Bill Moyers Journal; 302; A Conversation with James Dickey

JAMES DICKEY: I'm essentially a writer of long poems, which is not in favor at this time, but will eventually come to being in favor, I think. Because what I want to do, what I'm trying to do, is to reclaim for poetry what it used to have. To reclaim for some of some of the territory that it has relinquished unnecessarily to the novel and the short story. BILL MOYERS: What territory is that? JAMES DICKEY: Narrative. Something with a narrative thrust, a story thrust. I'll read you one of them, I have a new long poem coming out, I'll just read a little section of it. It's a kind of a vindication of the drunken poet who tries to make it one last ditch effort to relate himself to the universe, to the stars, to the solar system, to everything.

BILL MOYERS: Tonight a conversation with James Dickey, a southern boy who tells God how to rearrange the universe. DICKEY: "You've got to remember that my old man was an astronomer of Soats and didn't he say the whole night sky's invented? Well, now I am now inventing, I've you got a crane, right? How'd about lobster up there? With a snap of two right fingers, cancer will whirl up like an anvil, will rise, people will rise from their beds and take their weeping children and their arms, who thought their parents were departing for the heaven-clawed stars of death, they'll live and live, a lobster. Oh, no, no idea, and I dear God never had, listen to my God, that thing will be great. He's coming into my head, is he inside it or out? No, I can see him.

The DT's aren't failing me, the light of time shines on him, he's huge, he's a religious fanatic, he's gone wild because he can't go to heaven, he's waving his feelers, his sore hands, he's praying to the town clock to minutes, millennia, he's praying the dial stations of the cross, he sees me, imagination and dissipation, both fire at me, point blank. Oh God, no, no, I was playing, I didn't mean it, I'll never write it, I swear, a claws, a claws, he's going to kill me." BILL MOYERS: Why did you choose to live in this particular place, was there any, it was just an accident?

DICKEY: Oh, well, in a way. But the main point is to come to rest somewhere. To come to rest. It's where you want to lay your bones down, that I would like to be buried there. I think when you come to my age, 52 and a half, I'm at the age where you count half birthdays. You compose, you have great fun composing your own epitaph. MOYERS: Have you done that? DICKEY: I have indeed. MOYERS: What is it? I don't want to be buried in a coffin. I don't know whether the state of Georgia or the state of South Carolina would stand still for this. But because we made a movie up on the river, the Shatuga River, what I would ideally like is to be dumped into the ground on the west bank of the Chauga River, right

by the wildest of the rapids, which is a place called Woodall Shows. And covered it up, for somebody to play dueling banjos over with my grave. And I have a vast simple stone erected, maybe a wood-carved thing, that'd said James Dickie, 1923, 1975-6, whatever it would be, American Poet and novelist, here seeks his deliverance. BILL MOYERS: James Dickey is the sum, and more, of all the contradictions that appear in the powerful terrifying and tender poetry, which is made in famous. That's because he writes about the experiences he has lived -- from college football star to fighter pilot to hunter, woodsman, teacher, guitarist and dreamer of things not possible and already present.

From his book-lined study, here at the campus of the University of South Carolina, where he's Poet in Residence, Dickey, this is his wife, Maxine, ranges into a world he embraces lustily, even as he yearns for an order it refuses to yield, except in the poet's mind. SPEAKER: This is a very significant day in the life of DeCalb College, as a cultural and literary center, it's significant because of the presence of Mr. Dickey. SPEAKER TWO: He is a poet and he is a man. MOYERS: He has read and lectured widely and served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. In 1966, he received the National Book Award in Poetry. His first novel, Deliverance, was a huge success, as a bestseller and as a movie in which Dickie appeared as a rural Georgia sheriff. It was a fitting role. He still seems most at home in the Southern wilds whose passion, camaraderie, and violence recur again and again in the works of this most original man.

MOYERS: Why is there in so much of your work, so much obsession with violence and what the cruelty that men do to each other? DICKEY: I don't know who this is, except that I'm essentially a creature of the war. My most formative years has taken up with a waging war against an enemy, not one face of whom I had ever seen. MOYERS: You were a pilot.

