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The Morning Watch
James Agee, whose death at the age of 45 cut short a brilliant career in American letters, is best known to millions of readers for his posthumous novel, A Death in the Family.
In The Morning Watch, his only other published novel, the extraordinary power of language and the themes that so moved readers of A Death in the Family may already be seen. In prose of astonishing clarity and intensity, Agee captured the portrait of an appealing and very real boy - serious, pitiable, funny - at the moment of his initiation into a feared yet fascinating world.
In The Morning Watch, his only other published novel, the extraordinary power of language and the themes that so moved readers of A Death in the Family may already be seen. In prose of astonishing clarity and intensity, Agee captured the portrait of an appealing and very real boy - serious, pitiable, funny - at the moment of his initiation into a feared yet fascinating world.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
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About the author
James Agee
100 books288 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
March 13, 2025
HOUSEKEEPING 2025:
Heavy Catholicism. So, right up my alley. As a kid raised in a Catholic family, this shit is just my soymeat and potatoes. Lyrically beautiful Agee, a man pilloried by many 'book people' for the sin of being a human being. The horror...
Heavy Catholicism. So, right up my alley. As a kid raised in a Catholic family, this shit is just my soymeat and potatoes. Lyrically beautiful Agee, a man pilloried by many 'book people' for the sin of being a human being. The horror...
August 26, 2011
This book is about an adolescent boy mourning the loss of his father and desperately trying to achieve religious piety...without really understanding what that means. Being a child, he takes things literally. Being sensitive, he takes things personally. And, basically, talks himself in shame spirals trying to sort it all out. --It's interesting how religion can reflect one's core issues: shame, anger, or existential dread. We're never more revealing than when we talk about "God"!
Though the story is meant to be humorous, it's mostly horrifying and a little sad taken within the context of Agee's real life. He was a man devoured by shame, ultimately drinking himself to death. It's rather telling, in my opinion, that both his novels are centered on young boys, lost and deeply insecure. Frankly, I doubt he ever did sort it all out. But then, who does?
A Death in the Family, his second novel, is a true masterpiece.
Though the story is meant to be humorous, it's mostly horrifying and a little sad taken within the context of Agee's real life. He was a man devoured by shame, ultimately drinking himself to death. It's rather telling, in my opinion, that both his novels are centered on young boys, lost and deeply insecure. Frankly, I doubt he ever did sort it all out. But then, who does?
A Death in the Family, his second novel, is a true masterpiece.
February 4, 2018
This is a superlatively beautiful novella containing some of the best similes for entering indoors/exiting outdoors I've ever heard. The book gives you a little peek into a consciousness. Sort of like a Virginia Woolf thing? You might like it if you like that.
You'll like this book if you can get your hands on it. I just recently found a copy of the book in After-words bookstore in Chicago this past Thursday, and I rejoiced and read the whole thing again that night, loving the concept of depicting anecdotes snuck into the wandering internal monologue of a boy at prayer.
Especially cool: books with three parts, the first and third of which are narrow, like metal bookends, compared with the hefty, digressing, energetic second part.
You'll like this book if you can get your hands on it. I just recently found a copy of the book in After-words bookstore in Chicago this past Thursday, and I rejoiced and read the whole thing again that night, loving the concept of depicting anecdotes snuck into the wandering internal monologue of a boy at prayer.
Especially cool: books with three parts, the first and third of which are narrow, like metal bookends, compared with the hefty, digressing, energetic second part.
March 1, 2015
The Morning Watch, more of a novella than a novel, was first published in 1951 and is a precursor to Agee's more mature and accomplished, though posthumous, A Death in the Family (one of the finest novels I've read).
Drawing upon his experiences as a boy attending the Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys, run by Episcopal monks, The Morning Watch takes place over the course of about three hours, as Richard and his fellow students are awoken in the very early hours of Good Friday to pray at the chapel alter. Similar to novelist Nicholson Baker's later experiments in relating minute amounts of time, every minute of the time spent in chapel as experienced by Richard is described. A sensitive and earnest soul, twelve-year old Richard is torn between a passion for holiness and the contradictory self centeredness he believes extreme piety must require. The characters and situations have all the subtle, carefully observed frailty and flawed humanity of a Rembrandt sketch.
