Our Scrapbook

Goodbye to Serpents

2009-09-16T02:13:00.000-07:00

My father loved zoos, even the tired old cages and their tired old captives at Grant Park in Atlanta. He liked to look into the eyes of the animals in a way that was only possible in places such as these, and he thought somehow that he connected with the wild beasts behind the bars. I witnessed the scene that became the poem "Encounter in the Cage Country," at the London Zoo in 1962, and in the real world there were no dark glasses. The panther just saw my father in the crowd, and fixed on him, and would not take his eyes off of him. But the favorite zoo of all was the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which has changed very little since we used to go there, even if the old hole in the wall entrance off of Rue Cuvier is now re-built and leads the way to a pleasant little restaurant before you get to the entrance of the ménagerie. This was the scene of many a very happy afternoon in 1954, and again in 1962, where the visits always centered around the vivarium and the snakes there -- and their eyes -- that are the subject of "Goodbye to Serpents." Today, if you sit on the bench where we used to sit outside the vivarium, this is the view. - CD

William Tecumseh Sherman Dickey

2008-08-22T15:02:00.001-07:00

Hannah and Her Slave Sisters

2008-08-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

Grandmama Maibelle Dickey

2008-06-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

From Our Scrapbook

Thanks to Patsy for sending us this obituary of Maibelle Swift Dickey, mother of Maibelle and James and Thomas, from The Atlanta Journal, June 10, 1977

Making War Under the Pine Straw

2008-03-14T01:00:00.000-07:00

These are some pictures that were taken with David Goldenberg's camera in 1974 when David and Chris were shooting the documentary in Atlanta. Probably they were taken by Tommy Dickey or Patsy Dickey. In any case, we're very glad to have them. David had the darker hair, Chris the lighter hair. (David still has hair.)

Anyone interested in buying a DVD of the complete movie can visit
BombsInTheBasement.blogspot.com.

Dickey Scrapbook Slideshow

2007-12-17T04:50:00.000-08:00

Hunting Civil War Relics - The Background

2007-07-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

The only brother James Dickey ever knew was Tom, who was two years younger. There had been another brother, Gene, who died as a child before Jim and Tom were conceived, and whose memory haunted them both. A picture of Gene, a beautiful blond child in a sailor suit, always hung in their mother's bedroom.

Jim and Tom competed hard against each other during their adolescence, especially on the playing fields of Atlanta. But then Jim went to war, and Tom, a much more talented athlete, became a nationally ranked runner. My father wrote at least one bitterly jealous letter home from the Pacific about the success Tom was having on the track.

As adults, I think the two men mystified each other. Both had beautiful wives, both had two kids, and they both lived comfortably in the Atlanta suburbs during the late 1950s and early 1960s. But Jim, the advertising man and poet, was obsessive and ambitious for his art, while Tom devoted himself to the relatively undemanding world of real estate, and to his one great passion: The Civil War.

Whenever Tom could, he'd take an old World War II surplus mine detector out onto the old battlefields to find such bits of ordnance as he could. And there was a lot. Eventually the walls of his rec room were lined with neatly catalogued artillery shells and other treasures dug up from yards in Atlanta, swamps in South Carolina, even pulled from the bottom of Louisiana bayous. The concrete floor of his basement looked like an ammo dump. Eventually he wrote an authoritative illustrated treatise about the ordnance which is on the shelves of many military academies and specialty libraries. Tom died in 1987, but much of his collection is now on display at The Atlanta History Center.

In the early 1960s, Jim wrote a poem about Tom's relic hunting that is also, ultimately, about their search for a common history. It begins:

As he moves the mine detector
A few inches over the ground,
Making it vitally float
Among the ferns and weeds,
I come into this war
Slowly, with my one brother,
Watching his face grow deep
Between the earphones,
For I can tell
If we enter the buried battle
Of Nimblewill
Only by his expression ...