DICKEY: I flew in the Pacific and I had some terrible things happen to close friends of mine that were castrated, beheaded, and so on, and this cannot but breed hatred. MacArthur, who was my commanding officer, said to the pilots of the Fifth Air Force, their air crews of the Fifth Air Force, bring no ammunition back. If you can't find your primary target, find your secondary target, expend your ammunition or find something, find a train depot or marshalling yard, find something. If you can't find that, find a Sanpan, a fishing boat, but blow it up with those 20 millimeter cannon. But do not bring any ammunition back, shoot something, put the fear of God, the fear of America, into the enemy. MOYERS: Did you enjoy being God? DICKEY: In a way I did. And so would anybody else. MOYERS: You wrote that terrifying poem. DICKEY: The fire bombing, which is about exactly that. MOYERS: Well in there you talk about the pleasure of the power and the flame.

Was it real pleasure? DICKEY: Yes, because you were never faced up with what you did. You will attacking say, 9, 10,000 feet at night. You never saw what you did. You never saw the families burned alive in their homes. You never saw the children mutilated. All you saw was this God-like explosion of flame that you caused, and you would never be able to command that sort of power under any other circumstances. MOYERS: One of your critics says, Dickey is sweet, he's winning, he's high-minded, even while riding of bestiality, and violence, and lust. He confronts reality, but he's never touched by it. DICKEY: Well, I don't know, I don't know about that, but- MOYERS: Were you touched by what happened? DICKEY: Yes, I was, and I wouldn't have written that particular poem if I had not been, because it stayed with me for years and years and years. Why didn't I feel guilty? The main emotion of our time is guilt, and if you don't feel guilt, there will be plenty

of people around, especially in intellectual circles, who will say, why the hell don't you? You know? But when you're in airman, the ultimate guilt at what you've done is the guilt of the inability to feel guilt. Because you have not seen the result. MOYERS: How can a man be a killer and a poet? DICKEY: Well, there's plenty of examples in literary history where they have been. Good Lord, VianTKTK was a murderer and so on, and I'm not sure that Shakespeare was not. Norman Mailer, also parenthetically, I could say, would bear this out, that Jeffus is lying in the suburbs, he says, in ease and security, how quickly the soul in the man begins to die. He will dig, he will look up above the stalled oxen, enving the cruel falcon, and dig down

beneath the straw to find himself a stone to bruise his hand. MOYERS: You think that's essential to us? DICKEY: Not essential, but I think many feel this. Norman Mailer, the violence writers of our time, James Jones, Mailer, and many another, do feel something, myself and my own novel, Deliverance and a good deal of the poetry. I do feel what the French writer, de Montaigne, says, says, if your life ever begins to bore you, risk it. MOYERS: Well, do you agree with Camus, that the only question worth asking is the question as a man have a right to take his own life? DICKEY: Well, in a way I do. And such an eloquent and persuasive writer, as Camus is, it's very hard to argue with him.

The only time I ever saw him, I heard him lecture at the Sorbonne, and he was talking about the Existentialist proposition that we no longer have any supernatural sanctions. the belief in God, except in a few enclaves and so on, is pretty much gone from us. We no longer have a medieval society where everything we do is related to the future world and our particular road to getting into it. The Sartres and the Camus say essentially, and this is what he was talking about that night at the Sorbonne, that man is no longer has to depend on any kind of supernaturalism nor can he rely on them. That man is essentially what he has made of himself. The famous Sartrean formula, man is free to act, but he must act to be free.

It was pretty much the subject of that evening's lecture on the part of Camus. What was apparently a French Catholic boy down the road from me. I was sitting there as a spellbound at Camus' eloquence. This was a couple of years before he won the Nobel Prize, and I was spellbound. But this boy suddenly bounded to his feet, obviously very much on the religious side of the question against Sartre's humanism and his existentialism, and so on, and he bounded to his feet with a turtleneck sweater on and a huge silver crucifix around his neck. And he challenged the speaker. They do these things well in France, I love to be in it on that kind of discussion. You know, you love meetings. Right, and he says, he shouted to the speaker, what can I do to start a new religion? And Camus brought back Humphrey Bogart with a raincoat slung over his shoulder as he lectured and so on. And he used a moment and he says, what can you do to start a new

