Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [50]
The waste one senses in Agee’s career had other roots as well. He was spectacularly born in the wrong time and place. He was too versatile, for one thing. In art as in industry, this is an age of specialization. There is a definite if restricted “place” for poetry; there is even a Pulitzer Prize for it, and poets of far less capacity than Agee have made neat, firm little reputations. But his best poetry is written in prose and is buried in his three books. Nor was he solely dedicated to literature. Music was also important to him, and the cinema, so closely related to music, was his first love, and his last. I think he never gave up the dream of becoming a director, of expressing himself directly with images and rhythm instead of making do at one remove with words. His best writing has a cinematic flow and immediacy; his worst has a desperate, clotted quality, as though he felt that nobody would “get” him and was trying to break through, irritatedly, by brute exaggeration and repetition. But he was typed as a writer, and the nearest he could come to making movies was to write scripts—scripts that go far beyond what is usual in the way of precise indications as to sequence of shots, camera angles, visual details (the raindrops on a leaf are described in one), and other matters normally decided by the director. They are the scripts of a frustrated director.
The times might have done better by Agee. They could exploit one or two of his gifts, but they couldn’t use him in toto—there was too much there to fit into any one compartment. In another sense, American culture was not structured enough for Agee’s special needs; it was overspecialized as to function but amorphous as to values. He needed definition, limitation, discipline, but he found no firm tradition, no community of artists and intellectuals that would canalize his energies. One thinks of D.H. Lawrence, similar to Agee in his rebellious irrationalism, who was forced to define his own values and his own special kind of writing precisely because of the hard, clear, well-developed cultural tradition he reacted so strongly against.
If his native land offered Agee no tradition to corset his sprawling talents, no cultural community to moderate his eccentricities, it did provide “movements,” political and aesthetic. Unfortunately, he couldn’t sympathize with any of them. He was always unfashionable, not at all the thing for the post-Eliot thirties. His verse was rather conventional and romantic. In the foreword to Permit Me Voyage, Archibald MacLeish, than whom few have been more sensitive to literary fashions, accurately predicted, “It will not excite the new-generationers, left wing or right....Agee does not assume...a Position.” Ideologically, it was even worse. In an age that was enthusiastic about social issues, Agee’s whole style of being was individualistic and antiscientific. He was quite aware of this; oddly, considering the constellation of his traits, he had a strong bent toward ideas. Unlike, say, Thomas Wolfe, he was an intellectual; it was another aspect of his versatility. This awareness comes out clearly in a passage from that extraordinary grab bag Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
“Description” is a word to suspect.
Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others as a poet rather than a prose writer, despises this fact about words or his medium, and continually brings words as near as he can to an illusion of embodiment. [Here the frustrated movie-maker speaks, for if words cannot embody, pictures can, and without illusion—a picture is an artistic fact in itself, unlike a word.] In doing so he accepts a falsehood but makes, of a sort in any case, better art. It seems very possibly