Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [48]
A Death in the Family should be read slowly. It is easy to become impatient, for the movement is circular, ruminative, unhurried. He dwells on things, runs on and on and on. Perhaps one should be impatient. What Agee needed was a sympathetically severe editor who would prune him as Maxwell Perkins pruned Thomas Wolfe, whom Agee resembled in temperament, though I think he was superior artistically. A better comparison is with Whitman, who also runs on and on, hypnotizing himself with his material, losing all sense of proportion, losing all sense of anyone else reading him, and simply chanting, in bardic simplicity, to himself. Like Whitman and unlike Wolfe, Agee was able at last to come down hard on The Point and roll it up into a magically intense formulation; the weariest river of Ageean prose winds somewhere safe to sea. After pages of excessive, obsessive chewing-over of a funeral, including a morbid detailing of the corpse’s appearance and several prayers in full, Agee comes down, hard and accurate, to earth and to art: “[Rufus] looked towards his father’s face and, seeing the blue-dented chin thrust upward, and the way the flesh was sunken behind the bones of the jaw, first recognized in its specific weight the word, dead. He looked quickly away, and solemn wonder tolled in him like the shuddering of a prodigious bell.” Should one be impatient? I suspect one should. Granted the preceding longueurs were necessary for the writer if he were to work up enough steam for this climax, it doesn’t follow that they are necessary for the reader. Would not a more conscious, self-disciplined writer have written them and then, when he had reached the final effect, have gone back and removed the scaffolding? It would have been interesting to see if Agee would have done this had he lived to give final form to A Death in the Family.
Agee was seldom able to tell when he was hitting it and when he wasn’t. That he should have hit it so often is a sign of his talent. There are many passages in A Death in the Family that can only be called great, much though the word is abused these days, great in the union of major emotion with good writing.
In some literary circles, James Agee now excites the kind of emotion James Dean does in some nonliterary circles. There is already an Agee cult. This is partly because of the power of his writing and his lack of recognition—everyone likes to think he is on to a good thing the general public has not caught up with—but mainly because it is felt that Agee’s life and personality, like Dean’s, were at once a symbolic expression of our time and a tragic protest against it. It is felt that not their weakness but their vitality betrayed them. In their maimed careers and their wasteful deaths, the writer and the actor appeal to a resentment that intellectuals and teenagers alike feel about life in America, so smoothly prosperous, so deeply frustrating.
James Agee was born in Knoxville in 1909. He went to St. Andrew’s School there, then to Exeter and Harvard. In 1932, the year he graduated from Harvard, Agee got a job on Fortune. For fourteen years, like an elephant learning to deploy a parasol, Agee devoted his prodigious gifts to Lucean journalism. In 1939, he moved over to Time, where he wrote book reviews and then was put in charge of Cinema. In 1943, he began writing movie reviews for the Nation, too. He resigned from Time and the Nation in 1948, specifically to finish A Death in the Family but also because he realized that otherwise he would never get down to his own proper work. There was reason for his concern. Although he wrote constantly, in a small, shapely script that contrasted oddly with his oceanic personality, he finished very little; I remember grocery cartons full of manuscripts he had put aside. In 1948 he was thirty-nine, and he had published, aside from his journalism, only a book of poems, Permit Me Voyage (1934), and a long prose work, Let Us Now Praise Famous