This must have rankled him, because he always insisted he wrote his three novels merely to pay the rent, an absurd claim to anyone who knows his fiction. But this is only one of many inconsistencies that crease through Dickey’s life. He came from a family that had, he admitted, ““no interest in the arts, and none had as little interest as I.’’ He never quite got over his youthful anti-intellectualism. Even when he discovered the joys of poetry as an adult (while writing erotic letters to a girlfriend during the war, he claimed), he could never talk about his writing without wearing the camouflage of hard-drinking outdoorsman.
He was an Emerson who looked forward to hunting season. Even when he conjured ““The Heaven of Animals’’ (1962), he insisted that ““It could not be the place/ It is, without blood.’’ And while Dickey never stopped promoting his extravagant side, he seemed to understand that such reputations have the shelf life of milk: he quietly saved the best part of himself for his writing. And the best of that writing has no expiration date.
