This dissertation has been 64—6873 microfilmed exactly as received

BEHAR, Jack, 1929- JAMES AGEE: THE WORLD OF HIS WORK.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 3 963 Language and Literature, modem

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright by Jack Behar 1966 JAMES AGEE: THE WORLD OF HIS WORK

DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Jack Behar, B. A., M. A., M. A. C

The Ohio State University 1963

Approved by

Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For permission to reproduce passages by James Agee from copyrighted material, I wish to thank the following: Yale University Press, for permission to quote from Permit Me Voyage (1934); Houghton Mifflin Company, for permission to quote from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (ISoO ^94^), and from The Morning Watch (1951); Ivan Obolensky, Inc. and the James Agee Trust, for permission to quote from A Death in the Family (copyright 1956); Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee (copyright 1958); and Agee on Film: Volume II (copyright I960); and George Braziller, Inc., for permission to quote from Letters of James Agee to Father

Flye (1 9 6). 2

ii

C 0 Sage, Dlchter, was du tust?— Ich ruhme. Aber das Todliche and Ungetüme, wie haltst du's aus, wle nimmst du's hln?— Ich ruhme, Aber das Namenlose, Anonyme, wie rufst du's, Dlchter, dennoch an?— Ich ruhme. Woher deln Recht, in jeglichem Kostume, in Jeder Maske wahr zu sein?— Ich ruhme. Und da/> das Stille und das Ungestume wie Stern und Suurm dich kennen?;— Weil ich nihme. Rainer Maria Rilke

iii CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

I; THE YOUNG P O E T ...... 11

II: THE JOURNALIST...... 36

III: THE FILM CRITIC...... 82 (i) Film Criticism...... 82 (ii) Criticism of Mass Culture...... 94

IV: THE FILM SCENARIST...... Il4 (i) The Blue Hotel...... 119 (ii) The African Q u e e n ...... 131 (iii) ÿhe Bride Cornés to YellowSk y ...... l44 (iv) 'fhe Ni'gïïïï of the~l?unter ...... 154 (v) Noa No a ...... l64

V: THE NOVELIST...... 18? (i) A Death in the Family ...... 187 (ii) The MornTng Watch ...... 205 (iii) Tïïë Film-Maker as Novelist...... 218

POSTSCRIPT: ATTITUDES TOWARD MASS CULTURE ...... 222 (i) Poetics of Popular Art...... 222 (ii) A Note on the Problem ofMass Culture . . 228 (iii) Agee Once More...... 246

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 256

AUTOBIOGRAPHY...... 263

iv INTRODUCTION

Any study of James Agee's work, at this point in time, is bound to be somewhat fragmentary and necessarily tentative. Some of what he wrote has yet to be published, and the sort of documentation one would need to see his career from within is not available. Ideally, a study of Agee would be at once biographical and critical, an effort to see the work in relation to the career that Agee fash­ ioned, or that he allowed to be fashioned for him. And its end would be to let us know how indeed such came to be his career, and how his life-long concern with the media of popular culture emerged from the very life he lived. In the absence of the necessary documentation, I work with the available published materials and discuss them in relation to the various roles that Agee played as poet. Journalist, novelist, film critic, and film scenarist. But I wish to contend that beneath the seeming contradictions stemming from these roles, and the various involvements that Agee had in culture, there is a fairly consistent point of view as regards the meaning and significance of art, and at least an image of what genuine popular art might be like. I propose the thesis that the aesthetic 1 2 ideal informing all of the work after the initial volume of poems was a notably filmic ideal and that Agee*s com­ mitment to it both as critic and creator almost forced him to concern himself with popular culture. ^ That is to say, Agee's concern with the promise of popular culture, and with that part of it which mattered most to him, the movies, arose almost inevitably from the aesthetic ideal that placed so heavy an.emphasis on the immeasurable worth of unmediated reality. It is a curious fact how nearly obsessive was Agee's commitment to the real world. Throughout his life the real was an object of desire and need, and he constantly

2 The word 'tilmic" is not meant to suggest an essen^ tial characteristic of.film style, such as movement, for example, but obviously movement is involved. More exactly, I wish to convey what'.is suggested in the word "flow, ” or in the phrase '^he flow of experience," that is, careful moment-to-moment notation of external movement and action in which (at least potentially) the objective and subjective can be unified. In addition, I should wish the sense of smooth movement, of gradual transitions, and of simultaneity to register in the word. Finally, the word suggests some­ thing of first importance to Agee himself, namely the bias of film in the direction of "realistic"representation, what­ ever the special uses to which the conventions of film can be put. The common reality was still immensely vital to Agee, and film was the form par excellence in which the audi­ ence could apprehend its richness. But we should notice that Agee did not believe the common reality, or the real, could be apprehended in slavishly imitative modes of docu­ mentary realism. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Me^ (Boston, i960 Q.94'3 ), he noted'thâF "if you share the naturalist's regard for the ^real,'* but have this regard for it on a plane which in your mind brings it level in value at least to music and poetry, which in turn you value as highly as any­ thing on earth, it is important that your representation of 'reality' does not sag into, or become one with, naturalism . . . (p. 2 3 8) 3 exalted It, but not as an empiricist or commonsensioal realist might, but as a poet whose sensibility demanded a continual alertness to the sheer individuality of the things of the world — to things in themselves. There was always the possibility of joy in the satisfaction of this need, and one might identify the joy Agee experienced as the Wordsworthian joy, the joy that arises in the hos­ pitality of the self to the.existence of things and people in the world one knows. For Agee, fulfillment was to be gained in surrendering to and then restoring the real to original grandeur. Indeed, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men records Agee *s struggle to find a form in which to commun­ icate his sense of the dignity of actuality — the world restored, not transformed; known so deeply, in fact, that it would be beyond transforming. If for Agee the world as it existed was an object of need, as it was, say, for Words­ worth, van Gogh, and Wallace Stevens, then it was necessar­ ily the proper theme and source of art, and the quest of the writer was to redeem it, to 'Wke it new. " Agee ’s af­ filiations are quite plain, then; they are with the Roman­ tic poets, and possibly in the twentieth century, with the Imagists — in sum, with those protests undertaken in the name of man, or in the name of the real language of men, against the elaborate artifice of poetry, and indeed occa­ sionally against the inevitably discursive, mediating, distancing qualities of language. 4 Now, the striking fact is that the filmic ideal re­ mains constantly attractive throughout Agee's career, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to A Death in the Family. But it is of course nowhere more insistently articulated than in the film criticism, where Agee *s sense of the elaborate falsity and contrivance of much Hollywood film brings him to exalt natural process, movement, and feeling as a norm against which the honesty and genuineness of popular art may be measured. Furthermore, in the film criticism Agee's aesthetic ideal clearly supports his humanism, the one be­ coming identified with the other, together making a vision of man. But the over-all humanistic valuation of the world is asserted in whatever genre Agee worked, so that there is a remarkable continuity of feeling and outlook from work to work, although obviously the demands of form, and in parti­ cular Agee's search for a filmic form, make for differences as well. What brought Agee to write film criticism and

scenarios, however, is clear as early as 1 9 3, 6 when his work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men drove him logically to in­ sist on the humanistic value of the real, and when he began to search for "contemporary"forms in which something of its miraculousness could be caught and communicated. I do not assume, however, that one can speak with any confidence at this time of the meaning of Agee's work for the problem of mass culture. Only the whole narrative of 5 his career would enable us to speak with any authority on this matter. That he had difficulties making a career for himself is obvious; and that these were tied up with the peculiar position he occupied as a serious writer whose sensibility drove him inevitably to try to realize his talents in the media of popular culture is still more obvious. The letters to Father Flye make it clear that Agee was a troubled man, engaged in a more or less perraan- 2 ent holding action against a painfully disorganized life. And clearly the career Agee made for himself was peculiar­ ly open to disappointment. In the letters one sees him as he is gradually overwhelmed by “special assignments," by the diffusion of his energies, and by the lack of co­ herence in his life. In letter after letter he complains of apathy, a ’greyness of spiri't, a terrible accidia. None­ theless, I am not ready to deplore the lack of coherence in the work (as is W. M. Frohock, who is too much so), or to assess its costs (as does Dwight Macdonald) by setting it against the modest traditionalism and order Cf English

•5 literary culture. Certainly the letters underscore the

2 Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (New York, 1 9 6). 2 3See W. M. Prohock, "James Agee — The Question of Wasted Talent, “ in The Novel of Violence in ^erica, second ed., revised and enlarged (Dallas, 1957 Cl95Sji,pp. 212-230; and Dwight ffeodonald, James Agee,“ in Against the American Grain (New York, 1 9 6), 2 pp. l43-l66. 6 nearly desperate efforts of Agee to reclaim his life and career from disorder, to give it a center, and to find some way of bringing his talents to embodiment in literary-filmic forms. But it does not follow from this that Agee was (as Macdonald has him) a victim of the Luces of our world, and that we ought to meditate the fact that his culture could not save him from himself, from the excesses of his talents, or from his thorny romance with Hollywood. But now is not yet the appropriate time to read the letters too closely as biographical documents. Certainly they reveal,a good deal about Agee, but obviously a good deal more remains to be revealed. At best, now is the time to look at the work, at the ideals which inform and the sensibility which works in it, to know what is there so that we may know what is not there and perhaps what ought to have been there. Nor is now the time to wrap up Agee's career in the ready-made archetypes of the American liter­ ary-cultural melodrama: private against public, poetry a- gainst journalism, integrity against hard cash, etc. For all the premature sainthood that already has been visited upon Agee, these archetypes will not do; they merely pre­ pare Agee's career for a weary phrase in someone's account of the ordeal of the American writer. If Agee moved with a kind of abandon from poetry to journalism, from the novel 7 to film scenarios, it may well have been because he knew what he was doing, not because his culture was helpless to convince him of the authority of traditional literary art. It is proper, if uninteresting, to wish that Agee had written five novels rather than five film scenarios, as does W.M. Prohock, or that he had never gone to work for the Luce publications, as does Dwight Macdonald. But if Agee was unable to know the wholeness of life and ca­ reer that some other writers have known, this was a burden he assumed, and the fact he assumed it is more important than the reasons why he did so. At any rate, other writers have burdens of their own. Furthermore, if the work must finally be seen as a coll^Ktion of fragments, these have their special unity and quality of aspiration and they ought to be understood as such. I find a significant part of their meaning to lie, on the one hand, in Agee's effort to ground popular art in respect for actuality; and on the other, in his having created at least one example of popu- . lar art (the novel A Death in the Family) that began to satisfy the definitions of filmic form his work as a whole propounded. Of course there are other facts . about Agge that are Interesting, and hence other ways of characterizing him; and these facts are probably to be related to his concern 8 to discover a form that might serve the needs of popular culture. In I95O, answering a Partisan Review Question­ naire on "Religion and the Intellectuals," he noted about himself : I veer between belief in God, non-belief, and a kind of neutrality, in all three frames of mind, I keep what I believe is meant by the religious consciousness. In the non-religious frame of mind it is of course important for me to believe that God has nothing to do with it — that "man and human life (and I would emphatically add, one's small further knowledge and mere sense, or effort to conceive of what existence is) are more than sufficient to inspire those feelings of awe, reverence, compassion, moral urgency and enigma, etc., which are certainly among the most vital human values and which combine to make up the religious consciousness spoken of. But in my own amorphous case I must suspect that this consciousness is en­ hanced (perhaps created) by unconscious under­ tones of belief and serai-belief in God. ^ The religious consciousness of which he speaks, focused steadily on man in his world, would ideally restore man to his world, and the real to its original miraculous sta­ ture. But I suspect that precisely Agee's romantic-reli­ gious consciousness of the world, and his own very deep need to feel "awe, reverence, compassion, moral urgency and enigma," made him a kind of outsider, neither at home in the generation of the twenties or in that which came to prominence in the late thirties and forties. As his 4 "Religion and the Intellectuals," The Partisan Re­ view. XVII (February, I9 5 0), IO6-II3. ■ 9 reply to an earlier Partisan Review questionnaire on Ameri­ can writing indicates, he was always a marginal and uncom­ fortable figure in the world of the New York intellectual, which he found stinting, parochial, and professionalized. ^ One has the impression about him that he simply refused to be given a small, safe position among the avant-garde, that he found its self-consciousness about its fate in America repelling, and that he identified himself with a freer, less political, and‘possibly more "visionary," and even vatic image of the writer. ■ Yet for all the respect he paid to instinct, and to those values which he considered to have their source in the religious consciousness, the yery nature of the di­ verse roles he came to play made him necessarily belong to our times — to belong to it so centrally, some would argue, that he became its victim. As I see it, the temptation is to make him all too desperately our own, and so to canon­ ize him among the latter day saints of American letters.

This would be unfortunate; it is immoral to discover that a writer belongs to us only after we have concluded that he was "done in" by the media of mass communications. The notion that Agee was somehow prevented from becoming him­ self, that in his work there is buried only adumbrations

5 Agee's answers were not printed in the magazine, but they appear in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pp. 350-357• 10 of an ideal "something” he never wrote, has a certain su­ perficial plausibility. But one ought not give it too much credence. Agee took his chances on becoming himself in the mixed and constantly expanding culture of our time. If he failed, he failed in the ordinary ways of human failure. In any case, I have not sought to provide the terms of a narrative-dramatic account of Agee's career. I should like to, at a future time, when I have much more evidence than I now have. Instead, I have sought to describe Agee's sense of himself as a writer, the quality of mind and sensi­ bility represented in his work, the strengths and weaknesses of the work. But I have not been overly concerned with mak­ ing stringent or unequivocal judgments. I have tried to be as interested in the form and structure of the work as in the sensibility it reveals; generally I have moved from an initial consideration of form and structure to a considera­ tion of Agee's abiding concern with the filmic, the presen­ tational, the real. I hope that the end of such analysis is to give us a sense out of what this abiding concern grows, how it expresses itself successively in the various forms in which Agee worked, and finally how it articulates an ideal of popular culture that the film criticism serves and the creative work at least in part illuminates. CHAPTER I

THE YOUNG POET

James Agee's career as a writer began in a most tra­ ditional way, on the publication in 1934 of a first volume of poems. Permit Me Voyage, in The Yale Series of Younger Poets. ^ It was a heavily introduced volume, containing as it did a foreword by Archibald MacLelsh and Agee 's own eight-page "Dedication," written in a highly declamatory and devotional prose-poetry that rose to moments of pure outrage over the madness of the world. A young man of his age, Agee expected a radical political change, perhaps a socialist commonv/ealth to take the place of the rapacious capitalist state; but he read the future in a steadily am­ biguous way, as if he were certain that his own best hopes for meaningful change were bound to be disappointed. Be­ neath a language that seemed unable to bear very much spe­ cificity, Agee constructed something like an allegory of his times, in which was figured the Fascist Right (repre­ sented mainly by the arms manufacturers), the Capitalists, and the liberal and radical Intellectuals. It was more

1 Permit Me Voyage (New Haven, 1934). Quotations from poems, identified by page reference, come from this volume unless otherwise indicated. 11 12 than clear that Agee had been driven not only to doubt but to a strategy of resistance. Although he did not put It In so many words, he was convinced of the change to come; but he was convinced equally of the insanity of his world, and he wrote as if out of the despair of his love for it. Apparently Agee had made some vague, tentative gestures of commitment to political radicalism. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the preliminary work for which he began in 1936 under assignment from Fortune magazine) he announced, in a footnote, that he was a communist; but presumably he was too troubled over his unresolved feelings to explain him­ self. And in letters written during the early thirties to his former teacher and life-long friend. Father Flye, he sought to Justify his attraction to communism, which had clearly discomforted Father Flye, but only to state finally that he considered himself "essentially an anarchist...." ^ Agee lived in New York City during a good part of the thir­ ties, and he was considered interested enough in radical politics to have been invited to respond to a Partisan Re­ view questionnaire on literature and politics. Yet he was perfectly correct in calling himself "essentially an anar­ chist." The quality of life that mattered most to him was profoundly anti-political, beyond ideology, charged with a

2 Letters of James Agee to Father Five (New York, 1 9 6), 2 p. 9 8. 13 peculiarly religious feeling sometimes for the land, and always for images of innocence and harmony. In a particularly revealing letter to Father Flye, Agee noted about himself that he was "drawn toward inno­ cence, and the relaxed or abandoned brain, and simplicity and childhood, and the so-called 'sub'-human for that mat­ ter and 'sub'-organic, than I've appeared by the ways I've written . . . . " ^ And in another, earlier letter, he spoke of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony thus:' When you get down here again I'll haVe my phonograph working — not here but in my office, to play at night. An empty sky­ scraper is just about an ideal place for it — with the volume it has. Something attracts me very much about playing Beetho­ ven's Ninth Symphony there — with all New York about 600 feet below you, and with that swell ode, taking in the whole earth, and with everyone on earth supposedly sing­ ing it; all that estranged them and all ex­ cept joy and the whole common world-love and brotherhood idea forgotten. With Joy speaking over them: 0 ye millions, I embrace you . . . I kiss all the world . . . and all mankind shall be as brothers beneath thy tender and wide wings. He observed that listening to the symphony brought him to an almost ecstatic sense of "love and pity and joy . . . . ” Although he was aware of the disadvantages of inno­ cence, of how it is vulnerable to the mockery of the world, he was deeply attracted to images of innocence and valued

3 Ibid., (Sept. 16, 1 9 3), 8 p. 1ÛY. 4 Ibid., (August 1 8, 1 9 3), 2 p. 6 0. 14 above all else those occasions in experience when "love and pity and joy" seemed to make the world new and brought one into ecstatic harmony with it. In the thirties Agee was responding to what he very likely interpreted as an attack on the order of feel­ ing and the developing view of life that his Christian upbringing and innate love of religious mystery had in­ stilled in him. It was as if he suddenly found himself in a world in which the poetic imagination could make no claims in its behalf, in which the obvious and convincing traditionalism of the poems he wrote near the end of tte twenties at Phillips Exeter (1 9 2-I 5 9 2 8), and on into his years at Harvard (1 9 2- 81 9 3), 2 was utterly without meaning and justification. The sonnet sequence in Permit Me Voyage was the work of a young poet who had earnestly studied the traditional forms and who had quite naturally appropriated the voice, the sense of the high seriousness of the poet's vocation to which those forms lent themselves. In fact, a number of the sonnets were concerned very precisely with Agee's sense of vocation, and particularly with his aware­ ness that in order to be a genuine poet he would have to make poems that would project his own voice. In the last of the sequence, he explicitly dealt with the vocation of the poet in the 1 9 3‘s: 0 % sovereign souls, God grant my sometime brothers, I must desert your ways now if I can. 15 I followed hard but now forsake all others. And stand In hope to make myself a man. This mouth that blabbed so loud with foreign song I'll shut awhile, or gargle if I sing. Have patience, let me too, though it be long Or never, till my throat shall truly sing. These are confusing times and dazed with fate; Fear, easy faith, or wrath's on every voice: Those toward the truth with brain are blind or hate: The heart is cloven on a hidden choice: In which respect I still shall follow you. And, when I fail, know where the fault is due. (p. 58) Like many young poets, Agee had found a style, generally neo-Elizabethan and metaphysical, but not a voice; or, put somewhat differently, he had appropriated a voice that, when the poems are at their best, coincided almost perfect­ ly with the formal., ceremonial, neo-Elizabethan cast of his mind and sensibility. So,it would be wrong to conclude that the poems are merely exercises in the Imitation of Agee's masters; in fact, a poem like "Anne Gardner," which celebrates a woman's mystical identification with nature, and seems to have been influenced by the language of E. A. Robinson, is at its worst when Agee seems to be on his own; it has ritual but no felt life. It is interesting that in the sonnet quoted above he Joins the "confusing times" and his need to find a language and voice of his own. This sonnet suggests ttiat Agee sought to resist the confusion of political ideology so as to find his vocation as poet 16 and private man, concerned with but necassarily wary of Z' c polltlcal factionalism. ^ The reviewers of Permit Me Voyage, particularly those in the liberal weeklies who were mindful of the political turmoil of the day, were well aware of the traditionalism of the poems. The "Dedication" opened: "in much humility to God in the highest/ in the trust that he despises nothing" (p. l6). And it concluded: 0 God, hear us. 0 God, spare us. 0 God, have mercy upon us.. Not one among us has seen you, nor shall in our living time, and may never. We fumble all blind on the blind dark, even who would know you and who believe your name. Our very faith and our desire, which are our whole and only way in truth, they delude us always, and ever will, into false and previous visions, and into wrong attri­ butions. Little as we know beyond the will of death do we know your nature: and the best of our knowledge is but a faith, the shape of a dream, and all pretense, (p. 2 5) The traditional Christian view of man, combined with Agee's scrupulous humanism, set its mark on the volume as a whole. Some reviewers, recognizing the possibility that an almost defiantly Christian and "private" volume would likely.not be attended to, told their readers what the proper (or improper) political response should be. For instance.