religion? "He says, get yourself crucified and rise from the dead." MOYERS: Well, I can guarantee you, that's one new religion that was stillborn right there. Jim, if you take the existential thought, that man is free to act, but he must act to be free, it then makes permissible anything, it even makes permissible the violence. DICKEY: It depends on the quality of the action, and also on the quantity, I should think. We have to be guided by some principle that would determine the direction of the action that we would take. Don't you think? MOYERS: Is this what you mean by the unity you've been searching for? DICKEY: Well, also, and also, Aldos Huxley's belief in kindness, we need more kindness. MOYERS: But is that enough? DICKEY: Is it? Again, I don't know, Bill, I don't know, but I think it's a large part of what we need. We need a little, a little less, a lot less self-serving, a lot less exploitation of other

people. MOYERS: Oh, but Camus was saying that night, that's the fundamental principle, self-serving. DICKEY: Yeah, it is. MOYERS: You be free, and isn't that what made the Sixties and made the early part of the century? Watergate and Vietman? DICKEY: Well, it was. It was. Or as Somerset Maugham, one of the great cynics of our time, much less a humanist than Camus, said, if it were possible for the individual human being to prefer somebody else's good to his, his own good, the human race would have perished long ago. MOYERS: One of the intriguing characteristics of your life is that you admire men like Hart Crane and James Agee. Men who were consumed by themselves and who, who ended tragically. DICKEY: Yeah, they almost said, look, if I had, if I would have furnished you with a suicide roll of the best poets of my generation, it would read like a role call of the best poets

of my generation, every one of them kiled himself. Berryman, Crane, oh, he's a little bit before me, Robert Shelley at Iowa, Weldon Keys, Delmore Schwartz, almost all of it, and this is a kind of an occupational hazard of American poets. Randall Jarell was another. MOYERS: Why do you think it is? DICKEY: I think their minds eat them up. Anybody who can write poetry like Randall Jarell has got to live in hell all the time because the intensity of his mental activity is such that it will give him no rest and he cannot, he cannot hide from, from his own mind. I love what Randall said about, about the death of Big Daddy Lipscomb, you know, the tackle on the Baltimore Colts, who died from an overdose dose of heroin, you could say exactly the

same thing of Randall. Randall says at the end of his poem, the world won't be the same without Big Daddy or else it will be. You could say the same thing of Randall, the same thing. The world won't be the same with Randall Jarell or else it will be. MOYERS: Some of your friends are worried that your obsession with Agee and Crane and men who work themselves... DICKEY: Is going to get to me. It is a self-revelation. It is. I understand those men. I don't understand the moderates. I understand the excesses. MOYERS: Are you capable of suicide? DICKEY: No. I don't want that. But death by violence, perhaps. MOYERS: Do you seek it out sometimes, you're bow and arrow hunting, your canoe trips?

DICKEY: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I really want to get killed by a grizzly bear. MOYERS: What? DICKEY: What a way to go. MOYERS: I thought, if anyone had said to me, how do you think Dickey wants to die? I would have said by drowning because of this fascination with the water. I think what was it you said when a man drowns, he joins the dead and... DICKEY: Yeah, so I had my second book is called Drowning with Wthers. MOYERS:You say that the war was a terrifying shape. DICKEY: That shaped my values. MOYERS: I can accept Huxley's imperative about kindness, and I'd like to be kinder, and I'd like for people to be kinder to me. DICKEY: Especially that. MOYERS: And I can understand the impact of being in the war and being a pilot on you. But what I still am grappling with is why today, 30 years after the fact, there is less kindness and violence still is at the theme, not only of your work, but our lives. MOYERS: Well, I'll tell you what I think, Bill.

DICKEY: I think that the affluent society has created a state of boredom, which can only be characterized by the word "crushing." MOYERS: Boredom, boredom, right? DICKEY: So that people will do anything to get out of it. The business of running rivers, and say like the people who are characterised in Deliverance. Four decent suburban fellas who go up to run a wild river before it's damned up. Before it disappears forever. Seems to be some kind of an index to the way people feel, you know? People would, I mean, they can sit down and have a martini and look at television and Bill Moyers show and something, and the suburban life comes out to be in a kind of condition of inconsequentiality, you know?