A second section involves a delinquent walk to a lake. Here the symbolism employed uncharacteristically becomes somewhat heavy-handed, though no less compelling.
Agee's writing is as poetic and poignant as always. The length and reach of The Morning Watch is modest, though, and probably of most interest to those who have read Agee's more important work, particularly A Death in the Family.
Drawing upon his experiences as a boy attending the Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys, run by Episcopal monks, The Morning Watch takes place over the course of about three hours, as Richard and his fellow students are awoken in the very early hours of Good Friday to pray at the chapel alter. Similar to novelist Nicholson Baker's later experiments in relating minute amounts of time, every minute of the time spent in chapel as experienced by Richard is described. A sensitive and earnest soul, twelve-year old Richard is torn between a passion for holiness and the contradictory self centeredness he believes extreme piety must require. The characters and situations have all the subtle, carefully observed frailty and flawed humanity of a Rembrandt sketch.
A second section involves a delinquent walk to a lake. Here the symbolism employed uncharacteristically becomes somewhat heavy-handed, though no less compelling.
Agee's writing is as poetic and poignant as always. The length and reach of The Morning Watch is modest, though, and probably of most interest to those who have read Agee's more important work, particularly A Death in the Family.
November 3, 2025
james agee?
tennessee?
the morning watch of Good Friday?
a kneeler and 24 hour prayer vigil?
goin’ swimming at the watering hole?
this novella was extremely in my lane™️
I’ve never read a character that could describe my childhood better than the inwardly-descending self-conscious protagonist Richard: one part pious, one part prig, one part worried about which one I really was.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that the snake is defeated when we live in the world, when we act, when he pray without self-conscious introspection about whether we really “mean” it. Perhaps the moral is that Christ won the victory by doing something and not worrying about whether it was enough.
But that’s my own aside. I’m not sure Agee got there. I think he was consumed by insecurity and grief and his main characters are too. But regardless of what his biographers might say, he is profoundly religious: we are never more exposed than when he talk freely about God
tennessee?
the morning watch of Good Friday?
a kneeler and 24 hour prayer vigil?
goin’ swimming at the watering hole?
this novella was extremely in my lane™️
I’ve never read a character that could describe my childhood better than the inwardly-descending self-conscious protagonist Richard: one part pious, one part prig, one part worried about which one I really was.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that the snake is defeated when we live in the world, when we act, when he pray without self-conscious introspection about whether we really “mean” it. Perhaps the moral is that Christ won the victory by doing something and not worrying about whether it was enough.
But that’s my own aside. I’m not sure Agee got there. I think he was consumed by insecurity and grief and his main characters are too. But regardless of what his biographers might say, he is profoundly religious: we are never more exposed than when he talk freely about God
July 10, 2022
James Agee was a fine writer. It is a shame that he wrote so few book length works and died so young.
This is the story of a twelve year old boy's spiritual experience while praying in a chapel before dawn on Good Friday at a harsh Catholic boarding school. Richard has been deeply affected by his father's death, his religious mother, the rituals and beliefs of the Catholic church and his own spiritual nature. He also lives in a young person's world where he has to navigate the strict discipline of the boarding school and the social stress of being a boy who doesn't quite fit in.
The wanderings of Richard's mind during the first section of the book are some of the best stream of consciousness writing that I have read. I could feel that Richard's mind twisted and turned through the same sort of process as my own mind, spinning out coherent streams of thought, but also hopping about - sometimes on account of external stimuli, sometimes through inner mental logic. The only other stream of consciousness writer who reproduces my own mental processes so well is Virginia Woolf. In Richard's case the wanderings of his mind take him to a spiritual bright light moment along the lines that William James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience. It's not anything that I have gone through myself, but Mr. Agee does a great job of conveying Richard's experience so that we can feel it vicariously. Richard's follow on spin down into the real world was also nicely described. The last part in the chapel and the final section where Richard and two other boys go off campus without permission to a swimming hole give us a Richard who has been profoundly affected by his revelation, as we see in the ways the he responds to the cicada shell and the snake, but who also has to live in the real world of school and rules and punishments and the struggle for social standing that all of us had to go through at Richard's age. It's like the final panel of the famous zen ox hunting pictures where the seeker, who has found the ox and attained nirvana in the earlier panels of the series, returns at the end to the marketplace.
