Forty years after its publication, Deliverance leaves most of us native Appalachian readers feeling—much like that quartet of luckless river voyagers—conflicted and sore. Its legacy of comedic shorthand spawned in the backwoods of northeast Georgia functions as a regional guilty pleasure. Most of us do not know whether to bow up at the story’s gamy iconography or wear the gag-gift T-shirt that reads “Paddle faster, I hear banjo music!”
However, many of the toothless-sodomizer jokes I have cracked over the years taste brackish in my purty mouth now that I finally have read the book, which does not contain the “purty mouth” or “squeal like a pig” lines made famous in the movie’s harrowing man-on-man rape. I grew up just down a curvy road from where the story’s action takes place, but I shied away from the novel for years, leery of what I might discover about “my people,” and possibly myself.
Certainly, for home-folk, some passages prove excruciating to read, but the writing swept me like a current into an exalted awareness of the primeval and our part in it, reinforcing a perverse pride in our queer—or quarr, as old-timers say—otherness. Appalachian Studies majors usually sputter when their turf is described as “the country of nine-fingered people,” defined in one brutal stroke by sawmilling mishaps. However, poet James Dickey’s novel, which was published as the leaves changed colors in 1970, struck some notes of cultural and geographic chauvinism in me that are, like a twangy, claw-hammer mountain ballad, more complicated and less guileless than they sound at first. Could it be that I am that odd hillbilly who read Deliverance and felt . . . proud?
Its lessons on nature, rendered with such lyrical precision, have been overshadowed by the so-called “love scene.” Dickey wrote with a pupil-dilating rapture for wilderness, for wildness. The river is “blank and mindless with beauty . . . its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence . . . the more wonderful for being unbearable.” Just his description of feeling an owl’s talon through tent canvas is worth the price of the book, which could make a vegan dream of bow-hunting. Humans—the orthodontically challenged and ultimately the Atlanta bidniss-men—are just more feral players in this darkling landscape.