Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [53]
Appendix:
JIM AGEE, A MEMOIR
AUTHOR'S NOTE: George Braziller has recently published The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. These extraordinary letters were written over a period of thirty years, from his admission to Exeter in 1925 to his death in 1955. Father Flye is an Episcopalian priest who was Agee’s teacher, before Exeter, at St. Andrews School in Tennessee and who became a substitute for the father he had lost at the age of six. (That Father Flye was normally addressed as “Dear Father” is a Freudian pun too deep for tears.) What follows is an article, considerably expanded, I wrote for the house organ of the Book Find Club.
In the ’twenties, James Agee and I both attended Phillips Exeter Academy, which then had an extraordinary English department: Myron Williams, E.S.W. Kerr, Hank Couse, Dr. Cushwa, James Plaisted (“Cokey Joe”) Webber, to set down the names of those who taught us something about writing. Jim and I just missed each other at Exeter, I graduating in the spring of 1924 and he arriving there in the fall of 1925. I find I wrote an old Exeter friend, Dinsmore Wheeler, in 1929, apropos of a project for starting an intellectual community on his farm in Ohio: “Our generation is one of great power, I think. There’s talent running around like loose quicksilver. A fellow named Jim Agee, onetime editor of the P.E.A. Monthly, has The Stuff. I’ve never met him but I’ve corresponded with him. He is all there when it comes to creative writing, or rather will be all there.”
Agee was then at Harvard and I on Fortune and we kept on corresponding, mostly about movies, which interested us as a form of self-expression much more than writing did. “A fellow in my dormitory,” he wrote me that year, “owns a movie camera (not the kind you set buzzing and jam into the diaphragm) and has done some interesting work with it....It’s possible we’ll do two movies [a documentary on Boston and a film version of a short story he had written]. The idea is that I’ll devise shots, angles, camera work, etc., and stories; he’ll take care of the photography and lighting.” (Like my own dream of an Ohio Brook Farm, neither of these projects seems to have come to anything.) We both admired the standard things—Griffith, Chaplin, Stroheim, the Russians, the Germans—despised the big American productions (“Noah’s Ark is the worst and most pretentious movie ever made,” he wrote) and looked desperately for signs of life in Hollywood: “Saw a movie today, Hearts in Dixie was its unfortunate title. The thing itself struck me as pretty swell [though] there was no camera work and very little else to recommend it from the real director’s point of view.” His enthusiasm seems to have been based mostly on the fact it was less melodramatic than Porgy. Similarly, his “Ever noticed Dorothy Mackaill? Along the general lines of Esther Ralston” was intended as a compliment. We really were hopeful then.
“I’m going to spend the summer working in the wheatfields, starting in Oklahoma in June,” he wrote May 10, 1929. “The thing looks good in every way. I like to get drunk and will; I like to sing and learn dirty songs and hobo ones—and will; I like to be on my own—the farther from home the better—and will; and I like the heterogeneous gang that moves north on the job....Also I like bumming....Finally, I like saving money, and this promises from $5 to $7 a day.” That summer I got a pencil-scrawled note dated “Oshkosh, Neb., maybe August 1” (the postmark is August 5):
Dear Dwight—
If pen and ink and white paper gave you trouble, this should rival the Rosetta stone. To add insult to injury, it’s written in a wagon-bed—about my only chance to write is between loads.
Am now working at hauling and scooping grain on a “combine” crew....Kansas is the most utterly lousy state I’ve ever seen. Hot as hell and trees ten miles apart. I worked near a town which proudly bore the name “Glade” because of a clump of scrawny,