The Prodigious James Agee

...For the most part, however, the writing is in the colloquial Mark Twain tradition, which seems to come most naturally to Agee and which he makes fully his own, adding a certain richness of language and rhythm...

...but his Remembrance of Things Past remained unwritten...

...The authority which the older generation found in its literary talent, these others found in systems of thought, political parties, business organizations, educational and other institutions, the examples of famous men...

...Argument was a false note in these confrontations, although it sometimes cropped up and he was capable of rage, hard and soft at the same time, stone and moss...

...The method was passionately analytical, the purpose was praise...

...Let us now praise famous men...

...A Death in the Family is incomplete, but it is full of prodigious moments and confirms one's memories of the prodigious individual who wrote it...

...Rarely a monologue, it was most often, and quite literally, tete-a-tete...

...In the circles he frequented, everyone was pretty intense...

...But it was more or less understood at the time that Agee was special...

...Something like that...

...They smoked, drank, talked, sat up late, wandered around the Village looking for company, dreamed of greatness, fought off sterility—just as he did...

...would be Agee with one interlocutor and two or three determined listeners, seated firmly in his chair, consuming the last of the host's last bottle, ducking his head, shaping his words with his hands, exhausting the topic, exhausting his insatiable listeners, exhausting himself...

...Was he too comfortably uncomfortable in this position, occasionally snarling at his keepers but still accepting the ration of money or admiration they tossed into his cage, still on exhibit...

...There was a unique power in him just as there was a unique beauty in his voice, eyes and hands...

...As I make it out from his conversations and writings, his main struggle was to recapture a creativity which he associated with Joyce, Griffith, Chaplin and others...

...If this is true, it helps to account for his piecemeal production as a writer, his occasional imitativeness and sentimentality, his difficulty in concentrating his mind on anything so definite as a story...

...A Death in the Family is, therefore, far from being a finished whole and it probably can't be understood or judged as such...

...These chapters the editors have placed as best they could, printing them in italics...

...He had the sort of temperament which would have made him a great writer if he had been born just a little earlier...

...He was also the captive of an ideological age, in which he shone by contrast...

...Our only genius," she added, looking hard at us...

...But there are six additional chapters, each more or less complete in itself, which deal with the same family, the same boy, but do not seem either to presuppose or to anticipate the father's death...

...But "genius" is one of those classifying words he resented...

...I have space here to speak only of his posthumous novel, A Death in the Family...

...As to the central subject, Agee renders the sheer shock of the death better than he renders any deeper realizations and consequences of it...

...What Agee did accomplish, between his movie reviews (which ought to be collected), his discursive but brilliant Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his over-written but moving short novel The Morning Watch, was magnificent, even though it seems fragmentary...

...The subject was usually not some matter of general opinion but a particular thing: a Russian movie, FDR's oratory, an episode in Hawthorne or Joyce...

...But to me, at least, it was not exactly a shock...

...Agee lived with a life-consuming sort of intensity...

...The general subject is clear enough: the sudden death of a father and the consequences of it to his family, especially his son...

...There are also pages— including one that tries to render the noise of an auto starting—which sound too much like pages in Ulysses...

...He is essential boy and she is essential aunt and the cap is essential cap...

...The topic was seldom abandoned until it had been thoroughly treated...

...The jeweled prose that Agee sometimes resorted to elsewhere is occasionally, and disconcertingly, present here, too...

...Men of letters are death, just death," he muttered in the course of a long dispute I once had with him about some such writer—was it Gide or Mann...

...Do you remember, Jim, how Edward G. Robinson gets shot down at the end of Little Caesar...

...This central event, as well as the events immediately preceding it and immediately following from it, are accounted for in several chapters which appear finished...

...So does the episode in which the son, Rufus, is bought a fancy cap by his aunt...

...Behind the billboards, yes," Agee would reply, with slow meditative ecstasy...

...It is, however, very wonderful in most of its parts...

...and then he would go on to recreate the whole scene in amazing detail: the lighting of it, the sound made by the bullets in the empty night, the helpless death slump of the lonely little gangster...

...His intensity was different from that of others we knew...

...His own generation—it was to some extent mine as well—was as literary and ambitious as the older one...

...Little Caesar he was—Charlie Chaplin turned criminal...

...He belonged to the time of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Cummings, Edmund Wilson...

...Meanwhile, your place as Agee's interlocutor had probably been taken by other individuals in succession: There were always eager candidates...

...At last the party would have disintegrated—the aggrieved drunks have slouched out, the political-minded have marched off in groups, still debating—and there at 2 a.m...

...And if he was a genius, it was in some sense a captive genius...

...At parties, among the swirling ranks, he liked to put his head together with some other sympathetic head, nodding emphatically all the time they talked, while he sliced, carved and scooped words out of the air with his hands...

...As the publishers make clear in a note, the novel had to be assembled from a lot of manuscript left by the author when he died...

...He was a captive of the Luce publications, for which he worked during long years...

...Agee, in particular, was very ambitious...

...Agee is a genius," a woman writer of decided opinions once announced to a group of us...

...They have also included as a prelude a prose poem, "Knoxville: Summer 1915," which Agee published in Partisan Review twenty years ago...

...It feasted to a considerable extent on what had been: his own past, the South's past, the past of art...

...He labored to repossess a world that had been triumphantly realized by the modern masters...

...An account of the family's visit to an ancient relative in the hills is in this style and seems classic...

...His talk was a sort of rite...

...His death was a great loss and grief to those who had known him, including myself (though I knew him only intermittently...

...They tended to become something quite different: professional revolutionists, Freudians, Thomists, Southerners, journalists, critics, teachers...

...he refined on it...

...Mostly, though, he didn't dispute what you said...

...Yes, Agee's habit of praise, the piety that distinguished him from the reformist rancor of others, partly turned him inside out, too...

...Like Proust, he could only have fully realized himself in some super-work...

...He smoked and drank as if to appease an elemental hunger rather than to satisfy a nervous craving...

...of literature, Columbia University James Agee died in May 1955 at the age of 45...

...Probably he would have gotten around to these: They seem to be assumed in The Morning Watch, which is about a similarly fatherless boy at a later stage of his development...

...But the younger ones seemed to lack the drive, the professional finesse, of the older ones...