My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  “Jan,” I said as the waters roared around us, “I’d rather get raped by a mountain man than go down this river with you again.”

  “Get out onto the rocks,” Jan said.

  “Are you nuts?” I screamed.

  “You’ve got to push us off. Then jump back in as fast as you can.”

  Resigned to my own death, I stood on the great rocks overlooking Sock-em Dog, pushed off, and watched Jan and the canoe get swept over the falls and disappear from sight. A quarter of a mile downstream they emerged. Shaken and dazed, Jan looked back and gestured with his hand and arm for me to join him.

  “I’m going to die because James Dickey wrote a novel,” I thought as I jumped feet-first into the raging, man-killing water of Sock-em Dog. I am the only person I have ever known who swam the Chattooga River because he loved the literary work of James Dickey. Though it damaged my friendship with Jan, I had taken risks for the sake of my art. It gave me encouragement to write Mr. Dickey to ask if I could sit in on two of his courses the following year.

  On January 9, 1972, I received this gracious reply from Mr. Dickey: Dear Pat Conroy: Thank you for your recent note and for the things you were kind enough to say about my work. If you want to sit in on one of my classes, it’s fine with me (he underlined the word “me,” giving me—not underlined—a cheap thrill), but you’ll have to take care of the administrative details with the English department, or whoever handles such things. Sincerely, James Dickey.

  I raced downtown to Edwards Department Store and bought a cheap black frame and put the letter in it. This letter remains emblematic and precious to me, and I have kept it near my desk for my entire writing career. I took it to Paris in 1979 and to Italy when I lived in Rome for three years in the eighties. I used it as a talisman and totem that my fate had straightened out in its course, and something ineffable and unalterable had come into my life. Now, at long last, I would learn whether I could swim the Chattooga or not. I began driving to Columbia twice a week to take Mr. Dickey’s course in modern poetry and joined his poetry-writing workshop. James Dickey became my teacher.

  Hero worship has always played an enormous role in my writing career. When I walked into James Dickey’s class, I suffered from a terminal case of it, a goner beyond hope of redemption. I knew of no known antidote for my Dickey fixation, knew only that it was incurable. When a writer takes possession of me, there is nothing I can do but sit back and enter into the sacredness and delight of the ride itself. When James Dickey strolled into the room for that first class, I was dizzy with an exaltation I can still feel today. I had come to the place where I would learn how to write as I thought I was born to write. As he set his books down on the desk, I promised I would take in everything this poet had to say and would not waste a moment of his time. True to my word, I never spoke to Mr. Dickey in those two classes, but I wrote down every word he spoke. I never heard anyone read poetry with such authority or conviction. He made the English language seem like a tongue he had invented himself. In every way, he was a marvelous, passionate teacher, the kind that changes the lives of students who come to him for enlightenment. I would leave his classes and dance to my car, my head filled up with his words. As I drove back to Beaufort, I tried to force myself to think about language in the way James Dickey thought about it, or more thrillingly, the way my teacher thought about it.

  From the beginning I had one great, roaring issue with the figure that James Dickey cut on the campus of the University of South Carolina. When Mr. Dickey first came into the classroom, it stunned me to see my father stroll into the room disguised as the greatest poet in the land. My hatred of my son-of-a-bitch father was in full flower when I came to Dickey’s class, and no one whom I had ever met reminded me so much of Don Conroy. Both of them were large, intimidating physical presences; both had been accomplished athletes; both had found themselves as night fighters during World War II; and both exuded a masculinity that I found overpowering and even dangerous. Because I had been raised in the house of the Great Santini, beaten up badly on a regular basis, forced to play sports by a father who would always root for the other team to belittle me, then sent to The Citadel for a final ripening, I had encountered enough machismo in my life to start a Spanish restaurant. Dickey’s mere aura could fill a room like a battleship, and his raw, animal physicality discouraged me from the beginning. I could even hear faraway hints of my father’s commanding voice when Mr. Dickey spoke. I had never before met a poet, and think I had fantasized that James Dickey would teach me things like flower arranging or origami when I was hanging around after class. “This is the guy who wrote ‘Falling’ and ‘The Heaven of Animals,’ ” I thought.

