Alnilam by James Dickey

First published: 1987

Type of plot: Philosophical realism

Time of work: January, 1943

Locale: Peckover and adjoining Latham Field, North Carolina

Principal Characters:

• Frank Cahill, a crusty, emotionally shallow Atlanta amusement park owner
• Joel Cahill, Frank’s recently disappeared and presumed-dead son
• Boyd McClendon, a Peckover hotel owner who befriends Cahill while he is staying there
• Colonel Vernon Hoccleve, the military commander of Latham Air Field, where Joel trained
• McClintock McCaig, a Latham flight instructor, Joel’s friend
• Stathis Harbelis, a Latham aviator cadet, Joel’s friend
• Major Bruno Iannone, a medical doctor at Latham
• Hannah Pelham, a Peckover girl who loved Joel

The Novel

Inspired, perhaps, by his own World War II flying experiences for the Army Air Corps, James Dickey’s novel Alnilam is set in the fictional town of Peckover adjoining a military airfield near Fayetteville, North Carolina. The central character, Frank Cahill, officially notified of the accidental flying death of his son, Joel, whom he has never seen, journeys to the airbase to meet the officers and aviation cadets.

Alnilam is not divided into chapters or major parts. All the events center around Frank Cahill, recently blind from diabetes, and his quest to find out about his son and the manner of his death. Lengthy passages of the novel are set in parallel columns reflecting darkness and light, the bold left type reflecting Cahill’s internal sensations and thoughts, and the right side the objective narrative of speech and events.

Alnilam opens with an interesting account of Cahill’s attempt to find his way out of a boardinghouse in the middle of a winter night to relieve himself. He is accompanied by Zack, his faithful, untrained dog. This hallucinatory opening is followed by flashbacks of Cahill’s life, fleshing out some biographical details and clarifying his present situation. He is the owner of Willow Plunge Amusement Park in Atlanta. Nineteen years ago, his pregnant wife, Florence, left him forever. He has never once seen or contacted his son, Joel. Cahill’s blindness, the result of the sudden onset of adult diabetes, occurred less than four months ago.

The novel’s events occur within a week in January, 1943. Cahill has just received a military telegram inviting him to the airbase where his son was training. The military cadets are graduating, and they want Cahill to attend the ceremonies. On a selfish whim, he decides to go and arrives with Zack in Peckover, which adjoins the base. He is enthusiastically welcomed by Colonel Vernon Hoccleve, the military commanding officer, who allows him to meet with officers, friends, and fellow cadets—anyone, in short, who knew Joel. Cahill questions all of them about his son. Cahill also meets Hannah Pelham, Joel’s wild girlfriend. She reveals Joel to be somewhat sadistic. Hannah seduces a somewhat surprised Cahill.

Soon a contradictory picture of Joel emerges from the various exchanges. Joel, it turns out, was a charismatic, although secretive and mystical individual. He founded a strange cult among his fellow students named “Alnilam,” which is Arabic for “string of pearls.” The name comes from the middle star in the belt of the constellation Orion. Joel believed that man and flying machine were extensions of one another, and he inculcated this belief through cryptic statements that his followers have elevated to the status of gospel.

Cahill’s investigative mystery deepens when he discovers that cadet-pilot Joel’s plane came down because of a downdraft while he was swooping over a brush fire. He was pulled out of his plane by a farmer and taken to a farmhouse. While the farmer fought the blaze, Joel escaped back into the fire. He then made his way to a river and disappeared forever. The investigating officials were sure his body would show up soon.

Cahill does not share their confidence; neither do the Alnilam cadets, nor McClintock McCaig, Joel’s flight trainer and friend. McCaig manages to get Cahill into an airplane and takes him for a flight so he can better understand Joel’s love of flying. Through it all, Cahill expresses curiosity but no grief. He is neither excited nor repelled by his observations and discoveries.

Cahill’s presence begins to have a negative effect at the base. Zack bites one of the cadets and attacks and kills a pack of dogs. Colonel Hoccleve orders Cahill to leave the base and not attend the ceremonies. The Alnilam group persuades Cahill to remain. They reveal to him Joel’s secret philosophy and the son’s prediction of his own disappearance and the appearance of his father. The cadets, allied with others at various bases, are planning a special surprise at graduation. Cahill enters the base secretly and wanders onto the airfield when chaos breaks loose. The cadets have initiated an insurrection by destroying airplanes, leading to the death of an older pilot and Zack’s decapitation. The novel ends with Cahill returning home and asking Hannah to come live with him. She refuses. Cahill boards his bus, realizing he has come to terms with himself.

The Characters

Frank Cahill is a newly blind, self-sufficient, irascible individual who has been a loner all of his life. Even his marriage, recounted in flashbacks, never brought him close to his wife. She left him while pregnant, and he never tried to contact her or his child until he received the military telegram. Dickey portrays a very unsympathetic character, a cursed, blind Oedipal figure searching not for a father but for a son. He finds some measure of salvation and meaning to life in his quest to understand Joel’s life and death.

Zack, Cahill’s constant companion, is a large, black, wolflike dog that everybody fears, and with good reason. Untrained and newly acquired because of Cahill’s sudden blindness, Zack attains mythical proportions. Afraid of nothing, the canine attacks an air cadet, kills a marauding pack of wild dogs, and is finally stopped only by whirling propellers at the novel’s end. Cahill carries the dog’s head in his hands in a rousing conclusion to the bloody carnage at the Latham Field graduation ceremonies.

