Dickey, the Paris bureau chief for Newsweek, is also a crackerjack reporter and savvy writer – his previous books include a novel and two volumes of war reportage – who in no sense is unequal to this difficult and psychologically delicate task.
Or, alternatively, because many of us who followed Dickey’s career reasonably closely have less reason to be surprised.Ĭhristopher Dickey’s memoir is certainly as unsparing and honest a book as Susan Cheever’s, with a similarly uplifting message of redemption and reconciliation. Christopher Dickey’s Summer of Deliverance, which appears less than two years after James Dickey’s passing, may not have the same shock value, but only because the Era of Pathography is firmly upon us.
Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark shocked a lot of Cheever readers when it appeared in 1984, two years after her father died. Cheever veered off into bisexuality, Dickey into compulsive womanizing (he once claimed to have bedded a thousand women), yet the carnage visited on wives and children is depressingly the same.įinally, both writers produced offspring who grew up to be writers themselves and who, in the shadows of their fathers’ deaths, memorialized the relationship in memoirs that separated truth from fiction, man from myth. Both Dickey and Cheever were prodigiously self-destructive alcoholics and, to be charitable about it, marginally functional family men. And the parallels hardly end there.Ĭheever and Dickey both took their families to Italy at pivotal moments in their careers, where each would recharge his creative batteries and, momentarily at least, escape whatever private demons pursued him. Each also wrote a breakthrough novel in his 40s that irrevocably reshaped his career, Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal, Dickey’s Deliverance. What the two men turn out to have in common, however, goes beyond their National Book Awards and contributions to the pages of The New Yorker, the magazine that helped build their reputations. Cheever, the mordant chronicler of suburban WASP angst, was principally a master of the short story, whereas Dickey was a poet by trade, and a superb one, as well as a swaggering, bare-chested Southern man of letters. Until now, perhaps, few would have thought to pair John Cheever and James Dickey as literary twins. SUMMER OF DELIVERANCE: A Memoir of Father and Son.
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