Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [51]
As MacLeish observed, Agee appealed neither to the Left nor to the Right. “I am a Communist by sympathy and conviction,” he wrote in the thirties, and at once went on to put a tactless finger right on the sore point:
But it does not appear (just for one thing) that Communists have recognized or in any case made anything serious of the sure fact that the persistence of what once was insufficiently described as Pride, a mortal sin, can quite as coldly and inevitably damage and wreck the human race as the most total power of “Greed” ever could: and that socially anyhow, the most dangerous form of pride is neither arrogance nor humility, but its mild, common denominator form, complacency....Artists, for instance, should be capable of figuring the situation out to the degree that they would refuse the social eminence and the high pay they are given in Soviet Russia. The setting up of an aristocracy of superior workers is no good sign, either.
The idiom (“the sure fact...figuring the situation out...no good sign, either”) and the rhythm are in the American vernacular, and thus hopelessly out of key with the style in which everybody else wrote about these matters then. Nor was Agee any more congruous with the Right. Although he was deeply religious, he had his own kind of religion, one that included irreverence, blasphemy, obscenity, and even Communism (of his own kind). By the late forties, a religio-conservative revival was under way, but Agee felt as out of place as ever. “If my shapeless comments can be of any interest or use,” he characteristically began his contribution to a Partisan Review symposium on Religion and the Intellectuals, “it will be because the amateur and the amphibian should be represented in such a discussion. By amphibian I mean that I have a religious background and am ‘pro-religious’—though not on the whole delighted by this so-called revival—but doubt that I will return to religion.” Amateurs don’t flourish in an age of specialization, or amphibians in a time when educated armies clash by night.
The incompatibility of Agee and his times came to a head in the sensational failure of Agee’s masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is a miscellaneous book, as hard to classify as that earlier failure Moby-Dick, which it resembles, being written in a “big” style, drawing poetry from journalistic description, and making the largest statements about the human condition. It is mostly a documentary account of three Southern tenant-farming families, illustrated with thirty-one magisterial photographs by Walker Evans, Agee’s close friend, who is listed on the title page as co-author and whose influence was strong on the text. But it is many other things as well—philosophy, narrative, satire, cultural history, and autobiography. It is a young man’s book—exuberant, angry, tender, willful to the point of perversity, with the most amazing variations in quality; most of it is extremely good, some of it is as great prose as we have had since Hawthorne, and some of it is turgid, mawkish, overwritten. But the author gives himself wholly to his theme and brings to bear all his powers; he will go to any lengths to get it just right. From this emerges a truth that includes and goes beyond the truth about poverty and ignorance in sociological studies (and “realistic” novels), the truth that such squalid lives, imaginatively observed, are also touched with the poetry, the comedy, the drama of what is unexpected and unpredictable because it is living. It is illuminating to compare Agee’s book with one of those New Deal surveys of “the sharecropping