Well, you feel that you live with your head packed in cotton. There's no reality. You don't have any touch on the world. MOYERS: You talk about Deliverance being about the suburban-dweller fulfilling his potentiality for violence. DICKEY: He's trying to. MOYERS: Do you have that potentiality? DICKEY: Well, I have had it, but no, I think I'm getting a little bit past it now. But it seems to me that Lewis, who heads the expedition in Deliverance, the one that was played by Burt Reynolds has a baleful fascination for the other kind of soft-jowled suburban nights that he leads into the expedition to go on the river, you know? And he's full of pseudo-philosophical platitudes because these people who work in counting houses

and advertising agencies and insurance firms and so on have never heard anybody talk like that before. When he says, when Lewis says, "I think the machines are going to fail, I think the system is going to fail. And there's a few men that are going to take to the woods and they're going to start the whole thing over again." MOYERS: Do you think some people wish that were so? But how does this apply to a STKTKTK, an anonymous creature out of nowhere? DICKEY: I think it all links up. I think it all links up because you would rather be something, even if murder is involved, you would rather be something. The Lee Oswalds of the world, they would rather be something than be the nothing that they are.

MOYERS: Is a gun, the only way to make a statement to them. DICKEY: Not to only, but one off and easily available. MOYERS: Easily available. DICKEY: That's well said. That's exactly right. Another kind of poet. Well, I wouldn't credit to move that. In order to be a poet, you got to be able to put down memorable words on a page. You just don't put a trigger. MOYERS: Is there a madness at the center of things today that is the characteristic of it? DICKEY: I think there's a certain kind of terror. And the terror is played off against respectability, which is intolerable. MOYERS: Eplain that. DICKEY: Well, on one hand, you have the need for some kind of activity that will activate adrenaline in your own body. Which is the sense of living on the edge, which gives significance to things, or at least the illusion of significance.

On the other hand, you have security, which militates against going out and crashing cars against lightnpoles, or being in demolition derbys and hunting the giant elk with the bow or hang gliding, and things like that, so on. But the fact, the fact that hang gliding, I mean, just to take one instance, and I'd like to do that, wouldn't you? MOYERS: I'm tempted I think I shall summon the ability to resist the temptation. DICKEY: Right. Well, maybe I won't. MOYERS: But what is there in us that wants to do that? DICKEY: I don't know, I really don't, I suppose the possibility of walking a tightrope between life and death. Because if you have nothing but life, you have nothing but the suburbs,

you have nothing but affluence, and so on. It's like the French philosopher Georges Bataille says, there is, at the heart of the human experience, a principle of insufficiency, and this would supply that, maybe. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. MOYERS: Do you think that principle of insufficiency has been at the heart of the region, the history of the region that we're both a part of, the South? DICKEY: Well, I think it is, I mean, the South, as I said, once said on a football coach, the death of Vincent Lombardi. I had the same feeling about the South, and I said about the coach, love-hate is stronger than either love or hate. Do you find that to be true in your experience?

MOYERS: I do, particularly with this, with this part of the country that won't let us go, and the fact that it won't let us go makes me think we romanticized its hold on us. DICKEY: Well, we have romanticized, but there are certain, real, real things about the South. Now, what I mean about real, nobody knows what real means. Plato didn't, Aristotle didn't, Heraclitus didn't, nobody knows what is meant when you say real. But there are certain things, characteristics, qualities about the South that are important to me personally. MOYERS: What are they? DICKEY: One of them is the courtesy of most people here. I remember riding on a train in New England, where there was a family, and they were trying to get the little boy to eat his dining car meal. And the father was saying to the little boy, look, "it's good, don't you like it?

It's good, eat it." That would never happen in the South. You would never hear a Southerner speak to his child that way. Have you ever heard a Southerner speak to his child that way? MOYERS: But I know that in the midst of all this civility, and kindness and courtesy, and beneath is a terrible violence. As men spoke with drawls, they lynched Negroes. MOYERS: Oh, yes, they did. They sure did. MOYERS: So I'm not sure, you see. I'm back again to Huxley's, to Huxley. Is Huxley's kindness enough? No, it isn't enough. The South is kind. People love each other. They're gentle with each other, but they'll hate you. DICKEY: Yes, they will. MOYERS: And then talk about it at supper. DICKEY: And you talk about violence. The violence of the Southerner of a certain type, say, the redneck type, is more terrible than anything that you will encounter on the streets of New York with a hold-up mob. When you see a Southerner come to, like the two fellas on the riverbank in Deliverance.