  During my time with James Dickey I heard him read Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill,” and thought I had never heard a more beautiful male voice read a poem of such shimmering and immaculate language. I fell in love with a dozen poets just because I heard their work read with such devotional respect in that classroom. That winter, I attended the first James Dickey poetry reading I could get to, where my overwrought hero worship shifted into a much higher gear. Before that night, I thought poetry readings were the most torturous way of spending an evening outside of setting yourself on fire. I have never heard any writer, before or since, who read his own work with such inimitable skill, passion, or confidence. James Dickey was so amazingly good at these performances (I witnessed five of them) that I have never read from my own work. If I could not mesmerize a crowd in the Dickey way, I wanted no part of putting a crowd to sleep because I lacked his talent or charisma. He packed in the crowds, and they came to be transfigured. I had stumbled into Dickey’s life at the most illuminating and perilous of times. James Dickey was in the process of becoming a celebrity, and I think it would partially ruin his life. That year, he talked often of Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight and the filming of Deliverance. I got to watch James Dickey fall in love with being James Dickey, and I believe this helped me as much as anything he taught me. I watched as Dickey became part of the newly developing celebrity culture in America, and I could sense its danger for him. I could hear the rapids ahead. He made it all sound glorious and romantic, this flirtation with Hollywood. All I could think of was, he was heading straight toward Sock-em Dog.

  As I watched Mr. Dickey fall in love with his own fame that year, I worried about him. Because of my study of him, I decided never to teach writing in college if I could help it. It seemed deleterious to a man’s character to have moon-eyed groupies such as me following you around campus, like a single file of box turtles. In class, I noticed that the other students were as gaga and reckless in their devotion to Dickey and his work as I was. I could not figure out how this would be desirable for the soul of a poet. The young women in the class were lovely and fresh and sometimes dazzling. These pretty girls would stare at Dickey with Casablanca eyes, the gorgeous eyes of Ingrid Bergman saying good-bye to Humphrey Bogart at the airport. It also occurred to me that those young women could offer Mr. Dickey a gift that I wasn’t about to offer him, even if he was interested in accepting it. When visiting writers from other colleges came that year, I noticed a lot of sixty-year-old male writers married to twenty-year-old girls. Though I was fully capable of screwing up my own life in inscrutable and even unimaginable ways, it was important to learn about the pitfalls I could avoid if I were vigilant and cautious. James Dickey walked into a cathedral of worshipers whenever he came to class. It was great for us, his students, but when I left class on the final day, I had real doubts it was good for him.

  I began serious work on The Great Santini while I was a student in Dickey’s class. I also wrote a poem about a Little League coach I had one summer in Arlington, Virginia. Dave Murphy was an FBI agent who died a slow, agonizing death from cancer the year after he coached me. When I turned it in, I was mortally afraid, because by then I knew that Mr. Dickey could be a harsh and mordant critic. What I mean by that is that Dickey judged his students’ work against the best poetry ever written. You either got
better or got your feelings hurt rather badly. When he handed out the poems in the next class, he had written on mine: Now we are onto something, Mr. Conroy. Now let’s have at it. This is the real stuff. Now the real work begins.

  I left class armed with weaponry I needed for my own life among words. James Dickey and I never became friends, and I say that with regret, even sorrow. He treated me with genuine kindness whenever we met, which was not often. When The Great Santini was published, I had a signing where everyone could have fit into a telephone booth. But Maxine Dickey came and bought a book and treated me like visiting royalty. I had never met the wife of a great poet, but I’ve loved her my whole life for the kindness and class she showed me that day. She told me, “Jim’s proud of you, but he’d never come to something like this. He’s very competitive, you know.”

  “Having you come, Mrs. Dickey, is the highest honor,” I replied. “It’s better than a visit from the ambassador from the court of St. James’s.”

  I saw James Dickey very few times during the rest of his life. He sent me telegrams when my books or movies came out. I wrote him two letters in my life, thanking him from the bottom of my heart for his teaching and saying that I hoped I would prove myself worthy of that extraordinary time in his classroom. Then I talked about his writing and how much I admired it. Recently I returned to James Dickey’s work. I didn’t have to go far, since much of his work is on my writing desk. I read from Poems 1957–1967 almost every day of my writing life. Sorties is nearby and is wonderful. I booked a return passage on Deliverance. I reread Self-Interviews, dipped into Alnilam again (the badly titled novel that neither Mr. Dickey nor I could pronounce accurately). With joy, I went to The Whole Motion and To the White Sea. With nostalgia, I gave The Zodiac another chance and still feel it doesn’t quite work. His output is enormous, and he wrote at a high level for a longer time than anyone else in the history of American letters. I would have loved to read the poetry he wrote in his late seventies and eighties. He kvelled with attention and praise. He bloomed in the limelight. Center stage was where he was born to be.

  After I read the biography James Dickey: The World as a Lie, I was going to write a letter to its author, Henry Hart, and suggest that his next biography focus on the life of either Heinrich Himmler or Vlad the Impaler. Although I know why Henry Hart subtitled the book The World as a Lie, I think its essence would be served better by calling it The World as a Myth, or The World as a Dream, or The World as a Poem. What Mr. Hart misses with astonishing completeness is that art can never be a lie—even if James Dickey claims it is.

  Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dickey across the land.

  Let me end my story with this: My relationship to James Dickey is a simple one. I go often to his mansion of art. To me, his book Poems 1957–1967 is the finest book of poetry ever published in America, and I include in that assessment Leaves of Grass, the collected works of Emily Dickinson, the works of Wallace Stevens, and I will throw in T. S. Eliot for dessert. When Dickey is writing at his best, it is like listening to God singing in cantos and fragments about the hard dreaming required for the creation of the world. Dickey crafts and fixes each of his sentences as though he were trying to shape a mountain range glorious enough to hover over Asia. When I read James Dickey, I am transported into that ecstatic country where poetry and poetry alone can take you and shake you with the cutting beauty and hammerlock of its language. Dickey changed the way I looked at mountain rivers, lifeguards, women preachers, flight attendants, wolverines, the belt of Orion, buck dancing, and a thousand other Dickey-praised subjects. His writing is mouthwatering, breathtaking, and our sweet-faced language had never packed as much bite and punch per pound as it did when James Dickey strung it to its bow and aimed it at the carotid artery of poetry itself. I can enter the world of his writing, and it is like swimming the Chattooga River. It is subtitled The World as the Truth.

  One of the proudest moments of my life came years after James Dickey was my teacher, and that was when the Dickey family asked me to deliver James Dickey’s eulogy. Here is my final prayer for James Dickey, and Dickey lovers will know where it comes from: Lord, let him die, but not die out.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHY I WRITE

  A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largesse. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire. I would work without a net and without the noise of the crowd to disturb me. The view from on high is dizzying, instructive. I do not record the world exactly as it comes to me but transform it by making it pass through a prism of fabulous stories I have collected on the way. I gather stories the way a sunburned entomologist admires his well-ordered bottles of Costa Rican beetles. Stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself. I am often called a “storyteller” by flippant and unadmiring critics. I revel in the title.

  Many modern writers abjure the power of stories in their work, banish them to the suburbs of literature, drive them out toward the lower pastures of the lesser moons, and they could not be more wrong in doing so. But please, do not let me mince words in this chapter in which I offer an explanation and apologia for why I write. Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks. I have been mortally afraid of the judgment of other writers and critics since I first lifted my proud but insecure head above the South Carolina marsh grass all those years ago. Some American writers are meaner than serial killers, but far more articulate, and this is always the great surprise awaiting the young men and women who swarm to the universities, their heads buzzing with all the dazzle and freshness and humbuggery of the language itself. My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own. Here is one: The writers who scoff at the idea of primacy of stories either are idiots or cannot write them. Many of their novels could be used in emergency situations where barbiturates are at a premium and there has been a run on Unisom at the pharmacies. The most powerful words in English are “tell me a story,” words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

  Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. When you come close to succeeding, when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life’s work.

  I have always taken a child’s joy in the pain
terly loveliness of the English language. As a writer, I try to make that language pitch and roll, soar above the Eastern Flyway, reverse its field at will, howl and reel in the darkness, bellow when frightened, and pray when it approaches the eminence or divinity of nature itself. My well-used dictionaries and thesauri sing out to me when I write, and all English words are the plainsong of my many-tongued, long-winded ancestors who spoke before me. I write because I once fell in love with the sound of words as spoken by my comely, Georgia-born mother. I use the words that sound prettiest or most right to me as I drift into that bright cocoon where the writer loses himself in language. When finished, I adore the way the words look back at me after I have written them down on long yellow sheets. They are written in my hand, and their imperfect shapes thrill me. I can feed on the nectar of each word I write. Some are salt-rimed with the storm-flung Atlantic on them, some mountain-born, writhing in laurel, but each with a dark taste of my own life fresh upon it. What richer way to meet the sunlight than bathing each day of my life in my island-born language, the one that Shakespeare breathed on, Milton wrestled with, Jane Austen tamed, and Churchill rallied the squadrons of England with? I want to use the whole English language as the centerpiece of a grand alliance or concordance with my work. I see myself as its acolyte, its spy in the College of Cardinals, its army in the field. I try to turn each sentence into a bright container made of precious metals and glittering glass. It is the carrier and aqueduct of the sweetest elixir of English words themselves. I build these sentences slowly. Like a glassblower, I use air and fire to shape the liquids as they form in my imagination. I long for that special moment when I take off into the pure oxygen-rich sky of a sentence that streaks off into a night where I cannot follow, where I lose control, when the language seizes me and shakes me in such a way that I feel like both its victim and its copilot.