Years later, in 1974, I decided to make a film about Tom. Of course, when I was a little boy in Atlanta, memories of the Civil War had been all around us. The centenary came and went. So did a second "premiere" of the movie "Gone With The Wind," which my parents attended in costume. Then, when my father was at the Library of Congress in the mid-1960s, I spent hours taking advantage of my special access as his son to pore over photographs of the Civil War battlefields. Many of them showed carnage that had been airbrushed away in popular history, and it added to my sense of shock and discovery that most were printed as "stereo" cards that could be viewed in sepia-toned 3D.

In film school I had seen the historical documentary "Nuit et brouillard" (Night and Fog) by Alain Resnais, which juxtaposed oddly bucolic scenes of the destroyed Nazi death camps as they looked in 1955 with the horrors that had existed in them a decade before. My idea with the film about Tom was to use a similar technique, with the still photographs of the Civil War dead that I had found in the Library of Congress played against scenes of Tom searching forgotten battlefields and vacant lots in the Sun Belt South.

The film was supposed to be about history and memory, and there's something of that, to be sure. But really it's about Tom: his great charm, his wonderful humor and his strange, and in some ways wildly dangerous obsession with the past.

-- C.D., Paris, July 2007

James Dickey on Saint Simons Island

2007-04-18T00:51:00.000-07:00

The pictures above, taken from the family album, are from the summer of 1942 when James Dickey was 19. He'd played football and run track in high school in Atlanta (those are North Fulton shorts he has on), but this particular summer he'd just graduated from the Darlington School, a military academy in Rome, Georgia. The United States had entered World War II, but Jim was headed for Clemson, where he'd spend his freshman year playing as a wing back before joining the Army and eventually the Air Corps.

Jimmie Dickey, growing up, had spent many summers on Sea Island with his father, Eugene (known as "Pop"), his mother Maibelle Swift Dickey ("Mom"), his older sister, also named Maibelle, and his baby brother, Tom.

Not one of those people is alive today, but Tom's wife, Patsy, remembers well the stories of Sea Island and the life the family led there. The boys spent their days with friends who'd descended from slaves and still spoke the patois called gullah or geechee. Although Mom lived into her nineties, when she was young she was diagnosed with a heart condition and she made it her practice to rest in a darkened room every afternoon. She would leave the boys in the care of a nursemaid or playing with their local companions. When they were very young, Patsy was told, they were actually tied to their older friends with a rope or harness to keep them from getting swept out to sea.

James Dickey wrote several poems that drew on his experiences in and around Saint Simons. The best known is certainly "The Shark's Parlor," about a couple of teenage boys on Cumberland Island, south of Saint Simons, who catch a fish much bigger than they bargained for: a huge hammerhead shark. They wind up dragging it not only out of the water -- the "beery shallows" -- but, with the help of bystanders, right through a rickety beach house much like the one pictured below:

The screen door banged and tore off he scrambled on his tail slid
Curved did a thing from another world and was out of his element and in
Our vacation paradise cutting all four legs from under the dinner table
With one deep-water move he unwove the rugs in a moment, throwing pints
Of blood over everything we owned knocked the buck teeth out of my picture
His odd head full of crushed jelly-glass splinters and radio tubes thrashing
Among the pages of fan magazine all the movie stars drenched in sea-blood.*

Many other poems that are less well known were also inspired by experiences along the South Georgia coast. "Near Darien" is one of James Dickey's best love poems. He has taken a flat-bottom boat out into the river in the night under a full moon. A wind blows up ...

And finds me exultantly sleeping,
My ear going down to the floor
Of the sea, overhearing, not fish,
Their gills like a bracken all swaying,
But man and wife breathing together.

A few years later, in the poem "At Darien Bridge," the poet likens marriage to the experience of the chain gangs he saw building the span across the water when he was a little boy:

The sea here used to look
As if many convicts had built it,

Standing deep in their ankle chains,
Ankle-deep in the water, to smite

The land and break it down to salt.
I was in this bog as a child

When they were all working all day
To drive the pilings down.