When they say to you, "I don't give a goddamn about you, back up that tree." Just don't do nothing. Just back up. No, it, voice says, now is it a matter of money? No, we want money, we'll take you money. The bone marrow chills, because the violence of those people is so terrible. Because they mean what they said, they are not fooling. If they pull a trigger on you, if they blow your brains out all over those woods, they'll do it. MOYERS: But I'm just as dead if a mugger in the subway, who doesn't give a damn about me. DICKEY: You might bluff him, but you won't bluff the Southerner. MOYERS: Well, why did you choose to stay here? You could have lived anywhere in the world. DICKEY: Because of the virtues of the place.

MOYERS: The vultures? DICKEY: No, not the vultures, they're plenty of them. The virtues, the virtues of the place. You know, there's a lot of things about it I don't like, but one of the things I do like about being a Southerner is the tail-telling ability of most Southern people and the jokes. I love Southern jokes, don't you? Yes, I am. I have a flavor to them that you just don't find anywhere else. I'll tell you what. There was this old boy who worked in Bowling Green, Georgia, ball-ground, you know, who loved clothes, and he saved up all his money every year working in this filling station to go to Atlanta to Robert HallsTKTKTTK to buy a suit, you know, a new suit every year. So he went up there and he went to Robert Hall's and he found his green suit and he really liked it.

He really looked good on him. So he put it on and he went back down the ball-ground and he's walking down the street and he's suit, hoping somebody would notice him. So a friend of his came up and said, Jack, boy, that is some kind of good-looking stack of threads you've got, boy. That really looks good. Brings out color of them strange eyes. It really looks good. But the left sleeve is too long. I must tell you, the left sleeve is too long. So he goes back to Robert Hall's and says, look, you're sold in this suit, 75 dollars. But the left sleeve is too damn long. He says, all right, but don't worry about it. We don't have to alter it. It's too long. Why don't you take your hand and kind of shoot it out like that and then nobody will notice a difference. It'll be all right. So he goes back down to ball-ground and he's walking down the street with arms like this. And another friend stops him in front of the drug store. He says, Jack, I like his suit. I think it's great. It really is. Everybody's talking about it. But the right sleeve is too short.

So he says, oh, my lord, god allmighty. 75 dollars, my whole years salary. And damn thing, don't fit. I'm going to get that suit altered, it's going to come out all right because the color is good. So he goes back up to Robert Hall's and told him, bare racks and you didn't know over here and all that. And he says, look, the right sleeve is too short. So what am I going to do about it? He says, all right, well, you just take that sleeve and you bring it in like that. You shoot this one out like that. You bring this one in like that. And it's going to be all right. It's going to be wear your suit, enjoy, and everything. So it goes back down to ball-ground, walking on the street. Another friend stops him and says, look, that's a great suit, Jack. It really does look good. But the pants are too long. So it goes back to Robert Hall's, one last time says, all right, now what, you got this,

you got it. The salesman goes and says, you got it solved on this side. You got it solved on this side. What you do is you take this hand and you pull up the pants like that and you hold this sleeve a bit and nobody's going to know that the damn thing is out of proportion. So he's walking down on Sunday morning, walking down the main street, Bowling Green, and he meets a man and his wife, and they say hello past the time of day. And after they get out of here, shot, they say the man's wife says, did you see poor Jack Simpson? You went to high school with him. Did you see poor Jack Simpson? He's staggering on the main street of Bowl Ground, Georgia. All crippled up with arthritis like that and the husband turns and says, yeah, but don't that suit fit him good.

MOYERS: No, whether the story is Southern, but the telling of it will do. DICKEY: It's all the same. It's all the same. MOYERS: Who was your favorite Southern author? DICKEY: Oh, no, I never did care for him that much. I just too, too prolix. Prolix? MOYERS: Yeah, too long-winded for me. Thomas Wolfe was too long-winded for me. MOYERS: He might have told the story quicker than you told him. DICKEY: No, but here's the thing, Bill. The whole point of the Southern storytelling tradition is that you do draw it out. And the length of it is part of the effectiveness. MOYERS: Bruce Catton, the greatest historian, said to me once, I'm not sure that I'd want to know the South when it isn't any longer a lost cause. DICKEY: Yeah. Because that's what makes it is that it isn't a lost cause. MOYERS: Have we made a myth out of that? Haven't we reveled in being the victim or the loser? DICKEY: Well, sure, but did not Homer or make a myth of Troy, which is the greatest poem of all

time, The Illiad. And it was about a losing cause. MOYERS: But I think sometimes the rest of the country finds us, well, boring, because we live always in that past when the glory of the possibility became the dust of it lying on the fire. DICKEY: Well, that's right. In a way, that's true. But the South is a region, which is important to mankind. The industrial East doesn't have it. The Far West doesn't have it. The Middle 2est doesn't have it. There's something that causes people to come to the South. And when they come, they stay. MOYERS: Yes. And they bring with them the very industrialization, the very generality, the very anonymity, the very blandness and homogeneity that makes other regions less interesting.

