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Letters of James Agee to Father Flye
I'll croak before I write ads or sell bonds--or do anything except write."
James Agee's father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Death in the Family." Three years later, Agee's mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew's, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee.
There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Though Agee was just ten, the two struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship, traveling Europe by bicycle and exchanging letters for thirty years, from Agee's admission to Exeter Academy to his death at forty-five. The intimate letters, collected by Father Flye after Agee's death, form the most intimate portrait of Agee available, a starkly revealing account of the internal and external life of a tortured twentieth-century genius. Agee candidly shares his struggles with depression, professional failure, and a tumultuous personal life that included three wives and four children.
First published in 1962, "Letters of James Agee to Father Flye" followed the rediscovery of Agee's" Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and the posthumous publication of "A Death in the Family," which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit Broadway play and film. The collection sold prolifically throughout the 1960s and '70s in mass-market editions as a new generation of readers discovered the deep talents of the writer Dwight Macdonald called "the most broadly gifted writer of our American generation." "From the Trade Paperback edition.
James Agee's father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Death in the Family." Three years later, Agee's mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew's, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee.
There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Though Agee was just ten, the two struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship, traveling Europe by bicycle and exchanging letters for thirty years, from Agee's admission to Exeter Academy to his death at forty-five. The intimate letters, collected by Father Flye after Agee's death, form the most intimate portrait of Agee available, a starkly revealing account of the internal and external life of a tortured twentieth-century genius. Agee candidly shares his struggles with depression, professional failure, and a tumultuous personal life that included three wives and four children.
First published in 1962, "Letters of James Agee to Father Flye" followed the rediscovery of Agee's" Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and the posthumous publication of "A Death in the Family," which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit Broadway play and film. The collection sold prolifically throughout the 1960s and '70s in mass-market editions as a new generation of readers discovered the deep talents of the writer Dwight Macdonald called "the most broadly gifted writer of our American generation." "From the Trade Paperback edition.
267 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
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About the author
James Agee
95 books285 followersNoted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published his novel
A Death in the Family
(1957).
This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.
Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.
Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.
In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.
Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.
In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.
In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.
Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.
Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.
This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.
Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.
Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.
In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.
Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.
In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.
In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.
Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.
Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.
Ratings & Reviews
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Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
March 4, 2013
Father Flye was my Great Great Grandfather. My late Mom (Pennie Deane Flye) gave me this book when I graduated from high school in 1987. I am honoured to be related to him.
December 30, 2019
James Agee writes like a fucking saxophone solo. (That’s it.)
June 3, 2012
I’ve just never quite got what the big deal was about James Agee. He is America’s Great Failed Promise, and he strikes me as being more symbol than manifestation (just like Hart Crane). Indeed, I was very impressed by “Death in the Afternoon” 20 years ago, but it struck me as having a brilliant beginning that fell off after the first 50 pages or so. Since I happen to own the undisputed World’s Largest Yale Younger Poets Collection (please, somebody dispute this!) I have a copy of his “Permit Me Voyage” for which Agee won the prize in 1934 – it’s just another post-Eliot late-Yeatsean over-cooked 1930s-1940s artefact, in my opinion. But I’ve never read “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” which is supposed to be his masterpiece (I’ve always imagined the photos being the best part of it, but this is based on nothing; my unfairness as a reviewer is really atrocious). As for his journalism, I just don’t care about 60-year-old movie reviews, or 60-year-old movies (for the most part) either. I do enjoy “The African Queen,” which Agee wrote the script for (or some of it), but I don’t really consider it to be one of the shining stars of western culture.
I grabbed this particular book out of my discard pile. An old friend of mine for whom I have a lot of respect was very enthusiastic about this book, so I thought I’d give it a go. They met when Agee (called Rufus back then) was a schoolboy and Fr. Flye an instructor at the tony Episcopalian Boarding School (I was confused at first, thinking Fr. Flye was Catholic – but Agee refers to Mrs. Flye all the time, and I managed to get this figured out).
***
The book was tough going for me at first. The early letters are full of astonishing promise – Agee had a relentless literary curiosity starting as a teenager that was remarkable. But he was a teenager, and there is what I can only call a kind of callowness to these letters that extends into his thirties. Let me swiftly add that he is far less callow that I was, but then I would not want to re-read my letters from those days, nor would I recommend them for anybody else.
But even into early adulthood there is a curious hollowness to Agee that I can’t quite figure out. He was undoubtedly talented, ambitious and capable of hard work. He seems to be bipolar, with a drinking problem. The mood swings he acknowledges, but he is pretty squirrelly about the drinking, even as a teenager. His marriages and children barely register, except as a responsibility that kept him working too hard in an effort to support them. Towards the end, his letters do contain an occasional affectionate reference to his family – otherwise, I have no idea why he had children, which he continued to do even as his unhappiness over his work, financial precariousness, and declining health were ruining his life.
