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By Root 995 0

creative writers of this century. This may have been because of his education or, more likely, because he had a gift that way. (He had so many gifts, including such odd ones, for intellectuals, as reverence and feeling.) Considering his hell-for-leather personality, Agee was a remarkably sophisticated, even circumspect, thinker. “Was just reading in New Masses Isidore Schneider welcoming Archie into the new pew,” he wrote me in 1936.[1] “Still have my ways of believing in artforart and, more especially, of conviction Marx—Marx plus Freud for that matter—isn’t the answer to everything.” Then he adds, with his typical balance, the last quality one would expect if one merely saw his picturesque side: “But just because Copernicus didn’t settle all the problems of the universe is no reason at all to go on insisting that the sun moves around the earth and comes out a little southwest of purgatory.” Jim was always moderate in an immoderate way, he was always out of step, and he had very little respect for the Zeitgeist. This was his tragedy and his triumph.

In his last letter to Father Flye, written a day or two before he died, Agee sketches out a fantasy about elephants—how they have been degraded by man from the most intelligent and the noblest of beasts to figures of fun. He felt he was dying and this was his last, most extraordinary insight. For wasn’t this just what happened to him? Wasn’t he also a large, powerful being who was put to base uses? The same note is struck in his fine parable, “A Mother’s Tale”—also written toward the end of his life—in which a mother cow tells her children and nephews and nieces a strange tale that has come down through the generations about the ultimate fate of their kind. I venture that here too Agee was thinking of himself when he wrote about the slaughter of one species for the benefit of another. The cattle have their own life and purpose, as he did, and they are used by more powerful beings for a different purpose, as he was. This, at least, is how I imagine he may have thought, or rather felt (for it may not have been wholly conscious), about it in his last years. It was emotionally true for him, and was also true in general. But looking at it more coldly, one must say something more. While Time, Inc., has in common with the Chicago packing houses one important thing—that its purpose is to convert something living, namely talent, into a salable commodity—it is not really an abattoir because those who, like Agee or myself, took its paychecks did so, unlike the cattle, of our own free will. The great question is, as Lenin once remarked of politics, who uses whom (I think he had a more pungent verb in the original Russian). It is possible to use instead of being used: Faulkner wrote Hollywood scripts for years. But Agee didn’t have this kind of toughness and shrewdness. He was, in a way, too big and too variously talented.

There is something helpless about elephants precisely because of their combination of size and intelligence; it is a fact they can be tamed and trained as few wild animals can. It’s not the fault of the tamers. Henry Luce was a decent fellow when Jim and I worked for him on Fortune and I’m sure Luce was, like me, charmed and impressed by Agee. But what a waste, what pathetic docility, what illusions![2] As late as 1945, after thirteen years with Time, Inc., Agee can still write to Father Flye that he has now been offered a job of “free-lance writing through all parts of the magazine,” and this not in despair but hopefully. As if for a writer to be given the run of Time were not like a collector of sculpture being offered his pick of wax figures from Madame Tussaud’s Museum. He was always looking for a way out—in 1932, his first year on Fortune, he is wondering whether he shouldn’t try for a Guggenheim grant, two years later he is asking Father Flye about the chances for a teaching job at St. Andrews, etc.—but he also was always full of innocent, elephantine hope.

In his perceptive introduction to the letters, Robert Phelps states that Jim got his job on Fortune because