DICKEY: Well, now, to get around to more or less to the center of what you're talking about, Bill, comes back to our initial quotation of Camus and Sartre, and the only Camus says that the main thing is to whether a man has the right to take his own life. You and I say, I hope you'll agree, that the main proposition is to how you live your life. You come from an anonymous and fortuitous concatenation of genes, do you not? Your mother and your father married, and they were a product of thousands of years of other people, which led up to you. Me the same, anybody the same, exactly the same. We were born into this region. The only philosophical proposition that's worth anything at all to consider is to how

you're going to live your life. What you want it to contain. How you want it to be. Now for example, do you want to be an internationalist, not you, but is one going to be an internationalist, or do you want to be rooted in a single region? Do you want to stay in one place and do forays, or in my words, sorties out, say to Europe and other places. still have a place to come back to. Or do you want to just kind of be an nomad? I mean, these are questions that are important. MOYERS: You didn't want to be a nomad. DICKEY: Well, I was for mean years a nomad, but I came back, and that has got to matter. MOYERS: But did what you came back to turn out to be what you wanted it to be? DICKEY: Yes, I think principally it did because I insisted on making it, as I wished it to be, within the circumference of the Southern ethos.

This has something to do with rootedness. You should be rooted. I do firmly believe, as a Southerner, as a born Southerner, and as a voluntary Southerner. I do believe that you should be rooted in a place, but you should also be able to make forays out from that to see some of the variety of the world. This is the great thing about being, about a regional bias on one's own part, because things come out of a region which are indigenous to that region, which are particular and peculiar to that region. For example, John Peale Bishop, another Southern writer, says that the unique test of the validity and the value of a culture is the ability of that culture to develop an indigenous or native cookery.

MOYERS: Cookery? DICKEY: Now, I happen to agree with him. I think that fried chicken is a great contribution to world culture, don't you? MOYERS: I do, and I think the same is true. DICKEY Now, when you eat a Southern meal, you know that you have supped among the gods, because who other than a god could invent the divine fact of okra? MOYERS: What else do you like? DICKEY: To eat? I like the cooking of Louisiana. I like the rice dishes that they do. I like to see food along the Maryland show, the oyster dishes, and that sort of thing. I like New England, lobster, they've got a little bit of a lock on the indigenous cookery, syndrome. MOYERS: I'm glad so you could see something. DICKEY: They have a little something, but nothing like the South. Cornbread, for example.

MOYERS: Do you like that? Of course. Yeah, I do. I went out to see my 90-year-old grandmother recently, she was about to be operated on for the first time in her life. In fact, it was the first time in 90 years that she had been to the hospital, and she went to the surgery, still complaining that she hadn't been able because she became ill as I was arriving there. She had not been able to cook me her cornbread. DICKEY: Well, the South has got that cookery, and everybody is trying to get in on it, you know. It's just true Southern cookbook, you know, true, you know, just for sale costs, that's how to say. We've got our cookery, we've got our stories, we've got our writers that come from the stories and that tell the stories, and we've got a certain courtesy, which may be dying out, but it still exists because it has existed. We have a certain tradition of family in the South. I was shocked when I went into the service.

In 1942, I was in there with a lot of Pennsylvania and Ohio boys who did not even know their first cousins names. Now, that to a Southerner has a certain degree of immorality about it, don't you feel that in your family? Oh, sure. MOYERS: My family. I have cousins that I hate. DICKEY: I hate them, but I know them. You know? Yeah, they're old drunks. I had one cousin, this is another tall tale. Actually, he was, yeah, he was the first cousin. His name was Bill Dickey, and he was, he was not a drunk, but the drunk. MOYERS: Every town has to have one. DICKEY: Yeah, right. Well, he was, you should have seen him. And the family was in despair of him, and they finally contrived to get him into Alcoholics Anonymous. And you know, the buddy system where you, they teem you up with a cured alcoholic who comes out in commiseration is with you through your bad time when you got to have a drink