The hardest part of the book for me was all of the Catholic ideas about sin, confession, the suffering of Jesus and finding the path to God through pain and self-denial. I do understand that this is integral to Richard's way of thinking and that without it he could not have achieved his moment of pure communion with God, but every part of me rebels against this as the spiritual path. Ugh. There are other less bumpy roads that give the same reward of the journey and that take the seeker to the same destination.
This is the story of a twelve year old boy's spiritual experience while praying in a chapel before dawn on Good Friday at a harsh Catholic boarding school. Richard has been deeply affected by his father's death, his religious mother, the rituals and beliefs of the Catholic church and his own spiritual nature. He also lives in a young person's world where he has to navigate the strict discipline of the boarding school and the social stress of being a boy who doesn't quite fit in.
The wanderings of Richard's mind during the first section of the book are some of the best stream of consciousness writing that I have read. I could feel that Richard's mind twisted and turned through the same sort of process as my own mind, spinning out coherent streams of thought, but also hopping about - sometimes on account of external stimuli, sometimes through inner mental logic. The only other stream of consciousness writer who reproduces my own mental processes so well is Virginia Woolf. In Richard's case the wanderings of his mind take him to a spiritual bright light moment along the lines that William James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience. It's not anything that I have gone through myself, but Mr. Agee does a great job of conveying Richard's experience so that we can feel it vicariously. Richard's follow on spin down into the real world was also nicely described. The last part in the chapel and the final section where Richard and two other boys go off campus without permission to a swimming hole give us a Richard who has been profoundly affected by his revelation, as we see in the ways the he responds to the cicada shell and the snake, but who also has to live in the real world of school and rules and punishments and the struggle for social standing that all of us had to go through at Richard's age. It's like the final panel of the famous zen ox hunting pictures where the seeker, who has found the ox and attained nirvana in the earlier panels of the series, returns at the end to the marketplace.
The hardest part of the book for me was all of the Catholic ideas about sin, confession, the suffering of Jesus and finding the path to God through pain and self-denial. I do understand that this is integral to Richard's way of thinking and that without it he could not have achieved his moment of pure communion with God, but every part of me rebels against this as the spiritual path. Ugh. There are other less bumpy roads that give the same reward of the journey and that take the seeker to the same destination.
Read
July 10, 2022@colby gets mad when I don’t write reviews so here you go @colby:
“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’” - Genesis 3:8-10
“…although he felt very lonely, and suddenly wanted very much to be in there with them…, he wanted still more not to be anywhere near them or anywhere near anybody.”
“Now that they had stopped walking and stood in the brightened silence of the open light the day began to look practical; they realized how chilly the air still was, even here out of the woods, and how bitter the water still looked, and they no longer felt like going in. But none of them was willing to admit this frankly even to himself, and it was only after they stripped that they became openly hesitant.”
“’Tis the Spring of Souls today, Christ hath burst His prison, and from three days’ sleep in Death, like a Sun hath risen. But not yet…. We know a secret far inside ourselves but we don’t dare tell it, even to ourselves.”
That’s it. That’s the story. It’s beautiful and sad and stuck in that lonely (self-destructive?) place between garden and empty grave.
Sheesh. We just want to be loved !!
“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’” - Genesis 3:8-10
“…although he felt very lonely, and suddenly wanted very much to be in there with them…, he wanted still more not to be anywhere near them or anywhere near anybody.”
“Now that they had stopped walking and stood in the brightened silence of the open light the day began to look practical; they realized how chilly the air still was, even here out of the woods, and how bitter the water still looked, and they no longer felt like going in. But none of them was willing to admit this frankly even to himself, and it was only after they stripped that they became openly hesitant.”
“’Tis the Spring of Souls today, Christ hath burst His prison, and from three days’ sleep in Death, like a Sun hath risen. But not yet…. We know a secret far inside ourselves but we don’t dare tell it, even to ourselves.”
