Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [52]
Adults writing to or teaching children: in nearly every word within these textbooks, for instance [he has three devastating pages on one of them, which every writer for children should read], there is a flagrant mistake of some kind. The commonest is this: that they simplify their own ear, without nearly enough skepticism as to the accuracy of the simplification, and with virtually no intuition for the child or children; then write or teach to satisfy that ear; discredit the child who is not satisfied, and value the child who, by docile or innocent distortions of his intelligence, is.
The “esthetic” is made hateful and is hated beyond all other kinds of “knowledge.” It is false-beauty to begin with; it is taught by sick women or sicker men; it becomes identified with the worst kinds of femininity and effeminacy; it is made incomprehensible and suffocating to anyone of much natural honesty and vitality.
The book grew out of an assignment to Agee and Evans from Fortune in 1936 to do a story on Southern sharecroppers. For two months they lived in the Alabama back country. Fortune, unsurprisingly, couldn’t “use” the article. Harper then staked Agee to a year off the Luce payroll to write the book. When it was done, they couldn’t use it, either; they wanted deletions in the interests of good taste, and Agee refused; since the higher-ups weren’t enthusiastic anyway about this strange, difficult work, Harper stood firm. Finally, Houghton Mifflin bought it out in 1941. The critics disliked it—Selden Rodman, Lionel Trilling, and George Marion O’Donnell were honorable exceptions—and it sold less than six hundred copies the first year. Moby-Dick sold five hundred, which was six times as good a showing, taking into account the increase of population.
The mischance that dogged Agee’s career is evident in the timing of his death. Those who knew him best say that in the last few years of his life Agee changed greatly, became more mature, more aware of himself and of others, shrewder about his particular talents and problems. In the very last year, he had even begun to pay some attention to doctors’ orders. He was by then getting such good fees for scripts that he was looking forward to doing only one a year and spending the rest of the time on his own writing. He might even have found out who he was. A Death in the Family contrasts significantly with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It rarely achieves the heights of the earlier book—I think Agee’s literary reputation will be mostly based on about half of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—but it is written in a more controlled and uniform style; it has more humor and none of the self-consciousness that often embarrasses one in the earlier work; its structure is classical, without Gothic excrescences; and, most significant of all, human beings are seen objectively, with the novelist’s rather than the poet’s eye. There is also the remarkable short story, “A Mother’s Tale,” he wrote three years before his death: a Kafka-like allegory, perfectly ordered and harmonious all through, of the human situation in this age of total war. I think only a thoroughly developed writer could have done it. Like Keats, Agee died just when he was beginning to mature as an artist. That Keats was twenty-five and Agee forty-five doesn’t alter the point. Agee was an American, of a race that matures slowly, if ever.
“He was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge. He was capable of realism...but essentially he was a poet....He had an exorbitant appetite for violence, for cruelty, and for the Siamese twin of cruelty, a kind of obsessive tenderness which at its worst was all but nauseating....In his no longer fashionable way, he remained capable, and inspired. He was merely unadaptable and unemployable, like an old, sore, ardent individualist among contemporary progressives....He didn’t have it in him to