and you, you, you got to resist it and all that. And this fellow came out to Bill's house regularly, and they'd play cards and that sort of thing. But my cousin, Bill Dickey, who worked for the railroad, Central Georgia Railroad, who's known as Railroad Bill, was not only one of the few people who was not cured by the Alcoholics Anonymous buddy system, but succeeded in getting his buddy back on the bottle. So instead of gaining one that lost two. MOYERS: Little setback to the cause. DICKEY: Oh, but they gone. MOYERS: Here we are in 1976. We're celebrating 200 years of a revolution. Everybody's having his say, the politicians, the editorial writers, the president. MOYERS: What does a poet say about this American experience?

DICKEY: Well, the American experience, my Lord, there are so many different ways of saying things about the American experience from the poet's point of view. But I would say, from my own particular stance, that it seems to me that the New World offers to the poet as well as to the person, the citizens, an almost infinite range of possibilities of experience. Now when you look at your relationship to your country, you realize that you are born of a certain time and of a certain place, and the accidents of fortune are pile in upon you, you know. The accidents of fortune got me born, you know, to kind of a drunk

and neer-do-well of a father and an invalid mother who tried desperately to maintain the gentile tradition of the post Civil War South during the Depression. Now that has got to be something to conjure with as somebody who's growing up under those circumstances. Yours were different. You were out there in the plains of Texas, in Marshall. MOYERS: Piney Wood. DICKEY: Piney Wood. Your circumstances are different from mine, and yet in a way they all link up. This is our version of America, it's Bill Moyers' version of America and James Dickey's version of America, because we came into an historical period, and we were nurtured by it and defeated by it, and if we were any good, we rose above it, transcended it and

used it. MOYERS: As you live it, as you travel the country, as you do your readings at college campuses and for groups, so do you come to any kind of insight about what we, the people, want to be, what you think, we collectively aspire to be? DICKEY: Well, if I could solve that problem, I could raise up the American nation, singing hosannahs under the most high, everything would be solved, but I can, any more than the politicians can. I would say this, every man wants to be himself within a situation which allows him to be so. And I would also say what my wife said to me when I began to give poetry readings, I said, Maxine, I'm a rather shy person, I can't get out in front

of a big audience and you know, I read my work and so on, I mean I'm terrified, even at the attempt to do something like that. She said, we'll look Jim, Jimbo, she calls me, said, just get up out there, I'm in front of the mic, get on the stage and be yourself, Which all sounds fine to me, until I began to reflect a bit on it, and I laid at a middle night at 4:30 in the morning. I said, Maxine, I said to my wife, imagine something, you said, your advice is great, just get up there and be yourself, but which one? Because everyone has many selves, and it seems to me that in our country and in our time, or any kind of a time and historical era, that we ourselves live our only human lives

in, it's necessary to energize as many of yourselves as you can. Wilbur Mills for example with the girl jumping into the fountain and so on. Everybody thinks that's terribly, reprehensible, I applaud it. Because he had had a repressed kind of personal situation, and this was a release for him, and I don't begrudge him that at all, I would vote for him, because of it, not in spite of it, but because of it. There are many people who have life situations in which they are trapped, and their truest and most instinctive selves are negated. they need a release, oh yeah, I'm on the Wilbur Mills side, aren't you? MOYERS: I'm on the side of that fundamental, undeniable mystique of self.

DICKEY: Yeah, that fundamental, undeniable right to make a fool of yourself, if you need to. Amen, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, one of the things about America, Bill, is that we're all expected to be saints when everybody, and everybody's neighbor knows damn well that we are not. So that we're supposed to maintain a mask and that's wrong because nobody, Wilbur Mills or nobody else, can do that successfully, and he should not be asked to. MOYERS: Why did you choose, Jim, why did you choose Jericho as the title? DICKEY: Well, I don't know because I'm a longterm reader of the Bible, I just think it's marvelous rhetoric

and beautifully stated, and it seemed to me like there's something about the concept of the notion of there being the possibility of a promised land that was right for the South because in a way it is. As Bishop says, we may have had slavery, we may have had lynchings, of course we did, and we fought on the American version of the Iliad where we were the losing side, we were Troy, instead of being Achilles' factions, the Achilles, we lost. But Bishop goes on to say somewhat arrogantly, but in a statement that I myself have remembered, this does not alter the fact that the Southern portion of the United States at a certain historical period, conceived and achieved a way of life somewhat more amiable than any yet seen on this