***
Religion is the framework that holds together Fr. Flye and Agee, not surprising given Fr. Flye’s profession. But there is a curiously flat feeling to it all, I thought. Although Fr. Flye’s letters are not reproduced for the most part, I got the feeling from his introduction and Agee’s references to their encounters that Fr. Flye was a conventionally forward-thinking, faintly liberal clergyman with a pretty comfy situation and a somewhat obtuse, comfy little faith. Grossly unfair of me to suspect this, probably, but I just wasn’t impressed. I should mention right now that based only on the little snippets provided in his editorial footnotes, and Agee’s responses to his letters, I do not care for Fr. Flye. He strikes me – again, based on slender evidence – as unctuous, self-satisfied, and superficially spiritual in a well-fed priest’s sort of way. He was loyal to Agee (and, I get the feeling, vicariously thrilled at Agee’s success in NYC magazine and movie industries).
As for Agee, as a young man I sometimes got the feeling that Faith was sort of a moral get out of jail free card. Certainly more troubled, doubting, and altogether more nuanced that Fr. Flye’s, Agee’s faith, Agee wound up pretty much falling away from Christianity. His later (post-40) ruminations on this were moving. And to Flye’s credit (via a snippet from one of Flye’s letters – these were sometimes provided to shed light on Agee’s references), he seemed to have a fairly accepting approach to his troubled friend.
***
Perhaps the best aspect of the book is the fact Agee continues to struggle morally. I guess “morally” is the right word. I don’t want to trivialize him with some sort of “personal growth” rhetoric, but I am not sure how to put it, exactly. Agee manages to shed a certain youthful callousness and incipient narcissism that dogged him into his 30s. He never gave up; his self-criticism seemed genuine for the most part, his struggles more dogged the more hopeless things became. His alcoholism was never conquered, but he never stooped to becoming an automatic apology-machine or excuse-mongerer about it. Agee tells Fr. Flye that his wife mentioned that his greatest flaw was self-pity. Indeed, the letters bear this out. But he fought it. I found this moving and even inspirational.
***
Agee is American Literature’s Butterfly that was Broken on the Wheel of American Culture. This may be his enduring claim to fame and it is perhaps true to some extent, but his was not the only possible outcome. Yes, there is no way for a poet to make a living in America. There’s no news here. And yet that is not Agee’s tale, exactly…
One of the great myths about Agee’s failure is that he was ground to pieces in the satanic mills of the Time-Life magazine empire of the Henry Luce. Well, maybe. But Agee needed to make a living during the Great Depression and the Luce Empire was a pretty good gig if you could find it. Agee complained about his job, but only because it wiped out all his time – but curiously, you never really find him complaining about management or his assignments. If anything, his bosses gave him a remarkable freedom of movement; after a few years he seemed to be a kind of roving reporter who was able to some extent pick his own assignments – in fact “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” was a paid assignment that the editors chose not to run and apparently let him issue on his own (not that it did him any good financially). Agee was treated quite well here (and see Whittaker Chambers’ experiences as a Luce writer – he was pretty grateful to them for the work, as I recall reading. Chambers and Agee were, I believe, work buddies).
The reason I bring this up is because it is hard to fathom the fear and loathing that the Time-Life Corporation inspired among the intelligentsia of the 1930s-1950s. The “Partisan Review” crowd considered Luce to be evil incarnate, butchering the English language in the service of Moloch or Mammon or one of those guys. Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Dwight MacDonald, John Berryman…all those guys would pepper their work with vicious attacks on Luce and the Time Magazine pidgin-English that was destroying the English language. God, what would those folks think of our print culture now?
In any case, Agee left Time-Life and wound up writing movie scripts. Although there are certain “Day of the Locust” aspects to his Hollywood encounters, he was fairly successful. But as always, Agee was his own worst enemy, drinking and spending too much, but feeling really, really bad about it.
***
Note on the text: this book is slightly older than I am (printed Oct. 1963, I was spawned in Nov.) and it is printed on some of the worst, acidic paper I have ever encountered. The pages are yellow and astonishingly brittle; when ever I dog-eared a corner, the paper would break rather than fold. Really, it is quite a wretched production, although the lurid blurb on the back makes it somewhat worthwhile:
“He drank too much. He drove himself beyond the endurance of any human being. He was torn by guilt and self-doubt. He was haunted by the idea of suicide and obsessed with the idea of achieving greatness. His death at the age of forty-five was probably the greatest blow to American literature since the passing of Thomas Wolf…”
Thomas Wolf, another writer I just don’t get. Maybe another time…
I grabbed this particular book out of my discard pile. An old friend of mine for whom I have a lot of respect was very enthusiastic about this book, so I thought I’d give it a go. They met when Agee (called Rufus back then) was a schoolboy and Fr. Flye an instructor at the tony Episcopalian Boarding School (I was confused at first, thinking Fr. Flye was Catholic – but Agee refers to Mrs. Flye all the time, and I managed to get this figured out).
