Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [45]
James Agee
The late James Agee’s A Death in the Family is an odd book to be written by a serious writer in this country and century, for it is about death (not violence) and love (not sex). Death is conceived of in a most un-American way, not so much a catastrophe for the victim as a mystery, and at the same time an illumination, for the survivors. As for love, it is not sexual, not even romantic; it is domestic—between husband, wife, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents. This love is described tenderly, not in the tough, now-it-can-be-told style dominant in our fiction since Dreiser. The negative aspects are not passed over—Agee is, after all, a serious writer—but what he dwells on, what he “celebrates,” is the positive affection that Tolstoy presented in “Family Happiness” but that now is usually dealt with in the women’s magazines. Very odd.
There are other original features. We are used to novels that describe the professional and regional background more fully than the human beings, but here there is no “local color,” and we are not even told what the father’s occupation is. We are used to novels about “plain people” that are garnished with humanitarian rhetoric and a condescending little-man-what-now? pathos, as in The Grapes of Wrath and such exercises in liberal right-mindedness. But Agee felt himself so deeply and simply part of the world of his characters—the fact that they were his own family by no means explains this empathy—that he wrote about them as naturally as Mark Twain wrote about the people of Hannibal. The 1915 Tennessee vernacular sounds just right, not overdone yet pungent: “‘Well,’ he said, taking out his watch. ‘Good Lord a mercy!’ He showed her. Three-forty-one. ‘I didn’t think it was hardly three....Well, no more dawdling....All right, Mary. I hate to go, but—can’t be avoided.’” The last sentence, in rhythm and word choice, seems to me perfect. We are used, finally, to novels of action, novels of analysis, and novels that combine the two, but not to a work that is static, sometimes lyrical and sometimes meditative but always drawn from sensibility rather than from intellection. It reminds me most of Sherwood Anderson, another sport in twentieth-century American letters—brooding, tender-minded, and a craftsman of words.
James Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five. He died of a heart attack in a taxicab, and the platitudes about “shock” and “loss” suddenly became real. A friend I had for thirty years respected intellectually and sympathized with emotionally and disapproved of temperamentally and been stimulated by conversationally had vanished, abruptly and for good. I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it, but I am not the only one who expected he would. He really shouldn’t have died, I kept thinking, and now this posthumous book makes me think it all the harder.
The book jacket is, for once, accurate when it describes Agee as “essentially a poet.” For this is really not a novel but a long poem on themes from childhood and family life. The focal point is the death, in an automobile accident, of Jay Follet, a young husband and father who lived in Knoxville around the time of the First World War. This is about all that “happens.” There are other episodes grouped around the death, and they are often vividly rendered, in novelistic terms, but there is no plot, no suspense, no development, and thus no novel. The point of view is mostly that of Jay’s six-year-old son, Rufus, who is in fact James Agee, who is writing about his actual childhood and about the actual death of his father. Even those parts that are not told directly in terms of Rufus-Agee’s experience are affected by this