The Making of James Agee
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2005 The Making of James Agee Hugh Rollin Davis University of Tennessee, Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Davis, Hugh Rollin, "The Making of James Agee. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2005. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4310 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Hugh Rollin Davis entitled "The Making of James Agee." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allen R. Dunn, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Stan B. Garner, Michael C. Lofaro, Mary E. Papke, Paul Ashdown Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the GraduateCouncil: I amsubmitting herewith a dissertationwritten by Hugh Rollin Davis entitled "The Making of James Agee." I have examined the finalpaper copy of this dissertation for form andcontent andrecommend that it be accepted i_n partial fulfillmentof the requirements forthe degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. �&n R. �or Professor We have read this dissertation andrecommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: THE MAKINGOF JAMES AGEE A Dissertation Presented forthe Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Hugh Rollin Davis August 2005 11 Copyright © 2005 by HughRollin Davis All rightsreserved. 111 DEDICATION To Molly andMandi V ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank, first of all, Dr. MaryPapke forinitiating what would become this dissertation by generously referringme to Dr. Michael Lofaro, who gave me the opportunityto assist him in the continuing project of reassessing the work and lifeof James Agee. I wish to thankDr. Allen Dunnfor his patience, guidance, and insight in directing the dissertation and Dr. Stan Garner, Dr. Paul Ashdown, Dr. Papke, and Dr. Lofaro fortheir perceptive comments and judicious advice as members of the dissertation committee. I am honored to be associated with such a distinguished collection of scholars. I would also like to thankPaul Sprecher, head of The JamesAgee Trust, whose commitment to makingpreviously inaccessible materials available has stimulated a revival in interest in Agee and made this dissertation possible. Thankyou to the Yates Graduate Fellowship Endowment for financialsupport and to Goldie Jane Feldman and Dr. Bill Durrett forinspiration. Finally, I would like to express my love and deep gratitudeto my parents, Bill and Susan Davis, and my wife,Linda, forsustaining me throughout. vu ABSTRACT When JamesAgee died in 1955, all of his major works were out of print or not yet published. The posthumous 1957 publication of Death in the Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize forFiction in 1958, began a twelve-year period that saw editions of Agee's collected filmreviews, screenplays, letters, short prose, and poetry, as well as re-issues of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and TlieMorning Watch. As these works came into or back into print, establishing a de factoAgee canon, an Agee myth also emerged. Agee came to be seen as the epitome of the tortured artist, a noble failure who had been crushed by a system to which he had refusedto capitulate. Eventually, the myth came to predominate, and the work was judged not on its own merits but as a reflection of his various roles: rebel, poet, mystic, martyr. While the people most responsible forcreating Agee's legacy were long-time friends who wanted to ensure that his work would receive the attention it deserved, they did him a disservice by distorting or misrepresenting a large portion of his oeuvre. Built largely on manuscripts, journals, correspondence, and other archival material, "The Making of James Agee" offers a revised version of the Agee canon, revealing a writer much more complex than the caricature created by the Agee myth. Agee's engagement with the revolutionaryavant-garde was more extensive thanhas previously been acknowledged, forinstance, and is apparentnot only in his long-suppressed proletarian poetry but also in his use of the ideas and techniques of surrealismin the late 1930s. Surrealist ideas are also important to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which explores the limits of primitivist discourse before turning to aninvestigation of the individual unconscious. Having exhausted the possibilities of representationin Let Us Now Praise vm Famous Men, Agee turnedto simpler forms, drawing on the lessons of popular filmmakers such as John Huston to introduce an economy of form anddirectness of expression to A Death in the Family in order to engage the reader more fully. Throughout his career, Agee was concernedwith the surrealistproject of the reconciliation of art andlife, andeven though his works varywidely in style, they all constitute a complex commentaryon the possibilities of the written word to affectthe fieldof action. lX TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: "Death of a Poet": The Agee Myth and the Agee Canon 1 Chapter Two: "The Love of Jesus and the Mind of Marx": Agee's Proletarian Poetry of the 1930s 55 Chapter Three: "It Is Funny If I Am a Surrealist": Agee and the Avant-Garde 87 Chapter Four: "An Art and a Way of Seeing": Walker Evans, Agee, and Anti-Graphic Photography 121 Chapter Five: "Syncopations of Chance": Surrealist Ethnography in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 173 Chapter Six: "By Any Virile Standard": The Influenceof Popular Culture on A Death in the Family 293 Works Cited 345 Appendices 367 Vita 377 1 CHAPTER ONE "Death of a Poet": The Agee Myth and the Agee Canon Agee had convinced me that a man is not what he shows you he is, but what you perceive him to be. ... -Warren Eyster1 In November 1957, the newly chartered publishing firmMcDowell, Obolensky, Inc. released A Death in the Family, a novel by the late James Agee, who had died eighteen months earlier of a heart attack in a taxiin New York City. Though Agee had had a distinguished and wide-rangingcareer as a writer, at the time of his death all of his works, save fora few poems scattered in anthologies, were out of print. During his life, Agee had inspired affection, even devotion, as his prodigious talent and undeniable charisma, his out-sized compassion and capacious appetite for living led those around him to see in him the embodiment of the Romantic ideal. "Writers and reporters who swarmed around him cherished his spoken words and wolfeddown his writing," Richard Oulahan wrote of Agee' s tenure at Time magazine; "Some imitated his mannerisms-the stem-wheel gestures he used with his handswhen talking, his contempt forbarbers, his methodof working (he never used a typewriter, andhis microscopic handwritingwas the despair of copy desks), his binges" (69). For those who knew him, Agee was the prototype of theliterary author. In 1940 HarperBrothers editor Edward Aswell called Agee "one of the most remarkable writers I have ever known and the only one now living who, I feelsure, is an authentic genius" (221); 2 Dwight Macdonald, speaking forhis 1 2 "Conversations with James Agee,' (353). Other writers Aswell had worked with by that time include Thomas Wolfeand Richard Wright. 2 contemporaries a few years later, remembered Agee as "the most broadly giftedwriter of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work" ("Death of a Poet" 204). But the major work, it seemed in 1955, had never come. Agee published a book of poetry in 1934, a novella in 1951, and the unclassifiableLet Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) in between. He wrote hundreds of movie reviews and dozens of articles for mass-circulation magazines such as Fortune, Time, Life, and theNation, and his poetry and fictionappeared in literary journals such as transition, Botteghe Oscura, and Partisan Review. His last few years were dedicated to writing screenplays forfeature films, most notably in collaboration withJohn Huston and Charles Laughton, and forthe new medium oftelevision. While the sheer quantity of Agee's production in so many differentgenres was impressive, it was too unwieldy, too diffuse-histalent seemed to have been squandered on unworthy projects, and there was little besides Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (and even it was mostly forgotten)to prove it had existed at all. Agee had failedto write the Great AmericanNovel, and this failure-ofone so talented, so seemingly destined to do great things-represented a failure of the age. Appropriately, in 1953, just twelve years afterits publication, the printing plates forLet Us Now Praise Famous Men, unknown outside of those who knew Agee himself, had been melted down as scrap metal during the Korean War.3 Despite his failureto produce the major work expected ofhim--or,rather, because of it-Agee's personality became a rallying point for his admirers, who saw him as a rebel who had refusedto bow 3 In a letter to James F. Murray, the lawyer forthe James Agee Trust, EdwardN. Costikyanexplained, "[D]uring theKorean War, a War Production Authority order requiredthe disposal of plates inorder to free the metal for war purposes if the plates had been inexistence fora period of four years and had not been used during that period" (I).