Joel Cahill, Frank’s son, is never seen but is described by most all the other characters. Dickey portrays him as a Shelley-like figure, enigmatic, brilliant, and defiant. He is also cruel, and he creates and leads a dictatorial military unit. He dies (or mysteriously disappears) and remains to the reader a creepy, sadistic character.

Boyd McClendon is the garrulous, whiskey-drinking owner of a hotel/diner in Peckover who takes a liking to Cahill. He attempts to comfort and aid him during his week-long ordeal. His presence is crucial to the newly arrived blind hero unfamiliar with Peckover.

Hannah Pelham, who loved Joel, is the wild mountain maid working in the local mill. She sees the messianic cadet clearly, particularly his sadistic impulses. Through her, Cahill attempts to express his welling emotional breakthrough by novel’s end.

At Latham Air Field, Cahill meets a number of individuals. Colonel Vernon Hoccleve, a military commander, is depicted as a straightforward, no-nonsense officer who runs a tight organization. Disliked by Joel and most of the cadets, he is sympathetic to Cahill and Zack, at first, but realizes later the twosome are a disturbing presence. Sensing trouble, he attempts to bar Cahill from the ceremonies, but he is too late to stop the tragic events.

Joel’s flight instructor and friend McClintock McCaig is skeptical about the pilot’s reported death and disappearance. Through his investigative efforts, he discovers physical evidence that Joel may still be alive. Stathis Harbelis is also Joel’s friend and a member of the secretive Alnilam conspiracy. He comes across as naïve at first, but he is a committed true believer, dedicated to carrying out Joel’s cryptic commands to the very end. Finally, there is Major Bruno Iannone, the skeptical medical officer who sees Joel clearly as a dangerous demagogue and a menace to his unit and the U.S. military.

Critical Context

Alnilam was Dickey’s first novel since the highly acclaimed Deliverance (1987). Unlike his first novel, which was a straightforward, macho tale of four innocent people forced to confront their killer instincts in the wild, Alnilam was poetic, intricate, laced heavily with symbolism and given to visionary idealism. It was also less dramatic and less accessible to the reader. Yet Alnilam and Deliverance, while different in stylistic approach, plots, and characters, are remarkably similar in philosophy. The heroes in both novels come to an enlightened understanding of themselves through their remarkable experiences and move away from their meaningless lives.

Dickey exhibits a consistency in his writings. Years earlier, he wrote a poem stating that a man would never see until he either went blind or, like the mythical hunter Orion, became a part of the stars and light. Dickey’s major character in Alnilam, Cahill, fulfills that earlier poetic prophecy. Cahill, recently blind, achieves his own glorious transformation by searching for the truth about his son. In his struggle with himself and the strange world he is visiting, Cahill becomes like the warrior-hunter Orion, with his faithful companion Zack symbolizing the dog Sirius.

In his work, Dickey was always intoxicated with the power of language. In Alnilam, he uses that power to do for air what Melville achieved with water in Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851). For Dickey, air is more fundamental to human existence than water. He examines the kind of emotional state humans achieve when flying. His aim is to show how the human body reacts to leaving the ground. His passages on flying, the importance of flight, and aerial combat are easily the best parts of the book.

Dickey attempted to break new ground in fiction with Alnilam but was only partially successful. Critics complained that the novel was far too long, overblown, and pretentious and was marred by slow pacing. Although the book is ostensibly a mystery, it is shaped less by plot than by poetic impulses. At his best, however, Dickey creates vivid characters, especially Southerners, and is able to create a richly detailed picture of a region.

Bibliography

Dickey, James. Self-Interviews. Edited by Barbara Reiss and James Reiss. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. The most interesting commentary on Dickey is that of the writer himself. A collection of transcribed tapes of Dickey talking about his life and poetry. Includes an informative piece of autobiography on Dickey’s life before he became a full-time writer and straightforward analyses of poems that Dickey wrote in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Dickey, James. Sorties. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Divided into two sections. The first is a daily journal Dickey wrote in the late 1960’s, which contains an interesting mix of ruminations on everything from archery to the nature of love, as well as lengthy character and plot sketching from what was to be published as Alnilam sixteen years later. These entries provide a firsthand glimpse into the extensive planning and rearranging that occur in the creation of a novel. The second section contains essays on other poets, including Theodore Roethke.

Dickey, James. The Voiced Connections of James Dickey. Edited by Ronald Baughman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Baughman has selected portions of interviews with Dickey from 1965 to 1987. The range of selections includes Dickey talking about his poetry, his writing process, his fascination with sextants and celestial navigation, the work of other poets, and lengthy discussion of Deliverance and Alnilam. The image of a fascinating writer emerges, one who speaks plainly about the most sublime things.

Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. See the introduction for an overview of Dickey’s career. Kirschten includes four essays on Dickey’s novels; no bibliography.

Kirschten, Robert, ed. “Struggling for Wings”: The Art of James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. The introduction surveys the critical response to Dickey. There are also two essays on Deliverance and an extensive bibliography.

Suarez, Ernest. James Dickey and the Politics of Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Contains a detailed discussion of Alnilam and an extensive bibliography.