The Poet’s Family Album
By Christopher Dickey
The closet between the kitchen and the laundry room was still locked the week after my father died, and it took a while to find the key. In that low-eaved house by the lake in South Carolina, there were so many keys. They were buried in cluttered drawers, strewn on dusty bookshelves, crammed into cheap cufflink boxes among discarded military insignia. There were keys to briefcases and suitcases, typewriter cases and guitar cases, and there were Phi Beta Kappa keys. My father, so proud of this academic distinction he’d earned, liked to carry extras. There were keys to other homes we’d lived in when I was a child and to offices at universities where my father had taught poetry; and keys to cars that were sold, or given away in fits of largesse, or crashed when he was drunk; keys to doors and filing cabinets in places unknown and unremembered by any of us who were here, now, alive. And, finally, hidden away by the maid who took care of my father during the years when he was dying, here was the key to the closet by the kitchen.
There was no obvious treasure left inside. Once, there had been silverware, but all of that was pawned and lost when the second marriage was ending. What remained, pushed back on a high shelf, was the baby book my grandmother started in 1923, the year my father was born.
Its pages were made of heavy black construction paper and no matter how carefully I turned them their edges crumbled and came loose in the string binding. The photographs were simple, sunlit pictures shaded in brown and white. I had seen them before, but looking at them had been different when my father was alive to laugh with me at his scrunched-up infant face or his sailor suit or the yearbook picture of Mrs. Osterhout, his elementary school principal, defaced with beard and glasses by his rambunctious pen.
Here is a clipping from the school newspaper that says second-grader Jim Dickey was a member of the “Make Yourself Do Right Club.” What could that mean? I look around to see if there is anyone I can ask. But of course there is no one in the house now -- no one anywhere -- who would ever have known.
There is nothing to do but continue turning the crumbling pages. Class picture follows class picture, and it is not until my father is almost a teenager in seventh grade that I begin to recognize him with any certainty. He is standing there at the back of the crowd on the top step of the E. Rivers School entrance, tall, square-shouldered and smiling. It is the smile that I recognize.
Now, as I look at them, the photographs are filling up with adolescent life. Young Jim Dickey, captain of the high school track team, is stripped to the waist and radiant with the sun, or he is in front of the house and all dressed up for a date with one of the pretty high-school girls glued to these black pages. The energy of his youth draws me in. The thin white edges of the Kodak paper become window frames and I feel as if, through the strong sepia light, I might find a holographic revelation -- might change the angle just a little, and just a little more to get a better look at this lithe boy soaring Apollo-like over a backyard high-jump bar, or this sneering running-back clutching a football, or this young cadet on his way to war with the insolent grin that wasn’t quite hiding his fear.
“What a handsome kid,” I say out loud. The phrase lingers in the empty house. It is something he used to say about others. About my son, for instance. “What a handsome kid.”
I did not know my father the handsome kid.
I knew some of the places where the pictures were taken, because I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ house when I was little. I knew that driveway where the boy in the tweed suit stood with his sister and brother for an Easter Sunday photograph. Those steps in front of the place, and the yard in back, they were part of my life. I even knew where the sawdust pit was dug to receive the angelic high-jumper when he returned to earth. But the jumper himself, that child-boy-man in the pictures, I had never seen him alive.
Most of us have a moment after reaching middle age when we think we know our fathers not just as fathers, but as fellow men. Our own teenage resentments that linger so long suddenly give way to a sense that we’ve seen and done a lot of the same things as our fathers. They are old, but not so old. We are younger, but not so young. If we don’t understand everything about each other, really, at least we understand each others’ circumstances. And there’s also this: we actually knew our fathers when they were the age we are now. Maybe we were just kids, but we can remember glimpses of how they looked, how they acted, who they knew. No measure of memory, however, will take us back to the time when our fathers were teenagers full of dreams and fears, juiced up on testosterone, trembling at the prospect of a first kiss, feeling their way through to a future that was all expectation and no accomplishment. To reach them there requires an act of the imagination, or, perhaps, of the spirit.