That’s it. That’s the story. It’s beautiful and sad and stuck in that lonely (self-destructive?) place between garden and empty grave.
Sheesh. We just want to be loved !!
July 29, 2016
Still thinking about the implications of the locust shell and the snake... Loved the descriptions (particularly the one with the mirrors facing each other) of sin and redemption, of good and evil beauty. The last 30 pages or so were some of my favorite, ending with the walk back to the school, the shell at Richard's heart (which i think represents the bodily Christ legacy) and the snake (which maybe represents sin, since it has just shed its own skin, but is still beautiful) eaten in the hog pen. The fact that Richard feels deep empathy for both is a perfect picture of what it is to be human... And the sudden realization and recall of the deceased father, and the resultant lightening burden that Richard feels, helps Agee to show the human factor in all parts of the Christian tradition (the Christ and the Devil), which is extremely prevalent here in Tennessee.. Even the cover of the book, (which im just now noticing is a boys face, half shadow and half light) goes along perfectly with everything, and I can relate to Richard's devotional inner-monologues so so well, even though i havent been to church in years.
August 4, 2011
This is not my kind of book. I find the prose, beautifully and masterfully crafted though it is, to be tedious, its sentences too lengthy. Yet I think this short work is an extraordinary achievement. Agee explores several spiritual, physical and intellectual topics in dialectical relation to each other with exceeding care and wisdom. The fact that he can make his prose describe the unfolding of the events and their comprehension in the mind of his protagonist and his reader is remarkable. Agee's prose style helps him in this by giving him the time to show those shifts in consciousness and awareness that the reader might possibly recognize as similar to something experienced before, if not these particular subjects and events. The work is about Catholicism, bodily and spiritual mortification, coming of age, sexuality, death, and learning to comprehend Christ's suffering and sacrifice on an emotional and intellectual, theological, plain not available to children, but which, Agee's argument seems to be, present to adults.
January 21, 2015
Nowhere near as brilliant as "A Death in The Family," but still a powerful vignette of Richard (what must be James Agee himself in autobiographical fiction as a 12 year old), struggling to come to grips with the authenticity of his religious fervor as a young student in Catholic boy's boarding school in his home state of Tennessee.
Where others may get "bored" with Agee's refusal to let his readers turn away from the minutia of Richard's seemingly endless vacillation between self-doubt and self-righteousness, I look at what little James Agee has given us in this novella (144 short pages) and his few other works as gifts that I don't believe any other writer that I have read has the ability to give. January, 2015, has become the month of James Agee for me; while this "discovery" is exciting and rewarding, I am actually feeling an impending sadness knowing that I will have read all is literary works by the end of the next several weeks. Maybe that's the best compliment a writer could receive. I don't know.
Where others may get "bored" with Agee's refusal to let his readers turn away from the minutia of Richard's seemingly endless vacillation between self-doubt and self-righteousness, I look at what little James Agee has given us in this novella (144 short pages) and his few other works as gifts that I don't believe any other writer that I have read has the ability to give. January, 2015, has become the month of James Agee for me; while this "discovery" is exciting and rewarding, I am actually feeling an impending sadness knowing that I will have read all is literary works by the end of the next several weeks. Maybe that's the best compliment a writer could receive. I don't know.
January 28, 2013
This is an emotionally spiritual book about a young man and his relationship with God. I was very moved by many passages. It is a very short book, but I found myself re-reading pages, so it did take me some time. I felt the author's condemnation of himself as a fallible human being, and his oneness with God as he struggled with his failings. I shared some of his guilt and his self-recriminations. This book would probably not mean as much to a non-Christian.
July 11, 2019
James Agee is my Maurice Blanchot, where Maurice Blanchot is many "thinking" people's Paul.
January 8, 2022
3.5
Taken from the Library of America's edition of Agee's fiction (plus Let Us Now...). I also read the three short stories included at the end, all of which were quite good. "A Mother's Tale" features talking cows, namely a mother cow who can't stop herself from telling an absolutely horrifying story to her calves.