5 Cf. Letters (Oct. 1933) p. 6 7: "Little writing as I've done, and little confidence as live a right to, I still feel that life is short and that no earthly thing is as important to me as learning how to write." 17 Lincoln Klrsteln, writing In The New Republic, warned the left against passing a facile Judgment on the volume : The left will be upset perhaps by Its tradition­ alism and more so by the Impassioned, convinced and convincing religious emotion. But let them read the “Dedication” before excluding a brother- In-arms, who Is no simple churchman, but a born poet, already mature. ° Undoubtedly KirsteIn found Agee a "brother-ln-arms" because of the latter's fine capacity for Indignant judgments of his world. For example, part of the "Dedication" ran; To those merchants dealers and speculators In the wealth of the earth who own this'world and Its frames of law and government. Its channels of advertisement and converse and opinion and Its colleges, and most that Is of Its churches, and who employ this race and feed off It . . . . (p. 2 0) It was a sign of the times, of course, that KirsteIn should have so easily appropriated Agee for the left -- Indeed, should have found It necessary to use the approving phrase "no simple churchman," as If Agee's magnlflclent Indigna­ tion alone qualified him as spiritual kin, and that he lack­ ed only the credentials that explicit formulation of his emotional leftism could easily give him. (In the thirties literary men were typically seen to rest, after their a- wakenlng, at the very edge of the Marxist commonwealth; they needed only a push Into Das Kapltal.) 6 Lincoln Klrsteln, '!Plrst Poems, " The New Republic, LXXXII (Feb. 2 7, 1935), 8 1. 18, The resistance Agee offered the vision of the left was a natural growth from his understanding of the limita­ tions and paradoxes of man's nature, so that while he would celebrate the effort of those who would re-make the state, he would continue steadily to view this effort with suspi­ cion. For himself, he comprehended life under the aspect of eternity; his measured, grandiloquently archaic, nearly biblical language was In effect a disguised way by which he Insisted on his freedom from the much disputed gods of his day — so to see how they comported with the gods of tradition. At the same time that he cursed the war profi­ teers, he was suspicious of the socialists and communists; presumably he found their optimistic social greed a kind of heroic disability, one that men had to hold If only to measure properly their failures. And he'repeatedly Invoked the language of his religiously-oriented humanism in his high Southern rhetoric: "fate," "endurance," "death," "dark," "blind," "earth," etc. For Agee, these words pro­ jected the larger world of the poet and the proper dilem­ mas of man. But the rhetoric, sometimes carrying too much before It, also drove him to a kind of obscurantism that arose as the product of his need to assert, and hence re­ tain, a sense of the mystery of existence, the darkness that touches man’s knowledge, and the changelessness of many's fate: 19 To those who have seen or suffered this condi­ tion C i.e., the evil, hatred, and blindness of menp and who are fooled into the hope that it may be essentially changed. And into the hope that the cleansing of this state or its demoli­ tion and the establishment of a state new forged, and all the discoveries of science applied, will do any greater service to man than to level and ameliorate the agonies and the exigencies of his living, to his ease, and into the ignorance of a contentment in earth and in the stuffs of the earth; to the blinding of his heart still further toward right knowledge of himself, and to the ex­ asperation of those real agonies unbeheld, and in no time well.beheld, of his ignorance before the mask of his destiny and before his God, where no knowledge nor ease of earth may help him. (p. 2 1) If Agee depended on the rhetoric of traditional Chris­ tianity to resist the "Social Muse" and the political ab­ stractions of his day, this rhetoric also gave him a way of taking himself and his vocation seriously, and of re­ gistering sharply his sense of the dignity of man. One may observe, parenthetically, that Agee protested (as other Southern writers of his time were protesting) the whole ten­ dency of the Industrial state. There is a noble Southern primitivism in the phrase, "into the ignorance of a con­ tentment in earth and the stuffs.of the earth." It was as if Agee needed God to represent to himself an image of the human condition in which he could believe and the possibil­ ity of a life of the imagination that could seek its object apart from the inevitable, noisy, suffocating ideological battles of the thirties. However, the pressure of his need for an exalted life of the imagination made for a sometimes 20 wooden, oracular style; its rhetoric tended toward a mere­ ly generalized, diffused tragic sense of life, befitting God perhaps, too close to a kind of high Southern bombast, as again and again It affirmed the dignity of man In such phrases as "live and endure and breed and die" (p. 22). The significance of the "Dedication" did not lie, then, so much In Agee's profession of Christian belief but In his need to commit himself to a conception of man that took full account of his "mixed" condition and viewed his life as unfolding against eternal history. For Agee, the poems could follow only If he could continue to believe both In man's capacity for creative action and appalling misjudgments, Illusion, and evil. In a primarily politi­ cal age, that Is to say, Agee sought to justify the making of poems. And In the thirties, so we have been told again and again, a pbet almost had to have some such conception If he were to believe In the worth of private action — In the assertion of Individual sensibility. As any number of writers have testified, there was a growing fashionable suspicion of purely private action; one could feel very strange Indeed If his commitment was to the study of the past or to the making of lyric poems. ?

^For example, see Lionel Trilling, "Edmund Wilson: A Backward Glance," In A Gathering of Fugitives (Boston, 1 9 5), 6 pp. 4 9-5 9. See, too, Agee's letter to Father Flye, Letters (December 2 7, I9 3 1), p. 55! "What writing I've done has been done almost rigidly as.If I were composing music . . . In Intricacy of structure, recurrence of themes, and an attempt to write Impersonally . . . ." 21 The important fact about the "Dedication, " then, is that it revealed Agee as a writer who came of age in the thirties, a time when political factionalism and a sense of impending revolutionary upheaval, and a gross uncertainty about the worth of tradition made up the con­ text in which literary judgments were offered. Here is a typical statement, made in 1932, quoted in Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds (New York, 1956C19423), p. 316. At the present time . . . the artist is faced with an environment wl^ch is in a stage of dissolution, an environment in which the tentacles of the past have lost their grip, in which the old traditions have broken down .... An old America . . . is in the process of dying, and a new one, still in the chrysalis state, is struggling to be born. At a time when apparently nothing but dogmatic social and pcAiti^al beliefs were possible, as induced by the panic of depression and the sense of a society at a dead-end, Agee clearly announced his wish to serve God by writing well: Have mercy upon us therefore, 0 deep God of the void, spare this race in this your earth still in our free choice; who will turn to you, and again fail you, and once more turn as ever we have done. And make the eyes of our hearts, and the voice of our hearts in speech, honest and love­ ly within the fences of our nature, and a little clear, (p. 2 3) In this light the poems Agee wrote can be seen not merely as dealing, say, with the received love convention of the sonnet but as poised against the social-political world of the thirties, even when he shapes lines that 22 seem purely of a traditional Christian order and origin. Their appropriation of the tropes belonging to the con­ vention of the sonnet, and their attempt to recast, or transform, traditional forms (chorale, epithalamium) are evidence not merely of "traditionalism," but of the tra­ ditional beginnings of a literary career — an attempt of the poet to make a place for himself within the tra- 8 dition and to justify the poems he would write. In mastering the rhythms of his chosen predecessors, Agee established his musical skills and a kind of lyric identity; for him the making of a poem was a severe exer­ cise in musical form, the emotion sublimated into the form. The forms he chose were closed forms, for the most part, and fit vehicles for a ceremonial, stately Christian rhetoric: Who, knowing love must die or live free-fated. Free in your heartsearth headlong man created: Who manly died and sealed from all perdition Our ill condition: Your crown not God nor your great death retains you: As you are man so man for man ordains you: Who reign in man's regard 0 much forsaken Dear Christ awakenJ (p. 36)

See Theodore Morrison, Atlantic, CLV (March 1935), 12: '!His epithalamium is very pleasantly filled with echoes of the past; it too is a fine piece of harmony, and of beauty of expression within the familiar style of English poetry as it has come down from the Renaissance." 23 The poem ("A Chorale") rises, after a series of stanzas which move in rather strict parallelism toward an indict­ ment of man's "disenthronement" of Christ, in hymnal ex­ postulation: 0 Godsent Son of God our allsalvation. Is faith so sickly slow to indignation Your murderers against? Then faith betrays you: Your friends destroy you: Then the poem descends and closes in prayer for light, peace, and preservation, in stately choral invocation to God. Its heavy rhymes and concentration of language, as well as the choral Intensity of the whole, give it a hard nobility of line and movement. Agee uses the traditional form, with its echoes of biblical and Anglican forms of, address, to focus what he takes to be the sickness of his age. The result is a successful summons of the in­ dictment, of a time "withered of . . . ancient glory." Although the language was available to the stately forms of Anglican address, or to the melodies of Catholic sensibility, it was nonetheless an artificial language, and Agee wrenched it a good deal in order to gain inten­ sity. The result was that sometimes he produced merely an impressively archaic language, characterized by wrenched rhythms, inverted syntax, and hollow phrases. His "Epithalamium," for example, proves a relatively colorless, hard-pressed, and uninteresting poem when set against that of his model, Spenser: 24 Knotted In secresy, the sacred zone From every harm the unharmed virgin shields: One may unloose the knot, and one alone: The night is come, and bride to bridegroom yields. Close in her kindly and untroubled arms. He sets the zone aside, with gentle haste: The night is come, that hallows as it harms. And she assumes perfection, who was chaste, (p. 42)

Now all is ready, now the happy bride Lies unclothed as her lover, and on love That long frustration and the zone denied Hesperus streams his sanction from above. Now she yields all: her body to his own, ... Her steadfast loving gaze, her mouth to his kiss — All beauty and all love has never known The ragged.shadow of their radiant bliss, (p. 43) Characteristically, Agee was interested in the total peace and innocence of the sacred consummation, not in what C . S. Lewis calls the 'festal pomp and jollity" manifest in Spenser's poem. The lovers are driven, in all innocence, into "nothingness," and are made out to experience a con­ dition of oneness with the world — with the very substance of life: Such nothingness remains, and yet is gone. Looks upon all, and yet is void of sight. Quickens the roots of every flowering dawn. Coils in the core of every ripening night It breathes from steady water, is the pain Of bursting seeds, the agony of earth Shuddering out its life; streams down in rain That causes and alleviates all birth, (p. 43) The supernatural quality of the poem is too obviously literacy; and the unforgiveable euphemisms compromise 25 Its middling attractive seriousness before love.and mar- « riage. Agee found the form attractive because it allowed him to celebrate the rewards of innocence as well as the happy renewal of life; but he was possibly too serious, and he does not produce much Joy. "Now she yields all" and "sacred zone" are very bad phrases, and the diction — for example, "dim sky, " "bemused," "white oblivion, " "nadir," "glassy night" — is on the whole troubled by its yearning for scope in which the world of nature can participate. Agee wished the whole world sanctified at the moment of the lovers' happiness. The sonnet sequence in Permit Me Voyage. along with the group of lyrics with which the volume opens, consti­ tuted what was best in it. A lyric on the death of a child is tender and gratifying : Not met and marred with the year's whole turn of grief. But easily on the mercy of the morning Fell this still folded leaf; Small that never Summer spread Demented on the dusty heat; And sweet that never Fall Wrung sere and tarnished red;. Safe now that never knew Stunning Winter's bitter blue It fell fair in the fair season Therefore with reason Dress all in cheer and lightly put away . With music and glad will This little child that cheated the long day Of the long day's ill: Who knows this breathing Joy, heavy on us all. Never, never, never, (p. 12) 26 Although a few of the sonnets move uneasily under the weight of Agee's too strenuous imitation of his models, most have a dignity, a fitting impersonality, and a hard­ ness of design that controls them. Agee*s temperamental lyricism submits to the convention, with the result that the language is nearly always hard, well-tuned, and charged by his high seriousness. The strident self-con­ sciousness of the "Dedication" finds a limiting, and en­ abling, form. Although some of the sonnets may be rather prosaic and declamatory, they preserve enough of the Elizabethan voice that had influenced Agee to justify their structure as argument, plea, or invocation. In sonnet X, the heavy, abstract nouns — "anger and terror, scorn and doubt and grief" gain a surprising and vigorous specificity be­ cause the argument is faultlessly coherent: Wring me no more nor force from me that vow Which lovers love to hear for reasurrancej Rest faithful in firm silence, which is now Frail but sole bulwark for our love's endurance. However mad, it is my heart's belief That he who lies of love trumpets instruction For anger and terror, scorn and doubt and grief Swiftly to marshal toward our sure destruction. Since, though we know naught else, we know love true. When from the strict course which love's truth affirms The sick brain swerves, to guiltless hearts accrue Love's penalties and unpalliable terms. If you love truly, speak the vow for me: % lips can ill afford the blasphemy. The traditional variations on the theme of love are re­ presented: the disguises, the pathos, the helplessness. 27 the deceptions, and the tyranny of love. Sonnet XII, for example, begins with an image of love as a mighty God who chooses among lovers those who will "soar to hea­ venward birth"; What are his laws? By what high-dealt decrees Do lovers snared by all the laws of earth Transcend the pain and cruelty and lose ease That globes our globe, and soar to heavenward birth? The lovers ask in effect whether they will come to know spirit after a painful stay in the regions of flesh, where their love starves for want of tenderness and they grow distrustful of each other. The great God of love is re­ presented as mighty and inscrutable, and the lovers help­ less before his whim as they seek redemption from the flesh: "is there indeed a God who can redeem/ The love we know as a dawn-tinctured dream?" Some of the sonnets make mistakes that one would ex­ pect from a young poet discovering what he can do with lan­ guage. Sometimes the manner is too heavy — the figures too pressingly ingenious — for the matter. Such is the case in sonnet XVIII, where the experience the poem com­ prehends is not weighty enough to justify the metaphysical conceit with which it opens: The way the cleansouled mirror of a soul Dreams in the darkened flesh and smoky breath That only takes and tells the image whole When all obstruction's wiped away by death: So with our hearts that sleeping long have dreamed Imagination of celestial love. Their flaws in each the other has redeemed (True lovers such obscurities remove). 28 And now, but slowly, see our hearts awake. The eyes unshut, the living sight shine clear; How still each heart reluctant lies to take The image of its image: though so near We lie, that surely both our hearts perceive Identities they scarcely yet believe. Like that ideal soul which dreams of release and wholeness, and is finally revealed pure and whole on the body's death, the lovers' dream of a paradisal ideal of love destroys the actual imperfections they have discovered in each other; and these having been destroyed, they find them­ selves possessing an identical purity and wholeness — the image exactly of their desire — and hence may truly love. The poem,,says, in effect, that we make our images fair through desire and imagination; but so commonplace a notion does not strictly warrant the elaborate contrivance of the Platonic figure on which the poem turns. It is not so much that the figure is decorative; rather, too much of the poem is invested in the figure. Occasionally, moreover, Agee *s awareness of the con­ fusion of his times, and of his own uncertainty, makes for a sonnet rather sluggishly high-minded and abstract: When beyond noise of logic.I shall know And in that knowledge swear my knowledge bound Di all things constant, never more to show Its head in any transience it has found: When pride of knowledge, frames of government, • The wrath of justice gagged and greed in power. Sure good, and certain ill, and high minds bent On destiny sink deathward as this hour: Of this our earth and mind my mind confirms. Essence and fact of all things that are made. Nature in love in death are shown the terms: 29 When, through this lens. I've seen all things in one. Then, not before, I truly have begun, (p. 5 6) One feels the putatively political thrust of the sonnet but only vaguely. Again, Agee is taking his destiny in hand and asserting the superiority of what the post can ideally know — '(Essence and fact of all things that are made" — against hisr own troubled sense of the turmoil of his day; and perhaps he takes a too neutral view of "tran­ sience " — it is merely the Many against which he will as­ sert the Oneness to which the poet brings his world. He wishes to be rid of "transience" so to seize the day as poet and maker. But the poem succeeds only in showing us that Agee was possessed of the romantic faith that a world exists.-"beyond surmise," and that it is the poet's busi­ ness to resblve his world into the One; or, at any rate, to find "all things in one." The sonnets which center on Agee 's sense of vocation are less good than those that announce, if not quite as a faith to live by then as a simple Christian fact, the dra­ ma of which Agee saw himself a part: So it begins. Adam is in his earth Tempted, and fallen, and his doom made sure 0, in the very instant of his birth: Whose deathly nature must all things endure. The hungers of his flesh, and mind, and heart. That governed him when he was in the womb. These ravenings multiply in every part: And shall release him only to the tomb. Meantime he works the earth, and builds up nations. And trades, and wars, and learns, and worships chance. And looks to God, and weaves the generations Which shall his many hungerings advance 30 When he is sunken dead among his sins. Adam is in this earth. So it begins, (p. 46) It is likely that this sonnet succeeds so well because the subject, defined in advance by Christian belief, gives Agee his sense of high destiny in a fateful Christian dra­ ma. The hunger man knows gives him his human dignity; the Pall sets him free to pursue his hunger unto death. The sonnets that follow this one view man’s hunger as equally the curse and blessing he takes from Adam. Our doom is in our being. We begin In hunger eager more than ache of hell; And in that hunger became each a man Ravened with hunger death alone may spell: And in that hunger live, as lived the dead. Who sought, as now we seek, in the same ways. Nobly, and hatefully, what angel’s bread Might ever stand us out these short few days. So is this race in this wild hour confounded: And though you rectify the big distress. And kill all outward wrong where wrong abounded. Your hunger cannot make this hunger■less Which breeds all wrath and right, and shall not die In earth, and finds some hope upon the sky. (p. 46) The sextet focuses, again, on some of the social ideals of the thirties, when the inward, inherited hunger of which Agee speaks was not thought to have much to do with "outward wrong." For Agee, the hunger is strictly unap­ peasable. And man’s progress in hunger from birth to death, in alienation from God in a world that is yet His creation, is the Irreducible tragic fact of life. This tragic fact, the sonnets assert, is peculiarly the know­ ledge of the poet. As his vocation gives him an anguished yet noble acquaintance with it, he must celebrate it at a 31 time when an almost religious belief In the exhaustion of capitalist society and the Imminent triumph of social­ ism would deny or Ignore It. Archibald MacLelsh noted In the foreword he wrote for Permit Me. Voyage that Agee had "successfully passed . . . a techhlcal apprenticeship ..." (p. 7)» He was right. While the language of the poems could become on occasion stiffly ceremonial and weighted with archaisms of a dubious value — "beteemed, " "athwart, " "descry, " "dynasties of destinies," etc. -- Agee could nonetheless, particularly In the love sonnets, summon up the personal and yet suitably anonymous voice, commanding, self-con­ scious, engrossed In the drama It spoke, that he had made his own through study of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets: What curious thing Is love that you and I Hold It Impervious to all distress And Insolent In gladness set It high Above all other joy and goodliness? (p. 4g) Or: Wring me no more nor force from me that vow Which lovers love to hear for reassurance; Rest faithful In firm silence, which Is now Prall bulwark for our love's endurancè. (p. 5 0) And when he could employ the recognizable symbols of change, love, growth. Identification with nature, etc., or, as In "Anne Gardner, " use the poem as ritual, or simply put down his sense of his over-dependence on the 'foreign song" of 32 his predecessors, he avoided the circumlocutions and the pretty self-conscious phrases that marred a few of the poems. The title poem "Permit Pfe Voyage" adapted a line from Hart Ci*ane*s ’Voyages" ("Permit me voyage, Love, into your hands . . . ") into a clrianged context. The poem begins with a statement of Agee *s sense of his failures as poet, but they are made’ out to be of little moment as against the commitment to truth consecrated in the fullness of knowledge of God, to which he says his soul will "entirely bow.” The poem once again records Agee’s vision of his time, on this occasion from the angle of his vision of God. He knows he lives in a time that denies God: "l know in this gigantic day/ What God is ruined, . ." Yet the God­ head is an imminent fact in the world; "... and I know/ How labors with Godhead this day," knowledge of which keeps poets from destruction during a time when "from the porches of our sky/ The crested glory is declined." The poem ends with Agee’s prayer that he should become a true poet, "Of whom God grant me of your grace/ To be, that shall preserve this race." The poem communicates a young poet’s serious dedica­ tion to poems that would both ^ and manifest his faith in man — in the worth of "the stridden soul " now thought to be of a merely "private" and trivial significance compared 33 with social movements and imperious ideologies. The poem imagines a world without God; but Agee needs God, who fig­ ures forth for him the idea of dedication and truth, as well as of unappeasable hunger and human limitation. Permit Me Voyage clearly revealed Agee. It revealed the Christian devotionalism and pathos that, transformed as he grew older, remained probably the most important dimension of his sensibility, allied as it was to his in­ tuitively religious feeling for the variegated world and for people v;ho lived in it. The "Dedication" in particu­ lar revealed the attraction Agee felt for images of har­ mony and wholeness, for "concord in earth's least noisome commonwealth" (p. 2l). There was a strain of the romantic poet in Agee that did not come out very clearly in the poems, but spoke more vividly in the "Dedication," and that in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men characterized the chief images as well as in the whole attitude that Agee adopted.toward his subject. One can argue that it is a strange paradox that a writer with so powerful a sense of kinship with literary tradition, who identified himself (perhaps over-identified himself) in the "Dedication" with those artists whose work struck him as making for the little sanity left in the world, should have, on graduation from Harvard in 1932, joined the staff of Fortune magazine, writing (first for 34 Fortune, then for Time) feature articles, book reviews and film criticism, from 1932 to 1948, so that his career seems divided Into two parts having little to do with each other. The paradox may be a small and unimportant one, however — no cause for strenuous moralizing on the '‘pre­ dicament " of the American writer, or on the vulgar and elite strains In American life. Agee's Interests very probably took him beyond the "traditionalism" of the poemsj perhaps the poems did not even begin to answer to his con­ ception of himself as a writer. In any case, Agee began to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men soon, after the pub­ lication of Permit Me Voyage, and from the whole of this experience he drew the conclusion that conventional liter­ ary art was helpless to represent "the dignity of actuality. " Apparently Agee then sought a new form In which his sense of the dignity of man In the real world could be represen­ ted — and so deeply and simply that an audience could not help but find Its ovm dignity In the representation. Since we do not possess all the evidence; caution Is necessary. A final Judgment may hold that Agee never found the form, or at least that '3 was unable to realize tie possibilities he suppose:* '.o be Inherent In It. Neverthe­ less, we may speculate that the unity of Agee's career is to be located In his search for such a form, and that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the film criticism, and the 35 scenarios are to be understood as three ways In which Agee attempted to define and use it. Moreover, it may well be that in the novel A Death in the Family Agee's experience of scenario writing led him to conceive a new kind of literary realism — a kind he would have judged to be a necessary condition of responsible popular art. There is a good deal of evidence in the film criticism < ' # to support this view. At any rate, as we notice in the following chapters Agee *s repeated attempts to define a new kind of realistic art whose expression would be film- I ic, we should at least hypothecate that he was drawn to the popular media as critic and finally as practioner simply because he had discovered that his age needed re­ alistic art in new forms suitable to the modern conscious­ ness. Film was to represent "the dignity of actuality" — the common reality which the elite arts had found increas­ ingly difficult to represent except as subtly transformed into elaborately constructed fables of mythic and (often) parabolic significance. Film was to do what the elite novel could no longer do or no longer chose to do: bring us back to ordinary reality so to show us how we need it to know ourselves and our world well and pleasurably. CHAPTER II