***
The book was tough going for me at first. The early letters are full of astonishing promise – Agee had a relentless literary curiosity starting as a teenager that was remarkable. But he was a teenager, and there is what I can only call a kind of callowness to these letters that extends into his thirties. Let me swiftly add that he is far less callow that I was, but then I would not want to re-read my letters from those days, nor would I recommend them for anybody else.
But even into early adulthood there is a curious hollowness to Agee that I can’t quite figure out. He was undoubtedly talented, ambitious and capable of hard work. He seems to be bipolar, with a drinking problem. The mood swings he acknowledges, but he is pretty squirrelly about the drinking, even as a teenager. His marriages and children barely register, except as a responsibility that kept him working too hard in an effort to support them. Towards the end, his letters do contain an occasional affectionate reference to his family – otherwise, I have no idea why he had children, which he continued to do even as his unhappiness over his work, financial precariousness, and declining health were ruining his life.
***
Religion is the framework that holds together Fr. Flye and Agee, not surprising given Fr. Flye’s profession. But there is a curiously flat feeling to it all, I thought. Although Fr. Flye’s letters are not reproduced for the most part, I got the feeling from his introduction and Agee’s references to their encounters that Fr. Flye was a conventionally forward-thinking, faintly liberal clergyman with a pretty comfy situation and a somewhat obtuse, comfy little faith. Grossly unfair of me to suspect this, probably, but I just wasn’t impressed. I should mention right now that based only on the little snippets provided in his editorial footnotes, and Agee’s responses to his letters, I do not care for Fr. Flye. He strikes me – again, based on slender evidence – as unctuous, self-satisfied, and superficially spiritual in a well-fed priest’s sort of way. He was loyal to Agee (and, I get the feeling, vicariously thrilled at Agee’s success in NYC magazine and movie industries).
As for Agee, as a young man I sometimes got the feeling that Faith was sort of a moral get out of jail free card. Certainly more troubled, doubting, and altogether more nuanced that Fr. Flye’s, Agee’s faith, Agee wound up pretty much falling away from Christianity. His later (post-40) ruminations on this were moving. And to Flye’s credit (via a snippet from one of Flye’s letters – these were sometimes provided to shed light on Agee’s references), he seemed to have a fairly accepting approach to his troubled friend.
***
Perhaps the best aspect of the book is the fact Agee continues to struggle morally. I guess “morally” is the right word. I don’t want to trivialize him with some sort of “personal growth” rhetoric, but I am not sure how to put it, exactly. Agee manages to shed a certain youthful callousness and incipient narcissism that dogged him into his 30s. He never gave up; his self-criticism seemed genuine for the most part, his struggles more dogged the more hopeless things became. His alcoholism was never conquered, but he never stooped to becoming an automatic apology-machine or excuse-mongerer about it. Agee tells Fr. Flye that his wife mentioned that his greatest flaw was self-pity. Indeed, the letters bear this out. But he fought it. I found this moving and even inspirational.
***
Agee is American Literature’s Butterfly that was Broken on the Wheel of American Culture. This may be his enduring claim to fame and it is perhaps true to some extent, but his was not the only possible outcome. Yes, there is no way for a poet to make a living in America. There’s no news here. And yet that is not Agee’s tale, exactly…
One of the great myths about Agee’s failure is that he was ground to pieces in the satanic mills of the Time-Life magazine empire of the Henry Luce. Well, maybe. But Agee needed to make a living during the Great Depression and the Luce Empire was a pretty good gig if you could find it. Agee complained about his job, but only because it wiped out all his time – but curiously, you never really find him complaining about management or his assignments. If anything, his bosses gave him a remarkable freedom of movement; after a few years he seemed to be a kind of roving reporter who was able to some extent pick his own assignments – in fact “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” was a paid assignment that the editors chose not to run and apparently let him issue on his own (not that it did him any good financially). Agee was treated quite well here (and see Whittaker Chambers’ experiences as a Luce writer – he was pretty grateful to them for the work, as I recall reading. Chambers and Agee were, I believe, work buddies).
