James Dickey (1923-1997) was an American poet and novelist who served as a radar operator in the Pacific during the Second World War. This week’s poem relates an incident from that war.
For once I’ll put my comments at the end, to avoid a major spoiler, so please read the poem first and form your own opinions.
The Performance
The last time I saw Donald Armstrong
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,
Going down, off the Philippine Islands.
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side
That his body might pass through the sun,
And I saw how well he was not
Standing there on his hands,
On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,
Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving
In the great, untrustworthy air
He flew in each night, when it darkened.
Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
Next day, he toppled his head off
On an island beach to the south,
And the enemy’s two-handed sword
Did not fall from anyone’s hands
At that miraculous sight,
As the head rolled over upon
Its wide-eyed face, and fell
Into the inadequate grave
He had dug for himself, under pressure.
Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows
Months later, to see him again
In the sun, when I learned how he died,
And imagined him, there,
Come, judged, before his small captors,
Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them—
The back somersault, the kip-up—
And at last, the stand on his hands,
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured from the sea
And the headsman broke down
In a blaze of tears, in that light
Of the thin, long human frame
Upside down in its own strange joy,
And, if some other one had not told him,
Would have cut off the feet
Instead of the head,
And if Armstrong had not presently risen
In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,
And then knelt down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done
All things in this life that he could.
James Dickey
For me this poem is a real problem. When I first read it I thought it accomplished, moving, inspirational even. Then I came across a piece by a critic who had done some fact-checking. It turned out that the whole thing was pretty much made up. There had been a pilot called Donald Armstrong, but he had simply died in the crash. Another pilot with him had indeed been beheaded by the Japanese, but there had been no ‘performance’, no heroic gymnastics – that was something Dickey himself liked to do around camp, and he had simply projected it on to the situation in a kind of narcissistic wish fulfilment. I felt shocked and betrayed. But why, exactly? After all, we know that most of literature is ‘made up’. We don’t expect there to have been a real Odysseus who took ten years to get home after the Trojan War. We know Dante didn’t really get a guided tour of hell in the company of Virgil. We would not be perturbed to learn that the only pilgrimage Chaucer ever made to Canterbury was in his imagination, and we happily accept that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is a gross slander on the real king of that name who apparently ruled wisely and well for many years. In short, we normally accept the principle of ‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato’ – it may not be true, but it makes a good story.
So why do I feel that Dickey’s falsification of the facts in this case is such a letdown? I think it is because one feels it as a violation of trust, that in this instance so much hinges on the events described being literally true that if they aren’t, then what’s the point of it all? I don’t mind poets making honest mistakes. Larkin beat himself up about ‘An Arundel Tomb’ because he quite unintentionally misremembered or misinterpreted a few details. ‘Everything went wrong with that poem: I got the hands wrong – it’s right-hand gauntlet really – and anyway the hands were a nineteenth-century addition, not pre-Baroque at all’. I can live with that, and still admire the poem. But if you’re just going to take real people and real events and make stuff up about them for effect, then maybe you’ve chosen the wrong vocation and should be in politics, not poetry.
And yet, and yet… the poem still moves me. It is very confusing. Should I simply accept Dickey’s own view that there is nothing wrong in letting imagination prevail over veracity? What does anyone think?
David Sutton 