THE JOURNALIST

In 1936 Fortune assigned Agee and the photographer

Walker Evans the task of locating and living with a re­ presentative family of white tenant cotton farmers In order to prepare an account of their lives.^ Fortune refused to print their work, but It appeared eventually 2 In 1941, much expanded, as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,

Agee never forgot under whose aegis he had come to Ala­ bama, and a good part of the moral, polemical, and vision­ ary quality of the book was shaped by his revulsion from the Icy detachment and the Imposed point of view of Luce journalism. Apparently after Fortune refused to publish what he had written, Agee once and for all set himself against Luce journalism with Its' polntlessly pointed points of view. Its straight, ambiguously neutral reports on the national estate, and Its well-dlsclpllned commitment to

1 See Agee's note to "A Selection From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," In Spearhead (New York, I 9 W ) , p. 509. 2 James Agee and V/alker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Fa- mous Men (Boston, I960 09^0 )• Quotatiïïns from this“ïïook are Identified by page reference. 36 37 ' O the American business comunnity. Agee had been very happy to have gotten a position on Fortune. No doubt he celebrated the happy irony — so magnifielently American — that a lampoon of Time style which he arranged for the Harvard Advocate inspired For­ tune *s interest in him. ^ Agee produced a variety of articles for Fortune. In 1935» for example, he was as­ signed the Job of rewriting a study of the American com­ mercial orchid, -which he was inclined, as he wrote Father Flye, to make into "a clear and inescapable small study of snobbism." ^ In most everything he wrote, he exhibited a mastery of the Time-Fortune style that earned him recog­ nition. From his letters to Father Flye, one cannot tell much about his attitude toward Fortune. except that he did

3 For some excellent commentary on Fortune in the thir­ ties, and Agee's relation to the magazine, see Erling lar- sen, "Let Us Not Now Praise Ourselves," Carleton Miscellany. II (Winter, I9 6 1), 8 6-9 7. 4 Dwight Macdonald tells how Agee got the Fortune Job — apparently with Mbcdonald's help — in Against the American Grain (New York, 'I9 6 2), p. 1 6 6. He also reports that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold less than six hundred copies the first year after its publication. 'It was remaindered, and until its reprinting in I96O, belonged to the sweet memory of disciples, although it was much in demand on the used and out-of-print book market.

^Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (New .York, I9 6 2), p. 77. 38 not care much for his Job but needed it badly enough to be grateful for the editor-in-chief’s willingness to re­ tain him on the condition that he learn to handle business stories.. 6 A story on the Tennessee Valley Authority, which the editor-in-chief thought one of the best pieces ever to appear in Fortune, made the occasion for the discussion of Agee’s future with the magazine. It was a fairly straight-forward piece of reporting, showing Agee getting command over the necessary stylistic maneuvers — the small, predictable irony balanced nicely against a faith­ ful account of the generous utopianism of the architects of T. V. A. At the end of the essay, Agee touched on the social-political question raised by T. V. A., the conflict between the private and public sectors of the economy; and, in the best journalistic traditions, he did not expound the conflict. Probably the best writing occurred at the beginning, when Agee described the rich resources of the Tennessee valley and spoke of how their being squandered had reduced a great many people to poverty. After finish­ ing his description of the geography and resources of the

^Letters, (Oct. 5, 1933) p. 6 6. 7 "The Project is Important," Fortune, VIII (October 1933). • Agee’s articles for Fortune were unsigned; those I refer to here are cited by Father Flye in notes to Agee's letters. 39 valley, he commented In the standard whimsical manner: ”lt is the valley that is newly T. V. A.'s to have and to hold, for better, for worse." Of the pieces Agee wrote for Fortune, probably "Six Days at Sea," a corrosively ironical, utterly merciless account of a cruiseship’s voyage to Havana was the most 8 interesting. It was a small cruel portrait, unlike any­ thing Agee ever wrote, in which a savage wit and something very like contempt, however sublimated by an underground pity, spared no part of the ritual of the cruise, nor any­ one Agee observed in pathetic attempts at fun, romance, and sport. The passengers were drawn as representative middle-class Americans caught in the ritualized absurdi­ ties, silliness, and illusion of people who have invested their money and dreams in the hope of a kind of pseudo- leisure class adventure, locked helplessly together while they sunk into disappointment, misery, and increasing des­ peration. The story was captioned with a question that looked suspiciously like parody: '^Have you ever taken a cruise? If so, this is what you may have looked like and

here are some of the things you might have done." Agee

8"Six Days at Sea," Fortune, XVI (September 1937). Agee wrote to Father Five,"Setters (November 26, 1937), p. 9 7: "I'm glad you like the Cruise article for I feel sure you know its cruelty was used to inspire pity in readers who never feel it when it is asked in another's behalf directly." 40 saw the passengers less as people than as inmates playing parts in a drama of disappointed Illusions. And his lan­ guage, for all his unspoken sympathy, carried the specta­ cle toward the edge of madness, the expected happy frolic appearing instead as something like a brawl in which inhi­ bition warred with the passengers' wish to let go and seize the moment of fun. The representation of human beings in "Six Days at Sea" gives us an image of other people's folly and madness, and whether Agee was aware, of it, the momentum of the lan­ guage, and the tone and the images of people, carried the clear suggestion of the writer's superiority to benighted, illusioned, desperate people. The photographs that accom­ panied the article carried the suggestion further. They were mercilessly candid, freezing images of ordinary enough behavior so that they would look absurdly gauche and help- less; ï’ather than all too absurdly human. I quote a passage of Agee's prose, in which the person is sacrificed to the image, much as in the style of Eliot or Pound: The wow of the evening was a blonde who was born out of her time: her glad and perpetually surprised face was that which appears in eight­ eenth-century pornographic engravings wherein the chore boy tumbles the milkmaid in an explo­ sion of hens and alfalfa. Her dress was cut with considerable extra elan to set off her un­ commonly beautiful breasts, which in the most extreme centrifuges of the dance swung almost entirely free of ambush. She had a howling rush and a grand time. 41 Other Fortune articles showed Agee was able to mani­ pulate the sharp, clean, witty style of the magazine. A standard Time-Fortune sentence, about T. V. A., read: "Ap­ parently it isn't quite possible to undertake such compre­ hensive responsibilities without a somewhat Utopian gleam in the eye: at any rate T. V. A. has it." Or, about a de­ signer: "Mr. Rhode is, in certain important ways, a middle- grounder." But the style could also rise to moments of genuine power, the images fixed in a string of developing phrases, moving very quickly and impressionistically, and registering, say, a vision of a deep emerging sadness. Af­ ter a detailed description of night-life and gambling, a piece on Saratoga — "August in Saratoga" -- concluded: And then along about five, the night spots thin out and the rest of their work is only for those who die with great difficulty; and out beneath the trees in the long low white­ washed buildings the odor of the coffee stains the air and you hear the thud of a hoof and the strange and princely language of a horse. And there comes one last night also when, as the ultimate parties blare and fritter to­ ward their red-eyed end, you hear throughout the streets of Saratoga the heavy and the de­ liberate steady rumble, as of an army in steady retreat, of the departing horse lorries. And every next morning the streets are as strangely empty as a new-made corpse of breath: the windows of the big hotels are blinded in Bon Ami; already the cottages are being board­ ed up and the furnishings shrouded in the smart clubs; a top-heavy obsolescent bus mulls down empty Broadway bearing its quota of sad-eyed hypochondriac Jews; and swift and broad upon the lush elms and the kaleidoscopic slate shin­ gles and the wild gables and the egregiously 42' extensive and pitiable slums of this little curious city there settles, delayed a little but by no means dispelled by Saratoga's other season, the season of waters, the chill and the very temper and the very cold of death. 9 Here there are no objects, or facts about objects, or even well-observed details of streets and people. The details enact a vision that is rendered in a precise im­ pressionistic style, defined by "apoplectically swirled colonnades" and "egregiously extensive and pitiable slums," .as well as by the mounting series of phrases that finally collapses into the phrase, "the chill and the very temper and the very cold of death." The passage is character­ ized by a kind of Scott Fitzgeraldian vision of mad jest and color and ill-spent desire dissolving into nothing­ ness, and by a properly large self-consciousness of style that fixes the vision in such sentences as "And there comes one last night also ..." which give the whole passage its mark of vision and design. Soon after the publication of "August in Saratoga" and before "Six Days at Sea" had appeared, Agee began to write what was to become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and as he met the people who figured in the book he sought to know and then write about them unprotected by the dis­ tance that Luce journalism, documentary style, liberal

"August in Saratoga," Fortune, XII (August 1935), 100. The article is misdated in a footnote supplied to a letter of Agee’s to Father Flye; see Letters, p. 75* 43 sentimentality, and aesthetic device opened up between a writer and actual human beings. He agonized a great deal over the task, since he could not help but conclude that it was literally "obscene" for a man to investigate and then reveal by assignment and for the careless con­ sumption of readers the private existence of other men, let alone""defenseless" sharecropper families easily domi­ nated by white northerners. Like a proper humanist, be­ ginning at the beginning, he raised the question of what it meant for a man to investigate other men. He was tor­ tured by the question (as we might interpret it in retro­ spect) of what even a minimally adequate humanistic repre­ sentation Of the lives of real people would entail for the man who made it, whether in words or in photographs. The question drove him to meditations on the nature of art, journalism and photography — on how, in effect, one can know and represent real people, and how one should lO relate to what one wishes to know. At times Agee seem­ ed to be asking a general question: How is one to knov/ other people and yet remain oneself? The difficulty, ap­ parent in the book as a whole, was that Agee could take

10 Agee wrote to Father Flye about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Letters (August 12, 1938), pp. 104-1031 " % trouble is that such a subject cannot be seriously looked at without intensifying Itself toward a centre which is beyond what I, or anyone else, is capable of writing of: the wholA problem and nature of existence." 44 nothing for granted; everything demanded testimony, which Is to say love, faith, ardor, celebration, devotion. Nei­ ther the people, nor the facts about their lives, especial­ ly of social and economic Import, nor anything that Impinged on their lives, seemed to Agee a matter that he could risk keeping quiet about. Everything was relevant and necessary to everything else; and everything was to be "taken In, " literally possessed, by the unguarded sensibility, then communicated back Into the world. And Agee did not want merely to make anyone of the lives of the sharecroppers. In the thirties the whole country was being made aware of how other people lived, of the facts of depression, and of the undisclosed geography of the American continent. To make people aware of things was the task of journalism and of journalistic-documentary forms; what Agee apparently wanted to write was. In effect, . an anti-documentary. When someone became aware of a share- cropper .living, say, in Alabama, he would likely become aware of a fact that had readily apprehendable connections with other facts, and sets of facts, generally of a social and economic order. The abstracted life, placed In rela­ tion to a set of facts and thereby easily comprehended, was not the kind of life and understanding of life In which Agee was Interested. What he was Interested In Is suggested In the follow- , Ing paragraph: 45 I think there la at the middle of this sense of the importance and dignity of actuality and the attempt to reproduce and analyze the actual, and at the middle of this antagonism toward art, something of real importance which is by no means my discovery, far less my private discovery, but which is a sense of "reality and of "values held by more and more people, and the beginnings . of somewhat new forms of, call it art if you must, of which the still and moving cameras are the strongest instruments and symbols. It would be an art and a way of seeing existence based, let us say, on an intersection of astronomical physics, geology, biology, and (including psychol­ ogy) anthropology, known and spoken of not in . scientific but in human terms. ■ Nothing that springs from this intersection can conceivably be insignificant: everything is most significant in proportion as it approaches in our perception, simultaneously, its own singular terms and its. ramified kinship and probable hidden identifica­ tion with everything else. (p. 245) The usual documentary ^might take as its subjects the under­ privileged poor living in slums, in corners of Alabama, or elsewhere, and its aim might be to serve a social purpose by showing us the miserable conditions under which they* live. It might end, of course, by making us feel guilty and thus merely serve our egocentrism. Agee was not beyond making his reader feel guilty, since he felt guilty him­ self. But his aim, as the quoted passage suggests, was to create a world in which human beings would be represen­ ted (or as Agee puts it, their existence would be seen) in relation to the totality of their environment. Such a view would entail creating a holistic vision of a world that we grasp, or begin to grasp, only as we see it under the aspect of its necessity, as it is true to its sources. Furthermore, the passage implies, Agee's ideal was to be- 46 come aware not of a set of social facts but of an expan­ sive order of things, in which people would have a place Just as anything else would have a place, on which no fixed point of view — and certainly no documentary point of view — could be imposed, and about which nothing was to be redeemed or changed or covered by sentimental emo­ tion. When everything was brought together into inter­ locking unity, and one saw it whole, then he could not help but see the necessity in the wholeness. The ideal — especially when viewed retrospectively — seems a strikingly filmic one; and of course Agee was even at this stage much influenced by the idea of film — for example, by the notion that film was an ideal form for an anthropologically-oriented anti-documentary whose end would be ‘the celebration of life. The ideal was also, for' Agee, an inordinate humanistic ideal, anti-political, and no doubt having some connection with Agee's temperamental anarchism. Sometimes one feels about him not only that innocence was the great reality in which he believed but that although he wished to represent people in the environ­ ment that shaped them, he could not imagine an environment that had social and political roots. Perhaps this was be­ cause "seeing" and (metaphorically) "possessing" mattered so much to him, as against, for example, manipulating, analyzing, reforming, etc. In this respect, Agee's attitude 47 toward existence Is much like the romantic attitude to­ ward nature. He possessed the hospitality toward be­ ing, as well as the Interest In the being of everything, that Wordsworth so magnificently possessed before him. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as he says again and a- gain, he wished to respect the dignity of objective ex­ istence, the worth of "unrecreated existence"; and of course his suspicion of art, and Indeed of language, de­ rives from his understanding that art does not allow for an unmedlated experience'of "unrecreated existence." In his devotion to the "dignity of actuality" and his suspi­ cion of art, Agee was also much Inspired by what he took to be the vast possibilities open to the camera for the "recording, communication, analysis, and defense . . . of a portion of unimagined existence ..." (xlv). Appar­ ently a book that was to have been two-hundred pages long got to be over four-hundred pages because Agee could never satisfy himself that he had in fact illuminated the actual­ ity he wished to honor. There are ways to explain Agee 's sense of failure, outside of observing that what he wanted to do, as he well knew, was beyond all human doing. C. Wright Mills has suggested that the book was only occasionally successful because Agee obscured the people and their envli'onment:

11 I have been helped here by an article that does not deal with Agee, but with the romantic attitude toward nature. See Denis Donoghue, "in the Scene of Being, " Hudson Review, XIV (Summer, I9 6 1), 232-246. 48 "instead of easing himself Into the experience In order to clarify the communication of how It really Is, he Jumps Into It, obscuring the scene and the actors and 12 keeping the reader from taking It big." It can also be said that Agee ‘s constant fear that he would work some distortion on his material; that some part of It (the houses the sharecroppers lived In, for example) would ap­ pear to him beautiful In Its severity and economy of line whereas It ought to have been recorded for the abomina­ tion It was; that the "outside" world was so dominated and dehumanized by money and art that few people could appreciate the significance he attached to what he wished to do; that naturalism was a disease of the spirit, unless Informed by poetry and mystery — that all of these fears, the excesses,of self-consciousness, stood between him and his material. His very effort to reveal himself as he meditated on his problems as writer, to share his exasper­ ated sense of M:he: ■limitless possibilities In his material that he would not be able to render, again Intervened be- tween him and his material; and all the frighteningly serious attempts In the book at least to touch the signifi­ cance, or better to consecrate the life, of everything In the environment, so that nothing would be lost from

Wright Mills, "Sociological Poetry. " Politics. V (Spring, 1 9 4), 8 1 2 5-1 2 6. 49 awareness, and each thing noted In "its own singular terms and Its ramified kinship and probable hidden Identifica­ tion with everything else" — by the same token, these attempts made impossible. Insofar as they are not only fragmentary but become desperate, the kind of composure that Mills spoke about. The paradoxical effect of Agee’s nearly worshipful attitude toward objective existence Is the Impression his prose gives that nothing really exists until It Is touched, taken In, possessed, given a life In scrupulous description and notation. Agee is so powerfully egocentric, his egocentrlcism being Inseparable from the virtue and beauty of the book, that especially the people appear not so much as they are (or, as Agee says. In memory he finds them to be), but as they exist as A^e "takes " them Into consciousness, or enacts In words his understanding of what they are. It Is clear why Agee obscured the tenant farmers. Wlien he came to Alabama on assignment from Fortune, he had every reason, of course, to think of himself as a "spy" ' hunting down a catch of text and pictures — a man from the world of Exeter and Harvard, an Intellectual with wor­ risome radical affiliations. He came to think of his work

13 I hope to show, in another place, that the visionary quality of the book is perhaps its most remarkable feature, and one that surely makes it an anti-documentary and occa­ sionally, in fact, a book of mystical vision. 50 as "this piece of spiritual burglary." Yet what began as "spiritual burglary" ended as an effort of love and understanding, whose end became something like redemption, the breaking down of his sense of estrangement, and Iden­ tification with a people and way of life In which he would find peace, all estrangement spent. He moved, that Is, from the cruel voyeurism of "Six Days at Sea" to a confron­ tation of "the problem of human understanding," his solu­ tion to which "was for him a kind of sacrament." His burden, however, was that he constantly suspected the worst of himself and then could not help making his reader aware of the anxieties such suspicions cost him. Indeed, an ad­ verse Judgment might hold that as If to prove the authen­ ticity of what he wrote Agee admitted Into his text every tormenting suspicion of his failure to prove worthy of the high significance he attached to his work. Agee’s torment and moral uncertainty — the fact that he could not take anything for granted, least of all the understanding of his readers -- were responsible, obviously, for the unique character of the book he produced — for Its fury, outrage, and Indignation, as well as for Its apparent disorder. Agee sought to surrender, hence to become

^^Letters. (January 13, 1939), p. 115* ^^Erllng Larsen, "Let Us Now Not Praise Ourselves, " p. 94. 51 steadily available to the fullness of objects and people, so that he could register the dignity of their actuality. Consequently he steadily refused the support of any conventional means of explaining, and hence giving coher­ ence to, his subject. In fact, however, his Christian devotlonallsm, which led him to affirm the dignity of ob­ jective existence, and the forms of meditation and ritual with which he was acquainted, allowed him at least some small refuge against the excesses that naked sensibility was likely to generate. And although he experienced a terrible discontent with language, as if he were worried that language necessarily Imposed pattern and value on ex-, perlence, and was capable therefore of grossly distorting the live moment of thought or action, nonetheless he was a writer given to creating an extraordinary high density of language. And one feels sometimes that it Is precisely the high density of the language that keeps one from know­ ing the people Agee would honor. Furthermore, Agee seems to have wished somehow to break through language, to have It wither away into worship, or Into the ideal anthropo­ logically-oriented documentary from which his agonized feeling would be excluded. At any rate, he was stuck with language. And he was stuck, as he seemed to have known, with a central Incoherence that was the result of his at­ tempt to write an anti-documentary that would forgo fixed 52 point of view, hence a principle of selection, and a clean manipulation of images that could serve the purposes of an overtly moral or propagandistic appeal. There was to be no appeal beyond the sharecroppers to reform, no implica­ tion that the product of the inquiry, or some social action which it could possibly inspire, or the book itself, would justify the inquiry, as an end more valuable than the in­ quiry itself. If there was to be no escape from language, for all of Agee's natural discontent with consecutive, linear re­ presentation and the discursive, mediating content of lan­ guage, and no escape through language to simpler modes of documentation and description, what in fact was left to Agee? Here is another statement of his ideal, and of his sense of being unable to achieve it: All this, all such, you can see, it so intensely surrounds and takes meaning from a certain center which we shall be unable to keep steadily before your eyes, that ghould be written, should be listed, calculated, analyzed, conjectured upon, as if all in one sentence and spread suspension and flight or fugue of music: and that I shall not be able so to sustain it, so to sustain its intensity toward this center human life, so to yield it out that it all strikes inward upon this center at once and in all its intersections and in the meanings of its interrelations and interenhancements: it is this which so paralyzes me . . . (p. Ill) All that w$s possible was the commitment to "The importance and dignity of actuality" (p. 245) and to, above all, the 53 unpredictable process of inquiry and surrender. The product of his surrender was a fragmented series of approach­ es to the tenant farmers, and in a variety of forms. Each proved necessarily incomplete, was necessarily exhausted, then followed by "a new beginning." The style, ranging from detailed, irnagistic "camera "shots to a sometimes over-wrought poetic prose that could act as a form of benediction; and from the supple exactness of plain speech to surging, loose­ ly structured, syntactically dense periodic.sentences, yielded to the pressure of Agee's nearly furious attempts to gain insight, oneness with things, love, and peace. Agee noted that he wrote in a continuum; he moved suddenly from narrating an event in the present to write about its future outcome; and from narration to poetic evocation, the objec­ tive to the subjective, from fact to vision, from the share­ croppers to himself.

