Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [49]
In the seven years that were left to him, he did manage to bring A Death in the Family close to final form and to publish a novelette, The Morning Watch (1951), and a short story, “A Mother’s Tale” (Harper’s Bazaar). But again most of his energies were diverted. For before he settled down to work in his old farmhouse in Hillsdale, New York, with his third wife, Mia, he had to get out of the way two profitable articles for Life, which he planned to knock out in six weeks and which took him six months. One was on silent-movie comedians; the second was on the films of John Huston. Agee had already, in 1947, written the commentary for one movie, The Quiet One, a documentary about Harlem life that was a great succès d’estime, but he had never worked in Hollywood. Huston liked his article, and commissioned him to do a script for a film version of Stephen Crane’s The Blue Hotel. Huston never made the film, but he was impressed by Agee’s script (and by Agee) and asked him to do one for The African Queen. This is mostly just another movie, but it does have several Agee touches—the Anglican service with only shining black faces in the congregation, Bogart’s stomach rumblings at the tea party, the peculiar horror of the leeches and the gnats. It was ironical, and typical, that Agee’s work with Huston was limited to a conventional adventure-romance film. Before they met, Huston made The Red Badge of Courage, and later he wanted Agee to work on Moby-Dick, but Agee had an interfering commitment. So two jobs that would have given scope for his powers were lost by luck, or was it destiny? Whichever it was, it was rarely on his side.
After The African Queen, Agee did a number of other scripts—for The Night of the Hunter, which is realistic and at times macabre in a most unHollywoodian way; for a delightful short comedy, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, taken from a story by Crane, in which he played the town drunk; for a film on the life of Gauguin (this, said to be his most remarkable script, was never used); for Genghis Khan, a Spanish-language Filipino film; for an “Omnibus” television series on the life of Lincoln; for a documentary about Williamsburg. Then he died.
Although he achieved much, it was a wasted, and wasteful, life. Even for a modern writer, he was extraordinarily self-destructive. He was always ready to sit up all night with anyone who happened to be around, or to go out at midnight looking for someone: talking passionately, brilliantly, but too much, drinking too much, smoking too much, reading aloud too much, making love too much, and in general cultivating the worst set of work habits in Greenwich Village. This is a large statement, but Agee’s was a large personality. “I wish I knew how to work,” he said to a friend. He wrote copiously, spending himself recklessly there, too, but there was too much else going on. He seemed to have almost no sense of self-preservation, allowing his versatility and creative energy to be exploited in a way that shrewder, cooler men of talent don’t permit. His getting stuck for so long in the Luce organization is an instance; like Jacob, he drudged fourteen years in another man’s fields, but there was no Rachel in view.
“Jim seemed to want to punish himself,” another friend says. “He complicated his creative life so much that he was rarely able to come to simple fulfillment. He would put off work until he got far enough behind to feel satisfactorily burdened with guilt. Somehow he managed to turn even his virtues into weaknesses. Jim was bigger than life, had enormous energy—my God, the man was inexhaustible! He reacted excessively to everything. The trouble was he couldn’t say No. He let people invade him, all kinds, anyone who wanted to. He thought he had time and energy enough for them all. But he didn’t, quite. His heart trouble began on Huston’s ranch out West, when he was working with him on the script of The African Queen. Huston was in the habit of playing two or three sets of singles before breakfast—he was a prodigal live-it-upper, too; that was one reason they got