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PARTISAN REVIEW
pletely elude James Dickey, though there is little reason to suppose he
has sought such virtues. Instead, Dickey has become more and more
himself, changing only by intensifying the mode he revealed in
The
Eye-Beaters, etc.
and
The Zodiac.
His is a poetry of strut and rhetoric,
which all too often becomes posture and bombast. Behind the strains of
this· book we can hear the gothic measures of a certain kind of southern
writing-the same strains that are evident in the fiction of William
Styron, for example. Operating in a world of heavy losses and crushing
failures, Dickey's speaker's argument doesn't seem to be with us or with
himself; rather, he addresses a projection of virtues and possibilities
whose absence he laments while yet realizing they provide his only
fitting subject. He must fondle and he must cry for these lost exalta–
tions, but the crying becomes shriller and shriller, so we can hardly tell
if he's lost them or if he's deluding himself about them in the first
place. The poem for the death of Vince Lombardi, a petty and
ridiculous figure foisted on us by the media's exploitative hungers,
stands as a typical example of Dickey's excesses. Our lack of communal
heroic virtues remains a serious ethical problem in America, but
judging from this poem, with its unconscious self-parody, it's hard to
know if Dickey realizes it's a problem or is simply taking delight in his
own corn pone mixture of
machismo
and bonhomie:
Yet running in my mind
As Paul Horning, I made it here
With the others, sprinting down railroad tracks,
Hurdling bushes and backyard Cyclone
Fences, through city after city, to stand, at last, around you
Exhausted, exalted, pale
As though you'd said "Nice going" : pale
As a hospital wall. You are holding us
Millions together. . . .
Lombardi is dying of cancer, and in Dickey's most tasteless image, the
coach's carcinomatous organ is apotheosized as a constellation (that
"exalted" from the passage above is going to be vindicated at all costsl):
. .. the surgeons got themselves
Together and cut loose
Two feet of your large intestine, the Crab whirled up
whirled out
Of the lost gut and caught you again
Higher up . Everyone's helpless
But cancer. . ..