Jim Dickey's childhood experiences on Saint Simons also resonated in the way he raised his own sons, Chris and Kevin, and his daughter Bronwen. One of the family rituals on the island was fishing with a hand line. Even when James Dickey was dying of lung fibrosis in the summer of 1996, his breath aided by a heavy oxygen machine, he would recall those days as he and Chris worked their way up the stairs to the third-floor bedroom of their house near Pawleys Island, South Carolina.

This if from Chris's memoir, "Summer of Deliverance," published by Simon and Schuster in 1998:

The machine was about as big as a hotel minibar and probably as heavy, but I held it next to me as I climbed, afraid that I'd lose my balance. I'd always tensed up around my father; always been clumsy. I was forty-four years old and that hadn't changed.
One flight, the landing, one flight, the second floor, another flight and another landing, and finally the last flight to the top floor. I set the machine down delicately, then stood up and stretched with some slight sense of accomplishment as I felt the muscles in my back and shoulders pump up a little from the strain. I found a plug; hit the switch. The machine sighed to life. The little ball floating in a tube on the front climbed to the 3.5 liter line and steadied.
"Five!" he shouted from below, and I wondered where he got the breath. "Five! Got to have it!"
I adjusted the knob; watched the ball rise. "You got it," I shouted down. I couldn't see him from where I was. I shook out the long plastic tube to make sure it wasn't kinked and he had some slack. It went taught. And jerked.
Then jerked again.
And again.
Damn!
"Chrissy?" His voice sounded -- as okay as it could.
"Chrissy? What's that?" He jerked on the tube again, like a fish striking a line.
He was playing. Ah, God. He was calling up memories of summer vacations forty years ago on a long pier in Florida; memories of a father teaching a son the secrets he'd held onto from his own childhood, that code you build up over a lifetime: How to hold a marble and aim it and shoot it, or how to make a predator-call from a blade of grass between the thumbs; or how to know when a fish was striking a hand-line, or a crab was just sawing at it. I jerked gently on the tube to set the hook, just like he taught me, and went back downstairs smiling.

The thirteen pictures below were not dated in the scrapbook that Maibelle Swift Dickey kept for her oldest surviving son from 1923 to 1948, and many of them were arranged on the black pages by size rather than chronology. From appearances, most were taken when Jimmie Dickey, born in February 1923, was five to ten years old.

None has been published before.

*"The Shark's Parlor" is written with gaps in the lines which this Blogger software removes automatically. The text will be a little clearer if you read the full poem as published in "James Dickey: The Selected Poems."

Note: All these pictures can be enlarged if you click on them. The computer file names of the scans begin with the words "Sea Island," but all were taken, I believe, on St. Simons.

All photographs and text on this site copyright Christopher Dickey

2007-04-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Maibelle, Jimmie, Tommy and friends, circa 1932

2007-04-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

On the steps of a house called Vann Haven, circa 1932

2007-04-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

Tommy and Jimmie fishing with nursemaid.

2007-04-18T00:22:00.000-07:00

Tommy and Jimmie on horseback, circa 1929

2007-04-18T00:09:00.000-07:00

2007-04-18T00:07:00.000-07:00

Pop with Tommy and Jimmie about to go fishing.

2007-04-18T00:06:00.000-07:00

Tommy, Jimmie and friend ready to race

2007-04-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

Nursemaid and Jimmie in the shallows, circa 1927

2007-04-17T23:58:00.000-07:00

Jimmie and Tommy on sand sled, circa 1929

2007-04-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

2007-04-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

Jimmie dives off Pop's shoulders, circa 1929

2007-04-17T23:53:00.000-07:00

2007-04-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

Jimmie, happy with Mom in the shallows

Maxine Dickey, 1926 - 1976

2007-01-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

James Dickey's first wife, Maxine Syerson, was the only child of Maxine Webster and Valdemar Sejersen, who changed the spelling of his name when he immigrated to the United States from Denmark. This is a picture of the Sejersen family in the old country. Val is seated on the far right.