on this part of the planet in the New World. MOYERS: Oh, I wonder if it didn't achieve it though in in its own mythology. We may never get to the promised land if it ever existed for us to get to. DICKEY: but it exists in the mind, perhaps only there. MOYERS: It's obvious to me that you don't want your sense of being Southern to disappear. DICKEY: No, neither do you. Again, again, my teacher, great teacher, Donald Davidson, who was the mentor of the fugitive groups at Vanderbilt to say in the late 20s and 30s, used to lecture us most eloquently. He said, what gives variety and richness to life is differences. You don't go to Spain or to Italy or to France, because it'll be like what you've left in America. You want to go there because it's different.

There are places in Europe where even today where you can do no more than cross the street and the wines change, the food changes, the clothing changes, the folk songs change, everything changes. This is because these things are rooted in a particular area and they have been that way for hundreds or maybe some, in some cases, thousands of years. Flamenco music, guitar music is a Spanish thing. It's not a French thing. It's not an Italian thing. It's a Spanish thing. Same is true of the South. We have the two greatest musics that the New World has ever produced and they both came from the South. On the Black side, the blues, from which came jazz and all the stuff you hear on that side of music. And from the white Southern Appalachian tradition, bluegrass and country music, country western, out of which comes the whole Nashville scene.

We've produced that, but it's because we produced it in a certain time and of a certain historical configuration. MOYERS: But for all the chords that you resonate in me as you talk about that, I still think it's talking about another lost cause, don't you? DICKEY: I agree. And it's too damn bad. But I think that certain of these things can be preserved on records, they can be preserved in recipes, they can be preserved in certain modes of clothing and so on, they can be preserved and But they will only be similacra of what really actually was. I'm not idealizing things. I mean, I know that the skeleton and the Southern closet, as well as you do, as well as anybody does. I know that slavery was a disgraceful thing. Although perhaps not as disgraceful as it's usually made out to be. I would rather have been a slave, for example, as a Negro than being the New York ghetto right now.

MOYERS: Well, I couldn't say that. I couldn't make that to my reminder what Lincoln said. Any time I hear anybody recommend slavery, I suggest he tried first. DICKEY: Right. Okay. Well, let him try the ghetto too. MOYERS: What about James Dickey? What's going to be his deliverance? DICKEY: Well, I don't know. It'll be involved doing my work and doing my writing and and and living my life and taking care of my people and my family and getting them educated and and trying to experience what what there is to for me. And maybe I set myself the goal of life as far as longevity is concerned. I'd say 85. I can make it 85. But whatever I have to do will have to be done by then. One of my favorite writers is Robert Penn Warren. I saw them up from

Guthrie, Kentucky and I'll finish up just the little thing of his. What I believe in more than anything else is delight and ecstasy. Some of this will come out of the region as the flowering plant comes out of the ground. But you have to be there. It some could have happened to sit in to you in a city when you were about half drunk, for example, with a pretty girl. I don't knock that. Don't knock it if you ain't tried it. Some some good happen just walking along. I believe in both caused and causeless joy. You can see the flight of birds, you know, geese fly over and your heart will be filled with a nameless delight. That's the thing from which the poet strikes his spark. At least this kind of poet does. This is just a few lines from Warren, Robert Penn Warren, about being a boy in the country in Kentucky. As you see is the goose

go over, the flight of geese, and he's filled with an unnamable emotion. "Long ago in Kentucky, a boy stood by a dirt road in first dark and heard the great geese hoot northward. I could not see them there being no moon and the stars sparse. I heard them. I did not know what was happening in my heart. It was the season before the elderberry blooms. Therefore, there will going North. The sound was passing in northward. Tell me a story. In this century and moment of mania, tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances and starlight.

The name of the story will be time, but you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight." MOYERS: Do you remember what tktk said standing at the window there at the end? DICKEY:What? Men like me should live a thousand years. MOYERS: I hope you do. From his home in Columbia, South Carolina, this has been a conversation with James Dickie. I'm Bill Moyers. For a transcript, please send one dollar to Bill Moyers' journal, Box 345, New York, New York,

101019.