The reason I bring this up is because it is hard to fathom the fear and loathing that the Time-Life Corporation inspired among the intelligentsia of the 1930s-1950s. The “Partisan Review” crowd considered Luce to be evil incarnate, butchering the English language in the service of Moloch or Mammon or one of those guys. Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Dwight MacDonald, John Berryman…all those guys would pepper their work with vicious attacks on Luce and the Time Magazine pidgin-English that was destroying the English language. God, what would those folks think of our print culture now?
In any case, Agee left Time-Life and wound up writing movie scripts. Although there are certain “Day of the Locust” aspects to his Hollywood encounters, he was fairly successful. But as always, Agee was his own worst enemy, drinking and spending too much, but feeling really, really bad about it.
***
Note on the text: this book is slightly older than I am (printed Oct. 1963, I was spawned in Nov.) and it is printed on some of the worst, acidic paper I have ever encountered. The pages are yellow and astonishingly brittle; when ever I dog-eared a corner, the paper would break rather than fold. Really, it is quite a wretched production, although the lurid blurb on the back makes it somewhat worthwhile:
“He drank too much. He drove himself beyond the endurance of any human being. He was torn by guilt and self-doubt. He was haunted by the idea of suicide and obsessed with the idea of achieving greatness. His death at the age of forty-five was probably the greatest blow to American literature since the passing of Thomas Wolf…”
Thomas Wolf, another writer I just don’t get. Maybe another time…
February 3, 2016
James Agee's very human struggle. In painful honesty he documents his struggles: a career he doesn't like but needs; an inability to work on the writing most important to him; the conflict between his natural religiousness and his inability to commit to it; his inability to transcend his own limitations; and in the end his struggle with his failing health. That may sound depressing, but it's not, at least not in a self-pity sort of way. There are no illusions here. It never crossed Agee's mind that his struggles were anything other than an insignificant example of the problems, the tragedy, of existence.
Marginalia
- One letter sums up Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pretty well: "and of all the moral ambiguities and woundings of environment which have created present "heredity" and "inheritance" [we need] a more general and universal interdependent understanding of what human "health," mental and spiritual and physical, individual and social wold mean...for individuals are whatever they are through conditions and a world (materiel and of ideas) which might have been better: this includes all damage done their "moral fibre"; and it would seem to me obvious that it would take a few generations of patience and not of moral blame to clean them off. Too many causes are disregarded or thought too lightly of as against a more easy feeling that by and large people are to get what they deserve... A great majority of people keep on suffering under diseases they never asked for and will never understand."
- Out of nowhere Agee mentions Goodbye Mr. Chips, a book I loved as a child: he writes "definite liking, and definitely touched or even moved; mixed with suspicion, slight resentment of self and author at being moved by suspect material; and considerable basic disagreement with almost the whole 'philosophic' substance of it; in fact , a dislike of it much more intense than I had the puritanism to let myself feel, because that would spoil a nice warm bath of sentimental enjoyment" Guess I have to re-read that book now.
-I don't know why it took me so long to appreciate books of collected letters, but it's fast becoming one of my favorite genres.
- This is the second Melville House book I've read. They seem to pick great books and put them together well.
Marginalia
- One letter sums up Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pretty well: "and of all the moral ambiguities and woundings of environment which have created present "heredity" and "inheritance" [we need] a more general and universal interdependent understanding of what human "health," mental and spiritual and physical, individual and social wold mean...for individuals are whatever they are through conditions and a world (materiel and of ideas) which might have been better: this includes all damage done their "moral fibre"; and it would seem to me obvious that it would take a few generations of patience and not of moral blame to clean them off. Too many causes are disregarded or thought too lightly of as against a more easy feeling that by and large people are to get what they deserve... A great majority of people keep on suffering under diseases they never asked for and will never understand."
- Out of nowhere Agee mentions Goodbye Mr. Chips, a book I loved as a child: he writes "definite liking, and definitely touched or even moved; mixed with suspicion, slight resentment of self and author at being moved by suspect material; and considerable basic disagreement with almost the whole 'philosophic' substance of it; in fact , a dislike of it much more intense than I had the puritanism to let myself feel, because that would spoil a nice warm bath of sentimental enjoyment" Guess I have to re-read that book now.
-I don't know why it took me so long to appreciate books of collected letters, but it's fast becoming one of my favorite genres.
- This is the second Melville House book I've read. They seem to pick great books and put them together well.
