James Dickey: The World as a Lie

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.

Henry Hart is himself a talented and resourceful poet, and his writing abilities are fully on display in this beautifully paced and elegantly written biography of an important American poet. The story of Dickey's various forms of sly promotion and self-deceit -- on various levels of consciousness -- is aptly told by Hart, with a wry detachment that seems well-suited to the subject. He is generous in his descriptions of Dickey's achievements as a poet and novelist, and he understands the tragedy of Dickey's precipitous decline, brought on by alcohol and other forms of self-abuse. This is among the finest biographies I have read: a brilliant and thoroughly fascinating work of scholarship and narration.

Hart has produced an entirely absorbing read on one of the true tragic geniuses in American letters. Adopting a dispassionate tone reminiscent of Joesph Mitchell's legendary New Yorker "profiles," Hart deftly leaves all the gallows humor and domestic melodrama to Dickey, which the subject proves eminently capable of providing. I've noticed some reviewers protest that the author dwells too long on the poet's vices. This strikes me as akin to complaining that an otherwise cheerful biography of Richard Nixon devotes too many pages to the gloomy and tedious Watergate scandal. Dickey was a true rake who wreaked havoc on the lives around him. Hart removes the shroud of celebrity and reveals a troubled human being, one whose place in the Western literary canon cannot be challenged.

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).

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.