Deliverance

One of Drew’s feet flew up and touched my calf, and we were free and in hell.

I think a proper review of Deliverance needs to start with an acknowledgement of the movie -- and, yes, I saw it about twenty years ago and the only two scenes I remembered were the banjo duel and Ned Beatty's "purdy mouth" as he "squealed like a pig" (and I am delighted that the banjo scene was just as meaningful without hearing the music and satisfied that the hillbilly rape scene included neither purdy mouths nor squealing pigs). Nothing that happened after that point in the movie stuck in my long term memory, so happily, the most exciting parts of the book were as unspoiled for me as the wilds of the fictional Cahulawassee River.

In many ways, Deliverance is the book that James Dickey was born to write: Like the main character Ed Gentry (and like Salman Rushdie for that matter), Dickey once worked in an ad agency, and the introductory passages make plain (through the mocking of would-be artists at the agency) the author's early conflict between the desire to create art and the need to pay the bills. And like his macho survivalist character, Lewis Medlock, Dickey felt most authentic when he was out in nature, saying in Self-Interviews:

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.

Couple these experiences with the fact that Dickey was a celebrated poet and, despite the fact that Deliverance was ten years in the writing, it must have flowed from him like…water. Actually, as I understand it, those ten years were mostly spent paring back his manuscript; taming the poetry. But that does not mean that Dickey eliminated the poetry:

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.

When we first began studying novels in school, we were taught that plots had three basic forms: man vs. man; man vs. nature; and man vs. self. Deliverance ratchets up the suspense and menace by throwing in all three conflict types, each writhing with deadly consequences for the four main characters, and related with Dickey's sensuous and masculine writing style, the plot feels epical and biblical and wise. In an interesting synchronicity, the last audiobook I listened to was The Son, and the main character in that book (also, coincidentally, voiced excellently by Will Patton) was Eli McCullough, a white kid who had been kidnapped by the Comanche. After living with them for some years, Eli determined that their way of life was free and natural and real in comparison to what he had known before -- and this is exactly the lifestyle that Lewis in Deliverance dreams of; a taste of which the four citified men are all yearning for. But alas, paradise has been lost and the garden is full of serpents: in the form of the water moccasins that dangle from over-hanging branches and the river itself as it winds and snakes its way through forests, swamps and gorges. Although in the beginning Lewis dreamed of and prepared for a post-apocalyptic future where he could regain the natural way of living, by the end they must realise that paradise has truly been lost forever -- even if there was an H-bomb that wiped out the cities, there would always be toothless rednecks who could surprise you in the woods (and to add to my comparison to The Son, that was just as true for the Comanche in the wild days of the plains: the deadliest snake in the garden is man himself, not necessarily limited to the "civilised" man).

But mainly I was amazed at my situation. Just rather dumbly amazed. It was harder to imagine myself in a tree, like this, than it was to reach out and touch the bark or the needles and know that I was actually in one, in the middle of the night–or somewhere in the night–miles back in the woods, waiting to try and kill a man I had seen only once in my life. Nobody in the world knows where I am, I thought. I put tension on the bowstring, and the arrow came back a little. Who would believe it, I said, with no breath; who on earth?

There has been a long tradition of river novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but what I loved about this one was the way that Ed Gentry left feeling as though the river had become a part of himself -- even his art collages began to include "sinuous forms threading among the headlines of war and student strikes". I leave this book feeling as though the Cahulawassee River has become a part of me as well. I'll need to rewatch the movie now.

James Dickey, naturally, thought of himself as a poet foremost, and to demonstrate the poetic pacing of his novel, I will include one of his poems here:

For the Last Wolverine

BY JAMES L. DICKEY

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be

For a little while    still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,

Surrounding himself with the silence

Of whitening snarls. Let him eat

The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough

For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and from it, have an idea

Stream into his gnarling head

That he no longer has a thing

To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun

Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it

With all his meanness and strength.

Lord, we have come to the end

Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers

And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling    complete    in the joy of a weasel

With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach

Looking straight into the eternal

Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle

Hunched in mangy feathers    giving

Up on the theory of flight.

Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate

To the death in the rotten branches,

Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come

Of it    something gigantic    legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills

Of ice    screaming    that it cannot die,

That it has come back, this time

On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk    and fall

On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon

Riding into battle    into holy war against

Screaming railroad crews: will pull

Whole traplines like fibres from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,

You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion

Of being the last, but none of how much

Your unnoticed going will mean:

How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire    the elk’s

Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing

Thing,” with himself, to eat

The world, and not to be driven off it

Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,

Skunk-bear, carcajoy, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

                        Lord, let me die    but not die

Out.