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By Root 1111 0

they were impressed by “an ingenious parody of Time” he had put out when he was editing The Harvard Advocate. I wish this were the whole story, but I remember in 1932 recommending Jim, then looking for a post-graduation job, to Ralph Ingersoll, then managing editor of Fortune, where I’d been working since my graduation from Yale. And I’ve dug up a letter from Jim which is almost unbearable in dramatic irony, the audience knowing how it is going to turn out: “Noted contents of your letter with eyes rolling upward and stomach downward with joy, relief, gratitude and such things. I shall send a wire in the morning to beat this letter down....I don’t want to miss any chances of losing this chance (for which thank you, God, and Managing Editor Ingersoll)....Words fail me re. the job: besides the fairly fundamental fact that I don’t want to starve, there are dozens of other reasons I want uh job and many more why I am delighted to get this one.”

But I didn’t do him a favor, really.

[1]*The reference is to Archibald MacLeish, who had, under pressure from the Zeitgeist, temporarily edged over toward the Communists. Four years later the war had begun—no one ever had to ask Archie “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”—and MacLeish was attacking Dos Passos, Farrell, Hemingway and such as “The Irresponsibles” who had betrayed the American Dream. Shortly thereafter he was running Roosevelt’s Office of Facts and Figures, as our wartime propaganda agency was at first quaintly called.

[2]*On both sides. In Fortune’s case, they never really knew just where to have this strange creature. When he first arrived on Fortune, Agee speedily became, largely because nobody could figure out any other way to use him, the staff specialist in rich, beautiful prose on such topics as Rare Wines, Famous Orchid Collections, and The World’s Ten Most Precious Jewels. When this finally reached the attention of Henry Luce, he was indignant, for he had a theory that a good writer could write on anything—also Fortune was supposed to be about business. He thought it somehow immoral that a writer should do only what he was best at—there was a lot of the Puritan in Luce. So he assigned to Agee as occupational therapy an article on The Price of Steel Rails, and furthermore announced he, Luce, would personally edit it (as he often did in those days). It was a fascinating topic for anyone with the slightest interest in economics, since the price of steel rails, which had been exactly the same for some fifty years, was the classic example of monopolistic price-fixing. But Agee, of course, had not even a slight interest in economics. He did his best and Luce did his best—“Now, Jim, don’t you see... ?”—but finally Luce had to admit defeat and the article was assigned to someone else (me, I think) who did a workmanlike job. The trouble with Agee as a journalist was that he couldn’t be just workmanlike, he had to give it everything he had, which was not good for him.

Ernest Hemingway

He was a big man with a bushy beard and everybody knew him. The tourists knew him and the bartenders knew him and the critics knew him too. He enjoyed being recognized by the tourists and he liked the bartenders but he never liked the critics very much. He thought they had his number. Some of them did. The hell with them. He smiled a lot and it should have been a good smile, he was so big and bearded and famous, but it was not a good smile. It was a smile that was uneasy around the edges as if he was not sure he deserved to be quite as famous as he was famous.

He liked being a celebrity and he liked celebrities. At first it was Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was an athletic young man from Oak Park, Illinois, who wanted to write and he made friends with them. He was always good at making friends with celebrities. They taught him about style. Especially Gertrude Stein. The short words, the declarative sentences, the repetition, the beautiful absence of subordinate clauses. He always worked close to the bull in his writing. In more senses than one señor. It was