16 I have been helped very much by Professor Kurt Wolff's notion of "surrender and catch, " which in a series of arti­ cles he expounds and Justifies as a method appropriate to social inquiry, and particularly to community studies. Pro­ fessor Wolff's paper, "Surrender and Religion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, II (1 9 6), 2 I6-3O, makes specific reference to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as does his yet unpublished paper,"^Surrender and Community Study, " at greater length. To surrender, he holds, is to bracket . "received ideas:" for example, when engaged in community stu­ dy, the frames of explanation, assumptions, techniques, etc. of orthodox sociology. The investigator seeks to retain his freedom to be imposed upon, to surrender and receive -- to "catch." "Surrender and catch" is an obviously relevant des­ cription of Agee's mode of thought and feeling. 54 The Importance of the book lies, however, not so much In Its method, or lack of method, or even In Its celebra­ tion of human dignity, as in Agee's naked encounter with a world that emerged in an act of worshipful description and notation after a torturous identification of the writer with his subject. His ideal was to make the world in which the sharecroppers lived become one, caught somehow filmically, and charged by the power of his devotion, scrupulous docu­ mentation, and will that he (and we) should see it for what it was. So that he conceived of his mission as a strictly religious one; the "unimagined reality" could very likely consume a life-time's work of notation, and one could want to write about it only if one saw his task as a near-reli­ gious imperative, as literally the moral assertion of one who had become a "witness." But the role of witness is fearful, uncertain, and at best dubious, and particularly for a writer given, as Agee was, to elegiac piety and celebration. One could argue, for example, that Agee's respect for people, his extreme deli­ cacy, and his instinctive humanism, were excessive and harm­ ful to human relations. His respect for the identity of other people often made it impossible for him simply to speak to them. In wanting everything to remain as it was, of course, he was responding, to what he took to be the inca­ pacity of reformers or politicians for understanding the 55 lives of impoverished, timid, repressed human beings. But in resisting the safe, répertoriai style of documentary journalism, and in trying to honor the mystery that the sharecroppers did not need the New Deal to rescue them from their hard world, Agee became alarmingly egocentric, posses­ sed by awe and reverence, and threatening to absorb every­ thing he observed into an aspect of grace, terror or beauty, or into an occasion for elegy and celebration. The result was that the tenant farmer families (although not their work, possessions, and houses) came to exist not in "the cruel radiance of what is" (p. 11) but in Agee's dark medi­ tations, against the backdrop of what he called "eternal history" (p. 102). One can understand his fear of bureau­ cratically administered change, and of impersonal documen­ tary technique, and yet feel that his fear of change was ex­ cessive, that he was too much dominated by the world that had forced him to think of himself as a spy. In rebelling against its over-rationalized techniques, Agee came to yearn for a form that would allow him to achieve an explosively holistic representation of life, negating (as it were) the world that existed beyond immediacy and particularity. When Agee's language withered away into worship, be­ coming a language of observations precisely represented, he could lovingly enact a piece of his devotion to things as they are; and he could become what he most wished to be: devout, devotional, discerning — hospitable to being, in 56 a worshipful relation to reality. He could then move be­ yond the tumultuous, agonized love that informed his medi­ tations on necessity, and led him in "Colon” to construct a metaphoric paradigm of man's fate. Hence in the sections on "Money," "Shelter," "Clothing," and "Work," he did not have to translate what could have been a sentimental jour­ ney, or expose journalism, or reformist polemic, into arche­ typal and poetic terms; or protect the sharecroppers from the world by giving them an archetypal and poetic life a- mong the "enchanted swarm of the living" (p. 21). And given Agee's standing temptation to represent human beings merely in their common humanity, as victims of what he called "the furious assaults of the universe", he was able to re­ sist in these sections overly generalizing them, or seeing them as fallen angels, irresistably yielding to the circum­ stances that all men share merely in being humnn.

(ii) Agee worried a great deal about the form of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; perhaps he over-worried. Apparently this was because he wanted the book to be a kind of memorial, not simply a collection of scattered commentary on the share­ croppers and their world and on the photographs by Walker Evans with which the book began. At any rate, Agee revealed in a number of places how frustrated he felt over his ina­ bility to unify his work. He was always beginning anew. 57 first to meditate on the ideal form he hoped to create, then once more to confront his subject and himself. Since he had rejected "the ordinary frames of explanation" that conceivably could have given unity to his subject, he found 17 himself with no place at which to begin or end. He be­ gan in médias res, and in a sense he began again and again in médias res. Yet he sought to find a principle of unity in what he wrote, and a form that would not be simply impro­ vised, growing as he responded to the inexhaustible possi­ bilities of writing about what he had observed. We can gather that this form would have mediated between fact and vision, description and interpretation, meditation and ac­ tion; or that it would have arisen in a kind of visionary act that would not have mediated anything but rather would- have obsorbed everything to itself, in something like a Whitmanesque vision. Agee tried various kinds of literary forms but aban­ doned or transformed each of them: straight first-person narrative, as he told of his meetings with various people; careful description of the houses in which the sharecroppers lived; poems, prologues, indroits, psalms that provide some­ times a bitterly ironical view of the subject and sometimes a heavily serious comment on it. Sometimes the book became

17 Paul Goodman, untitled review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Partisan Review, IX (January-Pebruary, 1942)', W. ------58 centered in Agee’s quest for personal authenticity, especi­ ally when he was worried by doubts about his own integrity and capacity to prove worthy of his seriousness; and on these occasions the sharecroppers faded into the background of the book and Agee wrote as if he felt the need to justify himself before God. Always, however, his moral uneasiness was inseparable from his moral earnestness; and his search for form nothing less than a search for some way of both giving expression to and controlling, orchestrating and ob­ jectifying, an excruciatingly personal experience. There are numerous indications in Let Us Now Praise Fa­ mous Dfen that Agee, deeply influenced by music as he was, sought to construct the book according to a conception of musical fomm. The theme would be developed contrapuntally through successive atages of the book until it reached a kind of choral intensity. At any rate, the vision of life whose constant pressure is felt in Agee’s language was too large and orchestral to be encompassed in amy of the stan­ dard literary forms. In the "Preface" Agee said that he in­ tended "that the text be read continuously, as music is lis­ tened to or a film watched, with brief pauses only where they are self-evident" (xv). Furthermore, he thought the oral dimension of what he wrote of first importance, that "variations of tone, pace, shape, and dynamics" were to be given their full weight in our reading the book. All of 59 this implies that Agee thought of the book as an orchestral poem, its unfolding intensity to be the product of changing perspectives, the accretion of descriptions of a variety of things and people, and a counterpoint of mood and images. One example of the procedure — an Interestingly self- conscious one — might do here. Book I begins with Lear's speech, "Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are," against which Agee juxtaposes, on the following page, the words of the Internationale, "Workers of the world, unite and fight. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win." Agee explained, in a footnote, that the words of the Internationale were "not dealt with directly in this volume; but it is essential that they be used here, for in the pat­ tern of the work as a whole, they are, in the sonata form, the second theme; the poetry facing them is the first." Ap­ parently he was suggesting that the words of the Internation­ ale could be read as the counterpart of Lear's new awareness that for too long he has been ignorant of- how poor people lived; but Agee would suppress any appeal to the revolution­ ary consciousness of his time, and the emphasis would be placed on discoveries whose meaning would be necessarily a- political — above all, the discovery that the sharecrop­ pers existed. For Agee this was to be more than a simple discovery; its end was to be love, that is, belief in the existence of human beings all but lost in repression and 60 silence. Nothing was to be allowed to Intrude between him­ self and his attempt to record every dimension of their reality. But apparently Agee thought that musical form — images reflecting back on each other, certain contrapuntal musical devices, the use of interludes, etc. — might save him from too heavily injecting himself; or at least would minimize, or partially controll, the helpless subjectivity that he would necessarily involve in the book. The other remarks on musical form need but brief men­ tion. Agee worried about worrying himself over form: "No doubt I shall seriously distress myself over my inability to create an organic, mutually sustaining and dependent, as it were musical form . . . (p. 10). The musical structure was to have a kind of ritual counterpart: the ritual, cere­ monial form of the mass. Part Three, for example, some hun­ dred pages long, begins with Psalm XLIII, which is followed by three sections of "inductions," and two "introits." The "introits" were, so to speak, preparatory prayers to the fi­ nal celebration — in Agee's text, they preceded the Lord's Prayer and the solemn verses from Ecclesiasticus beginning "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us," and including a verse which spoke Agee's intention very clearly: "And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been bom; and their children after

them" (p. 4 4 5). 61 Agee wished to draw on the severe music of celebration and sanctification that his childhood upbringing In High Chitrch Anglicanism had made part of his sensibility. His sketchy attempt, then, to give the book a ritual, ceremoni­ al, catholic fofm. Indicates that Agee sought to relate his sense of pathos before the almost unconscious suffering of the sharecroppers to the sacred history of man, as preserved In Christian tradition. He moved, that Is to say, from ihe Initial almost mystical darkness of "On the Porch: l" and "A Country Letter" to, at the end, a sacramental Intuition of human divinity and immortality. His religious humanism.de­ manded at least something of the traditional ritual forms; and If not the forms, then the language:" . . . they shall be drawn up like plants with the burden of being upon them, their legs heavy, their eyes quiet and sick . . ." (p. 8 3). Agee was always moving Into quasl-blbllcal forms of address, as If he needed not only to become one with the people he came to love but to comprehend the whole of existence under the aspect of their lives, celebrating them because they were doomed — but not any more doomed than anything else which managed to exist. For Agee the people were quite li­ terally "beings," and he tended to Identify them with being as such, a kind of sentence under which everything and every­ one lives: "... and soon, quite soon now. In two years. In five. In forty. It will all be over, and one by one we 62 shall all be drawn Into the planet beside one another; let us then hope better of our children, and of our children’s children . . (p. 439)* His sensibility was almost per­ fectly in harmony with the biblical sense of man’s exile, of the burden of being he must share (rather, say, than his burden of being himself.) At the end of the book Agee’s pity is touched by mystery and rapture, the uttering of pro­ found faith in the regenerative powers of life, and the ima­ ges of the children, Squinchy Gudger and Ellen Woods, body It forth: ...his face is beatific, the face of one at rest in paradise, and in all this while her gentle and sober, earnest face is not altered out of its deep slantwise gazing: his head is now sunken off and away, grand and soft as a cloud, his wet mouth flared, his body still more profoundly relinquish­ ed of itself, and I see how against her body he is so many things in one, the child in the melodies' of the womb, the Madonna’s son, human divinity, sunken from the cross at rést against his mother, and more beside, for at the heart and leverage of that young body, gently, taken in all the pulse of his being,the penis is partly errect. And Ellen where she rests, in the gigantic light: she, too, is completely at peace, this child, the arms squared back, the palms open loose against the floor, the floursack on her face; and her knees are flexed upward a little and fallen apart, the soles of the feet facing: her blown belly swimming its navel, white as flour; and blown full broad with slumbering blood into a circle: so white all the outward flesh, it glows of blue; so dark, the deep hole, a dark red shadow of life boood: this center and source, for which we have never contrived any worthy name, is as if flame were breathed forth from , it and subtly played about it: and here is this breathing and play of flame, a thing so strong, so valiant, so unvanquisable, it is without effort, without emotion, I know it shall at length outshine the sun. (p. 442) 63 The '\nas8 " celebrated at the end Is precisely the "mass " of a religious humanist; it affirms, almost in ecstasy, the incorruptible sources of life — the eternal return of life to its primal sources of being in radiant sexual­ ity. Above all. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the book of a visionary poet; and by this I do not mean a man who has visions by fits and starts but rather a man who impo­ ses — even as he seeks not to impose on anything but rath­ er to welcome everything that imposes on him — a vision, a fabric of metaphor and imagery, on what he sees. One would obviously have to make qualifications, simply given the wide range of style and response to experience that are found in the book. But it will hold as preliminary to further exposition of structure and form. Musical form can be thought of metaphorically, in the way one thinks of Eliot's Four Quartets, say, as merely a sustaining, interweaving, contrapuntal design, as theme and variations: the design we get in a great many kinds of literary compositions. Thinking of musical form in this way, one notices certain features of arrangement in Agee's book. For example, the three sections called "On the Porch," (pp. 19-21; 221-253; 461-471) which Agee noted were written together in 1936 and which open in médias res, have much the same kind of emotional color, atmosphere, and 64 quality of feeling. They are placed, moreover, at moments of withdrawal into meditation and general reflection, and are preparatory to a new movement of consciousness into description, narration, etc. Agee described the section in footnote: I may as well as explain that "On the Porch" was written to stand as the beginning of a much.long­ er book, in which the whole subject would be dis­ posed of in one volume. It is here intended still as a preface or opening, but also as a frame and as an undertone and as the set stage and center of action, in relation to which all other parts of this volume are Intended as flashbacks, foretastes, illuminations and contradictions, (p. 245)

The first section of On The Porch (p. I9-2 1) evokes the unity of life in silence and darkness, into which everything is assimiliated: the oneness of organic and in­ organic existence. The metaphors of vision work to place the sharecroppers in strangely beautiful union with the heavy dark world in which they dwell. The people are col­ lapsed, as it were, into the darkness, the outer limit of their world but also vbttj likely a metaphor of separation, fear, and death. Agee constantly represents their lives as unfolding in universal reality, ultimately to be joined in death to it. In the "Preamble" to Book II, he speaks of what he loiows of them: ...and of whose living we know little in some while now, save that quite steadily, in not much possible change for better or much worse, mute, innocent, helpless and incorporate among that small-moted and inestimable swarm and pol­ len stream and fleet of single, irreparable 65 existences, they are led, gently, quite steadily, quite without mercy, each a little farthertoward the washing and the wailing, the Sunday suit and the prettiest dress, the pine box, and the closed clay room . . „ .(p. 9) And in "On the Porch: l" Agee sees them not only as "incor­ porate among that small-moted and inestibable swarm . . . of single Irreparable existences," but in sleep brought "companionate among the whole enchanted swarm of the liv­ ing, into a region prior to the youngest quaverings of creation" (p. 2l). Their union with the world is made out to be enchanted and primordial. In the second section (pp. 221-253) Agee discovers Joy in participating in the actual, and his discovery becomes the occasion of some reflections on the aesthetics of ex­ perience. But the discovery of Joy, rather than what Agee makes of Joy as the end of a genuinely human existence, is crucial here. The dead oak and pine, the ground, the dew, the air, the whole realm of what our bodies lay in and our minds in silence wandered, walked in, swam in, watch­ ed upon, was delicately fragrant as a paradise, and, like all that is best, was loose, light, casual, to­ tally actual .... All the length of the body and all its parts and functions were participating, and were being realized and rewarded, inseparable from the mind, identical with it: and all, everything, that the mind touched, was actuality, and all, every­ thing, that the mind touched turned immediately, yet without in the least losing the quality of its total individuality, into Joy.and truth, or rather, reveal­ ed, of its self, truth, which in its very nature was Joy, which must be the end of art, of investigation, and of all anyhow human existence, (p. 2 2 5) 66 The aesthetics'of Agee's practice, or rather the Ideal aes­ thetic of the effort "to recognize the stature of a portion of unlmagined existence," are implied In these lines. When one gains the experience of oneness, mind and spirit admin­ istering joyously to each other, this Is because one has managed to become "hospitable to being," ready to receive and to give in turn. The joy Is that of the receiving, as­ similating, participant spirit welcoming whatever Imposes Itself In consciousness; In Agee's case, the joy that he ex­ periences In discovering the scintillating actuality of the, world, which gives him "at least [an] Illusion of personal wholeness and Integrity" (p. 227). The joy Agee discovered led him not only to make It the measure of the possibilities of human existence but to reflec­ tions on the "poetics" of his undertaking. In part, his re­ flections are the product of his discontent with art, which figured In his mind as another means of keeping life at a safe remove: "Above all else: in God's name don't think of

It as Art" (p. 1 5). More Important, his reflections enacted the moral vision that his book would represent and he would attempt to live by: representing the actuality of the lives of the sharecroppers, he would represent the crystallization of fate, of necessity, of what at one point he calls the

"disease |^ha^ Is being" (p. 2 2 9). He says about George Gudger, for example, that he could Invent incidents and a 67 background for his life which would tell a relevant truth about him; but that . . . somehow a much more important, and dignified, and true fact about him than I could conceivably invent, though I were an inimitably better artist than I am, is that fact that he is exactly, down to the last inch and instant, who, what, where, when and why he is. (p. 2 3 3) Hence Agee does not protest — he knew, of course, that pro­ test was worthless unless it was informed by something like Lear’s terrible knowledge of the unguarded condition of human life; indeed, he knew that "social protest" would remain merely a species of self-righteous indignation if it were not proceeded by recognition "of the anguish of the collision with actuality." Agee wanted the sense of the naked actuality to be felt throughout the book. In part, again, his motive was to bur­ den the reader, of whom he was intensely distrustful. And how is this to be made so real to you who read of it, that it will stand and stay in you as the deepest and most iron anguish and guilt of your existence that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot for a moment exchange .places with her, nor by any such hope make expiation for what she has suffered at your hands, and for what you have gained at hers. . . . (p. 321 Such moral coersion appears an insufferable priviledge of the writer; one can collect "iron anguish and guilt" only 13 See Robert Penn Warren, "Elizabeth Madox Roberts; Life is From Within," Saturday Review of Literature, XLVI (March 2, 1Q63),' 38; . "T I . she knew that to recognize fully the dignity of any creature demands that we recog­ nize the anguish of the collision with actuality." 68 at the cost of passivity. It is plain, however, that Agee's own fear and guilt produce this passage. Perhaps he is too ready to disbelief in other people. With respect to its sentimental liberalism and its readiness to protect • itself from experience with easy solicitude for the poor and dispossessed, the world outside of Agee's experience enters the book only as it reflects-the vices of Luce jour­ nalism. One comes finally to recognize one's helplessness rather than anything resembling "iron anguish and guilt" as if Agee's excess of self-consciousness and his consum- ming uneasiness about himself end by preventing us from experiencing the actuality that he wished scrupulously to honor. The poetics of the undertaking are confusing. It is certainly clear from what impulse Agee's suspicion of "art" springs; he was very much aware of the slick, dehumanized photographs of a Margaret Bourke-White. And he concluded, also, that much of supreme value in human experience, par­ ticularly sudden moments of illumination that arise in en­ gagement with actuality, were "beyond the power of an art to convey" (p. 228). Nonetheless, he believed that his aim was to defend actuality — .the simple, severe images of life he had known — against the falsifications worked upon them by easy sympathy or their reduction to the matter of "social protest." But the program obviously was not carried 69 out, and' not merely because Agee filled the book with his exacerbated self-consciousness, or even because he doubted the capacity of his putative readers, or his ovm. capacity to do what he sought to do. When we examine what Agee produced, rather than what he wished to produce, the visionary quality of the book draws attention. For all of Agee ‘s dedication "to give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are "

(p. 242), he gives the sharecroppers back to us refracted through not merely the quality of consciousness of which he was capable but through a world, a vision of raan.ls fate — of the common necessities that life places on man. This vision can be examined as it becomes articulate in the first movement of "On the Porch" and in "A Country Letter." The atmosphere of "On the Porch: l" characterizes the first section of "A Country Letter." Agee meditates in the night, at the Gudger house, over a coal-oll lamp, while everyone else sleeps. His awareness is focused on the lamp, and he begins to set down what he can of its appearance: It is of glass, light metal colored gold, and cloth of heavy thread. The glass was poured into a mold, I guess, that made the base and bowl, which are in one piece; the glass is thick and clean, with icy lights in it. The base is a simply fluted, hollow skirt; stands on the table; is solidified in a narrowing, a round inch of pure thick glass, then hollows again, a globe about half flattened, the globe-lass thick, too; and this holds oil, whose silver line I see, a little less than half dovm the globe, its level a very little — for the base is not quite true — tilted against the axis of the base. (p. 49) 70 The mind absorbed, as it were, in the object, Agee can lovingly sharpen distinctions and apprehend in sensuous detail: This "oil"is not at all oleaginous, but thin, brittle, .rusty feeling, and sharp; taken and rubbed between forefinger and thumb, it so clean­ ses their grain that it sharpens their mutual touch to a new coin edge, or the russet nipple of a breast erected in cold; and the odor is clean, cheerful and humble, less alive by far than that of gasoline, even a shade watery . . . . (pp. 4 9-5 0) But the motive of the description is not to set things down scrupulously, as Agee does in the sections on "Shelter" and "Clothing" in Book II. The coal-oil lamp becomes, as Agee concentrates on it in absolute silence, the access of mind to vision, almost to mystical insight that insures success­ ful communication. Intent on the flame in the glass, he knovis "such holiness of silence and peace that allon earth and within extremest rembrance seems suspended upon it in perfection as upon reflective water ..." (p. 5 1). And he experiences his power to comprehend his world as it becomes unified in meditation and is brought to a kind of immaculate consciousness: . . . and I feel that if I can by utter quietness succeed in not disturbing this silence, in not so much as touching this plain of water, I can tell you anything witnin realm of ^God, whatsoever it may be, you will not be able to help but understand it. (p. 5 1) Prom this point, Agee goes on to tell of his loss of the sense of time; it is as if he were fixed, in revery and 71 meditation, to an intensely felt "present" that brings the world round to him. But he does not move backward into his own past. Everything seems to him to have with­ drawn "to source," into a fragile yet absolute peace, and Agee, entirely absorbed into it, is freed "to tell at all leisure and in all detail, whatever there is to tell: of where I am; of what I perceive" (p. 52). The experience is that of the mysterious wholeness- of the person, the issue of which is the confidence that the world is perfect­ ly reflected in oneself — that vision, hitherto bounded by lethergy, habit, noise, etc., is freed to discover its object and to faithfully represent it. The world having become whole and available to the writer, the sharecroppers can then be apprehended as they share a world in common with him; so that Agee moves logi­ cally to an image of the sharecroppers as simply represen­ tative human beings, shaped mercilessly by their circum­ stances ; Above that shell and carapace, more frail a- gainst heaven than fragilest membrane of glass, nothing, straight to the terrific stars: where­ of all heaven is chalky; and of whom the nearest is so wild a reach my substance wilts to think on: and we, this Arctic flower snow-rooted, last matchflame guarded on a windy plain, are seated among these stars alone: none to turn to, none to make us known; a little country settlement so deep, so lost in shelve and shade of dew, no one so much as laughs at us. Small wonder how piti­ ably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when every star strikes us sick with the fright: do we really exist at all? (p. 5 3) . ' 72 And he himself finds a kind of metaphysical Identity with them as he contemplates the distances that rise beyond the small Gudger house and discovers a terrifying Isolation to be a common human fate. In "A Country Letter," then, Agee wrote a visionary poem that saw the lives of the sharecroppers as expressive of the Inevitable loneliness and separation of life. He saw them under the aspect of eternity, as It were — from above, "drawn Inward within their little shells of rooms .

