The Poetry of Precision
Schickel, Richard
The Poetry of Precision by RICHARD SCHICKEL THhe late James Agee was "essen--¦- tially a poet." So states the jacket of his posthumous novel, A Death in the Family (McDowell-Obolensky. 339 pp....
...But the colleges are a pretty fair microcosm of our society, so maybe you'll learn something about the big picture from a study of Barr's Liliput...
...The whole story is related in simple declarative sentences and there is a smattering of sex mixed in just the right proportion to the violence...
...That, however, requires some reading between the lines...
...But Agee's was a highly selective eye, which ignored the trivial and the unnecessary...
...Obviously Hadley hoped, through his gimmick, to make some telling comments on American politics...
...5.95), which is the story of a crusade to save the African elephants from needless slaughter at the hands of white hunters...
...To the half-mad Morel, who leads the crusade, the elephants are symbols of "the margin of humanity" which man must maintain if he is not himself to become extinct...
...Jones has a tin ear and an even tinnier philosophy...
...Agee's selectivity brilliantly heightens the mood of his work...
...Of course, the real trouble in the Groves of Academe is a result of something much more deeply imbedded in our society than fatheaded college presidents, hack teachers, and idiot college trustees...
...There is, of course, another poetic tradition, one in which compression, precision of language, the careful use of symbol, image, and metaphor are the laws of composition...
...The effect of this tradition on the novel has been mainly pernicious...
...It needs no excuses or apologies...
...Happily, they never go over the edge...
...The writing it has fostered has mostly been pretentious, vague, and rather self-consciously "beautiful...
...253 pp...
...He (It...
...In short, this is a pretty typical example of standard American entertainment fiction, vintage 1958...
...At that, it is probably an improvement over Lew Wallace...
...A society, Morel reasons, must take on the burden of such useless things as elephants, or soon concepts like dignity and justice will become extinct because they too will seem materialistically useless...
...Writing and ideas are of about the level you'd expect to find in a high school literary magazine, except that the faculty adviser would blessedly blue pencil the sexy stuff...
...The result is a book of hilarious scenes, in which nearly every cherished academic fraud is opened to public view...
...But, all in all, The Roots of Heaven is a highly rewarding and stimulating novel...
...Unfortunately, Agee did not live long enough to complete final revision of the book...
...The sentence aptly describes the book in which it appears...
...304 pp...
...It is at least one reviewer's nomination for the Pulitzer Prize...
...Another stimulating book is String-fellow Barr's Purely Academic (Simon and Schuster...
...The point is that James Agee looked long and deeply into those old eyes, and he had the precise command of his art necessary to set down clearly what he saw and what its meaning was...
...His (Its...
...Toward the end of the novel, the boy, Rufus, is listening to an uncle's description of an incident at his father's funeral, which the child was not allowed to witness...
...They introduce into a previously pleasant block a particularly repulsive family in an attempt to drive property values down, and they are not above some even more unsavory techniques...
...There is, unfortunately, a great deal of truth in Barr's humor, and you'll probably learn a lot from him about why our colleges are turning out a generation of barely literate B.A.'s...
...We are, of course, made privy to the thoughts and feelings of those people, although no stream of consciousness technique is used to reveal them...
...It is all about kicking and gouging (physical as well as verbal) in a suburb which is threatened by unscrupulous real-estate agents who are attempting to put up one of those hideous low-income "developments...
...3.95...
...Agee, too, saw clearly, and because he did, he makes us see clearly new meanings in familiar things...
...A good deal of space is also devoted to details of their behavior and to the words they speak...
...Joy Follet, a good man, the father of two small children, is killed in an auto accident...
...3.95), and most of the reviewers have paid due homage to the poetic quality of his book...
...The latest is Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven (Simon and Schuster...
...It tells with precision how Follet's family, including his in-laws, behaved in those days...
...This calculator, see, figures out scientifically all the things a guy should say and do if he wants to get elected...
...The Europeans have been successfully combining the two in their fiction for years...
...A first novel by Roderick MacLeish, A Time of Fear (Viking...
...But, of course, it is more than that...
...very nearly gets elected...
...Jacket and reviewers are correct...
...223 pp...
...Working with commonplace materials, as the Impressionists did, Agee found great truths, and was able to communicate them while eschewing the banalities of photographic realism...