January 7, 2011
Wow. I immediately went on the wagon after finishing this book. James Agee wrote one my favorite books of all time, "A Death in the Family". Not so much the subject matter, but the writing in that book is likely the best I've ever come across. I wanted to know more about him, and the early letters in this book give the impression of a guy whose talent was only exceeded by his ambition. He had some fascinating ideas about the medium that were to some degree recognized in "Let us Now Praise Famous Men', but even at that I don't think he felt he'd expressed himself fully. The tragic part is the realization toward the last third of the letters that the man is a raging alcoholic. There's one letter he writes about the difficulty of sticking to the "two highball minimum" that his doctor's prescribed that is incredibly sad in it's resignation. He died an old man at 45. I just happen to be 45. If you sought out this book, you're likely a fan, and I therefore can't recommend it. James Agee was one of my heros and I would have preferred he stayed that way.
April 30, 2014
Written on the last page: "From the outset I knew J. would die of a heart attack in a taxi, but I had no understanding of the man. His self-loathing is permanent, barely abating his whole adult life, but in an inverse ratio J. had a fundamental love of Life, a respect and adoration—just never for his own, which makes his self-loathing all the more empathy inducing.
His opinions on the relationship society should have towards the poor, the suffering (humans and non-) gives me a concrete feeling of hope: there have been others who feel as I do; I am not alone; my ideas—my core belief, that all life should be respected equally, and decisions made from this perspective—are not alone in the world; there have been others; there will be others; it is necessary we continue to struggle for a utopia we can't conceive of, but can only approach through specific, [temporally near,] cultural criticism."
His opinions on the relationship society should have towards the poor, the suffering (humans and non-) gives me a concrete feeling of hope: there have been others who feel as I do; I am not alone; my ideas—my core belief, that all life should be respected equally, and decisions made from this perspective—are not alone in the world; there have been others; there will be others; it is necessary we continue to struggle for a utopia we can't conceive of, but can only approach through specific, [temporally near,] cultural criticism."
July 8, 2025
This is no tidy correspondence. No charming exchange of literary wit or polite updates from the provinces of intellect. This is a man bleeding through his typewriter. James Agee, called Rufus as a boy, haunted as a man, writes to his former teacher and lifelong spiritual confessor, Father James Harold Flye, in a series of letters that chart not a literary journey but a descent, one slow, stuttering fall into self-knowledge, self-doubt, and at times, near self-annihilation.
To read this collection is to trespass into the soul of a man who never learned how to live without hurting. Or perhaps never wanted to.
And still—it is beautiful.
Pat Conroy once said that a writer is someone who refuses to live a life without wounds. If that is so, then Agee was born for the vocation. His wounds were not clean, surgical incisions. They were ragged things, half-healed and reopened by memory and longing and the God he could never quite stop loving or stop leaving. The letters pulse with contradiction: a devout agnostic, a committed husband who strays, a father who rarely mentions his children, a brilliant mind undone by drink and self-loathing.
But Lord, how he could write.
His prose stretches between the profane and the sacred, from the staccato tremors of madness to sentences so rapturous they feel plucked from liturgy. He weaves through matters of faith and filth without pause, as if the two were always meant to walk hand-in-hand. He doubts God but never quite casts Him out. He loathes himself but writes with such aching clarity that one wonders if self-hatred isn’t a kind of sideways reverence.
The tension that fuels these letters, the same tension that animated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is not between success and failure. No, Agee never much cared for that. The true battle is between the soul’s reach and the body's ruin. He was a man who saw life with unbearable clarity, but could not find the will to hold it together. A man whose capacity for compassion dwarfed his ability to survive.
To read this book is to watch a butterfly break its wings against the glass of American culture. Agee didn’t die in a blaze of youthful tragedy. He died by inches. By cocktails and deadlines. By ambition strapped to poverty and greatness crippled by guilt. He clawed his way through a system that offered money but asked him to write like a stranger. Hollywood paid the bills. Time-Life gave him a name. But none of it gave him rest.
Still, beneath the misery, there is movement. These are not the letters of a man content to suffer. Agee fights, bitterly, beautifully, with his flaws. His alcoholism. His self-pity. His romanticism. His tendency to confuse literary salvation with divine mercy. And he fights not for applause, but for something quieter and crueler: a way to live honestly in a world that punishes sincerity.
And then there is Father Flye from St. Andrews, Sewanee, Tennessee. The letters are addressed to him, yes, but they rarely seem interested in him. He is the confessor whose replies we never see, the pastoral mirror in which Agee casts his darkest self. Whether Flye was kind or cloying, wise or shallow, is left to our imagination. But the presence of him—silent, patient, maybe a bit smug—is enough to give the book its structure. He is the rope Agee pulls against, the imagined god in the machine, the man who bears witness to all that Agee cannot bear alone.
But more than anything, what moved me most in these pages was the nakedness of a man trying to tell the truth. Not a truth, polished and palatable, but his truth: raw, disjointed, unfinished. These letters are not literature. They are the wreckage from which literature is built. The scaffolding of a soul that never found its home.
