October 15, 1998

Dr. Hill

PRWR 6100

2137 words

Shuffling through manila folders filled with etched pages, I felt like a seedy private investigator prying into the life of James Dickey. I often wondered if he was ever bothered knowing that little elves were sifting through his pages of typed and scribbled text trying to build towers of reason and purpose out of his papers. During my visits to his manuscripts at Emory University, I could imagine him chuckling quietly to my left as I opened folders filled with his life's fingerprints. Flipping the translucent papers, I watched his words shift from prose to poetry and back again to poetry. I spread carbon on my blue legal pad in the same pattern as his pages. I tried to recognize his writing process and break into his creative mind. I often thought he was there in the room grimacing at me, trying to keep a straight face. He knew what I was thinking as I copied down more sentences. "Go ahead and try. Build your paper tower so I can blow it down," he whispered to me.

Through pages of scholarly text and manuscripts, I discovered patterns in James Dickey's creating and editing processes. At first, Dickey was a chameleon . His tracks were illusive, but then I began to feel his presence in his text. He moved in and out of his text quietly, but was always present. Sometimes I would find him in a poem as a central character. Other times I could not see him, but I could feel him watch me out of the corner of his eye. He was always there in his words, hiding behind a "Pine " or perhaps crawling in "Kudzu. " I finally began to see that his presence and vitality fueled his focus and awareness as a writer. It was such focus that guided his creating and editing habits and processes.

"Focus, " I could hear him whispering, 'focus. " I suppose he was right. James Dickey did have a focus and center in his writing. That center and focus in his writing was poetry.

In Self-Interviews, Dickey stated, "I've always had the feeling that nobody really understands poetry but me because I came to it of my own free will and by a very devious and sometimes painful route; I feel that it's something that I came to because, I suppose, of what my nature essentially is" (25). In his manuscripts of poetry readers find patterns in Dickey's creative and editing processes.

Scholarly texts and manuscripts have shown James Dickey as a habitual writer. He had a particular writing time and place as well as particular methods for creating and editing his work. Despite working all day in advertising, James Dickey would come home every night to write on his typewriter. As Dickey stated in Self-Interviews, "I was selling my soul to the devil all day and trying to buy it back at night" (44). He would sit for hours at night in his small study in his home in Westminster Circle in Atlanta, Georgia. Christopher Dickey describld @s father's study as a "desk, an unvarnished door [that] laid across two filing cabinets, [that] looked out on our quiet little street '(Summer of Deliverance 89). It was here that Dickey fell into his creative mind. He wrote "the province of the poem is the poet's, and in it he is God" ( Self-Interviews 32). In this power, James Dickey sought to create "poetry [that] will in the end have to be orderly but seem to be disorderly" (Self-Interviews 185). To achieve this ideal ordered poetry, Dickey went about his initial writing and editing in search of self-improvement.

In Self-Interviews, James Dickey stated "I have always been much in love with the idea of improvement' (25). Dickey even revealed the source for his infatuation with improvement. He continued to explain in Self-Interviews, "Self-improvement sounds like a coupon that you'd cut from the back of a magazine and send in to find out how to better yourself. But I must say that I apparently have a good deal of that quality in my makeup... I have a horror of backsliding, of not being as good at whatever I'm doing as I was last year" (25). It was this fear of deterioration in his art and life that pushed Dickey to higher levels of creation, revision, and editing in his writing.

James Dickey's manuscripts contained folders brimming with sheets of typed and hand written text. His manuscripts revealed folder after folder of typed uniform letters on dull gold, aged white, and translucent pages of text as thin as tissue paper. The folders also displayed pages of stationary and letterhead that revealed notes that could not wait for the typewriter.

James Dickey created initial poems and prose on his typewriter, but usually edited his work by hand. Dickey's sections of longhand revealed clues about various processes of editing he went through in his pages of manuscripts. Every curved letter that he carved in his papers revealed secrets of his revision and editing processes. His manuscripts acted as fingerprints to his quest for self-improvement in his writing.

James Dickey's primary revising and editing tool was drafting, redrafting, and drafting again. Christopher Dickey described his father's process as involving "stacks of paper, often a ream or more, that would be the draft of a single poem"(SummerofDeliverance89). Such an account left readers to believe that Janet McHughes's article describing a mere four drafts of Dickey's "Sleeping Out at Easter" was a minimal representation of Dickey's revision process (Struggling For Wings 101). Despite the amount of pages, Dickey's manuscripts revealed his conscious zeal for editing. James Dickey stated, "one almost unfailing constant [in writing poems] is that I like to work on things for an awfully long time. Constant experimentation is at the very heart of everything I do" (Self-Interviews 64).

James Dickey was always experimenting in his writing. He was writing stories and poems in his head, spinning stories and lies to find truth in his writing, and nailing those ideas to paper through his typewriter. Once typed he tested his words on the page. Through page after page of manuscript, readers watched him funnel words through his own mental strainer to make them pure and orderly.