. ."(p. 5 4); and, moreover, as they shared "being" with everything In the universe, with the whole world of histor­ ical time, and somehow managed "to bear to exist" at the same time that they were progressively destroyed by life. His prose made them out as things among things, feeling "the burden of each moment one on another . . ." (p. 57)• Whether Agee knew It or not, he was not merely acting as a poetic documentarlst, or poetic realist, seeking to transform or to negate altogether the kind of Impersonal documentary forms he knew from his apprenticeship to Luce journalism. He was one of those we seem to want to call nowadays "the visionary company," romantic poets. Clearly he believed that man's life had to be comprehended under the aspect of eternity, hence related to eternal history. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men he collapsed the distance between man (defined by his work, education, geography, etc.) 73 and Man (necessarily alone. Ignorant of his fate, a victim of the unalterable processes of life). Agee wished to see as accurately as possible but at the same time he was driven to place what he saw within a cosmic vision that would af­ firm his own deepest sense of what life is. What he knew, it is easy to conclude, he was all too ready to know again and again and again; so that the children he wrote about, as well as the sharecroppers, are the occa­ sions of tragic elegy rather than human beings in their own right. His beautiful tenderness and his great piety, re­ sponding deeply to images of human loss, separation, and fear, became the impulse to a consistently elegiac mode of feeling, in whatever form Agee wrote. For example, Untermeyer prints Agee's poem "Rapid Transit," a poem about subway passangers, in whom Agee sees "The faces of each ruined child:" Squealing under city stone The millions on the millions run, Everycone .a ilifei alone; : Every one a soul undone: There all the poisons of the heart Branch and abound like whirling brooks. And there through every useless art Like spoiled meats on a butcher's hooks Pour forth upon their frightful kind The faces of each ruined child: The wrecked demeanors of the mind 19 That now is tamed, and once was wild

19 See Louis Untermeyer, Modem American Poetry, new and enlarged ed. (New York, I9 5Ü), p. 6 0 7. 74 The conception of human beings, or at least of those who have been exposed of necessity to the poisons of urban existence. Is familiar; the Images belong (or used to belong) to the Idiom of modern poetry, and they easily descend Into Journalistic sentimentality. Here they are touched by genu­ ine pity. The poem views the subway passengers not merely as alienated from themselves: "alone,/ Every one a soul un­ done." It makes what Is expressed In this line very particu­ lar; the subway passengers have lost contact with the possi­ bilities of life that belonged to them as children. These have been reduced to uselessness, and paradoxically only their ruin Is preserved: "the wrecked demeanors of the mind." "Demeanors" here Implies more than a certain style of behav­ ior or manner; It suggests a certain assured and natural use of mind In relation to life, and "wild" reinforces this sug­ gestion, since It touches not only on the recklessness of childhood but on freedom of mind and Imagination. "Tamed" suggests that the ruin of the passengers Is much like a liv­ ing death; they have been tamed (i.e.. Isolated, drugged, stilled) beyond the possibility of selfhood or wholeness. Agee composed a prose analogue of the poem to accompany some photographs of subway passengers taken by Walker Evans: These facts: who they are, and the particular thing that happens to them In a subway: need brief reviewing and careful meditation .... The simplest or the strongest of these beings has been so designed upon by his experience that he has a wound and a nakedness to conceal. 75 and guards and disguises by which he conceals It . . . . Before every other human beings In no matter what Intimate trust. In no matter what apathy, something of the mask Is there; before every mirror. It Is hard at work, saving the creature who cringes before It from the sight which might destroy It. Only In sleep (and not fully there); or only In certain waking moments of suspension, of quiet, of solitude, are these guards down: and these moments are only rarely to be seen by the person himself, or by any other human being. 20 Another fugitive poem, first published In New Masses. may be compared with the two views of the subway traveller, since It has something In common with the attutudes they embody. There, In the earliest and chary spring, the dogwood flowers. Unharnessed In the friendly Sunday air By the red brambles, on the river bluffs. Clerks and their choices pair. Thrive by, not near, masked all away by shrub and juniper. The ford v eight, racing the Chevrolet. They cannot trouble her: Her breasts, helped open from the afforded lace. Lie like a peaceful lake; And on his mouth she breaks her gentleness:

0, wave them awake I They are not of the birds. Such Innocence Brings us to break us only. Theirs are not happy words. 20 "Note on Photography, " jL.e_., % e Cambridge Review. No. 5, March 20, 1^56. Walker Evans'^ photographs appear under the title, "fepld Transit: Eight Photographs. 76

We that are human cannot hope. Our tenderest Joys oblige us most. No chain so cuts the bone; and sweetest silk most shrewdly strangles. How this must end, that now please love were ended. In kitchens, bedflghts, silences, women's-pages. Sickness of heart before gold lettered doors. Stale flesh, hard collars, agony In antiseptic corridors. Spankings, remonstrances, fishing trips, orange Juice, Policies, incapacities, a Chevrolet, Scorn of their children, kind contempt exchanged. Recalls, tears, second honeymoons, pity. Shouted corrections of missed syllables. Hot water bags, gallstones, falls down stairs, Oldfashioned Christmases, suspicions of theft. Arrangements with morticians, taken care of by sons in law. Small rooms beneath the gables of brick bungalow. The tumbler smashed, the glance between daughter and husband. The empt^ body in the lonely bed And, in the empty concrete porch, blown ash Grandchildren wandering the betraying sun Now, on the winsome crumbling shelves of the horror God show, God blind these children! 21 The poem moves from its opening in a scene of courtship, and with the attending suggestions of ceremony and gentle love, to a vision of what awaits the lovers; they will grow up in­ to the world catalogued in the long section beginning "How this must end . . . . " Their innocent moment of Joy will destroy them, since it will lead inevitably into the world they will have to endure until death. At the close the poet prays that the lovers should see, as he sees, what awaits

21 "Sunday.; Outskirts of Knoxville, Tenn., Sprinted in Elizabeth Ibrew, Directions, in Modem Poetry. (New York, 1940), pp. 243-244., 77 them; but also that they should be blinded so that their Joy can remain simple and uncorrupted by what one must learn of life. Again, like the poem "Rapid Transit," there is an undertone of deep pity. Indeed, if the pity were not so obvious and strong, one could find the poem alarming: an­ other protest against the horror of middle-class existence; another poet unwilling to face the prospect of adulthood. One of the best and saddest lines in the poem, "Our tender­ est Joys oblige us most," and the lines that follow it, suggest not only that what is most tender in human feeling most relentlessly binds us to human responsibility, and hence to the future, but that love is a kind of deception since it strangles life as it tragically introduces us to "agony in antiseptic corridors" and finally makes of us "the empty body in the lonely bed." Yet the long catalogue re­ cords an acceptance of all this, something like a tragic ac­ ceptance, and the prayer of the concluding line that God "blind these children" is the prayer of a poet who knows that if love commits its most devout and gentle youth to in­ evitable pain, fear, and disappointment, yet this is the pe­ culiar pathos and cost of love. Agee protests at the same time that he seems to accept the cost, although its horror is made very real in the catalogue. Agee had a very special affinity and feeling for the - images of life tha3fc figure in "Rapid Transit" and "Sunday: 78 Outsicirts of Knoxville, Tenn." He made a large and sus­ tained effort to believe in innocence, and surely out of deeply felt need. For Agee, of course, innocence was not a grand historical myth, a way of conceiving of man as he frees himself from the burden of history so to make his life new, but a precious reality that gave life spirit, . grace, charm, Joy. Moreover, it was a reality against which he set the politicalized and socialized existence of men. But the high valuation he placed on innocence made up a limit of his comprehension of life. He was in­ clined to see people as literally fallen angels, as having of necessity yielded to the relentless pressures that life brings to bear on all men. And his concern with violated innocence, as in the scenario of The Night of the Hunter. was an outgrowth of this view. Agee could make his pity inform moments of sublime imaginative vision, but generally only when he was con­ fronted by people in whom he coulc’ read the extreme condi­ tions of life: Negroes, tenant farmers, children. On such occasions he would bring to bear on them his elegiac sensi­ bility — his great sense of pity, reverence and mystery. One thinks of the marvellous scene in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of the terror of the young .Negro couple which Agee accidently precipitates, and of his remark: "The least I could have done was to throw myself flat on my 79 face and embrace and kiss their feet” (p.42). But he was likely to impose the identical heavy sense of pathos on everything that moved him to utterance: every moment is a guarded one, lived under disguise, for the subway travel­ ler; in men's faces is reflected the ruin of the children they must have been: the sharecroppers submit to "the mer­ ciless burden of being upon them" (p. 8 3); and the chil­ dren in A Death in the Family hardly seem to exist at all, except as they are sheer vulnerable innocence. In writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Agee discov­ ered his critical perspective and point of view. The no­ tion of the filmic emerged from his manifest need to honor the dignity of actuality, of ordinary life. It emerged, at first, as a protest (as one might suppose) against the triumph of modernism in the arts — against the enormous subtlety and power to transform reality witnessed in the highest manifestations of literary art in the twentieth century. And it ended as a defense of the objective world of nature and man against the admittedly boundless power of literary imagination to shape it anew, and in so doing to devalue or at least distort it. In making highly formal, mythic art, writers like Mann, Joyce, and Eliot tended to make ordinary reality merely subservient, the important fact being the organization into which it could be placed. Agee would not sacrifice the real world to the demands of 80 myth-making; he hoped to live without myth so to allow common reality to retain Its full phenomenal power. Per­ haps he was not fully aware of what academic criticism has 30 well demonstrated — that form gives our percep­ tions meaning, and that In literary art form tends to be meaning. In effect, however, Agee was concerned with the cost of the sacrifice of perception — our sense of the richness of the world — to,the demands of form. From this concern grew his thinking about the possibilities of film, a form In which the common reality could be presen­ ted, In which things could reveal their abounding grace, and narrative could be rehabilitated. We can Infer that the problem of art for Agee was still the old problem, the relation of the real world to the world newly made In the work of art. He was dissatis­ fied with art because he believed It entailed too much sacrifice of the real world, and he wanted to allow the real world to retain Its Identity. It Is possible to see In Age^Ss suspicion of art not only the sign of his great reverence for the common reality of man but the beginnings of his efforts to define a domain of film practice that could best servô the needs of popular art. In effect, Agee had begun to make distinctions between elite art and a po­ tentially popular art -- between those artists who seem driven to sacrifice common reality In adjusting It to the 81 demands of careful design and those who feel ”a deep obli­ gation to things as they are."22 Prom the latter artists, Agee believed, one could hope for popular art, In the film criticism which he began writing in 1941, the year in which Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published, Agee was to create a film aesthetic that would further develop the major theme of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and hence his sense of the necessity of popular art in film.

22 The phrase in quotation marks is from Prank Kermode. ~ "The House of Fiction," Partisan Review. XXX (Spring, I9 6 3), 6 1. This article consists of Kermode * s reporting and comment # interviews with several contemporary English novelists, and I have found it most useful in composing the final two paragraphs of this chapter. I have also drawn on Arthur Mizener, "The Elizabethan Art of Our Kbvies," Kenyon Review» (Spring, 1 9 4), 2 1 8 1-1 9 4. CHAPTER III

THE FILM CRITIC

(1) Film Criticism For our purposes, the dominant interest of Agee's film criticism is that it repeatedly touches on the moral and aesthetic attitudes that informed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and were later to inform A Death in the Family.^ In his film criticism Agee insisted again and again on a certain indispensable minimum of naturalism in film; and he lavishly praised movies that succeeded in proving faith­ ful to the detail of observation. He was driven to exas­ peration when chances to record real people, streets, land­ scapes — indeed, the whole moving process of life in the real world — were ignored. Yet he believed, as he did dur­ ing the time when he was preparing to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that natural and inanimate objects could be photographed so that they yielded symbolistic implica­ tion. By the same token, Agee was immensely attracted to

1 Agee on Film; Reviews and Comments by James Agee (New York, 1958 ). 'Quot'atio'ns' 'from this volume are ï'3'entifi'ed by page reference. The film reviews printed herein include everything Agee wrote for The Nation during his tenure as film critic between 1942 and 1$48, together with a selection of the reviews he wrote for Time between 1941 and 1948. The Time reviews differ noticeably from The Nation reviews; many of them conform to the peculiar conventions of Time style. What I say here holds largely for The Nation reviews. 82 83 films which, taking advantage of the recording power of the camera, yet went beyond It toward some kind of formal, stylized, or "poetic" representation of reality. But he asserted repeatedly that the poetry (one can substitute "intensity, " or "honesty, " a word that occurs frequently In the criticism) was unimaginable except for a film ma- 2 ker’s faithfulness to detail — to actuality. The re­ ality principle was very strong In Agee, and he protected Its rights against films In which soft Images and soft, self-conscious contrivance dominated. Indeed, his film criticism exhibited the same reverence for the worth of the unrecreated things of the world as did Let Us Now Praise Famous jfen. And like that book. It Is constantly aware of how. In the end, they must come to have expres­ sive power. The terms of the criticism remained unchanged during the seven years that Agee was a film critic. The twin possibilities, or poles, of film — documentary and "ex­ pressive" representation — concerned him again and again. He criticized *Ehe Ox-Bow Incident for Its self-conscious attempts to achieve heavily planned effects. On the other hand, he praised the formalized simplicity, the perfect

2 See Norman Holland, "Agee on Film: Reviewer Re-Viewed," Hudson Review, XII (Spring, 1959), 1^9: "When Agee calls for realism, he really means honesty. ' . 84 artificiality, of Bataan. likening it to a "native ritual dance" (p. 45). Of The Ox-Bow Incident he wrote: It seems to me that in Ox-Bow artifice and nature got jammed in such a way as to give a sort of double, focus, like off-printing in a comic strip. Here was a remarkably controlled and intelligent film; and in steady nimbus, on every detail, was the stiff over­ consciousness of those who made it of the excellence of each effect, to such a degree that the whole thing seemed a mosaic of over-appreciated effects which con­ tinually robged nature of its own warmth and energy, and the makers of the ambitious claims which they had made on nature, (p. 44) While Agee never slighted the claims of actuality, de­ manding of film that it be able to communicate a sense of the substantial existence of things and people, he did not propound an aesthetic of naive realism. His insistence on "actuality" was in part polemical; he was depressingly a- ware of the Incredible devaluation, or ignorance, of actu­ ality embodied in Hollywood films. He was fully aware of the organizing, selective power of the camera; of how art and actuality can interact or be played off against each other; and although, like the generality of serious movie critics, he greatly vàlued movement in film, nothing he said implied that he would have thought the art of film be­ trayed if a movie stood still and allowed an audience mere­ ly to see. He said quite plainly that the camera shapes things so that they become what we see they are: "There is hardly one moment in the collaboration of cameras that implies a truly creative eye, that makes a subject be it­ self with the intensity of a diamond" (p. 33). 85 His premise was that intensity would be a good pos­ sibility if actuality were honored. He found the inten­ sity, for example, in Farrebioue. "a record of the work and living of a single farm family, and of the farm it­ self, and of the surrounding countryside, through one year. " . . . it is clear in nearly every shot that he [George Rouquie^ is infinitely more than a mere documentor, that his poetic intelligence is pro­ found, pure, and vigorous .... He knows as well as any artist I can think of the power and the beauty there can be in absolute plainness . . . . Much of the picture, and much of the finest in it, has this complete plainess; but raised against this ground bass Rouquier's sense of device and metaphor is equally bold and pure. (p. 297) In Farrebique Agee discovered, of course, that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had gotten a proper visual embodiment. Rouquier succeeded because he had the faith of the poetic documentarlst; he photographed people and things so that they revealed their literal, unrecreated existence, their abounding grace. For a film maker to have a "cinematic sense" (p. 3 2), or to give things a "cinematic edge" (p. $4), he had to work somewhere between the opposing claims of documentary realism and stylized or formal representa­ tion. In his review of Tennessee Johnson, Agee remarked:

"if you give this realism poetic clarity without blurring its naturalistic clarity, you will have the beginnings, at least of a good historical film . . ."(p. 2 6). There are various other comments of the same order; they sketched out a film aesthetic with an inseparable 8 6 : moral dimension. Agee's concern that actuality be honored, that the camera not impose itself in falsely stylized or softened images, reminds us of his abiding moral concerns. His unremitting dedication to actuality was at the center of his strenuously moral thinking; the camera's denial of the worth and integrity of people and things was but an in­ stance, for Agee, of a general insensitivity to human values in American society. Like a great many critics of mass cul­ ture, Agee measured the quality of American society in the images movies created of the common life, but in an unsyste­ matic and unprofessional way, as if this were sinQjly an or­ dinary way of taking the measure of life. And precisely because by the very nature of the task he assumed he was forced to look closely at the shape and import of countless images of fantasy, dream and wish-fulfillment, Agee's cri­ ticism naturally opened out into American life. The moral dimension of the criticism does not make a problem, then; it merely made the criticism comprehend what Agee understood to be the crisis of popular art. Soft images, kitsch, arti­ ness, pseudo-folk — all of these pointed to the softness and deadening contrivances of society as a whole:

Pew Americans either behind or in front of our camer­ as give evidence of any recognition or respect for themselves or one another as human beings, or have any desire to be themselves or to let others be them­ selves. On both ends of the camera you find very few people who are not essentially, instead, just promo­ ters, little racketeers, interested in the •'angle." I suspect it will some day be possible to deduce out 87 of our non-fiction films alone that the supposedly strongest nation on earth collapsed with such magi­ cal speed because so few of its members honored others, or even themselves, as human beings. (p. 224) In his review of the Italian film. Shoeshine. Agee made clear the humanistic premises of his criticism; the humanism corresponded perfectly with the emphasis of the film aesthetic. The responsibility that Agee demanded was, first of all, responsibility to the craft and art of film-making; but it was also humanistic — responsibility to the actuality of the human person. For example, he praised Preston Sturges * comic ingenuity and his rich in­ ventiveness in The Miracle at Morgan * s Creek, yet found him insufferably hollow, his genius merely fattening off a great feast of nihilism; And in the stylization of action as well as lan­ guage it seems to me clear that Sturges holds his characters, and the people they comically represent, and their predicament, and his audience, and the best potentialities of his own work, essentially in contempt. His emotions, his intelligence, his aes­ thetic ability never fully commit themselves: all the playfullness becomes rather an avoidance of commitment than an extension of means for it. Cyni­ cism, which gives the film much of its virtue, also has it by the throat; the nihilism, the humaneness, even the gaiety become, in that light, mere postures and tones of voices; and whereas nearly all the mis­ chief is successful, nearly every central and final responsibility is shirked. Of course there is al­ ways the danger, in trying to meet those ultimate human and aesthetic responsibilities, of losing your gaiety; but that never happened to Mozart — or to Rene Clair at his best. (pp. 75-76) Sturges’ comic manner bullied and used people in a way that Agee found to be cynical and evasive; and against the moments 88 of high satiric triumph that Agee appreciated, he placed the prevailing tone of cute self-congratulation and patron­ izing aggressiveness. Was Agee, the», too much the humanist — the humanist in an overly strenuous moral pose? A good test case is Agee's review of Monsieur Verdoux. Finding himself without a job during a time of economic depression, Verdoux goes into the business of marrying, fleecing and finally murdering women of wealth so to be able to care for a crippled wife and a child. He defends murder as merely a logical extension of the ethics of capitalist society; a man must have money to fulfill his responsibilities to home and family, to insure that the private life remains inviolable. But Verdoux be­ comes engrossed in the mechanics of murder and money-making, arranging his business affairs with small-bourgeois expertise and relish, and soon his wife and child disappear into the background of his life. He loses them, and love: No doubt he loves his wife and child — there are two of the most heart-stopping, beautiful close-ups ever made, to prove that — but in the fearful depths into which he cannot risk a glance he loves only their helplessness, and deeper, only the idea of loVe; and that only because it consecrates his true marriage, which is to murder, (p. 2 5 9)