We live in a time that prizes resolution. We demand that stories close, that wounds heal, that heroes rise from ash. But Agee gives us no such comfort. His story is the story of most of us, unfinished, unresolved, and throbbing with the ache of unrealized grace.
He drank too much. He loved too little. He lived too deeply. And in the end, he died in a taxi cab, just as he knew he would. But along the way, he left us these letters, not perfect, not polished, but true.
And in truth, there is beauty. And in beauty, there is God.
Even when we can't believe in Him. Especially then.
To read this collection is to trespass into the soul of a man who never learned how to live without hurting. Or perhaps never wanted to.
And still—it is beautiful.
Pat Conroy once said that a writer is someone who refuses to live a life without wounds. If that is so, then Agee was born for the vocation. His wounds were not clean, surgical incisions. They were ragged things, half-healed and reopened by memory and longing and the God he could never quite stop loving or stop leaving. The letters pulse with contradiction: a devout agnostic, a committed husband who strays, a father who rarely mentions his children, a brilliant mind undone by drink and self-loathing.
But Lord, how he could write.
His prose stretches between the profane and the sacred, from the staccato tremors of madness to sentences so rapturous they feel plucked from liturgy. He weaves through matters of faith and filth without pause, as if the two were always meant to walk hand-in-hand. He doubts God but never quite casts Him out. He loathes himself but writes with such aching clarity that one wonders if self-hatred isn’t a kind of sideways reverence.
The tension that fuels these letters, the same tension that animated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is not between success and failure. No, Agee never much cared for that. The true battle is between the soul’s reach and the body's ruin. He was a man who saw life with unbearable clarity, but could not find the will to hold it together. A man whose capacity for compassion dwarfed his ability to survive.
To read this book is to watch a butterfly break its wings against the glass of American culture. Agee didn’t die in a blaze of youthful tragedy. He died by inches. By cocktails and deadlines. By ambition strapped to poverty and greatness crippled by guilt. He clawed his way through a system that offered money but asked him to write like a stranger. Hollywood paid the bills. Time-Life gave him a name. But none of it gave him rest.
Still, beneath the misery, there is movement. These are not the letters of a man content to suffer. Agee fights, bitterly, beautifully, with his flaws. His alcoholism. His self-pity. His romanticism. His tendency to confuse literary salvation with divine mercy. And he fights not for applause, but for something quieter and crueler: a way to live honestly in a world that punishes sincerity.
And then there is Father Flye from St. Andrews, Sewanee, Tennessee. The letters are addressed to him, yes, but they rarely seem interested in him. He is the confessor whose replies we never see, the pastoral mirror in which Agee casts his darkest self. Whether Flye was kind or cloying, wise or shallow, is left to our imagination. But the presence of him—silent, patient, maybe a bit smug—is enough to give the book its structure. He is the rope Agee pulls against, the imagined god in the machine, the man who bears witness to all that Agee cannot bear alone.
But more than anything, what moved me most in these pages was the nakedness of a man trying to tell the truth. Not a truth, polished and palatable, but his truth: raw, disjointed, unfinished. These letters are not literature. They are the wreckage from which literature is built. The scaffolding of a soul that never found its home.
We live in a time that prizes resolution. We demand that stories close, that wounds heal, that heroes rise from ash. But Agee gives us no such comfort. His story is the story of most of us, unfinished, unresolved, and throbbing with the ache of unrealized grace.
He drank too much. He loved too little. He lived too deeply. And in the end, he died in a taxi cab, just as he knew he would. But along the way, he left us these letters, not perfect, not polished, but true.
And in truth, there is beauty. And in beauty, there is God.
Even when we can't believe in Him. Especially then.
July 28, 2025
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye.
Following the death of his father, James Agree, Knoxville native, Pulitzer Prize winner moved with his family to Seewanee, Tennessee where he attended St. Andrews, an episcopal boarding school originally founded to educate “barefoot boys from Appalachia.” There he cultivated an unlikely friendship/mentorship with Father James Flye, his history teacher. James Agee (called by his middle name, Rufus) was ten years old at the time. The two friends would often travel together and continued to exchange letters until Agee’s death at 45.
“After a while I was taken in and put to bed. (after a family evening on a spread quilt under the stars) Sleep, soft smiling draws in me to her and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”
The last paragraph from Knoxville, Tennessee, the introduction to A Death in the family by James Agee.
And so, James Agee’s letters to Father Flye offer a wide window into the day to day struggle of determining just who he was, of discovering what attracted him and what repelled him. These letters are not merely social correspondence. They chronicle Agrees life, school, jobs, marriages, travels, children, the books he has read, the books he wants to read; but more so, these letters reflect the tortured mind of a melancholy genius full of self doubt .
