By Guilt Possessed

...The final parallel in our lives came during World War II...

...We shared, too, a passion for Beethoven and Schubert symphonies, playing them at maximum volume far into the night on the hi-fi in Jim's empty office...

...Both of us had written and published poetry, and were filled with the ambition of becoming the author of the Great American Poem...

...The Agee legend grows and grows...

...Pearl Harbor ended my resistance, but not Jim's...

...In the past he had detested the small-mindedness of Rockland, but now, in his own way, he followed the example of Jesus' washing the feet of the poor...

...The novelists Agee admired most were realists: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Joyce, Wolfe, Faulkner...

...the second, Houghton Mifflin, brought the book out during the War and it expired virtually unnoticed when Europe fell to Hitler...

...He finally conquered them by divorcing his cool, intellectual yet protective wife, Via Saunders, to embark on a passionate affair with Alma Mailman . He married Alma at the end of the decade, but the relationship soon broke down and she left him, taking along their son Joel...

...and with his writings, which struck her as obscene and irreligious...

...Without hesitation or stopping to make changes, he batted out what was probably his greatest lyric, "Millions Are Learning How...

...And he did several movie scripts, including The African Queen (John Huston tacked on the melodramatic happy ending...

...Mine was printed and soon forgotten...

...I know this because one day he dropped by my office while I was reading the galleys of a new anthology I was editing...

...For Agee, such caring was filled with spiritual implications...

...it was his way of praising God...

...Of course, Jim also wrote film criticism, the finest to that date...

...Yet he let sentimentality turn his protagonists here into noble victims of capitalism, symbolic saints lacking the capacity for rebellion or self-awareness...

...Whenever he threw himself into a situation requiring compassion, the best of his nature came to the fore...

...Two blocks away I was co-editing Common Sense, a new magazine dedicated to presenting capitalism in the worst possible light and to founding a party capable of overthrowing it without the help of Moscow or Marx...

...Meanwhile, Bergreen's remarkable biography remains unchallenged...

...He left off bewailing his artistic and sexual frustrations and his narcissistic daydreams of literary fame in favor of relieving the sufferings of others and, by extension, his own...

...I had no desire to emulate these masters...

...He had skillfully parlayed this into a job at the nascent Luce empire's fledgling publication, Fortune, on the 52nd floor of the Chrysler Building, and was—uneasily—glorifying capitalism's latest success stories...

...As is the case with most of Jim's best work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is an amalgam oflove and hate: lovefor its three primitively simple tenant families and their makeshift dwelling...

...Jim never really recovered from his father's death...

...It has been fostered by numerous books and even a film biography...

...They're all in my head," he said...

...hate for those who gave him what he considered a "humiliating" assignment, and for himself in the role of a spy, transforming human degradation and squalor into art, only to leave his naive subjects to their desperation and anonymity...

...We were stunned by the epic cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, Friedrich Murnau and Erich Von Stro-heim...

...His mother, who survived him, was wholly out of sympathy with his anguish, which she regarded as self-indulgence...

...Jim, however showed signs that he might, if he could tear himself away from poetry, music and the radical journalism already bringing him into conflict with his benefactor, Henry Luce...

...But since his school days at Exeter, Jim had harbored homosexual leanings that deeply troubled him...

...Tending the needs of others brought him solace and wellbeing...

...James Agee was a fine poet who carried at least some of his poems, finished yet unwritten, in his memory...

...Most reviewers have praised it, and I side with them...

...In the mid-'30s we both married "well-bred" women who shared most of our interests, passively...

...The impulse to kill himself was present in Jim's messed-up life from early on, and he realized that masochistic ambition with drink...

...He evaded military duty, and after Hiroshima joined those who equated the dropping of the atomic bomb with the Nazi Holocaust...

...his intellectual friends, among them Dwight Mac-donald and Robert Fitzgerald, have contributed affectionate memoirs...

...Shoving a typewriter in front of him, I responded, "Start typing...

...At the time of that incident, he was already engaged in the three years' labor of turning a routinzFortune assignment—a documentation of life among the Alabama sharecroppers, with photographs by Walker Evans— into the impassioned prose-poem Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...

...Jim felt his biological father had similarly abandoned him to the unfeeling Mrs...

...But throughout his life Jim was tormented by a deep guilt about his inability as a child to prevent his strong, atheistic, deeply loved protector from leaving the house and a cold wife one fatal night—the night a foresworn drink brought about the automobile crack-up that shattered Jim's secure world forever...

...I am grateful to the author for its balanced view of a friend...

...I told him that there was space for one more of his poems...

...I took it to Random House that afternoon...

...If Alma, oranyone else, wants to write an apologia for his self-destructive course, there is time...

...Like most of the generation that lived through the betrayal of idealism following 1917, we opposed American entry into the fighting...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Artists in Tune with Their World," "The Eye of Man," "Tongues of Fallen Angels" This extraordinarily detailed biography succeeds in conveying James Agee's generosities, exaltations and triumphs as well as his cowardice, self-indulgence and final defeat...

...Alma (who once gave in reluctantly to Jim's insistence that she share her body with a friend while he looked on) has attacked Bergreen's book in a letter to the New York Times as "meanspirited," filled with "errors and distortions," and badly written...

...We discussed our differences without recriminations at our last meeting in Malibu, just before he died...

...Jim cast hisintheottava rima of Don Juan but, possessing neither the cynicism nor the wit of Byron, wisely dropped the effort after several hundred stanzas...

...But Laurence Bergreen's James Agee: A Life is the first full-scale overview by someone outside...

...I published the first excerpts of the piece in Common Sense, and much later, two reluctant publishers compressed the work between hard covers...

...with his radicalism, which she feared...

...We had lost our fathers very early in our childhoods...

...Newly graduated from Yale and Harvard, respectively, we were each riding the crest of a wave of nationwide publicity generated by our separate undergraduate journalistic assaults on the establishment, in his case a witty parody of Time...

...That Jim had reconciled himself by then to the world, even to his father's tragedy, became clear in his posthumously published masterpiece, A Death in the Family...

...To those who might doubt his insight or feeling I offer one example: "Sick with remorse, he forsook decadent Harvard for staid Rockland in late October, expressly to care for [his sister] Emma and a distant relative who were both hospitalized...

...When I first met Jim in New York City in the early '30s, we had much in common...

...Our private lives were in some respects also curiously parallel...

...Jim'smost impressive poetry, though, was in his prose...

...In fact, he was deeply devout throughout his life, trying endlessly to reconcile his love of God and his rational indignation at mankind's "abandonment" to poverty, misery and war...

...Agee—for whom he was quick to substitute first Via and later, following the tempestuous interlude with Alma, his third wife, the practical, uncomplicated, motherly Mia Fritsch, who to the end put up with his infidelities and ultimate decline into a suicidal alcoholism...