I never read the book. Nor did I see the movie, though it came out so quickly after that it marked it as something unusual right off the bat. I don't know why. I would have liked the bluegrassy dueling banjos piece. Maybe I was just going with a girl who didn't like movies then.
I had heard that the instrumental was older than the movie, and it's true.
Some time or place it entered my consciousness as one more Southern writer trying to show intellectuals that he wasn't some hick by putting down the people he came from. I never much liked that attitude, from a Southerner or anyone else. You might have to make an uneasy truce with the people you came from, but they are always part of you and deserving your best look.
Well it's a featured Great Book in the National Review series right now, and Cat Baab-Muguira does a good job convincing me I was completely wrong about this. What Dickey is doing is much more complicated and subtle than that - exactly the sort of coming to terms with your past that an author should do. For example, the four main characters debate what to do with the body after they've killed one of the attacking hillbillies. Four way discussions in novels are usually a billboard screaming "There's not only two sides to this issue."
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I met James Dickey when I was a teenager. He was a night fighter pilot in the Pacific theater of World War II.
They discuss this in the podcast,how often he exaggerated his biography. He was a radar operator with over fifty combat missions, which should be enough for anyone's bragging rights. But he had to say he was a pilot.
Yes, he said that to me. Sorry to hear that it wasn’t so.
Apparently he also claimed to have grown up hardscrabble in NW Georgia, but was actually wealthy* in Atlanta, chauffeured to school. Yet even after knowing he was an incorrigible liar about his own past, people still loved him and admired him. The rest of us can only dream about such things.
*Patent medicine fortune. 3S is apparently still sold in Walmarts in the South.
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