Again, Agee fully appreciates the demonic wit and the relentless irony of the film, and particularly the unfolding drama of Verdoux's inner destruction; his comments on parti­ cular scenes exactly communicate their point. Nonetheless, Agee finds the film evasive and even corrupt. It does not 89 take Verdoux*8 self-destruction seriously enough; it is too impressed by its own irony; and it absolves. Verdoux and condemns capitalist society. After he is apprehended, Verdoux asserts a gay audacity in the face of death. But Agee sees that Verdoux is a man who has removed himself from the sources of love, whose loneliness is absolute, and whose soul has withered. And he contends that Chaplin evades the responsibilities of the popular artist by offer­ ing the audience an easy way of identifying themselves with the reckless nonchalance of Verdoux, hence an easy way of disclaiming responsibility for the public acts that secure their private happiness. Here Agee's humanism is opera­ tively relevant to the critical act he performs, and the humanist-critic is justified. Agee found himself a humanist as someone might find himself a lover or saint; he did not have to make many de­ clarations in the manner of Faulkner's late "public" style in behalf of our putatively heroic fate. Generally his humanism was but a dimension of his honesty and decency as a human being, fully operative in the way he thought about movies — measuring the possibility of genuine movies and genuine popular art. And it never disbarred him from plea­ sure and fun. He could enjoy a shot for its pure nerve or theatricality; and he was able to conceive of movies

3 For an example of such a declaration, see Agee on Film, p. 284. 90 succeeding and giving pleasure because they managed to con­ tain their trashiness artfully, or were able to wrench a small triumph or two from it, or because a star was able to glitter a little. More important, however, he was heroi­ cally devoted to examining the transformations that reality underwent in movies, experiencing a sense of personal vio­ lation when a piece of reality he cherished was belittled or distorted or dissolved; and he continued doggedly to mark the failures and administer the therapy that he conceived for even the most blatant failures of will, feeling, and imagination. If anything, the consistency of his enthusiasms offer difficulty. Agee fbund the documentary-poetic style of films like Shoeshine. Farrebique and Zero de Conduite the measure of filmic possibility. Of Shoeshine he wrote: And in spite of some near-stock characterizations and situations, everyone in the film bulges with a depth and complexity of realness that is immea­ surably beyond the hope of mere naturalism; be­ cause everybody is perceived as a complete human being, one feels at every moment that almost any­ thing could happen, and that the reasons why any given thing happens are exceedingly complex and constantly shifting their weight, (p. 2 8 0) Agee rarely saw an image of the "complete human being" ex­ cept in the faces of amateur actors, in movies aspiring to­ ward poetic realism, and in simple stories of presumably intrinsic cinematic power. The simpler the story, the more the camera could be free to reveal the umwelt, the sheer vivid presence of external reality. Too often Agee spoke - 91 with the voice of the poet-narrator of Let Ua Now Praise Famous Men, giving the Impression that only the realization In film of what he attempted to do In that book could have satisfied him. He wrote, for Instance, about San Pietro, a documentary produced by John Huston on the capture of an Italian village by American Infantrymen; As for the over-all plan and Implication, I don't see how that of any postwar film Is going to Im­ prove on It, and I rather doubt that any will come quite up to It. For at one and the same time, without one slip along the line, from the most tick­ lish fringes of taste to the depths of a sane mind and heart. It accepts the facts and treats them as materials relevant to anger, tenderness, pride, veneration, and beauty. Somehhere close to the essence of the power of moving pictures Is the fact that they can give you things to look at, clear of urging or comment, and so ordered that they are radiant with Illimitable suggestions of meaning and mystery, (pp. 163-164) But he may have sentimentalized the mystery when he yearned for movies that would do justice to the American city; again he wanted streets, things, people — the a- bundant details. But he Ignored the florid sentimentality, lovingly embraced, of much city photography; even the best of It Is touched by a quaint reverence for the prolifera­ ting grotesquerle of the city. And for all his awareness of comic style — dependably conventional character types, necessary denials of actuality In the service of forced meanings, exaggerated Images, ritualized actions, and the like — the movies that mattered most to Agee he Invaria­ bly saw as overpowerlngly reverential before the wholeness 92 of human beings. Occasionally he found reverence in rather coy and sentimental movies; he Judged the sweet hokum of % Remember Mama satisfactory popular art because he conclu­ ded that the movie was made with love and pleasure; and he had an exaggerated affection for the hard, low-keyed, docu­ mentary realism of such movies as The House oh 92nd Street. Boomerang, and 2 ^ Rue Madeleine. mainly because they were shot on actual locations. But he seldom specified the re­ lationship of background actuality to the film as a whole. Apparently he was too fond of actuality, and too eager to see it done justice in movies, to ask whether the journal­ istic accuracy of such films did not result in a merely tertiary realism, whereas the main effect was to project an image of a kind of taunt, well-calculated professional busyness that at once creates and allows the audience to 4 enjoy its muzzled anxieties. At any rate, during the immediate post-war years Agee found in the low-budget, neo-realistic films of the Italians 4 Cf. Raymond Williams and Michael Orrora, Preface to Film (London, 1954), p. 40; "Any competent film-maker can, nowadays, reproduce such an external actuality — a house, a street, a general way of living, the appearance of a certain kind of person; but the test is always, in this essential distinction of types of naturalism which I am urging, whether the created actuality can be seen to have a necessary and genuinely revealing relation to the inner emotional movement; or whether, as I think it ào in the majority of cases, we are offered what I would call a ’false actuality,* in which the convincingness of the ex­ ternal detail is operating as a substitute for a convinc­ ing actuality of considered and genuine feeling," 93 the natural respect for human beings that he found seldom in American films; he discovered in them a kind of ideal non-political humanism born of a sense of oneness between film-maker and audience. When he reviewed Shoeshine♦ he began: The elementary beginning of true reason, that is, of reason which involves not merely the forebrain but the entire being, resides, I should think, in the ability to recognize oneself, and others, pri­ marily as human beings, and to recognize the ulti­ mate absoluteness of responsibility of each human being .... I am none too sure of my vocabulary, but would suppose this can be called the humanistic attitude. It is still held, no doubt, by scattered individuals all over the world, is still nominally the germinal force of Western civilization, and must still sleep as a potential among almost uni­ maginably large numbers and varieties of people; but no attitude is more generally subject to dis­ advantage, dishonor, and misuse today, and no other is no nearly guaranteed extinction. Even among those who preserve a living devotion to it, more­ over, few seem to have come by it naturally, as a physical and sensuous fact, as well as a philosoph­ ical one; and fewer still give any evidence of en­ joying or applying it with any of the enormous pri­ mordial energy which, one would suppose, the living fact would inevitably liberate in a living being. (p. 278) Agee's sense of a community of people growing less and less capable of a variety of emotional responses, of directness of speech and action, and unselfconscious respect for them­ selves and other human beings, using but a fraction of its resources of vision and evergy — his sense of all this made up the context in which he viewed Shoeshine. He said that the film gave him to know that the humanistic attitude was still alive. The statement itself makes it clear that 94 Agee's sense of himself as a writer, which helped him to view movies as at once creator, critic, and audience member, brought him to meditate on the crisis of humanism, and per­ haps brought him to write criticism of popular culture that would reflect the humanism that in his life was still "a physical and sensuous fact."

(ii) Criticism of Mass Culture

In the 1 9 4's 0 Agee was not dealing with the subtleties of symbolic form, the conundrums of meaning, and the high modern purpose that inform the films of Bergman, Antonioni, and Resnais in the 1 9 6's. 0 He was writing at a time when The House on 92nd Street and Boomerang looked like break­ throughs to a real world, rather than — as they do today — consciously stylized and underplayed urban thrillers, of a genre whose development was limited and which quickly froze into a contrived low-key formula. In effect, Agee was speak­ ing in behalf of an aesthetic and moral form, a vision of human life that he supposed could inform and enoble popular art. In the Italian neo-realistic cinema, for instance, Agee saw a return to sanity and human proportion, the submission of the film-maker to a world that was immediately and con­ tinuously compelling, and a sense of community between artist and audience that allowed certain kinds of values (in parti­ cular those born of suffering) to be affirmed and celebrated. 95 The situation is very different today. Antonioni has done his homework in the m o d e m novel, and he explains that the neo-realists emphasized the connection between the individual and the environment, whereas he seeks to treat "the individual himself in all his complex and dis- .uieting reality and in his equally complex relations with others.” 5 One may see Antonioni’s films as a late modern­ ist feeding off the harvest of dehumanization and failure. Again and again he represents the failure of love in a kind of late modern environmnnt that, in its earlier forms, poets and novelists discovered during the first decades of the 20th century. Apparently our new iconography replaces Molly Bloom with Monica Vitti. At any rate, we have moved from the image of the city as a place where police and their victims play a cat-and-mouse game timed to explode against the most striking cityscapes, to clean, well-light­ ed buildings in which tenuously married couples vaguely gnaw at each other out of inexpressible anxiety. Antonioni’s films are, in fact, an almost too perfect glossary of the obsessive themes and images found in modern fiction. ^

In the 1 9 4’s 0 Agee’s Judgments were shaped by his

5 "a Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on his Work," Film Culture, No. 24 (Spring, I 962), p. 46. 6 On the relationship of Antonioni’s films to the , novel, see William S» Pechter, "Two Movies and Their Cri­ tics, Kie. Kenygn Review, XXly (Spring, 1 9 6), 2 351-3 6 2. 96 commitment to the poetic possibilities of quasi-documen­ tary forms. This commitment, qualified as it was, brought him to praise anything in films that touched on "natural piety," "reverence for unaltered reality," "the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing, " "warmth of spirit," etc. At times he sounded too much like an obsessed critic; but this was because he believed that "the grandest prospect for a major popular art since Shakespeare*s time" (p. 136) was being betrayed. Agee's task became the difficult one (and perhaps an impossible task) of attempting to define what genuine popular art — an art, as he said, "worthy of its responsibilities " — would be like. But it was only when he sought to recreate some piece of the popular art of the past that he revealed what this definition would entail. His essay on the silent screen comedians, published in Life in 1$49, described not only the comic manner and the symbolic repertory of Langdon, Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin but a community of interest that existed between them and their audience. Likewise, Agee's praise for Shoeshine and To Live in Peace, for example, followed on his recognition that the common conditions of life in Italy during the immediate post-war years made pos­ sible films that did not so much interpret, re-order, or redefine reality as simply create images that memorialized what human beings had lived through and that gave them a 97 sense of completion and satisfaction, rather than — as elite art might do — undercut or call their lives into question. Agee wrote about Shoeshine ; The film is almost uniquely moving and hearten­ ing for still another reasoh. Almost every minute of it has a kind of rashness, magnanimity, and deep, wise emotional directness which, I an con­ vinced, can hardly if at all exist in a piece of work unless those who make it are sure they are at one with a large, eager, realistic audience: In other words, very large parts of a whole people must have been moved, for a while at least, by the particular kind of aliveness which gives this film its peculiar radiance. When that is the case, men of any talent whatever can hardly help surpassing themselves. But when most of a people are in a- pathy, of sufficient anxiety to stun the spirit, every talent or hope, no matter in what spirit or attitude it may operate, is reduced to a fraction of its potentiality, (p. 2 7 9) And when he discussed the work of D. W. Griffith, Agee saw The Birth of the Nation as "a perfect realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like . . . ," and praised Griffith for being "a great primitive poet, " for achieving "a sort of crude sublimity which nobody else in movies has been able to achieve," and for getting a "dreamlike absoluteness" into the images (pp. 313-14-15). He saw the greatness of The Birth of the Nation as the pro­ duct of the oneness of Griffith and the collective dream — or, as we should call it, the myth — that he was able to make into an epic account of the emergence of the nation. In other words, Agee saw in the example of the silent screen comedians, the films of D. W. Griffith, and the 98 Italian neo-realists a relationship between artist and audience that made possible genuine popular art — but perhaps only after the art became mythic, passing beyond concern with naively contemporary plots or events, and concerning itself with "universels" that could take on a kind of dream-like, immediately compelling significance, where the audience is not lectured or coached on ways of responding to troublesome problems in their own experience but brought to recognize a pattern of human experience with which they can identify. Like many serious writers in our age, Agee seemed to have longed for a lost coherence between artist and audience, and it was this that he discovered in the silent 7 films, Griffith, and the Italian neo-realists. He was willing to accept a good number of falsehoods in movies that treated contemporary themes if the maker seemed to be at one — rather than obviously superior to — the dream his work embodied. He judged David L. Selznick to be such a film-maker; and for all the glossy falsehoods of Since You Went Away and The Best Years of Our Lives, he liked these films. It is instructive to compare Agee's attitude toward the latter film with that of Robert Warshow, another film critic and writer who was an intellectual. For 7 I am indebted here to David T. Bazelon, "Agee on Film." The Village Voice, IV.(December 24, 1958), l4. 99 Warshow The Beat Years of Our Lives offered an occasion to write an "anatomy of falsehood." He judged that the ideas or symbols on which the movie rested "would not o bear serious examination.' And he convincingly demon­ strated that the surface accuracy and literalness of the film*3 images made its high optimism possible, since this discouraged anyone’s questioning its assumptions about American life, and particularly the assumption "that the problems of modern life . . . can be solved by the opera­ tions of ’simple* and •American’ virtues . . . ." He showed furthermore that the film, in a fashion notorious­ ly typical of Hollywood films, evaded real social prob­ lems and possible points of conflict by reducing them to problems of personal morality; can the former Army ser­ geant induce the bank for which he works to give veterans loans without collateral? Will Americans allow class dif­ ferences to separate them from one another? The movie attempts to show that such problems need not cause trouble because representative Americans inevitably find the good will to solve them; and Warshow finds this notion but an­ other form of political obscurantism. He concludes by commenting on what he interprets as the dream of male pas­ sivity that the film projects: the sailor who has lost 8 Robert Warshow, "The Anatomy of Falsehood," in The Immediate Experience (New York, I9 6 2), pp. 1 5 5-I6I. 100 both hands In the war Is put to bed every night by his wife, and Warshow suggests that his misfortune could very well be the occasion of wish-fulfillment, since the sailor can be passive without having to experience guilt over his passivity. Agee notices much the same things about the movie as does Warshow; for example, that it is barely plausible that three veterans of very different class and background would see one another in civilian life; and that the ban­ ker's defense of veterans' getting loans without collater­ al leaves "the impression that he has cleverly and lovably won his fight and will win it on every subsequent occasion

. . (p. 2 3 0). But Agee is interested in the movie in a way that Warshow is not because he sees the relationship between the film and "slick-paper fiction" and judges the film to have the promise of "a great and simple, limpid kind of fiction which few writers of serious talent seem able to attempt or even respect, at present" (p. 229). He obviously respected this kind of fiction, and hence was less interested in examining the falsehoods one could find in the film than in praising what was good about it, or at least what promised future good in a kind of film he believed it was the obligation of Hollywood to make. Agee was interested in Selznick's Since You Went Away for the same reasons; he found it an improvement over the very sticky Ladies Home Journal story on which it was 101 based. And he enjoyed the fantasy of the film because he Judged that Selznick was at one with It, and that the family he had created — the Hiltons — were at one with It, too, and hence beyond understanding themselves. In other words, he could spot the obvious falsehoods but he would not stop with merely an examination of the lies our movies tell us about our lives; and not merely because one who enjoyed movies Inevitably enjoyed the falsehoods (or the fantasy) along with the occasional moments of truth, but again because Agee saw In Selznick*s movies (and In others) the possibility of a popular art that would “bring . . . some measure, however meek, of understanding, order, and Illumination" (p. 8 9) to ordinary experience. He would write about Brief Encounter: It Is my Impression that the same story, with fancy variations. Is told once or twice In every Issue of every magazine for housewives — oftai with a certain amount of sincerity, almost never with enough Insight, detachment, style, or moral courage to make It better than wretched. Here, I must grant, there are several tricks of over­ art If Ice ■#: and some of ham. But because In this case the story Is written, filmed, and acted with a good deal of the positive qualities I mentioned, the picture Is both a pleasure to watch as a well- controlled piece of work, and deeply touching. Even an unforglveable formula such as the lover’s Looking Like A Little Boy when the woman’s atten­ tiveness reawakens his Idealism, becomes remark­ ably real when It Is handled tenderly and cleanly .... If, In my opinion, the movie at Its best suggests merely all that woman’s-magazine fiction might be at Its own best, that Is not Intended as a back-handed compliment. For It seems to me that few writers of supposedly more serious talent even undertake themes as simple and Important any more: 102 SO that, relatively dinky and sentimental as it is — a sort of vanity-sized Anna Karenina — Brief Encounter is to be thoroughly respected. Tp T215; This remark indicates very clearly the direction of Agee's thinking about popular art. He had a sense (rather than a theory) of the needs of the mass audience, and he appre­ ciated movies that he saw attempting to satisfy them, how­ ever small and "dinky" their achievement, however inevi­ tably false they would appear measured against the under­ standing of "complexity" and "difficulty" embodied in elite art. He could be just as discomforted by obvious romantic sentimentality as the next man; but, on the other hand, he did not worship complexity in the way that many intellectual critics of the popular arts do. The latter say, in effect, that no "vanity-sized Anna Karenina" could ever satisfy them, that nothing less than confrontation with what Warshow, for instance, calls "the frightening complexities of history and experience" would be honest. ^ Agee never believed this, and what makes him an Interesting critic of popular art is precisely his disbelieving it. He constantly looked for movies about which he could hold that they honored the needs and experience of ordinary peo­ ple. Hence, although he argued that The Best Years of Our Lives reduced its best insights, or its potential insights.

