To the White Sea.

To the White Sea

James Dickey

Dell Publishing

New York City, NY

ISBN: 0385313098, $11.95, 275 pp.

"A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness--a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility." --Jack London

To the White Sea is a brutal, lyrical odyssey of an American's trek across World War Two Japan from Honshu to the snowy wastes of Hokkaido, the northernmost island. Compared to Jack London, master of the primeval tale, James Dickey, the author of Deliverance, is even more primitive, if that is possible. For while London described the ferocity he found in the struggle of man and beast to survive in the northern wild, Dickey's narrator is striving to become an animal in the wasteland.

Everything in this story told by Muldrow, a mythological Anthropos or Primordial Man as Dickey constructs him, is of his senses: the blue-gray hue of a winter sky; the stench of sewage; the rumble of bombed buildings collapsing in sections; the wail of panicked Tokyo crowds lumbering through charred streets like a cattle-herd.

But in order for the narrator to reach the ice of the North, the fire in Tokyo must first light the way. On the night of March 9, 1945, Muldrow, tail gunner on a B-29 Superfortress, takes off from Tinian Island along with three-hundred and fifty bombers. The day before, a Colonel has detailed what is in store for the people of Japan:

"We are going to bring it to him. Fire. Up yonder. Up yonder to the north. North and fire. We're going to put him in it. We're going to put fire all around him. We're going to put it over him and underneath him. We're going to bring it down on him and on to him. We're going to put it in his eyes and up his asshole, in his wife's twat and in his baby's diaper. We're going to put it in his pockets, where he can't get rid of it. White phosphorous, that'll hold on. We're going to put it in his dreams. Tokyo is going to remember us."

This raid is the climax of a three-month firebombing campaign designed by Air Force General Curtis LeMay to end the war by burning the Japanese nation to a cinder. Loaded to the gills with incendiaries, the Superforts conduct the most devastating raid of all, worse even than what will come to Hiroshima in August, obliterating 16 square residential miles in Tokyo and killing 85,000 civilians. Built essentially of teakwood and bamboo, floods of fire roll, roil, and gush through the buildings, streets, and infrastructure of Japan in an all-consuming torrent. At ground zero the temperature rockets to 1800 degrees. Canals boil over, metals melt, and human beings burst spontaneously into flames.

Muldrow parachutes onto the edge of this inferno when his ship is blasted by flak, and lands near the Tokyo docks where he holes up in the cockpit of a crane and then in a sewer pipe. He plans to weave his way out of the city in the pandemonium and make for the countryside where avoiding people is easier, and then move north like a migrating caribou.

Equipped only with his G.I. emergency kit containing a tiny map, knife, fish hooks, twine, flints, a compass and flashlight, he is nonetheless uniquely suited to survive. Raised by his father on Alaska's Brooks Range, he has learned to stalk game, traverse glaciers, navigate through ice lakes in kayak and snowshoes, stay warm, make shelter, and keep camouflaged like the snowshoe hare. Of his prowess he says, "I could outthink any animal or bird that lived in the cold, by thinking more like he did than he could do."

The Wild is not his problem; the problem is getting there safely, through a rabid populace that will tear an American soldier to pieces. To illustrate the danger, Muldrow, skulking in the hills, witnesses a downed flier decapitated by a mob and the severed head kicked about like a soccer ball.

Guided by Polaris, he eventually manages to hop a train and lie hidden in the wood of a log-carrying freight car. Far from feeling fear or dread over his predicament, Muldrow is a happy man, reveling in his element. With the night train chugging forward under a full moon, he spins a fantasy of Alaska, imagining himself as a lynx standing atop a hill with others of his kind, then plunging into a herd of caribou and cutting out a calf while the frightened herd thunders off. Howling in his fantasy, he lets loose for real on the train--there is no one to hear him--throwing back his head and howling lustily at the star-studded sky, baying the moon. "What had me," he says, "was more than I was. I couldn't help myself and didn't want to."

With this scene we begin to glimpse the depth and power of the novel. For Muldrow is clearly in the grip of an archetype, an enduring primordial image of himself as a man-beast, simultaneously hunter and hunted, predator and prey. The motif of the man-beast, whether called a Werewolf, a Minotaur, a Yeti, or some other name, is common to all cultures in all times. And true time, as an American Buddhist monk whom he meets explains, is the time of the psyche which is eternal; the human psyche intrinsically possesses and passes on a race-memory that draws it back even to its own origins, to the world of pure instinct. "You are two people," the monk says. "One lives in the mechanical time of the clock. The other one watches what the first one does. He watches from the dream, when the spirit comes loose from the clock. The second self can go backward in time." The theme of de-evolution, of an atavistic descent into the unconscious, will reach full flower in the story's climax.

Despite capture and a savage beating by Japanese soldiers, Muldrow engineers a daring escape and at last arrives at the strait, where he steals a boat and rows across what he conceives of as a white sea, the heart of ice, to Hokkaido and the North of his dreams. In a snow swept forest he tracks a herd of goat-like creatures and, after a vicious goring, Muldrow kills a bull. He then settles down in the snow and feasts with gusto on raw animal-flesh, hoping to ingest its mana, its spirit, man predatory and primitive as any brute that ever lived: "I started to eat, first off the hip and then up around the spine, bringing the blood in too, as much as I could get. Don't let anybody ever tell you blood is not good to drink? They say about the wolverine that it will never be driven off a kill, that it'll die before it will leave what it's eating. I could believe it; I out-ate any wolverine."

In the Wild he meets and shares food with an ancient hunter. Fascinated by his knowledge, Muldrow remains with him and learns the ways of his hawks, inheriting them after the old man dies. When, in a symbolic conclusion Muldrow at long last achieves his heart's desire--the death of his human body--his soul begins to molt and he metamorphoses into a great-winged bird of prey. Though at first glance this may seem silly, the climax was actually being prepared on the book's second page and the entire narrative bent was toward this end. Obviously for

Dickey there is more honor among the animals of the world than among men. Much better, then, to be one of them. After all, it was not the caribou nor the hawks nor the bears that burned down Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Man-made and technological, a forbidden fruit plucked from the tree of consciousness, fire here represents the worst attributes: cruelty, corruption, lust for domination, naked aggression, murderousness. Though beasts may be, in Jack London's phrase, "red in tooth and claw," they live and die by natural selection and are without evil purpose, without malice, without sin. Those distinctions are reserved for man. Dickey contrasts animals hunting food in the pristine north of immutable cold to the human butchers down below, hauling the hellfire of war along behind them with both hands.

To the White Sea is a very fine novel, beautifully crafted, with the incidents arranged in perfect order and building admirable tension before exploding in a worthy finale. It is full of haunting, numinous imagery and possesses a splendid simplicity and economy of language in harmony with its elemental theme. This is unsurprising, coming as it does from the pen of a major American poet. If the plot strains credulity--how predictable that Muldrow proves to be an Alaskan survivalist--(it would have been far more interesting had Dickey made him an accountant), that is a small price to pay for the creation of a modern myth.