Remembering James Agee

by James (ED) MADDEN, Jeffrey Folks (Editor)

Book by

172 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the late 1960s, I became interested in movies. In the first twenty or so years of my life, I had seen no more than two or three dozen films in theaters, far fewer, I believe, than most people my age. But I began to see a great many films, old and new, and to care about film as an art form. The first books about films that I read were two new paperback volumes, I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael and Agee on film: Reviews and Comments, a compilation of some of James Agee's writings about films from the 1940s and 1950s. I was not familiar with many of the films Agee discussed, but his writing brought them to life in a way that no other critics that I read at the time possibly could. How could one not want to see if Monsieur Verdoux or The Best Years of Our Lives or Henry V lived up to Agee's detailed enthusiastic descriptions? And he was funny and his prose was fine even when he was writing of films now totally forgotten. The poet W. H. Auden wrote of Agee's film criticism in the magazine the Nation: "In my opinion, [Agee's] column is the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today."

His film writing brought me to his other work, some of which I did not especially like, and some of which I liked very much indeed. I believe that the next book by Agee that I read was a collection of his letters, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, which I found fascinating. Agee had two published novels. I thought that his short novel The Morning Watch was rather too long. The subject, a schoolboy's religious vigil, was far from my experience or interest. His other novel, published posthumously, was A Death in the Family, the story of a young boy whose father dies in an automobile accident. This was based on a similar incident in Agee's childhood. It won a Pulitzer Prize. I think it is a fine, tender book.

Agee also published short fiction, of which I have only read a small part; I particularly liked the story "A Mother's Tale." I have not read any of Agee's poetry. I have only read a small portion of his acclaimed non-fiction book about Southern tenant farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which Agee's text is combined with Walker Evans' marvelous photographs.

Remembering James Agee is not intended to be a biography of all of Agee's life. It is, rather, a compendium of essays written by people who knew Agee. In addition to an introductory chapter by the editor David Madden, there are essays by Agee's mentor and long-time friend, Father James H. Flye, photographers Walker Evans and Florence Homolka, Agee's Harvard roommate Robert Saudek, film-maker John Huston, editor David McDowell, fellow authors Louis Kronenberger, T. S. Matthews, Robert Fitzgerald, Whittaker Chambers, and Dwight MacDonald, and Agee's widow, Mia Agee. Many of these people worked with Agee; all of them were his friends. The individual essays vary from a single page to sixty pages. Two of the most interesting are the two longest, by Agee's life-long friends Dwight MacDonald and Robert Fitzgerald. All the essays except Madden's have been previously published elsewhere.

One of the points made repeatedly is what a pity that Agee wasted so much of his life on writing about matters of scant importance. Some of these people do not seem to value greatly Agee's film work, either as a critic or as a screenwriter. His criticism seems to me to be splendid, as good as any writing about film that I have read. As a screenwriter, he wrote much of the script for a quite good film, The African Queen, and the original script for a great film, The Night of the Hunter.

Mia Agee comments on this in her essay, the concluding one in the book, written with Gerald Locklin. She writes:

There has been much written about James Agee and his work since his death and I have nothing but appreciation for most of it. I am, however, struck by how often his critics talk about his having "wasted his time and diffused his talent." The justification normally cites the many years he worked for magazines such as Fortune, Time, and the Nation, magazines by whom he was employed. To these are added all the many months he worked in Hollywood doing scripts for movies that saw production or a few that didn't. In addition there are those Innumerable commentaries that had to be written for foreign films - mostly documentaries. It is true that he had to work very hard at all these jobs and whatever writing he could do of his own had to be squeezed in to off hours, and there were never enough of them. However, the question still remains whether this was in fact a waste of time. I am not convinced of it. It is true that he may have stayed with some of these jobs too long, but would it really have been any less wasteful had he spent his days in an advertising agency, or driving a New York cab, or becoming a dirt farmer in the Tennessee mountains? What do writers do when they have to make a living?

And, as I said above, this "wasteful" work had great value.

In addition to the essays, there are twenty photographs of Agee, some by himself, some with others. (One of those "others," whose name does not appear in the caption, is Charlie Chaplin.)

One thing that I have not mentioned that is discussed in almost every essay here is that, his writing aside, Agee was evidently a fine man, caring not only about his friends but about all the world - a very good writer and a very good person. This book is a tribute to both those qualities.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

If James Agee only had written “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (a prose poem that would later become the preamble to the posthumously published A Death in the Family), it would be enough for me to have considered him a great writer. As it stands, he created other works that have stood the test of time: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his film criticism and the screenplays to The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. Agee died of a heart attack at age 45, reasonably well-known and frustratingly full of promise. This 1974 collection of essays, Remembering James Agee, provides a fine introduction. David Madden, the “other” Knoxville writer, edited and contributed his own original essay about a 1972 weeklong conference on Agee at St. Andrews Episcopal School near Sewanee. The essays are the works of Agee friends and colleagues, usually introductions to other books by or about Agee. You might think this would lend itself to hagiography, but the contributors couple their fondness with memories of his excesses with alcohol, smoking and temper. When an author dies young, there can be a lot of romanticism about “what could have been” and there’s some of that here, too. But most contributions are fair appraisals of the man and his work. I don’t know if college students read Agee now, but at one time he was popular in certain circles. Dwight Macdonald refers to “an Agee cult,” comparing the Agee followers to those of James Dean: “In their maimed careers and their wasteful deaths, the writer and the actor appeal to a resentment that intellectuals and teenagers alike feel about life in America, so smoothly prosperous, so deeply frustrating.” The best of the essays, oddly enough, is from a man known better for his photography than his writing, Walker Evans. In an introduction to a later edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans writes eloquently: “All you ever saw of [Agee’s Christianity] was an ingrained courtesy, an uncourtly courtesy that emanated from him toward everyone, perhaps excepting the smugly rich, the pretentiously genteel, and the police. After a while, in a round-about way, you discovered that, to him, human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls.” Long out-of-print, this is recommended if you can find a library or bookstore copy.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I jump from here to Madden's chapter "A Memoir" by Robert Fitzgerald who was a roommate of Agee at Harvard and who helped Agee get his first job writing At Fortune magazine..The people who knew Agee well liked him as a person and all believed he was a great writer. Robert Coles, an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University included James Agee in the great people he wrote about in addition to writing the standard psychiatry mbook on the morals of children. He believed Agee was being truthful when he said in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" that he could not write about their lives to include everything he knew and saw in them. But he was praising these sharecroppers in a way that no writer had ever done. Coles inclluded Agee amng the mst moral of writers of the 1930's through the 1950's and it was only after writing "A Death in the Family" that he received the accolades that a great writer should get.