9 Warshow, "The Liberal Conscience in 'The Crucible,' " in The Immediate Experience, p. l84. 103 Into cheap Sunday School glibness, at the same time he saw in it an abortive attempt to deal with representative Amer­ ican experience in a quiet and responsible style. And he would comment about a given scene, as he did about the one in which the sailor's father helps him get ready for bed, "that I would set it in the world with the best ficr- tion, or poetic drama, or movies that I know" (p. 233). He would give way to his temptation to over-praise even the most obviously small efforts to prove faithful to the shape and quality of ordinary life. Perhaps what saved him from a kind of dead-end insis­ tence on "complexity" was that he was not only capable of analyzing fantasy and stating its appeal but of sharing it, while at the same time viewing closely the imagina­ tive workings of popular movies and exploring the char­ acteristic combination of the spurious and the genuine. Agee was always willing to allow movies to work on him — to charm, irritate, outrage, or overpower him; and there­ fore he was freely available to movies, although obviously and continuously aware of the range of hypocrisy, insult, and poor craftsmanship they might embody. If he criti­ cized a movie for its sentimentality, he was likely to show how the sentimentality worked for him, both genuine­ ly and spuriously. Apparently Agee was close enough to his childhood love of movie fantasy still to be able to 104 surrender to it, but never so completely as not to be able to examine the implications of his surrender. Even in so perceptive a critic of popular culture as Robert Warshow there was a certain Inhibition and rigidi­ ty, possibly the result of his post-radical political al­ legiances. His commitments always had to be protected, indeed over-protected, so that it was hard for him to con­ ceive of anything in popular culture having intrinsic ima­ ginative value, or imaginative value for an audience mem­ ber who was not Robert Warshow. The same holds for Dwight Macdonald. He cannot imagine what it means for anyone to like Our Town, and therefore he cannot imagine how the play could work for an audience. What Macdonald knows everyone who thinks about masey'popular culture knows, and by this time is somewhat embarrassed knowing: that the mass-industrial state makes for mass culture for mass man. But Macdonald employs the terminology — miraculously, I think — without embarrassment, and continues to work from impeccable but very dull equations. He will not admit the possibility that a play which is openly nostalgic and sen­ timental (therefore possibly in control of its nostalgia and sentimentality), that reduces the world to small-town

Protestant chit-chat about life and death, may work in ways which are not ignoble or trivial or dishonest and yet not grand, dark, and painfully truthful. All he knows is that I Q $ such works of art are by definition kitsch, and are there­ fore to be condemned out of hand. Perhaps the difference between Macdonald and Agee was that Agee was an artist, with the artist's capacity for surrender, and in particular with the artist's feeling for the texture anu tone of experience. About Macdonald, on the other hand, one feels that he has little real inward­ ness and little capacity for belief. Agee's reviews were initiated from within the experience of the films, not from a point of obvious superiority to it. And his judgments of films that most deeply engaged him were in some measure equivocal — unsettled, hesitant, torn between love and hate. But the range of art to which he appealed registered his aspirations; the names of Homer, Shakespeare, and Mozart, for example, appear again and again, and they indi­ cate that Agee was attempting to place his awareness of elite art at the service of — as David T. Bazelon has well 10 put it — "an idea of an uncreated popular art." This "idea" drove Agee almost unmercifully, so that every review became, in effect, in one way or another, a meditation on the possibilities of this "uncreated popular art," an at­ tempt to Imagine what it would entail from the film-maker. Hence the tone of moral earnestness (attractive enough in its own right) had behind it the pressure of Agee's search

10 Bazelon, "Agee on Film," p. l4. 106 for a way at least roughly to indicate “the special mode of responsibility" that the film-maker would assume toward

11 • his audience. The statements he made were not always very exact, or even very useful. Sometimes they were all tone, style, and moral commitment: a criticism for anxious humanists, Agee among them. Nonetheless, Agee’s fear of dehumanized film art, and what we can see now as his possible over-valuation of certain forms of schematic and neo-realistic subject mat­ ter and a kind of highly-charged, "primitivistic" visuali­ zation, followed inevitably from his search for responsible popular art. He simply praised what was at hand that most vividly suggested how the film-maker's sense of responsi­ bility could be placed at the service of his audience. His search might be called "existential," conducted without the useful (but perhaps too readily usable) cate­ gories of post-Marxist sociology, and without the highly patterned responses of critics whose outlook has been shaped by such concepts as alienation, substitute experience, dream- work, escape, etc. Agee was a humanist, but not an academic humanist, and he did not use the special cant of our day; there was little, if any, of the quasi-historical and

11 On responsibility, see Roy Harvey Pearce, m s s Culture/Popular .Culture; Notes for a Humanist's Primer," College English. XXIII (March, I9 6 2), especially 426-428, from which the phrase within quotation marks is taken. 107 analytic shop-talk that is characteristic of a good por- tion of the criticism of mass culture. 12 He knew a dream when he saw one, and likewise a '!raasturbation-fantasy tri­ ple-distilled" (p. 1 2 0), and other varieties of fantasies on the themes of American life. But apparently he never thought that the end of analysis was to demonstrate that the movies, by the very nature of the commercial apparatus that supported them, could not help but arouse socially repressed desires to the end of making them all the more unbearable; or to show that movies exist to offer substi­ tute gratifications to people increasingly unable to find 13 genuine gratifications in mass society. Nowadays too many critics of mass culture think their job is done once they have made the standard point about the production of kitsch; or have shown how the problem of mass culture is involved with the historical movement of modern society as it has evolved under the influence of technology, industrialization, bureaucratization, etc; or when they have finished contending that whole industries have arisen in our.time to tease our anxieties and to ex­ ploit our needs for adventure, social status, and love, and that they do such a good job that increasingly we find

12 For some remarks of Agee’s on humanism, see Letters of James Agee to Father Five (New York, I9 6 2), p. 192. ^^Por e^mples of such analysis, see the contribu­ tions of Irving Howe and Ernest van den Haag in Mass Cul­ ture: The Popular jb?ts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White (Glencoe, 1957)* 108 ourselves incapable of selfhood, let alone of satisfied selfhood. It is all too clear today that the standard points, whether in historical generalization or in modish sociological analysis, are no longer worth making, that essays which expose the pathology of mass culture increa­ singly seem dull or irrelevant, or both. Moreover, cri­ ticism of mass culture provides a ready-made essayistic form that can be used by somewhat nostalgic, modestly leftist literary critics unable to engage American socie­ ty politically. It gives' them a perspective, and it fos­ ters the illusion that they are engaging in radical pole­ mic (sophisticated by psychoanalysis and a century of European sociolog^l, and hence keeping alive in a grey un­ adventurous time the idea of socialism or of a culturally intransigent avant-garde. Of course, theirs is a kind of substitute gratification, too; and it is tied up with their experience of a strange, unappeasable discomfort as they find that they have been accorded new status and respect as genuine middlemen in a noisy, expanding, culture-hun­ gry society. This is not the society into which»in the thirties, they expected to grow up. But it is not so much that the critics are the prob­ lem, or that the essays begin to look dull and modish, or that the analysts treat of images that do not have for them even the trace of a flicker. Rather, hardly anyone who writes about mass culture has a conception of how a 109 given product may be genuine in the terms it sets for it­ self, how it may administer to rather than exploit the needs of the audience. Agee was struggling to find such a conception, and we can find its fragments scattered throughout the pages of his film criticism. His comments on women's magazine fiction, and its relation to certain kinds of very popular movies, and his constant search for movies which treated the "simple and important themes"

(p. 2 1 5) with at least a minimal fidelity to their impor­ tance and implications — indicates that Agee was willing to search, and in searching to use his understanding of life as an elite artist to make a start toward defining at least the minimal conditions of genuine popular art. Fortunately, Agee was never so blind, or so irrele­ vantly arrogant as his friend Dwight Macdonald, as to have believed that the ideal of the intellectual should be mass culture for the masses and high culture for the elite. But of course Agee never came to worship — very late in the day — the happy coherence of English literary culture, as has Dwight Macdonald, Agee's ideal was popular art in­ formed by a relation to elite art, or a kind of art both popular and elite, on the model of Chaplin's comedies, and the films of Griffith, the Italian neo-realists, and 14 Here I draw on Pearce, op.. cit., and see also his The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, I9 6 1), pp. ^ - 252. 110 possibly those of John Huston. Bazelon says very cogently that in fact the effort on which Agee was engaged was the creation of a unified sensibility, and that split as he was between Time and The Nation» the effort was all the 15 more crucial for him, as man and artist. But the effort was not only personal. It involved steadily viewing films from the point of view of absolute belief in their poten­ tiality as a great popular art; and it involved a life­ time's work in both popular and elite forms, the end of which was to show how they could be brought'into signifi­ cant relation. Agee described genuine popular art in humanistic terras in his review of Shoeshine; relative to a documentary style that "accepts the facts and treats them as materials r-ele- vant to anger, tenderness, pride, veneration, and beauty" (p. l64), as in his discussion of John Huston's war-time documentary San Pietro; and by noticing the "absolute plain­ ness" (p. 2 9 7) of Farrebique. These movies, Agee implied, stripped away the falsity of appearances, the elaborate glossy contrivances of Hollywood films, so that human be­ ings appeared in quiet dignity, fully human, their humanity registered in proportion to the directness, ease, and sim­ plicity with which they were viewed. But it is important

15 Bazelon, "Agee on Film," p. l4. Ill to notice that Agee *s praise of Farrebique ends by placing the film in a line of 'Crural art which extends backward through Van Gogh and Brueghel to the Georgies and to the

Works and Days" (p. 2 9 9). Again, the bias, as admirable and humane as it is, derives from Agee's nearly obsessive attraction to a kind of movie primitivism, that is, to movies which manage to evoke the magnificient power of the unrecreated things of the world through a severe reduction of means, a scaling down of the world to human proportion but also to pastoral simplicity. But it can be argued that precisely his anarchist temperament, and a touch of leftist sentimentality, spared him over-valuing complexity and irony, and made him constantly search for movies that treated the “simple and important themes" in responsible fashion. The demand that film represent the quiddity of things, that it restore the familiar world to innocence and purity, which runs through Agee *s film criticism and unites it with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the heroic attempt to speak in behalf of the virtues of even some kinds of slick and perhaps overly-professionalized popular art, represen­ ted Agee's efforts to stem the tide of triviality, pseudo­ art, and sheer junk that flooded him. Becoming, in effect, a propagandist for "the real," he dramatized his sense of the bare necessities of genuine popular culture, and his 112 belief that authentic popular art was inseparable from an authentic, if flexible, realism. The film criticism led Agee to scenario writing, and one would like to claim that the scenarios (and the films made from some of them) triumphantly affirm the principles Agee set forth iri the reviews. I think, however, that this would be to claim too much. On the other hand, if we take the operative concept in Agee *s film criticism to be "poe­ tic realism," a case can be made out that, for Instance, the film The Night of the Hunter masterfully combines sym­ bolic effect with accurate disclosure of the ordinary sur­ faces of life. Agee did not wish, after all, to harness the movies to an inhibiting, overly literal realism; in­ stead, he was calling for a realism flexible enough to ad­ mit symbolic and poetic effect and yet remain faithful to things in themselves. I do not wish to assert, however, that there is an obvious continuity from the film criticism to the scenar­ ios. That an argument can be made out to support a some­ what qualified assertion that such is the case, I do not doubt. But I am not ready to make it, and therefore I have chosen to forsake the kind of generalization that would enable us to place the scenarios within the context of Agee’s work as a whole. Indeed, I wish to argue that 16 See Norman Holland, Agee on Film: Reviewer Re- Viewed," p. 1 5 0, for an argument that "Agee’s films tran­ scend simple realism, but few of his reviews do." 113 A Death In the Family Is more organically related to Agee’s abiding,concerns than are the scenarios, and I present the evidence for this view In the last chapter of my study. CHAPTER IV

THE FILM SCENARIST

In 1948 Agee gave up his position as film critic for Time and The Nation in order to do free-lance writing, and especially to write film scenarios. He was commissioned to write The Blue Hotel and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky by Huntington Hartford Productions, the first in 1948-49, the second in 1951-52.^ The African Queen — on which John Huston collaborated — was produced as a film in 1951. The Night of the Hunter was written in 1954, and the film was released in 1955, after Agee's death. And Noa Noa, ôn which Agee began to work in 1953, was being readied for film production at the time of his death. In addition to the five film scenarios completed dur­ ing the years 1948-1954, Agee wrote the narration to the documentary film. The Quiet One (1949); the articles on the silent screen comedians and on John Huston for Life

(1949-1 9 5); 0 published % e Morning Watch (1951), a short story "A Mother's Tale" (1952), and continued work on A

1 The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky composed one half of Face to ÿace, rele'ased“Tn 1952; the other half was a film based on Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." The Blue Hotel was produced in part on "Omnibus."

114 115 Death In the Family; wrote the television programs on

Lincoln for “Omnibus” (1 9 5); 2 ^ and the English narration for the Albert Lamorlsse film White Mane, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Prix Jean Vigo in 1953 for the best short subject. During the last six years of his life, then, Agee produced a number of works that, accord­ ing to at least one person who knew him, he considered as ■2 making up in part for the years he believed he had wasted. It is difficult to make any comprehensive judgments about Agee's ideals, or aims, as a screenwriter, from the 4 five screenplays we have. First of all, four of them are adaptations from novels and stories, and although one of them was made into a highly popular film (The African Queen). two have yet to be produced (The Blue Hotel and Noa Noa), Secondly, all of them were commissioned; and it is hard to know whether Agee chose to do them or had to

2 I quote a description of the Lincoln series by Meyer Levin, "Abraham Lincoln through the Picture Tube," The Re­ porter. .VIII (April 14, 1 9 5), 3 31: "James Agee has written the series largely as a personally addressed Passion Play. He has understood Lincoln as a kind of American saint, and told of the death, the birth, and the early life of this martyr in episodes that have the suggestiveness and the lu­ cidity found only in parable. At the same time through in­ timate psychological effects he has achieved, here and there, a remarkable kind of confessional participation.”

I take this information from a WGBH-FM (Boston) in­ terview with Irving Howe on A Death in the Family broadcast Feb. 2, 1 9 5. 8

^Agee on Film: Volume II (New York, I96O). Citations from this volume are identified by page reference. 116 do them for want of money. The impression he leaves in his letters to Father Plye is that he considered his real work the writing of A Death in the Family and the stories he had begun; in 1951, for example, he complained to Father Flye that he was not getting as much of his own work done as he had hoped. ^ At any rate, since the scenarios he composed were adaptations, some doubt is raised that Agee considered them to have much relationship to movies that 6 ideally he would have written. Lastly, the scenario for The African Queen appears to have been worked on by some other writers before its shooting; and the movie that e- merged from Agee's scenario for The Night of the Hunter was the product, apparently, of someone else/s fairly ex- tensive rewriting of Agee's script. So there are two problems here; one, that we do not know, in the case of one of the screenplays, how much of it and what Agee wrote; and then, if we wish to be con­ cerned with the films that were produced from Agee's screen­ plays, one of these differs considerably from what Agee ori­ ginally conceived. The problems do not end here, since it 5 Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (New York, I9 6 2), p. 1 9 4. ^One may observe that whereas Agee would appear* to have had a good deal in common with Van Gogh — temperamen­ tally and from the point of view of their commitment to "actuality" — he wrote an almost too faithful and certain­ ly a worshipful scenario on the life of Gauguin. 7 . See' the review by John Hus se 11 Taylor of Agee on Film; Volume II. in Sight and Sound. XXX (Winter, 196O-6 1), 46-47, 117 might be objected ,that a screenplay is merely a sketch for a film, not to be examined as If It were a piece of litera­ ture. But even If this objection were warranted. In Agee's case It Is largely irrelevant, since he did not conceive screenplays as sketches for films but as precisely visual­ ized Ideal conceptions of what completed films would look like. That he should have conceived of screenplays In this fashion Is not surprising given his work as a whole. And at least as early as 1937, when his experimental script The House was published, Agee had been Imagining completed films down to the most exact details, describing with novel- Istlc precision not only physical objects and camera angles but the entire rhythm and movement of the film. I quote from The House ; Same rhythm of shots repeated at height between second and third floors; then between crest of wall and slate roof. Camera rises a little so that the whole screen Is roof; there must be no sky yet; sinks a little, rises a little again, withdraws a little, gently sinks: Its sinking cut short by sudden shot at ground again, founda­ tion wall standing square from the ground, quite close taken. Prom here, camera Immediately, slow­ ly rises dead vertically. Weatherboards, a lacy window, boards, second-floor window, boards, sink steadily past; a small and trick-shaped window just beneath a gable starts to sink .... The shut window Is blind with curtain bright with sun. Behind It, darkness. In which faint worrying move­ ments of some human being can.scarcely, unldentl- flably, be discerned. Everything should be strong, bright, arid, and each shot should be laid square with a steady best, not too slow though deliberate. 118 not flashing (about two and a half seconds per rhythmic unit) . 8 Although less heavily detailed, the descriptions and nota­ tions in Agee's scenarios are very exact, so that although there are obstacles in the way of a reader who attempts to visualize the films the scenarios would make, it is possi­ ble to derive a very clear idea of Agee's intentions. In what follows I offer descriptions and appreciations, on the whole, rather than literary criticism. Sometimes I am concerned merely to evoke the image of what Agee had in mind for the screen; and at all times my aim is to see what changes occurred in the writing when Agee had to conform not only to the conventions of film but to those fixed by the materials he adapted. Is the result any other than could have been achieved by most any professional scenarist? What in the scenarios is characteristic of Agee's work as a whole, and what are their strengths and weaknesses? These are some of the questions with which I am concerned. I propose to treat of the scenarios in the order of their composition, and then to comment on their common features of style, their use of the conventions that belong to the materials Agee adapted, and their relationship to popular art.

8 New Letters in America, ed. Horace Gregory (New York, 1 9 3 7 ),— w : ------119 (i) The Blue Motel

The singular sharpness and abruptness of movement in Crane's story are especially well-adjusted to filmic treat­ ment. And if a film-maker simply took as his task to find expression for its terror, he would be unlikely to go too far wrong. The movement of the story could be viewed as analagous to that of a kind of ritualistic dance, the char­ acters moving toward and away from each other in fear, in­ comprehension, or pity. And since the responses the char­ acters make are very nearly always those of extreme visual gesture, registering dismay, irritation, anxiety, disbelief, the image of the ritualistic dance seems all the more appro­ priate. For instance, the Swede's sudden, shifting glances, his consuming suspiciousness, and his almost paranoic changes in mood, are perfectly adaptable to film convention. Further­ more, the movement of men'and objects as they appear from his angle of vision could be represented in a variety of distorted or exaggerated shots. Of course. Crane's style is itself emphatically visual. In "The Blue Hotel" the characters sometimes appear to be submerged in the action, and they tend to look small next to its ferocious, headlong movement. And this makes for the sense of the irrational that is very strong in the story. The Swede himself is reduced to merely an image; we have the sense that what we see is what remains of a man. His oddly 120 formal, circuitous speech, and his burly, ill-proportioned body make him appear the image of the odd-ball, the fool or madman, at once piteously comic and tragically vulner­ able to the ordinary atrocities of daily life. An utterly frightened man, his connection with life at best tenuous, his gestures come to reveal his inner disposition. He makes the gesture of the martyr, for example, and discloses his self-destructiveness. In Agee's scenario, he meditates on the snow, and is driven into intense excitement, "his eyes becoming almost dreamy" (p. 4o8). He responds to the out­ doors scene as if it gave him confirmation of his doom; and a moment later he is more than confirmed when the farmer and Johnnie quarrel over their game of cards. The Swede stands in extreme close up, with "deep fright and guile in the face and a strange and malignant smile" (p. 4o8). Of course the impressionism of Crane's style is itself cinematic; it makes provision for the film-maker's stylized juxtaposi­ tions of images, the swift cuts and fade-outs, that capture the oppressive anxiety-filled movement of the story. But the style is not merely impressionistic; it is hard, linear, and discontinuous, more given to passive than to active con­ structions, and it perfectly reflects the random, fragmen­ ted, disjointed action of the narrative. Negating order and sequence, and instead emphasizing disjunction and dis­ continuity, the language of Crane communicates a sense of the radical disorder and uncertainty of life. 121 Certainly it is true that, in one sense, the story has no "meaning," that it is an exercise in conjuring up the Absurd and the Horrible, another one of those planned blas­ phemies against our animal nature. Crane himself was ap­ parently uneasy about the story, since in its rather enig­ matic conclusion he assigns moral responsibility for the Swede's death to Scully, Johnnie, the Cowboy, and the Eas­ terner. It was as if he would redeem the outrage he had committed in leading the Swede to his death by finally in­ voking a world in which moral order and judgment are pos­ sible. "Every sin is the result of collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of the Swede." Yet the story is only marginally and uneasily about an ac­ tion that can be described as "sinful." After all. Crane represents the Swede as an exacerbated, suicidal, driven human being; his initial laughter is the portent of what later becomes his all but hysterical recklessness. When the Swede leaves the hotel after defeating Johnnie, Crane notes : The Swede, tightly gripping his valise, tacked across the face of the storm as if he carried sails. He was following a line of little naked, gasping trees, which he knew must mark the way of the road .... He found a street and made travel along it, leaning heavily upon the wind whenever, at a corner, a terrific blast caught him.