Maxine Webster and her sisters were raised in Union City, Tennessee, by an imposing father who bore a certain resemblance to President William Howard Taft.

One of Maxine Webster's first loves was Reggor Motlow, heir to the Jack Daniel distillery. But Maxine was a flapper and a free spirit. She went out West with some friends and met Val at a campsite in Yellowstone Park. (She drew his attention when she sang "Pistol Packin' Mama Don't You Two-Time Me" by the campfire.) The courtship was quick and Maxine was soon pregnant.

Their daughter, nicknamed "Ting," was born in 1926.

Val and Maxine separated when Ting was still an infant, and Maxine Webster got a job in Nashville working in the attorney general's office. Ting was sent off to Birmingham, where she was raised by her aunts. Eventually she moved back to Nashville, where she graduated from Saint Cecilia Academy.

In her late teens during the war, Ting briefly married a Naval ensign and jeweler named Joe Watts. They divorced after about a year, and young Maxine got a job as a ticket agent with American Airlines. On a blind date, she met Jim Dickey, who was studying at Vanderbilt on the G.I. Bill.

They were married in 1948.

2006-12-25T07:21:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1954, with money from a Sewanee Fellowship, James, 31, Maxine, 28, and Chris, not quite three, went to Europe. They landed in England, where they picked up a Hillman Minx convertible, then traveled to Dunkirk, down to Paris, and to the Cote d’Azur. In Cap d’Antibes, they rented a ramshackle villa called Galidou, on the hill below the lighthouse. They took occasional trips to Cannes, to get mail from the American Express office there, and up into the mountains to a small ski resort at Valberg.

In the spring they drove to Italy. What follow, in a separate posting, are photographs taken with a Kodak "Brownie" on that trip, and excerpts from a rambling conversation between James and Chris in Columbia, S.C., on December 29, 1996, a few weeks before James died.

All the photographs can be enlarged by clicking on them. - C.D.

Europe, 1954-1955

2006-12-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

Partial transcript, James Dickey and Christopher Dickey, talking about their family and their travels, on December 29, 1996.

JAMES DICKEY: … I remember that time in '54 when we were in Cambridge because I played the best tennis I ever played on their courts. I played with …an Australian. And all of them could play tennis. I eked out a narrow victory. I played way over my head. I remember those Peter House courts as being where I had my finest hour on the courts. But I loved walking around there. It's beautiful isn't it, Cambridge?

CHRIS DICKEY: It is beautiful, absolutely.

JAMES: … Yeah, we went there. We were there in England, round and about London looking at the museums and so on. We didn't travel much out from London on that trip. …

CHRIS: The first time we went over on the Queen Elizabeth and came back on the United States.

JAMES: And I won the ping-pong tournament. I still have the trophy.

CHRIS: On the Elizabeth or on the United States?

JAMES: On the Elizabeth, on the Elizabeth. The United States was a smaller steamer and everybody really did get sick. Me included. Oh I got so sick.

CHRIS: I remember the Elizabeth vaguely. I don't remember the United States really at all.

JAMES: Yeah, oh I got so sick. I remember the movie that I went to see on the United States was The Blackboard Jungle.

CHRIS: Oh yeah?

JAMES: And everybody was throwing up in the theater.

CHRIS: Jesus.

JAMES: Me included. Oh it was terrible. And ah, so we came back on that and then went to Florida. See I had been writing letters all the time we had been in Europe to try to get a job, teaching job, when we came back. And ah, so Andrew took me on.

CHRIS: You left Rice with no prospect of going back to Rice?

JAMES: No I didn't get along with the head there at all. … My salary at Rice was twenty seven twenty. I don't mean twenty seven thousand. I mean two thousand seven hundred and twenty and nothing in the summer time.

CHRIS: God how did we live on that? We lived in faculty housing.