In the months after my father died, destroyed by drink and gasping for breath at the end of his 74th year, I set out on a long search for the man I’d lost. I was writing a book about our life together and our life apart. When I was young he’d written a novel, Deliverance, that was made into a movie that made him, for a while, famous. The experience corroded everything in our lives. For most of two decades I blamed him for all that ever went wrong in our family. I left home and left him behind while I became a foreign correspondent covering other people’s wars. I came back to him -- we came back together -- only in the last couple of years of his life. In that time, and after he died, as I worked on my memoir I realized that what went wrong between us had only a little to do with his fame, or with Deliverance, and a lot to do with that kid in the crumbling old album. That boy I didn’t know was the person who haunted my father, the ghost that drove him. The same ghost had haunted me, and driven me from him.
Of course, other fathers introduce their phantom youth into their children’s lives. Maybe they do it by instinct, even by accident. But my father was methodical about it, whether we were watching football (that game he played so passionately and so briefly in high school and college) or reading together the work of other poets (A. E. Houseman’s violently sentimental “To an Athlete Dying Young”) or reading some of the most memorable poems that my father wrote himself -- about a boy riding his motorcycle to meet and make love to a girl in the back of a junked car; or older men talking high-school football; or fathers looking for their own youth as they play with their young sons. He just could not bear to let those years, that life, that energy of the handsome track star slip away from him. He wanted to recover it in his writing, his drinking, and in me. God, I was jealous of that young, unknowable father/ghost in the photographs.
For years after my father’s funeral was over and my memoir was finished, I couldn’t bring myself to look at those friable pages. They lay in a box under my desk at home. No key was needed, but I didn’t have the heart.
Then, just the other day, I opened the picture-book again. In the interval, the Poet James Dickey had come alive once more in the public consciousness, which was something he certainly would have wanted. But his image had been oddly, sometimes hideously twisted. He belonged, it seemed, to the Make Yourself Do Wrong Club. A mistress who’d been scorned long ago wrote a spiteful little book in which she talked about his drinking, his faithlessness, his baldness -- his baldness! -- and any other little curse her long-held fury could conjure against him. My own memoir, Summer of Deliverance, had been widely reviewed, and in almost everything written about it a fraction of a sentence from the first page was quoted: “My father was a great poet, a famous novelist, a powerful intellect, and a son of a bitch I hated.” So even though the book was about love and reconciliation, anger was the headline. As a journalist, I should have known that would happen, and I was sorry for it. But there was more, and worse, to come. A mean-spirited selection of James Dickey’s letters had been published. A dreary biography had appeared that claimed my father’s entire world was a lie, and assumed that all the bawdy tales told about him at faculty cocktail parties were the truth. After a while, I and my brother, Kevin, and our young sister, Bronwen, quit reading this stuff. To others it seemed sensational, or ludicrous, or bathetic. To us it had the stench of exhumation, the ugliness of desecration. To clear the air I would go back to the poems and novels, which are as fresh and powerful as ever, and I went back at last to the sepia, sun-streaked world of my father’s youth.
As I opened the album in my own home, far from the house in Carolina that is now torn down, that boy who haunted James Dickey, and who haunted me, was no longer a threat, and no longer a stranger. I knew more than the smile. I could see into the eyes and recognize them, too. I knew the best of what he would become, and I could put aside the worst. I hadn’t forgotten anything, but I’d forgiven everything, because what time had taught me was just how much I missed him. How much I loved him. Other pictures of my father, some taken with cameras, some remembered, some imagined, clicked through my mind like a slide show, but I kept turning back to the track team captain, the back-yard Apollo. Now, when I say his name out loud, that is the image I see, and it is not defaced by age, or drink, or anyone else’s pen. That was the man my father had wanted to be, to remain, to re-become. Why not? If there is a happy afterlife, then this is the man he is.
I look into those young eyes. “You are a great poet, Dad, and in your own way you were a great father.” I am alone in my own home, but it does not feel empty. “Your sons and your daughter love you as much as you could ever hope they would,” I tell him. “And, Dad, it’s true, you are a handsome kid.”
END
Originally published in A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance, edited by Sarah Ban Breathnach, July 2000.
