In reaction to his father's attraction to lying, Christopher Dickey became a journalist, a man for whom truth carried the weight of imperative. And this Gatsby-like impulse toward improvement drove him to become one of this century's major American poetic voices. Reality was of value only insofar as it inspired more interesting fictions. Nothing real was ever good enough for the author of Cherrylog Road and Deliverance. Until he was an adult, he had no idea it was all a story, made up because James Dickey thought it would make him a better writer to imagine it. But all through his childhood it remained in the back of his mind, an unsettling reminder of how fragile the facts of his life were. The awareness of this unknown, dead woman who had known his father before he and his mother had was a secret to be kept between his father and himself. She had died of blood poisoning, he said, and then he had come home and married Christopher's mother.Ĭhristopher never really pressed his father for more information. He had been married to someone else, an Australian woman whom he had met during the war. When Christopher Dickey was eight years old, his father, the poet James Dickey, took him aside and told him a story.
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