“In 1934 Agee wrote Father Flye, " I am in the most possible kinds of pain, mental and spiritual. The trouble revolves chiefly around the simple sounding problem of how to become what I wish I would, when I can't…My ideas and impressions and desires, which are much larger than I can begin to get to paper, are loose in my brain like wild beasts, not devouring each other, but in the process of tearing the zoo apart.”
In many ways, I’m reminded of Vincent Van Gogh…”the world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” (Starry, Starry Night by Don McClean.)
Jane’s Agee died in a taxi at age 45… “coronary thrombosis brought on by excessive drinking and smoking.”
Following the death of his father, James Agree, Knoxville native, Pulitzer Prize winner moved with his family to Seewanee, Tennessee where he attended St. Andrews, an episcopal boarding school originally founded to educate “barefoot boys from Appalachia.” There he cultivated an unlikely friendship/mentorship with Father James Flye, his history teacher. James Agee (called by his middle name, Rufus) was ten years old at the time. The two friends would often travel together and continued to exchange letters until Agee’s death at 45.
“After a while I was taken in and put to bed. (after a family evening on a spread quilt under the stars) Sleep, soft smiling draws in me to her and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”
The last paragraph from Knoxville, Tennessee, the introduction to A Death in the family by James Agee.
And so, James Agee’s letters to Father Flye offer a wide window into the day to day struggle of determining just who he was, of discovering what attracted him and what repelled him. These letters are not merely social correspondence. They chronicle Agrees life, school, jobs, marriages, travels, children, the books he has read, the books he wants to read; but more so, these letters reflect the tortured mind of a melancholy genius full of self doubt .
“In 1934 Agee wrote Father Flye, " I am in the most possible kinds of pain, mental and spiritual. The trouble revolves chiefly around the simple sounding problem of how to become what I wish I would, when I can't…My ideas and impressions and desires, which are much larger than I can begin to get to paper, are loose in my brain like wild beasts, not devouring each other, but in the process of tearing the zoo apart.”
In many ways, I’m reminded of Vincent Van Gogh…”the world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” (Starry, Starry Night by Don McClean.)
Jane’s Agee died in a taxi at age 45… “coronary thrombosis brought on by excessive drinking and smoking.”
October 24, 2024
I found out about this book from an epigraph to one of the chapters in “The Einstein Intersection”*, when I read the quote, it immediately drew me in, I looked up the book and decided to read it. I think it worked so well partly because I got interested in what the quote is about, partly because I liked the style in which it was written. The latter reason is mainly why I loved the book in its entirety, but the trouble is, I can’t describe what I like about the style and why (believe me, I tried). Not being able to clearly state the main appeal of the book, I’ll have to list some of the secondary ones instead. First, it’s a collection of personal letters by a writer and he sometimes mentions his work: the ideas, the struggles, the process etc. Unfortunately, though, the focus here is on the struggles, the author of the letters feels so miserable about his work, that one feels better about their own reading them, seeing as this is a person of some acclaim. Second, it discusses a lot of other books (poetry included), movies, and maybe plays (I can’t quite remember). It made me read Gulliver’s Travels in full for the first time, and it recommended some other books, that I’ve yet to read. Third, it’s a way to look into how people lived in the first half of the 20th century, and it discusses some of the issues current at the time. For instance, multiple letters (some of them in verse) discuss socialism, others state author’s views on education or feminism. It’s sometimes hard to tell what exactly those views are, but it’s interesting to read. Be aware that the mood of the book is sullen, which is perhaps expected, given the time the author lived in.
* this one: “My trouble is, such a subject cannot be seriously looked at without intensifying itself towards a center which is beyond what I, or anyone else, is capable of writing of . . . Trying to write it in terms of moral problems alone is more than I can possibly do. My main hope is to state the central subject and my ignorance from the start.”
* this one: “My trouble is, such a subject cannot be seriously looked at without intensifying itself towards a center which is beyond what I, or anyone else, is capable of writing of . . . Trying to write it in terms of moral problems alone is more than I can possibly do. My main hope is to state the central subject and my ignorance from the start.”
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October 12, 2022“[James Agee] began to play, Father Flye joined him, and a moment later they were singing together. For the first time, I think, I realized what it means when people are said to ‘raise their voices in song.’ Of course the hymns went back to their years together at St. Andrew's, but it was not nostalgia they were singing out of. It was an altogether hearty reverence, unsolemn and joyous, a reverence for everything, for the whole created world, and for all their differences, this was what they shared. In both of them, reverence was an inborn, inviolate instinct—neither a troubled conviction nor an act of faith, but simply an abounding, primary belief, as absolute as Blake's, that ‘everything that is, is holy.’” -Robert Phelps (from the intro)
Uh. Not gonna try to say it better. V cool to read two obviously brilliant people in conversation.
