Issue Two

To be honest, I never had any particular desire to read James Dickey’s Deliverance. I knew the story through the much better known movie, and though the movie was an excellent one, it did not seem to have a substance that would improve upon reading. Even further, when I was in high school in Washington, D.C., I listened to a local morning disc jockey who, at least twice a week, played a sound clip of the infamous Ned Beatty scene as part of his comedy routine. The movie, through no real fault of its own, had become somewhat ludicrous to me.

It was with indifference, then, that I picked up Deliverance in a friend’s apartment. To my surprise, I was hooked from the beginning. Instead of a simple adventure story, I found Dickey’s novel to be not only exciting, but both introspective and intensely lyrical.

In the spirit of such books as Lord of The Flies and Robinson Crusoe, Deliverance examines what happens to man when he is stripped of civilization and left to his own devices in heedless nature. The novel begins with four men–Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew planning for a rafting trip in a remote part of the Georgia wilds. The area is slated to become damned, but, as Lewis explains, "right now it’s wild …it looks like something up in Alaska." Bobby and Drew are reluctant participants; they are "day to day happy enough," and they do not especially need or want the trip. Dickey never really fleshes these two out as characters; they are used more as vehicles for the plot and for their responses to the events on the river.

Lewis, on the other hand, is the real impetus behind the trip. A gung-ho weightlifter, expert archer, and full-time survivalist, Lewis is always in search of a test of his skills, will, and endurance. He is something of a Hemingway hero in that his skills are not simply idle pastimes, but rather integral parts of an overall code of how to live truly. Unlike a Hemingway hero, however, Lewis never hesitates to expound on his ideas: "The human race thing. I think the machines are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over." It is not simply a rafting trip for Lewis, it is essential training for the life to come.

As opposed to Lewis’ grandiose motivations, Ed, the novel’s narrator and true protagonist, claims a more prosaic interest in the trip. In response to Lewis’ idyll of the woods, Ed answers, "I don’t mind going down a few rapids with you, and drinking a little whisky by a campfire. But I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about those hills." Instead of Lewis’ quest to live life to its fullest, Ed says that he lives by "sliding," which involves finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing … it is grooving with comfort."

But Ed is actually dissatisfied with his complacent "sliding," and though he might not realize it, he needs the trip to be more than just a weekend lark. He is the art director for a commercial photography company, but the "art direction" usually involves finding the best way to sell fertilizer and other less than life-altering products. This job has taken its toll; in his office, he stands motionless from "the feeling of the inconsequence of whatever [he] would do, of anything [he] would pick up or think about or turn to see." Yes, Ed is deeply afflicted by a classic case of modern day ennui and angst, an affliction which Dickey expands by coupling it to pointed references to "Muzak" and to the insipid routines and appearances of the other drone workers in Ed’s office. Ed is left "with a sense of being someone else, some poor fool who lives as unobserved and impotent as a ghost, going through the only motions it has."

What Ed gets from the river is a bit more than what he asked for. After a relatively calm beginning, the trip quickly slides into a living hell, and Ed finds himself in the role of leader, the one on whom the survival of the rest depends. In contrast to the sleepwalking state of his office life, Ed finds that it is now, when every decision and action can mean an extension of life or instantaneous death, that he truly experiences the world around him. Climbing a cliff face, where any wrong move will result in his fall onto rocks hundreds of feet below, Ed looks out at the river: "What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But, it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence." With only the most basic goal before him, survival, Ed is able to have communion with the Other, the great, unseeing Other which pays his slight and tenuous existence no mind.

So far, the novel’s general formula, at least as far as I have explained it, is not anything unusual or particularly original. I.e., modern day life is full of banal absurdities, and the primeval wilderness, because of its extreme dangers, is a place where one can truly be alive. Dickey, however, goes beyond this pat formulation. During his life and death struggles, Ed frequently remarks on his own situation in terms of old movies he has seen. He also refers to his plans and actions as "worthy motions [he] was going through, but only motions." Ed may be truly living and experiencing the world as he never has before, but there is also a concurrent sense of detachment, a sense that he is but a voyeur of his own struggle with death. Dickey even suggests that the primal can have its share of the mundane: as Ed tries to tie a rope around a body to send over a cliff, he observes, "the head lolled and jerked as I tied, and this irritated me more than anything had in a long time." Raw life, just like office life, can have its share of trivial annoyances.

Perhaps Dickey, through the character of Ed, suggests that modern man is doubly alienated: he is alienated from the world of his own creation, the world of Muzak and professions without consequence, but more, because of this creation, he is alienated from his original, elemental life. Ed might feel disembodied from his life as an art director, but, in reality, he is more of an art director than he is a bow-shooting, cliff-hanging, battler of hill-billies.

While this double alienation might appear to be a rather bleak conclusion, it also has an equally positive aspect. Ed, in experiencing both the transcendence and absurdity of his travails, returns to his former life with a new sense of its possibilities. He remarks, "The studio is still boring, but not as boring as it was." He has come to appreciate the relatively uneventful yet peaceful details of his old and true life. Perhaps man has lost something in no longer fighting daily, in the most basic sense, for survival. At the same time, pleasure and gratitude over a stable existence should never be lost.

James Dickey’s Deliverance is not a book to be missed. For all of the ideas it contains about civilization versus the wilderness, the book is most powerful on the simple level of Dickey’s writing. He accomplishes a difficult feat: he creates a riveting adventure, not in spite of, but because of his poetic description. He manages to keep the prose slow, lingering, and reflective, while simultaneously speeding the action along. The best way to describe Dickey’s writing is through Dickey himself. Ed considers what he must do with his bow and arrow:

"I took my good arrow off the bow quiver, nocked it by feel and drew it back, setting my feet firmly on two big branches and getting solid at full draw… I lined up the shot down into the open places as accurately as I could, thought for a second about shooting the arrow down into the sand to make sure of my elevation, fought off the idea with a quick springing of sweat and relaxed the broadhead out from the bow, letting my breath come forward at the same time. It had been close; I had almost done it. Involuntary release would get me killed, and it was also likely to lose or damage the arrow so that I wouldn’t have any chance at all, if the man came."

Throughout the novel, Dickey acts as Ed the Archer; he pulls back the bow of his prose till the tension is almost unbearable, fights the temptation to release too early, and then releases at just the right moment. The novel is a series of such well-timed releases, for as soon as he lets go of one set of gathering tensions, a new one has already begun.

Dickey, who died in 1997, was considered by many to be one of America’s greatest poets. He was also notorious as a hard-drinking and womanizing carouser. Both the man-of-letters and the man-of-the-world come through clearly in this novel. He is not too much of a poet to keep us from experiencing the immediacy of the visceral action, but he is more than enough of a poet to allow us to see beyond things-as-they-are. I read Deliverance on a trip to Taos, New Mexico, and just as good songs and books will do, this book has already become enmeshed in my trip, forever becoming a part of it.

James Dickey
Deliverance
© 1970
Delta Books (reissue)

$12.95; paperback