I’d watched DELIVERANCE as a kid and avoided it ever since as it was disturbing as hell. I had no idea it was based on a novel by James Dickey, which came my way when my friend John Dixon said I had to read it. So read it I did, and I’m glad I did.
It’s an almost iconic story now, but I’ll recap it anyway. Four middle-aged men decided to take a break from their comfortable but boring middle-class lives and go on a wilderness adventure riding a remote Georgia river. Along the way, it turns into a fight for survival against both men and the river itself, a horrific but purifying struggle that promises deliverance, one way or the other.
The story is fairly simple, but Dickey explores every piece of the visual scene and its psychic impression on Ed, the protagonist, with writing that can only be described as richly expressed. Dickey has a way of creating a visual scene that makes you feel like you’re standing there, including his portrayals of even minor characters and in particular the wilderness. Where he shines is in his explorations of fear and the courage to survive. “We were free and in hell,” Ed sums it up nicely at one point, and Dickey takes you every step of the way of this harrowing journey.
It’s one of the best novels about survival I’ve ever read, while being possibly the best about the male animal, particularly men struggling with middle-class malaise and midlife crisis and naturally seeking risk to feel truly alive again.
Yeah, Dickey could paint a scene.
Sitting on my shelf is a copy of “Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student”. The chapter on “Imitation” in this dry textbook has you copying excerpts from strong writers. Longhand. One a day, for a month. Nestled in there (with the likes of the Gettysburg Address and E. B. White) was something that left an impression on a kid from the suburbs:
(The man described in this paragraph has just been shot through the breast with an arrow)
“I got up with the gun and the powder, wrapping the string around my right hand. I swung the barrel back and forth to cover everything, the woods and the world. There was nothing in the clearing but Bobby and the shot man and me. Bobby was still on the ground, though now he was lifting his head. I could understand that much, but something kept blurring the clear idea of Bobby and myself and the leaves and the river. The shot man was still standing. He wouldn’t concentrate in my vision; I couldn’t believe him. He was like a film over the scene, gray and vague, with the force gone out of him; I was amazed at how he did everything. He touched the arrow experimentally, and I could tell that it was set in him as solidly as his breastbone. It was in him tight and unwobbling, coming out front and back. He took hold of it with both hands, but compared to the arrow’s strength his hands were weak; they weakened more as I looked, and began to melt. He was on his knees, and then fell to his side, pulling his legs up. He rolled back and forth like a man with the wind knocked out of him, all the time making a bubbling, gritting sound. His lips turned red, but from his convulsions–in which there was something comical and unspeakable–he seemed to gain strength. He got up on one knee and then to his feet again while I stood with the shotgun at port arms. He took a couple of strides toward the woods and then seemed to change his mind and danced back to me, lurching and clog-stepping in a secret circle. He held out a hand to me, like a prophet, and I pointed the shotgun straight at the head of the arrow, ice coming into my teeth. I was ready to put it all behind me with one act, with one pull of a string.”
From Deliverance by James Dickey.