Uh. Not gonna try to say it better. V cool to read two obviously brilliant people in conversation.
December 17, 2018
I've never been one for reading correspondences (though I've enjoyed the letters of Bishop/Lowell and James Wright). This, however, owing to the generosity of Agee's spirit was as engaging as Agee's other writing and, as such, some of the boldest sui generis discourse I've ever witnessed. I'd just seen Night of the Hunter, prior to starting this. I feel like my life has changed (or more accurately, I feel like my death has become all the more powerful). "So far as I can tell, I definitely want to write..."
I'd be remiss not to mention the influence of CD Wright, or to dedicate my reading of this to her: who introduced me to Agee's work (A Death In the Family) and who, like Agee, I wish had lived a lot longer. Amen for this book, and thank you to all the Father Flye's of the world.
I'd be remiss not to mention the influence of CD Wright, or to dedicate my reading of this to her: who introduced me to Agee's work (A Death In the Family) and who, like Agee, I wish had lived a lot longer. Amen for this book, and thank you to all the Father Flye's of the world.
January 29, 2025
Lo compré porque me gusta mucho la serie Pensamientos de editorial Jus. Es muy bonita realmente. Las cartas transcritas abarcan un período de 30 años , desde el otoño en que Jim ingresó en Phillips Exeter hasta que murió en 1955. Tiene algunas pocas muy interesantes, que hablan de sus lecturas o de algún aspecto emocional que esté atravesando. En general, no me gustaron, son bastante reiterativas y carecen de profundidad. Voy a conseguir la novela más famosa de Agee que es Una muerte en la familia del 58.
December 3, 2017
So, Saul Bellow once said: "Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we."
In these letters Agee is painfully uncertain of himself. His self-loathing is his lodestar but he wants love, and to make love real for others. I read these letters after having read his major works - the stuff for which he's famous. He drank, smoke, and stressed himself to death - at the end of his life succumbing to an orgy of heart attacks big and small. I could feel me deteriorating with him.
In these letters Agee is painfully uncertain of himself. His self-loathing is his lodestar but he wants love, and to make love real for others. I read these letters after having read his major works - the stuff for which he's famous. He drank, smoke, and stressed himself to death - at the end of his life succumbing to an orgy of heart attacks big and small. I could feel me deteriorating with him.
October 21, 2023
Had a reading block in the course of reading this book but today I binged the remainder and it’s quite good. My favorite letters were the ones which took form of poetry. They are few but they beam with rhyme, written by people proficient in the language. I’m eager to read poems by James Agee
May 4, 2020
Peoples private musing are sometimes better kept secrets. Thankfully the paperback was so old about midway I turned the page and the book crumbled and I was spared the torturous second half.
December 1, 2020
For anyone who likes to read letters, this collection is fantastic and fascinating.
May 20, 2021
Agee's greatest tragedy is that he's cursed with a startling clarity on his life and his world.
March 9, 2024
Love him. He's so depressed throughout this book but so earnest. Ernest is great.
February 10, 2017
La mejor manera de conocer el mundo interior del autor: sus problemas creativos, sus interrogantes con respecto a la fe, sus ambiciones, tormentos... Después de leer este libro es mucho más fácil entender por qué escribió guiones como "La noche del cazador".
May 16, 2014
This is a beautiful, nearly lifelong self portrait of an artist and a genius whose struggles and doubts will feel very familiar to anyone who ever tried to create something using just their hands and their mind. There were parts that made me laugh, parts that filled me with respect and admiration and many parts that I related to on a deeply personal level. But I feel like this book would appeal to a wide range of personalities in that same subjective way, each for their own reasons. That was always Agee's power in his traditional prose, so it's no shock that it comes through so strongly in his letters.
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August 23, 2007Lost and gone, for the most part. I might say, parenthetically, that I remember reading "A Death in the Family" and thinking it was a work of sheer genius, but then never being able to get through "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," even though I knew what a landmark look at the poor it was. This was more of a partial biography told in correspondence, but the details have disappeared.
March 29, 2013
Good reading for Holy Week. Agee's troubled yet nevertheless sincere faith in focus, and also his many quirks and problems of self-esteem. Variously devout and bawdy, always humble. He lives in these pages written to a man who was almost certainly an adopted father figure.
August 21, 2007
If only we all had a Father Flye.
September 17, 2012
This is a sentimental favorite of mine.
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