James Agee 1909 1955

1
James Agee 1909 - 1955

• poet, critic, essayist, fiction writer,
  experimental writer, journalist
• A writer first and foremost a born, sovereign
  prince of the English language

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John Hersey describes Agee

• HE HAD blue-gray eyes, which seemed to change
  color with the tones of his talk
• the bulging bags of an all-night writer under
  them
• a deep woundlike dimple in his right cheek when
  he laughed
• a big brave nose and
• expressive lips over tobacco-stained and badly
  snaggled teeth.
• The second incisor on the left was missing,
  leaving a gap through which tobacco smoke jetted
  and curled.
• Yet he was somehow, all in all, wonderfully,
  passionately handsome.

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Birth and Education

• Born in Knoxville, Tennessee
• Father died from a car accident when he was six
• Episcopal School in St. Andrews
• Philips Exeter Academy
• Harvard 1928

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Harvard years

• President of Advocate
• (Hersey) There he stamped out the patterns of
  his whole life became a nocturnal animal by
  choice
• a maverick, rebellious against the conventions of
  his habitat, too fond of the release of alcohol
• a nonstop talker a bonfire of tobacco an
  amorist and a wizard with perfectly unexpected
  words.
• First wife Olivia Saunders

5
Fortune Magazine

• German enlisting France
• (Letter to Fitzgerald) It varies with me from a
  sort of hard, masochistic liking to direct
  nausea at the sight of this symbol and this
  and this biggest and this some blank billion But
  in the long run I suspect the fault, dear
  Fortune, is in me that I hate any job on earth,
  as a job and a hindrance and semi suicide.

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Boss Luce
I CANT ACCEPT THIS!! (rip!)
Go to hell
GET A DEGREE FROM HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
No
WATCH IT! Dress better!
7
Assignment on Sharecroppers

• With Walker Evans
• Agee was stunned, exalted, scared clean through,
  and felt like impregnating every woman on the
  fifty-second floor.

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Working on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1936 - 41

• Impossible in any form and length Fortune can
  use and I am now so stultified trying to do
  that, that Im afraid Ive lost ability to make
  it right in my own way.
• Fortune rejected and abandoned his draft. He
  began to freelance
• Met and married second wife Alma Mailman. (with
  12 dollars and 52 cents left in his pocket)
• Begin to review books for Time
• Met and married third wife Mia Fritsch

Im in a bad period incertitude and
disintegration on almost every account
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Publications

• Books
• Permit me Voyage (1934)
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
• The Morning Watch (1951)
• A Death in the Family (1957) - Pulitzer
• Agee on Film (1958)
• Film scripts
• The African Queen (with Humphrey Bogart
  and Katherine Hepburn, adaptation of CS
  Foresters novel)
• The Night of the Hunter

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Walker Evans
I dont like to use tricky angles or stolen
shots. I gives my subject time to arrange
themselves however they wish, sitting down or
standing up, change clothes, so they feel at
home, at ease I strive for precision and clarity
in a humbled mode.
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Dorothea Lange Vs Walker Evans
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let us now praise famous men

• There had never been, and there never will be,
  anything quite like this book.
• The documentary book to end all documentary
  book - the unknowable human divinity
• (The book) is indescribable anyway. One must
  read it.

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General Representation of the Southern Tenant
Farmers

• Popular, exploited, obsolete topic
• Common styles dramatism or calm social
  scientific record

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What is truth?

• Through this non-artistic view, this effort to
  suspend or destroy imagination, there opens
  before consciousness, and within it, a universe
  luminous, spacious, incalculably rich and
  wonderful in each detail, as relaxed and natural
  to the human swimmer, and as full of glory, as
  his breathing.
• For in the immediate world, everything is to be
  discerned, for him who can discern it, and
  centrally and simply, without either dissection
  into science, or digesting into art, but with the
  whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as
  it stands

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Can truth be told? How?

• The book is about the impossibility to
  communicate what has been experienced
• It seems further curious that realizing the
  extreme corruptness and difficulty of the
  circumstances, and the unlikelihood of achieving
  in any untainted form what they wished to
  achieve, they accepted the work in the first
  place.
• A piece of body torn out by the roots may be
  more to the point
• If complications arise, that is because they are
  trying to deal with it not as journalists,
  sociologists, politicians, entertainers,
  humanitarians, priests, or artists, but
  seriously.

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Limitation I

• Limitation must not be concealed if the writer is
  interested to speak as carefully and as near
  truly as possible.

I can only tell you of him only what I saw, only
so accurately as in my terms I know how
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Essence

• This is a book only by necessity. More seriously,
  it is an effort in human actuality, in which the
  reader is no less centrally involved than the
  authors and those of whom they tell.
• an exhaustive a reproduction and analysis of
  personal experience, including the phases and
  problems of memory and recall and revisitation
  and the problems of writing and of communication,
  as I am capable of, with constant bearing on two
  points To tell everything possible as accurately
  as possible and to invent nothing. It involves
  therefore as total a suspicion of creative and
  artistic as of reportorial attitudes and
  methods, and it is likely therefore to involve
  the development of some more or less new forms of
  writing and observation.

