• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The first town across the Nebraska line was so different I declared a holiday, sat on a bench in the court-house park and wrote a story. I rather think I’ve stumbled onto the best possible surroundings and state of mind in which to write. I certainly was more at home with it than at Harvard, home or Exeter.

That night I saw a rather interesting movie, “The Leathernecks.”...It seems to me Richard Arlen is capable of pretty big stuff. I wish someone would give Von Sternberg a story for him....Have to tackle a load now.

Jim

An extract from another letter, written in 1936, may be of interest:

It seems to me, comrades, that New Masses readers should treat Dostoevsky kindly yet strictly. There are inexcusable gaps and deviations in his ideology and they must not be condoned; on the other hand, we must not on their account make an enemy of a man who has come far and who may turn out to be inestimably useful to the Movement. (signed) Granville Hicks. I think The Brothers Karamazov deserves the co-operation of all the finest talents in Hollywood and wd. richly repay all research & expenditure. A fullsized replica, complete down to the last tpmizznmst, of the Mad Tsar Pierre (Charles Laughton). Papa Karamazov (Lionel Barrymore). His comic servant Grigory (Wallace Berry). Grigory’s wife (Zazu Pitts). Smerdyakov (Charles Laughton). Smerdyakov’s Familiar, a cat named Tabitha (Elsa Lanchester, the bride of Frankenstein). Zossima (Henry B. Walthall)....Miusov (Malcolm Cowley)....in Alyosha’s Dream: Alyosha (Fred Astaire). Puck (Wallace Beery). Titania (Ginger Rogers or James Cagney)....Routines by Albertina Rasch. Artificial snow by Jean Cocteau....Entire production supervised by Hugh Walpole....To be played on the world’s first Globular Screen, opening at the Hippodrome the night before Jumbo closes. Mr. Dostoevsky will be unable to appear at the opening but Charles A. Lindbergh has agreed to be on hand (you may recognize him by the smoked glasses & unassuming manner) and a troupe of selected ushers will throw epileptic fits during the intermission (courtesy Max Jacobs). Margaret Anglin will sell signed copies of Countee Cullen’s Medea in the lobby. President Roosevelt will plant a tree. The Italian Expeditionary Force will observe two minutes silence in honor of the birth of the little Christ child. Artificial foreskins will be handed out at the north end of the Wilhelmstrasse to anyone who is fool enough to call for them. The film will be preceded by Glimpses of the New Russia, photographed by M. Bourkeovitz [Margaret Bourke-White who, after her marriage to Erskine Caldwell, no foe of the Soviets, did do some such book of photographs, as I recall]...Suggested tie-ins for hinterland exhibitors: arrange to have your theatre picketted by your local chapters of the American Legion, the Catholic Church, the Parent-Teachers Association, the Sheetmetal Workers Union and the Youth for Peace Movement. Set up Jungle Shrubbery and a Stuffed Gorilla in your lobby (your Police Station will be glad to furnish latter in return for a mention). If you are in the South, stage Negro Baptism (in white gowns) in front of your theatre. If in North, an Italian Saint’s Day or a Jewish Funeral will do as well. Plug this feature hard. It will richly repay you.

Until I came to transcribe this, I had not realized how tasteless it is, calculated to offend the sensibilities of every right-thinking and wrong-thinking group in the country, minority or majority. It goes beyond buffoonery to express a nihilistic, destructive, irreverent, vulgar, alienated, un-American and generally lousy attitude. And why drag in the Sheetmetal Workers Union? And if the union, why the cops? There is something very old-fashioned about the whole thing, more like 1926 than 1936—and certainly not at all like 1962.

One of the unexpected things about Agee—and there were many, he was what used to be called “an original”—is that he was able to think in general terms without making a fool of himself, therein differing from most American