a castle of books. In letters to correspondents like Ezra Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Anne Sexton, James Wright, and others, Dickey doggedly and keenly discusses the role of the poet in the modern world, the nature of modern poetry, and the function of literary criticism. Dickey's letters give us a glimpse into his mind and writing that no biography will ever be able to do. These letters are part of a steadily rising flood of material about Dickey, and large public libraries and academic libraries will certainly want to own them.AHenry L. Carrigan, formerly with Westerville P.L., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Indefatigable literary estate agent Bruccoli (English/Univ. South Carolina, editor of the letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, and Vladimir Nabokov) amasses the documentary chronicle of Dickey's metamorphosis from ``scarcely educated jock to award-winning poet. Despite the wide range of addressees, including Robert Bly, Philip Booth, Donald Hall, Richard Howard, Randall Jarrell, Denise Levertov, and Robert Penn Warren, Dickey is on truly intimate termswhether aesthetic or personalwith very few. Concerning his art, his most revealing personal statements typically occur in early correspondence with fellow-poet James Wright in the late fifties and the sixties: how Dickey is out to make ``a poetry that gives us life: . . . the live imagination as it leaps instinctively toward its inevitable (and perhaps God-ordained) forms''; why he writes about a few significant personal experiences (usually concerning his family) ``in order to understand these times and states, and to perpetuate them.'' Elsewhere, he relates to Wright vivid descriptions of a brawling debate with Jarrell and a winter deer hunt with friends and his son Christopher, during which Dickey improvised ballads. Unfortunately, in his later (post-Deliverance) letters, his grand-old-man status affords him too many opportunities for self-regarding pronouncements, such as judging fellow Southern writers and young poets. The quotidian aspects of a poetic careerand Bruccoli bluntly describes Dickey as a careeristare well-documented, from Dickey's popular speaking engagements and academic postings, through mundane dealings with magazines and publishers, to putting down rivals and sucking up to critics. (In one of the more amusing two-faced incidents, Dickey calls John Hollander ``a literary pimp and time-server'' but later sympathizes with Hollander about ``nit-pickers who balk at your poems.) For the appetite for life that drives Dickey's poetry, his letters to his son Christopher, though comparatively few here, are best. In disagreement with Auden, Dickey writes, ``Poetry makes plenty happen; it can change your life,'' as this passionate and ornery epistolary collection proves. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Personal Snippets of a Great Poet
First off, a disclaimer: I knew Dickey personally toward the end of his life. I met him once (in 1991) and talked to him on the phone every now and again after that. He was out of sorts much of the time, and not much of a conversationalist. But occassionally he would be on the upswing and revert to his old self. He loved the title of my first, unpublished novel, Seamarks, and used to always tell me "I'm on yo' side son!"-So, I suppose all this biases me, though I'm not sure in which direction, because I haven't sorted out my feelings toward this great man of letters, old enough to be my father or grandfather, who encouraged my efforts as a literary artist during the past decade. I truly don't like that this book was published, as is, so soon after his death. It doesn't take the shrewdest person in the world to figure out that the editors were trying to capitalize on his death while he was still fresh in the ground. I don't know how they selected which letters to publish. But I don't like whatever methods they employed. The letters just don't cohere like they should.-It seems to me, truth be told, that there wasn't much method or forethought; more a rush to publish what looked passable as a chronological sequence of some of his correspondence.-Such is the posthumous fate of a great artist. I made it a point to get to know Dickey because I thought, and still think, him to be the last truly geat poet alive. It just happened that he lived in Columbia, a two hour drive from my native Greenville.-Dickey was the last poet that I know of in the tradition of the visionaries of the early 19th Century. Though he would deny this at times, his son's memoir has him comparing himself to Shelley just before his death.-Also, the great English writer Malcolm Lowry had a TREMENDOUS influence on him, as the letter recounting Dickey's visit to his grave shows. Dickey was always recommending Lowry's works to me (particularly Lunar Caustic, an out-of-print autobiographical work regarding Lowry's stay in New York's Bellevue psychiatric hospital for alcoholism treatment.) - I'd already discovered Lowry years ago and read just about every word written by him three times over. - Chris Dickey may or may not know this, but those lines his father quotes from Goethe at the end of the book (attributing them to his mother) are from one of the three opening quotations to Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano. The point of all this emphasis on Dickey's debt to Lowry is that Lowry was one of the last in the same tradition. I'm just making my case. I think the earliest letters in this selection the best. I got a particular thrill of how taken he was with the now forgotten English poet Ernest Dowson. I was mentioning poets I liked when I met him in '91 (He was not in a particularly good mood, by the way.)and he kept stoliidly shaking his head and saying "never heard of him." But when I mentioned Dowson, he perked up, and a twinkle glimmered briefly in his eyes. Dowson drank himself to death in his early thirties, the victim of unrequited love, among other things...What Dowson, Lowry, Shelley and Dickey all have in common is that they viewed their roles as writers as seers, visionaries and prophets who, through their work, brought what others could not feel or see into the written word, and thus into the worlds of others less gifted....This is Dickey at his best, and this is why his letters are worth reading, to understand how such a person recognizes such a gift and evolves into a human being capable of expressing unparalleled beauty and unworldliness. I would, however, recommend that the reader wait upon a more comprehensive, less higgeldy-piggeldy collection of his letters. In the meantime, this one will have to do of course. Dickey could also be a monstrous jerk, as those of you who've read Hart's bio, The World as a Lie, know all too well. Hart did a great job, by the way, and I don't have the same reservations about his bio as I do about the publication of these letters. But buy this book anyway and read it. There aren't any poets like Dickey around anymore, and such a man's letters are worth reading...Although, who knows, maybe there are some left in this sound bite world of Oprah Winfrey show poetry. If you find one let me know, it will be like catching a falling star...My apologies to John Donne.

A superbly written and candidly presented autobiography.
Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman edit Crux: The Letters Of James Dickey, an excellent autobiography which provides a rich collection of works from 1943-1997. Dickey's extensive letters to literary correspondents from John Berryman to Ezra Pound and Anne Sexton are gathered together in a presentation recommended for any with an interest in Dickey's varied works.