...His novel is about an electronic calculator who runs for President sometime in the future...
...He could see it very clearly, because his uncle saw it so clearly when he told about it, and what he saw made him feel that a special and good thing was happening...
...One can only stand in awe of the monumental ignorance that went into the writing of this book...
...That he did not live to complete this final task is tragic, but the failure to do so does heighten the book's impressionistic quality, and the relation of the father's death to the boy's development (clearly the child is Agee himself) is quite obvious...
...What upsets Barr are the hypocrisies of the American educational system...
...Its plot is rather obviously manipulated, but this satire has the virtue—in an age marked by bland novelistic humor— of anger...
...As in the best graphic impressionism, there is in Agee's novel agonizing truth and shocks of recognition that are almost physically painful to the viewer...
...Thus, there are several brilliant chapters, set outside the short time span of the novel's main action, which describe a young and sensitive boy's growing awareness of the world...
...Moreover, it should be clear from the passage—which is typical of the book—that the kind of poetry with which his novel is infused is quite outside the tradition of what is commonly called the poetic novel...
...3.50...
...That is all that "happens" in the novel...
...In the end, virtue—of a particularly bourgeois sort—triumphs...
...A Death in the Family is a poetic novel, but unique in the long—and mostly fruitless— history of attempts to fuse the two forms...
...Dooley...
...It is to this tradition that A Death in the Family belongs...
...And, A Death in the Family is a very special and a very good thing...
...There have been more successful combinations of adventure and ideas—as in Conrad and Malraux —and Gary is sometimes needlessly repetitious and confusing...
...Another example of the average fare being served up these days is Arthur T. Hadley's The Joy Wagon (Viking...
...Likewise, they seem to think that anything as physical as adventure intruding in a philosophical novel will prevent it from being reviewed by the little magazines...
...372 pp...
...1266 pp...
...7.50), is an impossibly bad novel...
...He didn't —mostly because the telling comments he put on paper have all been made before by people like Mr...
...Agee obviously intended to weave this material more closely into the fabric of the main action...
...They were just color: seen close as this, there was color through a dot at the middle, dim as blue-black oil, and then a circle of blue so pale it was almost white, that looked like glass, smashed into a thousand dimly sparkling pieces, smashed and infinitely old and patient, and then a ring of dark blue, so fine and sharp no needle could have drawn it, and then a clotted yellow full of tiny squiggles of blood, and then a wrong-side furl of red-bronze, and little black lashes...
...Americans, when they set out to write an adventure novel, feel that anything faintly resembling real thought will hurt their chance of selling the book to M-G-M...
...Here is an example of Agee at his poetic best, in a description of a very old woman's eyes: ". . . suddenly her eyes darted a little and looked straight into his, but they did not in any way change their expression...
...The poetic tradition which men like Thomas Wolfe brought to the novel is that of free verse, the tradition of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and others...
...All this sounds a little forbidding, but Gary has drawn a fascinating gallery of characters who join Morel on his crusade, and their adventures are exciting even though they teeter on the brink of absurdity...
...He is an insider—having been both a teacher and administrator—and he knows whereof he writes...
...Finally, although you are probably sick of hearing it by this time, let it be stated once more, for the record, that James Jones' new book, Some Came Running (Scribner's...
...The novel covers the period from the night before his death to his burial a few days later...
...In an age of behavioristic fiction, in which cigarettes are incessantly lighted and drinks endlessly poured for no reason except that that is what people really do, the selection of material by a novelist is almost a revolutionary technique...
...A Death in the Family has no plot in the conventional meaning of the term...
...Vague light sparkled in the cracked blue of the eye like some kind of remote ancestor's anger, and the sadness of time dwelt in the blue-breathing oily center, lost and alone and far away, deeper than the deepest well...
...Briefly Noted It sometimes seems that only European novelists are capable of combining philosophy and adventure in a novel...
...And it is adherence to its laws—with only a few lapses into Wolfianisms—which makes Agee's final work such a splendid one...
...speeches are pure Eisenhower, and so are his ideas, except they are ten times more banal...
...More than that, along with his painstaking search for le mot juste, it results in a kind of literary impressionism of a high order, capturing a reality beyond mere naturalistic realism...
...In no other sense, however, is A Death in the Family an unfinished work...
...3.50) doesn't waste a bit of time on ideas...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