I've decided to spend 2022 working through Agee's work after a brief but potent encounter with the first 50 pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a work that ended up being unlike anything I'd expected. (I remember being glad it had been cut from my Southern Lit. grad class, simply because it sounded so boring. Now I'm envious of whatever alternate universe me who got to read it with that professor.) With yet another unpredictable and potentially demanding semester on the horizon, I've shelved that book for now, instead focusing on texts I can chip away at every day (Cheever's journals, Ross Gay's Book of Delights) or that I can read in a few days.
Hence this novella, which was . . . pretty good! I've got McCarthy and Joyce on the brain (especially with the Ulysses centenary coming up), but it's hard to not make connections between Agee and those others here. Agee's fiction is mostly autobiographical, from what I can gather, and the city of Knoxville is a prominent feature in his writing, making him a logical follow-up to my reading of Suttree. And apparently he was enraptured by Ulysses when it appeared in the U.S. This novella in particular reminded me of Portrait of the Artist: the lengthy middle section depicts the grueling loop a young boy's mind can fall into when contemplating sin and grace, and the young boy in question, Richard (a clear Agee stand-in), lives and goes to school at the church (which I think is Episcopal?), looked over by priests both avuncular and cruel. The story takes place on Good Friday, starting with the boys waking up in the middle of the night to say their prayers in the church and keep watch, so to speak, as they await the morning. There's some heavy-handed symbolism, particularly near the end (an actual snake appears), and it gets a tad boring at times, but that middle section: that's done quite well. Here's an excerpt I typed up:
“He looked proudly at the monstrance and felt strength and well-being stand up straight inside him, and self-esteem as well; for it began to occur to him that not many people would even know this for the terrible sin it was, or would feel a contrition so deep, or would have the courage truly and fully, in all of its awful shamefulness, to confess it: and again the strength and the self-esteem fell from him and he was aghast in the knowledge that still again in this pride and complacency he had sinned and must still again confess; and again that in recognizing this newest sin as swiftly as it arose, and in repenting it and determining to confess it as well, he had in a sense balanced the offense and restored hiss well-being and his self-esteem; and again in that there was evil, and again in the repenting of it there was good and evil as well, until it began to seem as if he were tempted into eternal wrong by rightness itself or even the mere desire for rightness and as if he were trapped between them, good and evil, as if they were mirrors laid face to face as he had often wished he could see mirrors, truly reflecting and extending each other forever upon the darkness their meeting, their facing, created, and he in the dark middle between them, and there was no true good and no true safety in any effort he might ever make to realize or repent a wrong but only a new temptation which his very soul itself seemed powerless to resist; for was not this sense of peace, of strength, of well-being, itself a sin? yet how else could a forgiven or forgivable soul possibly feel, or a soul in true contrition or self-punishment? I’m a fool to even try, he groaned to himself, and he felt contempt for every moment of well-being he could recall, which had come of the goodness of a thought or word or deed. Everything goes wrong, he realized. Everything anyone can ever do for himself goes wrong."
Taken from the Library of America's edition of Agee's fiction (plus Let Us Now...). I also read the three short stories included at the end, all of which were quite good. "A Mother's Tale" features talking cows, namely a mother cow who can't stop herself from telling an absolutely horrifying story to her calves.
I've decided to spend 2022 working through Agee's work after a brief but potent encounter with the first 50 pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a work that ended up being unlike anything I'd expected. (I remember being glad it had been cut from my Southern Lit. grad class, simply because it sounded so boring. Now I'm envious of whatever alternate universe me who got to read it with that professor.) With yet another unpredictable and potentially demanding semester on the horizon, I've shelved that book for now, instead focusing on texts I can chip away at every day (Cheever's journals, Ross Gay's Book of Delights) or that I can read in a few days.