Another primary method of revising and editing for James Dickey was his experimentation through his own type of "word straining." James Dickey often wrestled for the most exact ordering, placement, and sound of his words while editing his work. Page after page of his manuscripts illustrated his attempts to test word order, placement, and sound.

The 8th folder in box 74 of Dickey's manuscripts at Emory University revealed an eleven page prose rework of three to four central ideas and lines that were flowing through Dickey's mind as he typed. On the top of page one Dickey began, "But in the ruptured marshes of the mouth, the tongue stands blind Upon a tuft of prayer, begin to believe, romantic head, that these girls dying on the tips of praise behold you like the most ardent burning of the claw of a crab. . ." (box 74, folder 8, page 1). On page three, Dickey returned to these ideas in the form of a poem rather than prose. He began at the top of the page with "But in the ruptured marshes of the mouth/ But in the ruptured marshes of the mouth/ The tongue stands blind/ Upon a tuft of song, beginning to believe,/ But for the ruptured marshes of the mouth/ The tongue would walk/" (box 74, folder 8, page 3). In these sections, readers have experienced James Dickey's search for the most precise words to express his ideas. He battled over whether the tongue should "walk" or "stand blind." He also tested and twisted the sound of "tuft of prayer" versus "tuft of song."

Later in this folder, Dickey struggled with the language and word choice in another section of his text. On the top of page 8, Dickey began "Music hath cages which the soul cannot bear, in a sleeting norm of lies the notes lie over the evidences and stillness of destruction. . . ." (box 74, folder 8, page 8). On the bottom of the following page, Dickey again experimented with "Music hath cages for the mellow eye, the ear and the oil of rivers in t[h]e dead of night....... (box 74, folder 8, page 9). The following page started "music hath cages that the ear may bear: in them the flesh of the peacock turned round a spire,"(box 74, folder 8, page 10). Here Dickey paired "music hath cages" with "which the soul cannot bear," "the mellow eye," and "the ear may bear." Again, he illustrated his belief in experimenting with his words to improve the effectiveness and clarity of the poem.

James Dickey also improved his writing by breaking down his text into small mobile sections. Christopher Dickey best described his father's small mobile sections of text as slats of cardboard covered "with individually typed words carefully arranged and rearranged on it in a kind of poetic Scrabble my father played against himself to find new ways to put words together" (Summer of Deliverance 89). In folder 40 of box 74, two pages of Dickey's word play editing can be found. The pages are covered with one neat row of singular typed lines that run down the indented page like a game of mental Scrabble. The middle of one page contained these lines, "For woman, his loins awake,/ Though he is babbling./ His loins tremble open through his babbling. His loins tremble open, a pit beneath his babbling./ His loins tremble, with the open trembling of depth. His loins tremble widely with depth./" (box 74, folder 40, page 5). Dickey attempted to find the proper images and meanings in his poetry by slotting words such as "babbling," "open," and "depth," from one part of the line to another.

Dickey also jotted down sections of this word play in the margins of his poems as he attempted to access the precise sound and image from his words. In folder 43 of box 74 of his manuscripts, Dickey jotted words down in a slanted cursive on the left side of the typed poem. He wrote, "with the feeling I shall turn to endless light./ To a man of endless light./ A man of endless light upon the sun." (box 74, folder 40, page 1). Here readers witnessed his need to experiment with word order to clarify the place of "man," feeling," and "sun" in the lines.

James Dickey's constant revision and editing allowed him to work towards becoming the poet he desired to be in his lifetime. He combined words that transformed meaning beyond reader boundaries. His constant revision and editing pushed him toward self-improvement and poetic growth. He once told his students we "are trying to show God a few things he maybe didn't think of. It takes us to supply that. We are not trying to tell the truth. We are trying to make it so that when we sit down to write we are lords over our material. We can say anything we want to. The question is to find the right way, the best way to do it." (Summer of Deliverance 268). James Dickey did find the right way and the best way for him to do just that.

As a private investigator, I feel like my work with James Dickey's manuscripts is unfinished. His manuscripts seem like bed sheets blowing in the wind as I imagine his presence drifting away from me. I can hear him telling me it should be longer, that there were other quotes he would have used to describe himself, and that his editing was more than mental straining and archaic Scrabble.

But, I have played enough of my own word Scrabble and mental straining. This is my seventh revision. The boxes and books are closed. I am done with this small chapter of James Dickey's life and work. I am ready to begin another chapter. As I think about the next chapter, I can hear him laughing faintly, again.

Dickey, Christopher. Summer of Deliverance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Dickey, James. Self-Interviews. Ed. Barbara and James Reiss. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

James Dicke y Manuscripts. Series 2. Special Collections, Emory University.

Kirschten, Robert, ed. Struggling For Wings. Columbia: University of South Carolina

Press, 1997.