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The text was written with reading aloud in mind

• It is suggested that the reader attend with his
  ear what he takes off the page for variations of
  tone, pace, shape, and dynamics are here
  particularly unavailable to the eye alone, and
  with their loss, a good deal of escapes.
• Fitzgerald

The talk, in the end, was his great
distinguishing feature. He talked his prose, Agee
prose. It was hardly a twentieth century style
it had Elizabethan colorsIt rolled just as it
reads but he made it sound natural...you would
have blinked, gaped, and very likely run from
this same talk delivered without his mysterious
ability.
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Imaging with infinite accuracy
Balance of exactness
Hypersensitivity consciousness
Ageenesses
The monumental fleeting moments
Subtle metaphor
Additive Description
Setting the stage
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The recalled moment had been as if chiseled on a
monument, yet it was as fleeting as the notes of
a bugle at a ceremony when the body of the person
remembered elsewhere (Fitzgerald)
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Hypersensitivity consciousness
(Near a Church) The girlwhose heart I could
feel, though not hear, blasting as if it were my
whole bodyI could not bear that they should
receive from me any added reflection of the
shattering of their grace and dignity, and of the
nakedness and depth and meaning of their fear,
and of my horror and pity and self-hatredand so
distressed that I wanted only that they should be
restored, and should know I was their friend, and
that I might melt from existencethe least I
could have done was to throw myself flat on my
face and embrace and kiss their feet.
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Fine balancing

• The woman spoke to him sharply though not
  unkindly doing most of the talking,
  corroborative and protective of the young man,
  yet always respectful toward him. (p.35-6)
• We spoke and nodded, smiling as if casually they
  spoke and nodded, gravely, as they passed, and
  glanced back once, not secretly, nor long, nor in
  amusement. (p. 39)

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Description

• (Near a church) They were young, soberly
  buoyant of body, and strong, the man not quite
  thin, the girl not quite plump, and I remembered
  their mild and sober faces, hers softly wide and
  sensitive to love and pleasure, and his
  resourceful and intelligent without intellect and
  without guile, and their extreme dignity, which
  was effortless, unvalued, and undefended in them
  as the assumption of superiority which suffuses a
  rich and social adolescent boytheir swinging
  hands touched gently with their walking, stride
  by stride, but did not engage. (p. 40)

He seemed to model, fight, stroke his phrases as
he talked
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Break.
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Exact imaging

• The bed, between the hall door and the front
  wall, in the angle of the two walls, the head
  toward the wall, about six inches out from each
  wall, the foot at the window

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Setting the stage

• On the Porch Flow of Mississippi River
  Technological society
• A Country Letter
• Setting the time (mood) The Light in this room
  is of a lamp. (p. 51-2) (remember earlier we
  have All over Alabama, the lamps are out)
• Setting the perspective Small wonder how
  pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at
  night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile,
  when every star strikes us sick with fright do
  we really exist at all? (p. 53-54)
• Setting the connection Each (individual) is
  intimately connected with the bottom and the
  extremest reach of time the sleeping bodies (p.
  55-7)
• Story of Emma (p. 59 69)
• Getting ready for bed (p. 69 73)

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Emma object of affection

• and indeed Emma is rather a big child, sexual
  beyond propriety to its years, than a young
  women
• Each of us is attracted to Emma, both in sexual
  immediacy and as symbols or embodiments of a life
  she wants and knows she will never have If only
  Emma could spend her last few days alive having a
  gigantic good time in bed, with George and with
  Walker and with me
• They add an (unspeakable?) layer of emotions that
  richens and elucidate the significance of their
  farewell.

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Subtle (hidden) metaphor

• The pillow was hard, thin, and noisy, and
  smelled as of acid and new blood the pillowcase
  seemed to crawl at my cheek there was an odor
  something like that of old moist stacks of
  newspaper. I tried to imagine intercourse in this
  bed I managed to imagine it fairly wellI began
  to feel a sharp little piercings and crawlings
  all along the surface of my body I struck a
  match and a half dozen bedbugs broke along my
  pillow I caught two, killed them, and smelled
  their queer rankness. They were full of my blood.

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Book Reviews

• First major review by Ralph Thompson in NYT Agee
  was arrogant, mannered, precious, gross and the
  book was the choicest recent example of how to
  write self-inspired, self-conscious, and
  self-indulgent prose.
• Selden Rodman the excesses of the book make
  reader throw down the volume in rage, and curse
  the author for a confused adolescent, and
  Ezra-Pound-in-Wolfes clothing, a shocking snob,
  or a belligerent mystic posing with a purple
  pencil on the Left Bank of Fortune.
• John Jessup (Time) The most distinguished
  failure of the season.
• A year later, Lionel Trilling (American critic)
  I feel sure that this is a great bookAgee has a
  sensibility so precise, so unremitting, that it
  is sometimes appalling.
• Mrs. Burroughs I read it plumb through.and
  when I read it plumb through I gave it back to
  her (daughter) and I said, well everything in
  theres true. What they wrote in there was true.

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And Their Children After Them (1989)
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