Into The Wild, Mystical Yonder ALNILAM

By R.Z. Sheppard

From where the poet sat one recent afternoon, the boats appeared to be moving through tall grass. It was a serene illusion. The tawny-green South Carolina marsh spread for a mile, hiding the waterway so that only decks and sails were visible. Playing off the seen against the unseen is one of the tricks of the writing trade and of particular current interest to James Dickey, whose second work of fiction relies heavily on the uncanny perceptions of a blind man.

Alnilam is, as its dust jacket proclaims, a "novel by the author of Deliverance," the 1970 best seller that launched Dickey out of poetry circles and into the celebrity void. He was good, fast-drying copy. Big and burly as a stereotypical Southern sheriff (a role he played in the movie of Deliverance), he strummed a guitar, partied hard and shot at deer with a bow and arrow. His collection of poems, Buckdancer's Choice, won a 1966 National Book Award, but he was also a member of the warrior class, having flown Black Widow night fighters against the Japanese in the South Pacific.

The romantic killer is not an image that Dickey, 64, now cares to perpetuate. Sipping milk on a Sullivan's Island porch a few miles outside Charleston, he tells of blood on the brain that threatened his life last year and required surgery that left a dent in his skull. He talks of hanging up his hunting weapons and of resisting the temptations that caused Hemingway's slippage from art to publicity. "The work is the im-paw-dent thing," he says. "That's all that's going to be left. Otherwise it's just a faded photograph album with a picture of yourself with a rhinoceros head or a marlin hanging on a scaffold."

This is not to say Dickey avoids taking care of publishing business. Earlier on the day of the grass-borne boats, he and his wife Debba, 35, and daughter Bronwen, 6, drove down to Charleston from Columbia, where the writer is what he calls a "schoolteacher" at the University of South Carolina. (Dickey has the knack of making modesty seem epic.) His destination was Chapter Two, a bookstore where he was scheduled to sign copies of Alnilam. It was not the impersonal ritual that authors usually endure. Dickey greeted customers and actively solicited their patronage. The result, according to Owner Susan Davis, was that nearly half of the 100 copies she had ordered were sold.

The notion of 50 readers swinging in hammocks is hard to resist. At nearly 700 pages, Alnilam is a book for a long, hot summer. "I've tried to do for the air what Melville did for water," says Dickey with a laugh that deflects the seriousness of his novel. It is a euphonious mystery story set at a U.S. Army Air Corps training base during the 1940s. Flying, in the mechanical as well as transcendental sense, is basic to the action, which is surprisingly abundant for a book that is shaped by poetic impulses rather than plot.

Alnilam's protagonist is Frank Cahill, an Atlanta amusement-park and swimming-pool owner who has recently been blinded by diabetes. He learns that his son Joel is missing and presumed dead after a military aircraft training accident in North Carolina. Cahill and his touchy German shepherd Zack travel to Peckover air base to learn more, even though father has never laid eyes on son. Cahill had been abandoned by his wife shortly before Joel was born, 19 years earlier.

The truth about the young man emerges slowly and is hefty with mythological implication. Joel was a gifted student pilot who, like Icarus, got too cocky. In the Dickey version, the cadet flies too close to a raging brush fire and loses control of his plane in the hot turbulence. A farmer pulls him from the wreckage, but while he goes to get help Joel disappears, leaving only his broken goggles and a piece of zipper torn from his boot.

The novel's highly charged atmosphere turns these scrap items into relics. Blind Cahill literally feels his way to the truth about his son. Joel's former instructor breaks regulations and takes him for a dangerous spin that conveys the elemental and unnatural sensation of flight. Cahill also discovers that the lost flyer was the leader of a trainee cult known as Alnilam, named after the central star in the constellation Orion, the hunter. Eventually Joel is revealed as an incipient fascist, a "cool-headed demon," an arrogant manipulator of symbols and, reminiscent of the pseudoscientific romanticism of Nazi Germany, a practitioner of "precision mysticism."

This sinister news sets the novel on its final approach: a cautionary tale about the power of negative thinking, or, as one Alnilamist puts it, "Everything will be simple: simple and deep. There won't be anything else; only nihilism and music." Compared with the allusive qualities of the book, such statements can seem as obvious as a Goodyear blimp. But they cannot overshadow Dickey's talent for mating small details, his audacious lyric power and technical risks. At times he splits the page into two columns, the left registering the impressions of Cahill, the right a simultaneous visual sighting of events.

Alnilam also contains impelling descriptions of aerial combat, though we learn later the stories are probably lies. Significantly, the accusation cannot lessen the imaginativeness of the narration. It is one of Dickey's better stunts: to portray the artist as an inspired liar who can convince us that boats float on grass and a book can fly.