James Dickey: The World As a Lie

Rating:
Summary: Exhaustive and compelling
Review: Author Henry Hart has created a mammoth biography about one of the finest poets America produced in the 20th Century. Drawing from an exhaustive resevoir of interviews, anecdotal illuminations, criticisms and Dickey's work itself, Hart has painstakingly researched the life of a man who barricaded himself inside a fortress of glorious self-promotion.

By all accounts, the difficult Dickey loved the accolades and trappings of fame and worked extremely hard to promote his finely crafted poetry by painting himself as both the uber wilderness alpha male as well as the backwoods red neck. Following in the self mythologing traditions of Hemingway and others, Dickey, a former advertising executive knew how to market a product and became his greatest pitchman. Exploiting America's love of the violent pioneer, he quickly confused fact with reality. For underneath all the bluff, bluster and macho posings,there lay a sensitive, cultured aesthete who favored the creature comforts of the upper middle class.

Much to Hart's credit, he always keeps rightly focused on both Dickey's fine literary output as well as his highly respected career as a college professor. Despite all of Dickey's claims to the contrary, Hart reminds us that here was first rate literary critic and devoted instructor. Hart takes the position that in many respects Dickey became America's answer to Dylan Thomas.

THE WORLD AS A LIE, paints a compelling portrait of an often abrasive, but always fascinating artist. This is a great literary biography. A must read for all Dickey fans.

Rating:
Summary: a hatchet job
Review: Hart pursues his thesis (that Dickey built his life and work around lies) to the point that the book becomes a tiresome exercise in character deflation. It is as if the author wants us to applaud for each and every minute point or quotation of Dickey's that he manages to dismantle (although sometimes on scant evidence). Are we always to believe friends or associates of Dickey over Dickey himself? The author is like a child who manages to catch an adult in a lie and gleefully embarasses the adult over his mistruth. What Hart only occassionally points out is that the truth of Dickey's life is to be found in the lines of his poetry.

the above reviewer makes some excellent points and I defer to his knowledge of Dickey. I'm a Dickey fan; that's all I can say.

Rating:
Summary: Important Biography of the Poet James Dickey
Review: I was Jim's pilot in WWII and was astounded by some of his "recollections", but, then, does an auther have to (or should he) tell the truth? His job is creating images.

Rating:
Summary: The Lie of the Mind is the Truth
Review: In the introduction to "the James Dickey reader," which he edited, Henry Hart states poetically, "Like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Dickey erected a mansion that will endure in our collective memory, but one made of books rather than expensive stones." And in the introduction to his biography of James Dickey, Hart tells us how the subtitle, "The World as a Lie," was arrived at and of Dickey's rough equating of creative enterprise with lying. This is heady stuff, for certain, and Hart does the job of piercing through the philosophical (or anti-philosophical) haze and into the actual stuff or harder reality of James Dickey's life. Throughout the biography, Hart has the humorist's knack for letting what's funny show itself, while taking seriously what should be taken seriously. Hart's own unpretentious style moves neatly through a complex and at times outlandish subject, namely, Dickey. A worthwhile subject (Dickey) gets the good fortune of an equally gifted biographer and editor (Hart).

Rating:
Summary: Important Biography of the Poet James Dickey
Review: James Dickey was a figure of vast contradicitons. In this thoroughly researched biography, Henry Hart explores the life and the fictive sources for his creative gift. Far more than an account of dates and events, Hart offers readers a highly perceptive thesis about the sources of Dickey's own creativity that at one and the same time explains a great deal about his gifts even as it also explains the wreckage of his private life. These were not separate spheres to be kept forever in neatly contained boxes. Rather his propensity for the creative possibility of the lie facilitated his strongest writing even as it left a trail of wreckage in his own life and the lives of those who loved him best. This is an important biography that will not likely be replaced.

Rating:
Summary: The Controversy as a Container
Review: Some reviewers have expressed their concern and dissatisfaction with Hart's concern or possible over-concern with the lies that surrounded Dickey's life. The truth is in the poems and in Dickey's own personal statements. Dickey's poems are narratives mixing both autobiographical and fantastical details; some of which Dickey appropriated from other people's lives. Dickey's public life was a collection of stories...lies. Hart puts the focus of his biography on these lies, because they were so bound up with Dickey's actual life. In his 'Self Interviews,' Dickey himself describes his fascination with lying, both in art and in life. He felt that the poet and artist had the right to lie. If Dickey had not made such a big deal about lying throughout his life, then Hart's biography might seem overkill. But, seeing as Dickey was an admitted liar, provacateur and even suggested the title for the book (which serves as a great justification for the focus of the book), I feel the biography paints a wonderful portrait of a wonderful writer. Hart does not set out to smash the image of Dickey, but to illustrate the different perspectives of the poet's life. Aside from this, the work is beautifully written and the drama of Dickey's life provides ample subject matter for the reader looking for adventure.

I would recommend this book to both Dickey's fans and detractors as a substantial work of literature.