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viewpoint. The father and mother, although they are major figures, are barely individualized, since to a small child his parents are too close to be distinctly seen. The more distant and lesser figures, like Aunt Hannah, are more definite. Parents are big, vague archetypes to a child (Strength, Love, or—alas—Coldness, Failure), but aunts are people. In this child-centered structure, at least, A Death in the Family is in the American grain. (Why are our writers so much more at home with children than with adults?) Many of the best things are connected with Rufus: his delight over his new cap, his comic and appalling relations with his little sister, his nightmares (“and darkness, smiling, leaned ever more intimately inward upon him, laid open the huge, ragged mouth”), his innocent trust in the older boys, who tease and humiliate him with subtle cruelty. These parts of it can be recommended as an antidote to Penrod.

Agee was a very good writer. He had the poet’s eye for detail. “Ahead, Asylum Avenue lay bleak beneath its lamps....In a closed drug store stood Venus de Milo, her golden body laced in elastic straps. The stained glass of the L & N depot smoldered like an exhausted butterfly...an outcrop of limestone like a great bundle of dirty laundry....Deep in the valley, an engine coughed and browsed.” He could get magic into his writing the hardest way, by precise description:

First an insane noise of violence in the nozzle, then the still irregular sound of adjustment, then the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch as accurately tuned to the size and style of stream as any violin...the short still arch of the separate big drops, silent as a held breath, and the only noise the flattering noise on leaves and the slapped grass at the fall of each big drop. That, and the intense hiss with the intense stream; that, and that same intensity not growing less but growing more quiet and delicate with the turn of the nozzle, up to that extreme tender whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film.

I haven’t watered a lawn in forty years, but I remember that was the way it was in Sea Girt, New Jersey. And this was the way trolley cars were:

A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.

These passages are from “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” which appeared in Partisan Review twenty years ago; the publishers have had the good idea of reprinting it as a prelude to A Death in the Family. “We are now talking of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child,” he begins, and he concludes, “After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.” In between are five pages of reverie, lyrical and yet precise, about the after-dinner time when families sit around on porches and the fathers water the lawns. “Knoxville” is typical of Agee’s prose: in the weighty authority with which words are selected and placed; in getting drama, as Dickens and Gogol did, out of description; in the cadenced, repetitive, sometimes Biblical rhythm; in the keyed-up emotion that teeters on the verge of sentimentality (“soft smiling” falls in, and “unto” comes too close for comfort); in the combination, usual only in writers of the first rank, of acute sensuousness with broad philosophical themes.

Although A Death in the Family is not a major work, Agee, I think, had the technical, the intellectual, and the moral equipment to do major writing. By “moral,” which has a terribly