Hence this novella, which was . . . pretty good! I've got McCarthy and Joyce on the brain (especially with the Ulysses centenary coming up), but it's hard to not make connections between Agee and those others here. Agee's fiction is mostly autobiographical, from what I can gather, and the city of Knoxville is a prominent feature in his writing, making him a logical follow-up to my reading of Suttree. And apparently he was enraptured by Ulysses when it appeared in the U.S. This novella in particular reminded me of Portrait of the Artist: the lengthy middle section depicts the grueling loop a young boy's mind can fall into when contemplating sin and grace, and the young boy in question, Richard (a clear Agee stand-in), lives and goes to school at the church (which I think is Episcopal?), looked over by priests both avuncular and cruel. The story takes place on Good Friday, starting with the boys waking up in the middle of the night to say their prayers in the church and keep watch, so to speak, as they await the morning. There's some heavy-handed symbolism, particularly near the end (an actual snake appears), and it gets a tad boring at times, but that middle section: that's done quite well. Here's an excerpt I typed up:
“He looked proudly at the monstrance and felt strength and well-being stand up straight inside him, and self-esteem as well; for it began to occur to him that not many people would even know this for the terrible sin it was, or would feel a contrition so deep, or would have the courage truly and fully, in all of its awful shamefulness, to confess it: and again the strength and the self-esteem fell from him and he was aghast in the knowledge that still again in this pride and complacency he had sinned and must still again confess; and again that in recognizing this newest sin as swiftly as it arose, and in repenting it and determining to confess it as well, he had in a sense balanced the offense and restored hiss well-being and his self-esteem; and again in that there was evil, and again in the repenting of it there was good and evil as well, until it began to seem as if he were tempted into eternal wrong by rightness itself or even the mere desire for rightness and as if he were trapped between them, good and evil, as if they were mirrors laid face to face as he had often wished he could see mirrors, truly reflecting and extending each other forever upon the darkness their meeting, their facing, created, and he in the dark middle between them, and there was no true good and no true safety in any effort he might ever make to realize or repent a wrong but only a new temptation which his very soul itself seemed powerless to resist; for was not this sense of peace, of strength, of well-being, itself a sin? yet how else could a forgiven or forgivable soul possibly feel, or a soul in true contrition or self-punishment? I’m a fool to even try, he groaned to himself, and he felt contempt for every moment of well-being he could recall, which had come of the goodness of a thought or word or deed. Everything goes wrong, he realized. Everything anyone can ever do for himself goes wrong."
June 23, 2024
The Morning Watch is a short novel covering ground familiar to any thoughtful person who was raised in a religious setting. This stream of consciousness story describes the thoughts and prayers of Richard, a boy of twelve, as he wakes and sits through middle of the night Good Friday prayers at the Catholic school where he lives. Richard is a gentle boy eager to belong, an intellectually pious youth who is able to overthink and second guess his own motivations with the best of them. As he reflects on Christ’s suffering and his own inconsistencies as a believer, he manages to exemplify a deep desire to be seen as a real man and a desire to overcome his own gentleness, while also berating himself for his spiritual shortcomings and tendency to fail to meet his own standards in crucial moments of public faithfulness.
The Morning Watch takes place in a span of only a few hours and functions as little more than a stream of consciousness journal from the perspective of a self-persecuting middle schooler, but it manages to highlight many perspectives commonly wrestled through by philosophical youths raised in intensely religious contexts.
The Morning Watch takes place in a span of only a few hours and functions as little more than a stream of consciousness journal from the perspective of a self-persecuting middle schooler, but it manages to highlight many perspectives commonly wrestled through by philosophical youths raised in intensely religious contexts.
September 19, 2018
I wanted to read this because James Agee looms so large among American authors. It's quite unlike anything else I have ever read. It takes place entirely within the course of one night and records mostly the thoughts and emotions of one adolescent boy who is trying to keep watch in the school chapel during the Easter weekend, as there is very little action until dawn. As a result, the reader is constantly reacting and wishing one could reassure the boy, shake some sense into him, laugh with him, comfort him, encourage him, commiserate with him, and otherwise respond to his excruciating scruples and sense of conscience.
August 29, 2022
“A dogwood dilated ahead of them, each separate blossom enlarging like an eye, and swung behind, and deeply retired among the black trees ahead they could see the shining of others in the first light, triumphal and sad, lonesome as nebulae…”
An example of Agee’s lyrical writing.
Not quite as powerful as A Death in the Family but an interesting exploration of a young man’s attempts to assimilate and understand religion in the context of his father’s death.
[reading originally completed 8/28 but placed here for grouping]
An example of Agee’s lyrical writing.
Not quite as powerful as A Death in the Family but an interesting exploration of a young man’s attempts to assimilate and understand religion in the context of his father’s death.