JAMES: Yeah and your mother worked for, as a receptionist for a hillbilly radio station, KNUZ. Radio ranch. They were very fond of her there. She did a good job. We had that money. … I can remember calling up and hearing a spritely voice, "KNUZ Radio Ranch. Can we help you?" We struggled, man I tell you. We finally acquired a television set. … I remember before we got the TV set. Rice won the conference and they were going to play in the Cotton Bowl against the Univesity of Alabama. We all wanted to see the game. So the poverty stricken faculty came up with a pool and we rented a hotel room downtown with a television set. We all went down to watch the game. Which we won. So those were our conditions there. I had a five dollar allowance a week from the family to buy a book. And I still have some of the books that I bought down there. It was very carefully calculated. That was my big high point of the week. But I was writing away. ….

CHRIS: I remember Valberg.

JAMES: Way up in the mountains. That was a scary ass place.

CHRIS: That used to scare the shit out of me those drives up to Valberg.

JAMES: Amen. I saw a chamois standing on one of those crags. I thought it was a statue or something. But he turned around and ran off. I thought that is a real ---. It's out of that sort of Valberg landscape that I got a great deal of To the White Sea from.

CHRIS: Oh yeah?

JAMES: Driving up in there. That real rugged type country. Well who wouldn't be scared. … We drove her up there in our little bitty --

CHRIS: Hillman Minx.

JAMES: Hillman Minx, yeah. But, when you got up there it was a charming place, wasn't it? … It is so remote. [Used to go to a restaurant called La Baroque?] … It was sort of on the way up toward Valeberg. That is where they had those birds that shot to death with sand. You know so they wouldn't hurt the meat. We went up there a few times. That was quite a restaurant. That is the kind of thing you go to Europe for.

CHRIS: Yeah, there is less and less of it really.

JAMES: Yeah that is true.

CHRIS: Everything is better known.

JAMES: It's all going.

CHRIS: It is all being globalized and homogenized.

JAMES: It is all going. And we are all going to end up in that great Rexall in the sky. That is our heaven.

CHRIS: Eckerd's.

JAMES: Yeah, that is our heaven.

CHRIS: Yeah, shit. So … let's go back to the first trip. First trip we landed, didn't we land in Southhampton the first time?

JAMES: Yeah, we did.

JAMES: Yeah.

CHRIS: And then we went Dunkirk, then I don't know where we went. I guess Dunkirk to Paris.

JAMES: Paris.

CHRIS: And then and then I don't know. The logistics of that trip I made when I was three. I remember endless telephone poles. Because I would lie down and try and sleep in the back of the Hillman Minx. You'd make a little place for me. And I would be looking out the window and all I would see would be telephone poles going by. Seemed like long, long drives. Probably some of them were I think.

JAMES: Yeah. I was fascinated by every detail though. I had never been such a place before in my life. The only time I had been overseas was in the Army. This was certainly different from that. So when we got down to the Cote d'Azur, we looked around at various places. …

CHRIS: Wait. Backtrack. When we were in London did you go to, did you look up anybody in London?

JAMES: [David] Dowler.

CHRIS: Dowler. And did you, did you meet T.S. Elliot?

JAMES: Yeah, I met him. …

CHRIS: In '54?

JAMES: Dowler knew somebody who knew him.

CHRIS: Did you have a conversation with him?

JAMES: Very short. … Spender also. I had had some correspondence with and he knew him. And I had, did some things with him on his magazine Encounter. I believe did some light editing and so on. He didn't publish anything of mine. So we went from there …So we got down there [to the Riviera] and we were casting around down the South of France. What is the place that made so famous of Brigitte Bardot?

CHRIS: St. Tropez.

JAMES: We went to St. Tropez where it was very nice, but crowded. And I remember we went out on the docks where there were a lot of boats, sail boats, and some people invited us to come aboard and have a sandwich, all very friendly people. So we thought about there, but we couldn't find a place there. So we went on down the coast to Antibes. It seemed a nice little village. And we found a real estate guy there that rented us Galidou. And we talked briefly to the proprietess of Galidou who had that big overgrown front yard. I said, "Serpents, des serpents ici?" She said, "Pas de serpents." That was a great relief to me. NO snakes. So we live there with a very -- that was a pleasant part of life at Galidou. We had three or four glorious weeks. We would go down to the beach, to Plage La Garoupe, which was made by Gerald Murphy who was Fitzgerald's great friend.

