Dickey visit to open collection

In the 1972 film "Deliverance," author James Dickey, portraying the Sheriff of Aintry County, declares, "Let's just wait and see what comes out of the river." The scariest things that could come out of the river (in the form of dead bodies) are the secrets that the main characters are keeping. In that sense, "Deliverance," the film and the novel upon which it is based, is very much about secrets--keeping them, hiding them and being afraid of them.

The role of the sheriff was the third one for Dickey in the making of this film--the first two being that of screenwriter and novelist. And secrets are nothing new to Dickey. But in what might be his greatest legacy, Dickey is no longer keeping secrets. This month, The James Dickey Papers, part of the Floyd C. Watkins American Literary Manuscripts Collection, will officially open in Woodruff Library's Special Collections Department.

In a rare public appearance on Thursday, Oct. 12, Dickey will read from his work and attend a reception marking the opening of the collection. The event will take place at 7 p.m. in the Carlos Museum Reception Hall.

Understanding the collection

Steve Enniss, the manuscript librarian who has been cataloging the collection, explained that "in the broadest terms, this collection is very much what we thought it was." He described several important elements of the collection.

The collection documents the literary apprenticeship that led to the completion of Deliverance in 1970. New insight into Dickey's most important prose work might be gained through the numerous early drafts as well as the correspondence between the editors and the writer. Dickey, who held a national reputation as a poet during the 1960s when he served as the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress, seemed to be shifting genres. Enniss explains that there was much literary foreground to the writing of Dickey's first novel. In his early journals in the 1940s, there is evidence of a Dickey who already thinks of himself as a writer. The journal accounts include mentions of what he was reading and who was influencing his writing.

The collection also includes many early short stories that will be unfamiliar to Dickey scholars and remain unpublished. It is apparent even in these early works that war experiences were already an important influence on Dickey. War stories appear in many of his works including his second novel, Alnilam, and his most recent novel, To The White Sea. Dickey's own combat missions are recorded in official and personal papers in the collection.

Another important element to the collection is the documentation of Dickey's public life. Enniss points out that "like Dickey crafted verse and prose, he was also crafting a public persona, quite deliberately." The public and private Dickey becomes apparent in the numerous correspondence including letters to and from Richard Howard, Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, Willie Morris, Howard Nemeroff and Robert Bly. The correspondence often included drafts of poetry and responses to work.

The state of Dickey scholarship

When collections like this one are acquired by libraries, they are assessed in many ways including their potential research value. Although Enniss notes that Dickey, who was perhaps the most well-known American poet during the 1970s, has "fallen out of favor in many academic circles" he expects a reappraisal of Dickey's life and works. There are several points in a writer's history when this sort of reappraisal might happen--the release of a new work, the writer's death or important revelations about earlier works.

Kevin Ray, acting head of Special Collections at Washington University in St. Louis, where another major Dickey collection resides, stresses that their collection, acquired in the late 1960s, has been used by faculty and researchers in a variety of important ways. The Washington University collection covers Dickey's life and career from 1954-1970 and contains many revisions of poems and other editorial matter. These manuscripts have been used by classes to explore the creative process behind works of poetry or fiction. Ray pointed out that the manuscripts demonstrate "that revision takes place very often and is meaningful and frequently radical."

Researchers interested in the period in which Dickey was working or any of the many other writers with whom he corresponded have used the collection in their scholarship. He noted that Dickey scholars are fortunate that the bulk of his papers are only in two locations. "With many writers, researchers have to do quite a bit of globetrotting."

The Dickey collection at Emory represents the library's largest Southern literary archive and the largest research collection for the study of Dickey's life and work. While the collection holds much new information about the writer's long career and his personal life, Enniss notes that the conclusions must finally be left to the biographers. "The collection doesn't have an agenda. It doesn't argue favorably or unfavorably," he said. It does, however, indicate Dickey's willingness to share his secrets.

In the film "Deliverance," when the cocky Lewis played by Burt Reynolds plows down a mountain road until he stumbles upon the Cahualawasee river where their adventurous canoe journey begins, he announces, "sometimes you have to lose yourself before you find anything." Perhaps in his boxing up of his life's papers, photographs and correspondence and turning them over to a public realm, Dickey has lost a sense of his private and enigmatic self. But the collection with all of its secrets and surprises preserves and amplifies the echo of one of America's great literary voices.

--Matt Montgomery