[reading originally completed 8/28 but placed here for grouping]
Read
September 10, 2025Agee’s challenging little novella (1951) rhapsodizes the spiritual seeking of a 12-year-old boy in the early morning hours of Good Friday. He’s questioning his faith at a Catholic boarding school in the Tennessee mountains after the death of his father & the emotional abandonment of his mom. So, yeah, exactly what really happened to the author. Virtually plotless, “Watch” mostly takes place in the boy’s head as he prays—or tries to anyway—& hikes the woods. Joycean at times, it’s Agee at his best (capturing quietly profound moments) & worst. (Whaddaya know! Ten pages on snakeskins!)
January 5, 2026
Dieser kurze Roman behandelt einen 12 jährigen Jungen in einem Klosterinternat in den 1920er Jahren in Tenessee, USA , welcher im Zuge seiner Pubertät mit der Frömmigkeit und seinen Sünden (zumindest denkt er es wären Sünden) in Verwirrung gerät. Eim Großteil des Buches spielt in seinem Kopf ab. Seine Gedanken sind oft sehr verwirrt und er sieht oft in seinen Gedanken eine Sünde. Weshalb es auch zum Teil schwierig macht, die Gedankengänge zu verfolgen. Unabhängig vom Glauben kann das Buch aber dazu anregen seine eigenen Gedanken zu hinterfragen und zu reflektieren.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 26, 2020
A young boy dividing his attention between following religious practices, noticing the world and navigating social situations. What makes this interesting is he switches. Whichever persona of himself is being acted out is the compass by which he makes decisions. His different personas carry different moralities, so he is able do make differing judgement calls depending on who he is that minute.
Some of this felt very close to home from my pre-teen years.
Some of this felt very close to home from my pre-teen years.
May 8, 2018
A strange story about an obsessive young boy at a school in Tennessee run by Anglo-Catholics. Certainly some brilliant moments but the narration is rather convoluted and the sections centered around the Passion are overshadowed by the seemingly superfluous narrative concerning Richard ahd his friend's trip to the lake.
January 1, 2019
Even for a non-Catholic, this is a beautifully rendered portrait of a 12 year old boy at a Catholic school struggling to bring Christ into his life. Powerful and believable, Agee's only novel besides the magnificent A Death in the Family.
February 28, 2021
A novella (only 120 pages) about an adolescent boy at an Episcopalian church school and his time spent “keeping watch” in the school chapel in the early morning hours of Good Friday, and his struggles with understanding how to be a good Christian. An interesting read on a lazy Saturday morning.
November 28, 2022
I'm sure I missed a lot of the meaning behind this story; my rating of this book is ONLY a reflection of my lack of understanding. It's a story based on good and evil and the pull between them both. It's a short book, one that left me feeling as if I had missed some deeper meaning.
December 28, 2024
so much implied, unsaid, but there to feel and understand
January 31, 2025
This was much different than A Death in the Family. Almost unreadable. I struggled to plod through it.
This one had a preface by Alan Pryce-Jones
This one had a preface by Alan Pryce-Jones
January 19, 2016
First off, this one really struck a chord. In some ways it's like reading your own childhood. That's not say this is some nostalgic romp, it's pretty uncomfortable finding similarities with this character in your own childhood. It's also a story I never imagined was worth telling. The pathos it delves into isn't one you want to admit outwardly, given how unflattering it all is.
The story is divided into three parts. Part I: In hidden vainglory we meet the eleven year old narrator, Richard.
Part II: we begin to get a sense of the depth of Richard's pathology. An outsider acutely aware of his separateness from his classmates, he uses religion to protect himself from this painful otherness and as a means to feel superior to them in his otherness. Part II is also a sort of dark night of the soul of an eleven year old. "Not many people would know how terrible his sin was, or would feel a contrition so deep, or would have the courage truly and fully, in all of its awful shamefulness, to confess it: and again the strength and self-esteem fell from him and he was aghast in the knowledge that still in in this pride and complacency he had sinned and must still again confess; and again that in recognizing this newest sin as swiftly as it arose, and in repenting it and determining to confess it as well, he had in a sense balanced the offense and restored his well-being and his self-esteem; and again in that there was evil."
