An Absence of Influences

...The author then focuses on her theme: that Agee was a man riven by contradictions...

...author, "The Party of Eros" James Agee's life and work were inextricably one...

...We never find out what made him tick—and explode...

...Reviewed by Richard King Associate Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College...

...We get little sense of the circles Agee traveled in, and we put down the book having learned less about its subject than his own letters to Father Flye and the memoirs of friends have already told us...

...Agee's later life reflected the antinomies of his background...

...Dwight Macdonald wrote that his friend lacked not only personal discipline, but also a tradition to shape his considerable —and erratic—talents...

...Missing are the crucial details that reveal character or illuminate the intersection of the personal life and the cultural situation...

...So much so, in fact, that his all-night discourses on just about everything, his admitted failure to husband his talents and the clearly autobiographical nature of his writings have become staple fare in accounts of his life...

...No wonder he considered himself a spy and a traitor, a man who had done violence to the lives of his hosts...

...He should have added that Agee leaves his poverty-stricken Alabamans no culture—that is, no humanity...

...In reexamining Famous Men I found the narrative had little relation to its ostensible subject...

...Despite this embarrassment of riches, Genevieve Moreau's The Restless Journey of James Agee neither evokes the man nor satisfactorily explores the complexities of his work...

...He haughtily dismissed conventional radical or liberal solutions to their condition and preferred to see the terrible "beauty" of their lives preserved: Esthetics triumphed over politics...

...it needs ventilation, some modulations in mood and tone...

...He labored on a Time cover story with the same diligence he brought to his own work...

...This is his dark side, and should be examined in a biography that sets out to dispel the "myth of James Agee...

...He lived "under the sign of his absent father," who had been killed in 1915 when Agee was six, she points out...

...After a painful five-year period of revision, rejection and negotiations with publishers, it was issued in 1941 to minimal sales and attention...

...Hence the discrepancy his last wife observed between the size of his talents and the work he produced...

...Unlike Faulkner, who guarded his privacy with mulish tenacity, or Thomas Wolfe, who wrote so much and revealed so lit-tile of himself, Agee was a profligate self-discloser...

...its author's eye and ear masterfully capture nuance and detail...

...Yet the Gudgers, Woods and Ricketts rarely emerge as living beings...

...And, though his film criticism helped establish the genre in America, major reputations are scarcely made in so problematic a field...

...That this should be so is perhaps understandable, for the driving force in the book is its author's search for self-definition...

...Yet T.S...

...The contrast between his father, a rough-hewn, violent man from East Tennessee, skeptical of organized religion or any conforming creed, and his mother's middle-class, Northern and Anglo-Catholic origins set the stage...

...True, she is traveling in fast company: Agee's friends, particularly Robert Fitzgerald and Dwight Macdonald, have written insightful and not altogether laudatory essays on him...

...few critics bothered reviewing it...

...So in the end Agee's compassion for these rural victims condescended as much as the agitprop art and journalism he scorned...

...Was his brutality ever directed at friends or lovers...

...It is Famous Men, however, that Agee is best known for...

...And Agee himself, equipped with a fine critical mind, was typically eager to dissect his own flaws—melancholia, self-pity, weakness of will, acedia...

...By striving for a morality and an esthetic of consciousness unsullied by the world, he sought to reclaim through them the innocence he had lost...

...Although Moreau includes an example or two of his rage, she never goes any further...

...He had, albeit not in the way he thought...

...On the other hand, A Death in the Family, written at the same time in the late '40s, is a minor masterpiece, a staggering and moving work, offering a near perfect combination of tact and feeling...

...Without a shaping influence, his protean sensibility failed to cohere...

...Moreau's problem is that she fails to bring these contradictions to life...

...Similarly, she summarizes and scrutinizes Agee's work for thematic concerns, while rarely evaluating it or placing it in context...

...Perhaps such questions seemed indiscreet to Moreau, an invasion of privacy...

...We almost never hear their voices, merely the author's describing them or agonizing over them...

...The uprooted Southerner identified so closely with the tenant families because both he and they (at least as he portrayed them) were naked and alone and struggling...

...By leaving the South at the age of 16, Agee cut himself off from the energies released by the "Southern Renaissance...

...But it is not without good reason that a classic has been defined as a book no longer read...

...Everything was of utmost importance and consequently very little got done...

...The tenants and their surroundings are indeed meticulously described...

...His failure is intimately related to Moreau's contention that Agee lived under the sign of "the absent father," meaning that he experienced his tradition as an empty one...

...He shifted continually and uneasily between journalism and art...

...In short, The Restless Journey lacks the "high" gossip that makes literary biography worth reading...

...Not much separates them from the animals to whose lot Agee frequently compares theirs...

...Thirty years later it has assumed the status of a documentary that transcends the conventions of the form, an exemplary act of piety that renders justice to the lives of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama, where Agee and Walker Evans lived during the summer of 1936...

...It seems that he was often unable to discriminate between the essential and the tangential...

...Who the hell am I?" he asked near the end of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and continued by lamenting that "only the hard bastards come through, I'm not born and can't be that hard apparently...

...His was not so much an "anxiety of influence" as an anxiety over the absence of influences...

...between an excruciating courtesy and gentleness and occasional explosions of physical violence against himself and others...

...between a belief in the holiness of all creation and an attraction to the mordant writings of Celine...

...The pre-lapsarian state he imputed to the sharecroppers defined the distance he himself had traveled—and not their situation...

...Moreover, it is one of the few works by an American (particularly a Southerner) that depicts family life as something other than a chamber of horrors, a breeding ground for despair and psychosis...

...Moreau begins promisingly enough by devoting her early chapters to establishing the two themes of Agee's life—death and the South...

...His treatment of the tenant families recalls the failures of some of the historiography of slavery: A stress on the depths of privation and oppression runs the risk of denying the oppressed the space of freedom that, no matter how limited, ultimately constitutes their humanity...

...As a result, he vacillated between feeling that the whole world depended on his assuming a proper attitude toward it, and the nagging sense that he was utterly unworthy and not up to the task...

...Why, for instance, were his first two marriages failures...

...he had to do it all himself...

...and trying to account for their genesis...

...They are without religion or song, art or story, or games—a bit of affection and lust maybe, but hardly what could be called love or friendship...

...Macdonald's judgment that Agee's best poetry came mixed with his prose is probably accurate...

...Morning Watch is too cloying and obvious in its symbolism...

...with less evidence, she claims he always felt guiltily severed from his native region...

...Lionel Trilling perceived part of the problem when he scored Agee's lack of "moral realism...

...Mathews has reported that photographer Walker Evans broke off close contact with Agee because of the Ten-nessean's uncontrollable violence...

...What remains of his contributions are a novella, The Morning Watch, an unfinished novel, A Death in the Family, several short stories and fables, and one unclassifiable "classic," Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...