CHRIS: We would go out on the pedalos.

JAMES: Yeah he is the one who made that beach.

CHRIS: Yeah

JAMES: Go out on the pedalos and had a nice time. I wrote a lot there. And you had Tuffy to play with. A little caniche dog. … And you and I would get up on that upstairs porch and play soccer.

CHRIS: Yeah and you would hide, you would hide chocolate money for me. When I would come and look at it then you would jump out of the bushes and scare the shit out of me.

JAMES: Yeah, as I say, those were great days. We have some pictures of you and bringing the ice up for the ice box.

CHRIS: Have you been through all those pictures that I brought in?

JAMES: No, no there is too many of them. But we have got them. That is the heritage…. Maxine was wonderful. She was so adaptable. It was just a glory to behold. She could go anywhere in any country, she would not know a word of the language and she would have, by the afternoon she would have everything organized. She had the people down at the marché so, so close, so much in her favor that they would give os to the chien. Give the dogs free bones. It was kind of funny I was trying to learn the language to read the writer and to get conversant with the literary part of it. And I would read and so on with the dictionary. And she would go down and learn it on the practical side among the people in the markets and the stores and so on. And we would come back at the end of the day and compare notes. I would say, "How much French did you learn today?" She said, "Well not very much really, but I think I, down at the marche I think I learned something I think is going to be a lot of help to our family financial picture, a phrase." I said, "What is this magical phrase?" She said, "Trop cher." I said, "I think that will work."…

CHRIS: There was a cafe we used to go down to--

JAMES: Le Glacier. And we had a favorite waiter there. … Do you remember Picasso? … He was very nice to us. He was especially taken with you. … He sketched you. And I thought he was going to give it to us. He said [shakes his head].

CHRIS: Is that a true?

JAMES: Yeah, yeah sure it is. He, we have Picasso pieces here.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah I think we went to the Glacier the afternoon we were back in Antibes [in 1962] and it -- it was cold--

JAMES: Oh so miserable. And the bookstore that I loved so much, Monsieur Aldon, was closed and he was gone and nobody knew where he had gone.… When we got down to and got established at Galidou [in 1954] I would go over to Mr. Aldon's and talk for hours. And a man came in with his family and bought a book from him and talked to the librarian or whatever the book store guy, Aldon, for awhile and about the purchases he was making, some of the books. And he went away. I said to Mr. Aldon, "Picasso." And he said something to the equivalent, yes we have some Picasso here some prints and so on. I said, "No, no c'est Picasso lui-meme." "Picasso lui-meme, mon Dieu il a acheté un livre de cuisine!" So that happened. He bought a cook book. And that, what is it, Gilot? That girl, woman--

CHRIS: Francoise Gilot.

JAMES: Was in attendance also. I never did talk to her, but I saw a lot of her.

CHRIS: Yeah it's all these famous pictures that you see now with all the Picasso revivals of Francoise Gilot and two children, Paloma and the brother.

JAMES: Yeah she was very much, and Claude who was one of his older children. He … Now him I remember very little except that he was much taken with you and very, he was a very good guy just to stand there to listen to you. He couldn't speak any English and I didn't speak very much French. But he, I had the impression of Picasso as being very intent on what was being said and on the person he was talking to. I mean he wasn't making any show of himself at all. He was just -- he would be right with you and wasn't going to interrupt you or anything. It was very courteous. About the other side of his life I don't know anything except what everybody else knows…

CHRIS: But we are bouncing back and forth between '54 and '62. '54 we went down to Antibes and we were in Valberg and all that . And then we struck out. …

TAPE ENDS