Part III is so steeped in religious allegory that most of the coded language is over my head. It is full of images of death and rebirth. Three actually. The fourth time ends only with death, but Richard appears to take solace in the fact that the death ends with his own father in Heaven, which I guess is a sort of rebirth of its own. Part III is clearly where the author intended the rubber to meet the road, but it's so obtuse that the real heart of story is the self-mortification of Part II.
The story is divided into three parts. Part I: In hidden vainglory we meet the eleven year old narrator, Richard.
Part II: we begin to get a sense of the depth of Richard's pathology. An outsider acutely aware of his separateness from his classmates, he uses religion to protect himself from this painful otherness and as a means to feel superior to them in his otherness. Part II is also a sort of dark night of the soul of an eleven year old. "Not many people would know how terrible his sin was, or would feel a contrition so deep, or would have the courage truly and fully, in all of its awful shamefulness, to confess it: and again the strength and self-esteem fell from him and he was aghast in the knowledge that still in in this pride and complacency he had sinned and must still again confess; and again that in recognizing this newest sin as swiftly as it arose, and in repenting it and determining to confess it as well, he had in a sense balanced the offense and restored his well-being and his self-esteem; and again in that there was evil."
Part III is so steeped in religious allegory that most of the coded language is over my head. It is full of images of death and rebirth. Three actually. The fourth time ends only with death, but Richard appears to take solace in the fact that the death ends with his own father in Heaven, which I guess is a sort of rebirth of its own. Part III is clearly where the author intended the rubber to meet the road, but it's so obtuse that the real heart of story is the self-mortification of Part II.
February 25, 2009
I'm a fan of Agee. In this work he shows he is skilled at writing
from the perspective of a child, but honestly, he does a better job of writing
from the perspective of a child in A Death in the Family, and that book contrasts
it with adult perspectives and more depth. So, of the two, I'd recommend A Death
in the Family. I think The Morning Watch holds some appeal to me because it is about
a lonely boy in Tennessee growing up in a religious environment and his having conflicting
emotions about how to reconcile the different and developing aspects of his personality.
It also shows the flip sides of good and evil in almost everything. These themes may not
be appealing to everyone.
from the perspective of a child, but honestly, he does a better job of writing
from the perspective of a child in A Death in the Family, and that book contrasts
it with adult perspectives and more depth. So, of the two, I'd recommend A Death
in the Family. I think The Morning Watch holds some appeal to me because it is about
a lonely boy in Tennessee growing up in a religious environment and his having conflicting
emotions about how to reconcile the different and developing aspects of his personality.
It also shows the flip sides of good and evil in almost everything. These themes may not
be appealing to everyone.
August 20, 2013
I have all of James Agee's works -- most of them I've owned for over 40 years. In 1972 we used a selection from his poem, Permit Me Voyage, in our wedding vows.
But I'd never read The Morning Watch until now. It is a beautiful book, and one that resonated with me, as, like the protagonist (based on Agee himself as a boy), my father died when I was a boy, and like Agee's protagonist, I, too turned to religion (entering the minor seminary of our Catholic missionary order for a short time) for solace. So although this book had a special meaning for me, great writing crosses all interests.
But I'd never read The Morning Watch until now. It is a beautiful book, and one that resonated with me, as, like the protagonist (based on Agee himself as a boy), my father died when I was a boy, and like Agee's protagonist, I, too turned to religion (entering the minor seminary of our Catholic missionary order for a short time) for solace. So although this book had a special meaning for me, great writing crosses all interests.
July 18, 2011
A bizarre and breathtaking novella about a Catholic boy with a simultaneous Saint-complex and guilt-complex. Ethereal, strange, fragmented. The adolescent voice is shockingly real. I will definitely be rereading this one, since it reminds me of my Catholic upbringing (and eventual disillusionment as I became a man). It made me think of all the crazy things I thought while kneeling for all that crazy time in churches.
Plus, I love Agee. His sentences are hypnotic.
Plus, I love Agee. His sentences are hypnotic.
Want to read
April 28, 2009novella, autobio, went to st andrews
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