The storm that rages outside is no longer (if ever it were) a literal storm. It is a symbol of the primitive condition of the world, a world in which the orderly relations among 122 men dissolve into fear and outrage, in which the community of feeling possible to the men of Crane's "The Open Boat" is utterly impossible. The storm seems to drive man from one to another horrible excess, from uncontrollable fear to an irrational bumptiousness and false bravado. In fact, one can see the Swede's fate registered in the Chaplinesque, slightly comic image of his "leaning heavily upon the wind." Indeed, when at the end of the story Crane says that we live as "lice" who "cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb," he may be indulging in some rather excessive authorial editorializing and pressing the truth hard, and yet the situation of the Swede gives the remark at least the semblance of truth. Moreover, if men can be so described and the quickness with which they die can be taken as a sardonic comment on their pretensions, then there does not seem very much room left to accommodate "sin," nor to imply that the Swede's death can be viewed as the result of a chain of human failures. If "The Blue Hotel" communicates anything that is unequivo­ cal, it is how easily, quickly, and fatally life can mis­ carry, how powerless men are to cope with irrational im­ pulse, and how literally manic their world can become, In fact. Crane stands rather uncertainly between the purest animal pity and fear, on the one hand, and a too pressing ironical delight in the weakness and smallness of man, his 123 immense vulnerability and his sordid, meaningless end. In any case, at the end of the story it seens hardly appropri­ ate for Crane to comment on the moral failures of which men are capable, since he has created a world which does not allow the idea of moral failure to have very much weight or substance. Agee decides that Crane's story is in effect a morality play, and he dramatizes its implications by suggesting some­ thing of the Swede's relationship to his past. In Crane's story, of course, we learn only that the Swede had come from New York and that he had worked there for ten years. Agee, however, wishes to give his guilt and, fear a back­ ground and an explanation. Thus Agee has the Swede explain his suspicions: "Just one rule, Mr. Scully, and I learned it young. Don't never trust nobody. Be ready for anything. My father beat that into me. That's why I'm alive today" (p. 420). But this explanation is slight, since the scene deals with the Swede's fear and Agee is simply relating it to the Swede's gross suspicions about the world in which he finds himself. He begins to make something of the conclusion of Crane's story when the Swede leaves the hotel after his fight with Johnnie. As Scully and the Cowboy frantically mime their lust for revenge on the Swede, they are cut off by the Easterner's "Oh stop it!" and there follows, first. 124 a shot of the Swede as he makes his way from the hotel and is buffeted cruelly by the wind. The Swede is represerted as being in the grip of an enormous appetite for self-asser­ tion; he has discovered a new power and has taken new hope from it. "As he straightens and starts down the street into the middle of the town, he is smiling with a strange peace­ fulness and hope and sweetness — a tired Pilgrim on the homestretch to Paradise" (p. 463). Agee here suggests, and later through the Easterner openly states, that the new ap­ petite for life that the Swede experiences arises in his discovery that he has every right to be alive; escaping with his life, he is possessed by a kind of manic Joy, a pathetic eagerness fbr human companionship and a wish to be reconciled to life. Suddenly he opens his mouth and yells at the top of his lungs — then stands, like an idling loco­ motive, breathing quiet and fast through clenched teeth. Then his hands begin to move; fists hitting the air. Becoming aware of the suitcase, heavy in his right hand, he mingles grinning and weeping and moaning and hits it twice, three times, as hard as he can. It isn't enough for his desperation and Joy; again he scans the darkness; and suddenly, with his right fist, he hits himself as hard as he is able on the Joint of the Jaw. (p. 463) This emotion is the reverse of the terrified repressive­ ness, that, Agee suggests later in the scenario, characterized the Swede's entire life. We are meant, then, to understand that the Swede stands at the threshold of a new life, that he is startled into the awareness that he can seek the 125 satisfactions that hitherto have been thwarted or denied altogether. Agee's revision of Crane in this scene is of central importance to the quality of the scenario, since instead of the terrible shock that a reader of Crane's staory experiences in the face of the utter impersonality of the Swede's death, the reader or film-goer now experiences the pathos of a fairly obvious irony. The Swede's demands were decidedly all too human: a bit of conversation and companion­ ship, an outlet for the new life that was moving chaotically within him. At the moment when he is prepared to ll#e, he is killed. The scene in Agee's adaptation that follows the-depar­ ture of the Swede is made up of a somewhat too self-conscious dialogue between the Easterner, the Cowboy, and Scully. The Easterner gets ready to leave the hotel, presumably to save the Swede from the catastrophe made possible by the new reck­ lessness of spirit that possesses him. About the Swede, he says, "We'vo done him a great wrong,” and he then accuses the Cowboy and Scully of not at all caring whether the Swede spoke the truth in accusing Johnnie of cheating. The Cowboy and the Scully are puzzled and vaguely disturbed at the notion that Johnnie could have been cheating. Finally, the Easterner tells them that Johnnie did cheat, admits that he was a coward for not speaking up, and avows that he had learned that "there's a limit to cowardice." 126 Oh we're all cowards; that's the root of the trou­ ble. Johnnie is behind you're afraid to face the truth about him and your own unfairness; I'm just the worst of a bad bunch, (p. 469) Scully sneers, "I suppose that Swede's your idea of a hero," to which the Easterner replies: My bet is, he's been sick all his life, with coward­ ice. What a living hellI But I guess he reaches his limit too. He stood up to it tonight — worse fear than we'll ever dream of. And beat it too — sure as he beat up Johnnie. Yes, Mr. Scully, he's my idea of a hero. And whatever becomes of him now, it's our fault as much as his. With these lines the Swede is made into a scapegoat hero, the victim of the cowardice and moral irresponsibility of Scully, the Cowboy, and the Easterner. Indeed, Agee goes so far — too far, I believe — as to suggest, through the Easterner, that Scully is in effect a Judas. The Easterner's specula­ tion that the Swede suffered from cowardice cannot account, however, for the Swede's alternating moods of depression and wild arrogance. It does so only superficially, and with the added burden of explaining away the sense of the anxiety, mystery, and uncertainty that is manifest in the imagery of Crane's story and in the most brilliantly Imagined scenes of Agee's own adaptation. Much of the effectiveness of "The Blue Hotel" depends on our being baffled by the Swede's behavior and on our read­ ing the storm that rages outside the hotel as a symbol of the unloosed primitive terror of life. In Agee's scenario, the "living hell" that has been the Swede's life is recognizable. 127 to an excess, as the familiar hell of our personal lives, so that the raw, ungainly, clown-like Swede is possibly too much humanized. At the end he appears to be a man who final­ ly asserted his Just claims on life only to be (in effect) murdered by men too cowardly to face their own evil. "Good heavens," says the Easterner We flatter ourselves we're civilized men . . . fit' to cope with Destiny, Pate, the Devil Him­ self. And we come up against some puzzling minor disturbance like the Swede, and all we can do is the worst that's in us . . . . Oh, we declared ourselves, all right . . . as sure as that blue-legged heronI We made him what he's become tonight. We're the ones who've put him in danger! The description of the Swede as having caused a "puzzling minor disturbance" is Important, since it indicates that a bit of love and human symbathy would have been enough to have saved the Swede from himself. The Justification of this conclusion can be found in the disputed last section of the story" "Yes, a thousand things might have happened," said the Easterner, tartly. But such a conclusion is possi­ ble only sub specie aeternitatis. Agee's scenario shows the Swede attracted and moved to revery and dream by the specta­ cle of the blizzard outdoors. Agee specifies the shots: The Swede walks much more slowly, beveling almost straight toward the camera, deeper toward us than any of the others, eyes on angle of window: slow­ ly prodding tobacco into his pipe. His comment is a scarcely audible breathing; in his face is al­ ready the beginning of a strange excitement as he watches through the window and approaches it. Swede (with a strange, private excitement, almost a whisper): Yaahhl 128 And later In the same scene: His rigid, leaning stance has been four feet or so from the window. He is now very close to the window and is Just pulling under him­ self a small stool. O.S. The sound of the oily whirr of expert shuffling. Close shot — Swede from the same angle The window is beyond him, his eyes are.fixed deep into the snow. o.s. sounds of dealing and ad lib bidding. Camera pulls slowly around so that the Swede is in still larger close up, filling most of the screen. He is looking out intensely past the camera, giving tiny, rapid pulls on his pipe; his face showing signs of an inexplicable excitement; eyes becoming almost dreamy. Camera slowly turns square on the win­ dow to focus on what his eyes are fixed on — the post. (pp. 407-408) Such a man can not very well be described as suffering from cowardice or as making up a puzzling minor disturbance. The Swede's suffering is grosser, less rational, and more appalling than the speeches of the Easterner indicate. More­ over, Agee's conception of the way the Swede should look on the screen is at odds with the meaning that he imposes on the action. Of course, in a movie flat verbal message-pointing of the kind that we find in the Easterner's speeches will be relatively unimportant compared with what we see and witi the quality of feeling that is embodied in the movie as a whole. The quality of feeling that Agee wishes to evoke is that of pity and fear at the spectacle of the terrible miscarriage of a human life and it is in the scene of the murder of the Swede that Agee uses the camera to evoke, first, our pity and fear, and then some pure, generalized pathos. It is here 129 also that the nearly manic aspect of film culminates in the wickedly impersonal murder of the Swede. One of Agee’s especially skillful adaptations of Crane occurs when the Gambler drives against the Swede's body and thereby exposes a round, shiny expanse of belly. It gleams in the light that comes from the bar; and it makes an appro­ priately grisly image, since we are reminded that the Swede can be "pierced as easily . . . as a melon," as Crane had put it. As one would expect, Agee is able to represent the gross physical terror of the murder. Indeed, the scene as a whole is conceived so that it has the exaggerated clarity and the unbearable largeness of a nightmare. We feel here exactly what Crane wanted us to feel: how easily a man can die. The images are huge, and they linger ponderously be­ fore our eyes. After the stabbing the sound that Agee had described earlier as having a "supersonic tone" (p. 445, p. 48l), beginning pianissimo, increases steadily to "ultimate unbearable intensity." It is both the cry of the wind and a not quite human shriek that expresses at once the alien pre­ sence of nature and the absurdity of human action. As the Swede dies, Agee fills the screen with deliberately sentimen­ tal images of reconciliation and friendliness — Johnnie holding the Swede’s hand up as victor, the smile of a woman, the benign face of the Swede’s father — and dark images from the Swede’s childhood: "a little boy pulverizing the face of 130 another little boy," the angry face of his father. And he concludes with a shot of a "huge maternal face," presumably that of the Swede's mother — an image of a kind of blessing and grace. The conclusion of the scenario shows that Agee was wil­ ling to take some chances. The images at the end are large to the point of grotesqueness, and we are made to feel the Swede's death as that of a great lumbering beast — man in his vulnerable "animal" condition. Agee wishes to achieve a kind of terrible pathos. He envisions a solemn dance of death, at the end of which we are to know "physically" the moment when a man stumbles into his death and becomes liter­ ally an animal, an object for the swift descent of a knife. There are other risks. The Swede is represented as almost an oafish Clown, and it is too much to expect that such a man can survive in any world. Hence it is at best dubious — and certainly ungainly — to have the Easterner say that "Every sin is a collaboration. Everybody is responsible for every­ thing" (p. 486). Equally, it is risky to bring the Swede's past into the movie, to suggest that his past had undone him. He may then strike us as a man beset by the problem of his terrified repressiveness, the result of childhood docility. Agee took these risks, it seems to me, because he had decided he wished to emphasize the "morality" aspect of Crane's story — indeed, to make a morality play out of it. 131 Logically, then, he made the Easterner the moral focus of the drama (hence rendering explicit what was implicit in Crane's story) and gave his Judgment a great deal of empha­ sis. Unlike Crane, Agee does not have us look back at what happened in the light of the information provided by the Easterner. Furthermore, Agee portrays the Swede as a kind of Everyman who seeks fraternity with the men he meets at the hotel. But he is repulsed and then finally killed. One may infer that the sin of which the five men are guilty is that of being unable or unwilling to imagine what it means to be another man.

(ii) The African Queen

C.S. Forester's novel The African Queen is about the liberation of a post-Victorian woman during a piece of sus­ penseful adventure in central Africa. The stiff, hard-work­ ing, somewhat embattled sister of a missionary in German Cen­ tral Africa, Rose Sayer becomes an extraordinarily competent and implacable adversary of the Germans, and in the process discovers her womanhood as well as courage and self-reliance. The low-comic, uncouth, lazy cockney Allnutt, a vaguely dissi­ pated Islander in the service of the Belgians equally is transformed after he is forced against his will to Join Rose on her mission to sink the German ship, the Louisa, At first a cringing, booze-slinging, corrupted Belgian lackey, he emerges after a fearfully demanding Journey on the rickety 132 and dangerously unreliable African Queen ready to die in the attempt to sink the Louisa. Forester's novel is deliciously, at times perhaps un- intenionally, comic. Bit by bit the prudish, genteel Vic- torianism of the heroine slips off and she is revealed, at the end, to have bloomed into a buxom, resistant, sexual woman. The novel is high fun and at the same time asks the reader to support values that, without much moral in­ vestment of his own, he can readily approve. He can enjoy the comic metamorphosis of an altogether proper, disciplin­ ed and cautious spinster and a cockney machinist who is fretfully aware of the kind of decorum that he must manage vis-a-vis the well-bred spinster. Forester represents, then, two celebrated social and moral types, the spinster at the moment of her liberation and the dissipated Islander at the moment of his commitment to danger and responsible action, and indeed to love and marriage. The courage that Rose and Allnutt demonstrate brings them to glowing muscu­ lar life, and to the rewards of sexuality and tenderness the like of which they had never experienced. Above all. Rose becomes "Rosie," a tender but fearfully grand and domineering woman able to get her way with Allnutt and un­ relenting in her quest for the Louisa. By the end of the novel "Rosie" is fully a woman, her liberated sexuality the sign of the lovely transformation that she undergoes; in­ deed, she discards her bloomers (Allnutt needs them more 133 than she does) and stands free — a lovably fallen angel — of her past, her religious convictions and fears, and of her timidity and sobriety of spirit. Equally competent as seaman and mistress,*-hardened and ready for danger, Rose's

"fall" turns out to be amazingly successful. Throughout her adventure. Forester sees Rose as a kind of Joan of Arc, or as a female Captain Hornblower glued to her post at the tiller of the African Queen, seeking to strike a blow for England and Empire. It is the "beastly Germans" of fact and fiction — the Germans whose impecca­ bly clad officers and triumphantly arrogant vessel, the

Louisa, stand as infuriating smmbols of German rule and officialdom — who are Rose's adversaries. Striking a blow for England and Empire, Rose strikes through the waste of her years as an obedient, hard-working, spinster sister of a decaying, slightly prissy missionary caring for a flock of uncertainly converted blacks in the wilds of central

Africa. Almost too insistently Forester underscores the reviving power of Rose's womanhood, her instinctive ten­ derness and her proud, almost fierce sexuality. She thrives on work and on the harrowing responsibilities that her mission brings her; thus awakened, she thrives on

Allnutt, who becomes her comrade-in-arms, and then, in a natural transition, her lover. Forester's point is that Rose, dutiful spinster that she became, was always potentially an extraordinarily 1:4

fertile and lovable' woman. Indeed, he openly delights in bringing Rose to her full, unintimidated womanhood, and

her metamorphosis is reverently, charmingly, and comically described.

Those big breasts of hers, which had begun to sag when she had begun to lapse into Epinster- hood, were firm and upstanding now again, and she could look down on them swelling out the bosom of her white drill frock without misgiv­ ing. Even in those ten days her body had done much towards replacing fat where fat should be and eliminating it from those areas where it should not. Her face had filled out, and though there were puckers round her eyes caused by the sun, they went well with her healthy tan, and lent piquancy to the ripe femininity of her body. She drank her tea with her mouth full, in a way which would have horrified her a month back. Forester jokes a bit at Rose's expense, and he enjoys know­ ing what she does not know, but on the whole he takes her passion and high innocence seriously; she is the real tin of which the English are made: "She glowed, she actually felt a hot flush, when she thought of the triumph of Eng­ land." Much of the charm and gentle comedy of the novel emerges from Forester's insistent advocacy — sometimes too ringing to be quite straight-faced — of Rose's revived wo­ manhood; not only does the spinster take a lover, she is seen to be a kind of love-Goddess. "Rose was made for love; she had been ashamed of it, frightened of it, once upon a time, and had averted her eyes from the truth, but she could not maintain that supression amid the wild beauty of the Ulanga." Such a comically melodramatic view of nature — 135 nature as that which forces one to submit to instinct and thus to become free — underlies the gentle anti-puritanism of Forester's novel. Rose embodies the triumph of love and instinct over life-denying chastity; her sort of courage is contrasted with the pathetic, embattled missionary faith of Samuel, her brother, and with the starched correctness of the Germans. At the end of the novel, although her plot is foiled, her spiritual triumph is clear; the dirty, reckless freedom of Rose and Allnutt prefigures the victory of Eng­ land and Empire: the German beast has been confounded by the ingenuity and courage of ordinary Englishmen. Agee's adaptation of The African Queen shows us a film­ maker very much in command of his medium, able to discover a film style perfectly matched to the comic fantasy and un­ derlying seriousness of the novel. Agee makes no effort to remake the materials of the novel pr to transcend them;•he wants simply to make the most of them , and therefore he does not tamper with the plot or characters he takes over from Forester. Except for the brilliantly conceived ini­ tial scenes and an ending that eliminates some largely su­ perfluous "business" from the Forester Novel, there are few departures from the narrative line of the novel. That nar­ rative, in the main, is an account of the journey of the African Queen on its way to torpedo the Louisa, a journey involving heroic effort, terrible reversals of fortune, seeming defeat, and a final surprising victory. Moreover, 136 since Rose seeks revenge, and is viewed as a self-reliant David pitted against the towering and comfortable arrogance of Goliath: and since Allnutt, at first amused and slightly disdainful of Rose's intrepidity and uncomfortable in the face of her virgin majesty, finally submits to her and be­ comes as fearless as she, Agee confronted no great problem either with plot or character. What motivates them is quite clear, as clear as v/ho they are and where they are going. A film-maker therefore would not have to interpret or reveal them but discover the style — the mixture of reverence and playfullness — that would focus on the social and moral disproportion, the silent struggle, and the final weary com­ radeship and love that defines the relationship between Rose and Charlie. In fact, the art of this movie consists of framing shots of dazzling clarity and grace that keep the audience at a distance from the characters; we watch the transmuta­ tion of Rose and Charlie against an exotic landscape, a metaphor of "pagan nature," that leads them to a kind of second baptism, an initiation into the life of the senses, physical activity, and sexual experience. The idea of "pa­ gan nature" was a nineteenth-century invention of the Pro­ testant imagination, a myth, and it is particularly applica­ ble, comically, to the social-religious background in which we see Rose and Samuel at the beginning of the film. As they leave the intense Protestant atmosphere of the 137 destroyed village mission, a perilous outpost of Christian civilization, to go down the Ulanga into "pagan nature," anything seems possible. But it turns out that they are both too dramatically English to be seduced for too long; their fling is short and to the point and the life of in­ stinct is quickly shored up. The relationship between Rose and Allnutt has little in common with that between, say, a

Mellors and a Lady Chatterley; they are conceived as lower middle-class types who have been prevented from becoming what they really are — competent, courageous, self-reliant human beings. When they sit down to tea brewed from out of the African Queen's boiler, or when Rose administers mater­ nally to the exhausted Allnutt, we catch a glimpse of what they will be once they settle in an East End flat and put out their aspidistra. They become what really they have always been. Their triumph is comic, they at last possess their absurdly thwarted humanity.

The initial scenes of Agee's adaptation make up a near­ ly perfect film sequence, leading to the death of the Rever­ end Samuel and to the forced abandonment of the mission. Un­ like Forester, who narrates the death of Samuel rather quick­ ly, Agee opens on a scene in the chapel where we see the earnest Protestant intensity of the sweating Brother Sayer, the dutiful Rose Sayer, at once spinsterish and unafraid, and the hard-working, hard-pressed Negroes doing their ut­ most with a hymn in which they are led by Samuel. Against 138 the missionary intensity, and the appalling uncertainty of its results, the glaring whiteness, and the comic and heroic Protestantism of the scene, Agee poses the rickety, tattered, but somehow noble African Queen — the noise of whose engine drowns out the hymn-singing — and its disso­ lute cockney commander, Charlie Allnutt. Two worlds of imagination are thus deftly introduced and juxtaposed: the uneasy Protestantism of the village mission, comically unsuccessful for all its strained efforts to convert the heathen, and the happy paganism and squalor of Charlie Allnutt. The missionary's Africa comes alive in the rush of the heathen outside the chapel for Allnutt's discarded cigar, and in the ensuing disruption of the cha­ pel service. The genteel but intrepid spinster; the bony, over-earnest, pathetically failed missionary; and the low- living, lazy, dirty Allnutt are all introduced. Particu­ larly Rose and Samuel are all too available to spoofing; v;e can imagine them figuring as the butts of a disenchanted anti-Protestant comic nihilism — the weary Shepherds lead­ ing their flock toward the light at the same time they pro­ tect themselves from corruption in black Africa. The hymn goes : Peed me with the heavenly manna in this barren wilderness. Be my sword, my shield, my banner, be the Lord my righteousness. (p. 1^4) Their propriety asks for a playfully comic attack, for they are close to caricatures of their kind; yet throughout Agee 139 treats them with respect, affection, and courtesy. If they are distant, rapt, and provincial, they are also brave, in­ nocent, and fearlessly Christian. The death of Samuel at the hands of the Germans is represented as pathetic and fearfully monstrous. In addition to the chapel scene, Agee creates another scene that does not figure in Forester’s novel; it precedes the pillage of the mission by German troops, photographed so that they appear to bloom from the jungle. The scene is a kind of set piece, a small comedy of manners, stylized by ■ the camera and beautifully executed. The dining-room in which tea is served is held in rigid suspension by the camera. We have the image of a bit of civilized English life trans­ posed to Africa: the uncomfortable ill-mannered Allnutt, be­ yond Christian redemption, guzzles his tea and suffers the embarrassment of a growling, unappeasable stomach, while

Rose and Samuel sit in carefully guarded silence, unable to cope with the repeated violations of decorum. The comedy of the scene is thoroughly traditional: the social outcast is condescended to by his betters and in turn thoroughly discomforts them.

Agee well appreciated (as his essay "Comedy's Greatest

Era" shows) the comic techniques of the silent movie, and he appropriated them to fine advantage in The African Queen.

The very best of the movie, indeed, represents moments of highly stylized gesture and response, facial expressions fro­ zen into dismay, embarrassment, or wide-eyed disbelief. l4o magnified by close-ups and focused with brilliant clarity. The scenes are constantly moving; the camera moves back and forth, bringing the German troops into the village mission with a terrible. Jolting suddenness, or coming forv/ard to rest lingeringly on Allnutt's face as, for example, he comes awake to the screeching sounds of Rose's scuttling of his gin supply; or when we are shown the impersonal rape of the mission from the point of view of Samuel, whose eyes regis­ ter his utter bereavement and horror. This shot is comple­ ted, later, in a close-up that catches him on his collapse to the floor, in a kind of demented, grotesque, animal-like sprawl, his white drawers appearing as a pathetic symbol of his timid, dedicated life as a servant of the Lord. The clarity, precision, and discipline of the images are remarkable, and they exhibit the unity of tone and de­ sign that we find in the movie as a whole. Of course, even a rather mediocre movie-maker ought to be able to accomplish marvels with a Journey punctiu'aited by alternating moments of raw exhilaration, overwhelming fear, bottomless disappoint­ ment, and awesome feats of courage and self-reliance; the Journey itself, moreover, furnishes a wealth of cinematically promising material. And since Rose behaves as if she were a true heir of Trafalgar, of anti-authoritarian, Protestant England, Agee did not have to be slavishly realistic in por­ traying her. Her fearlessness emerges in demonically exag­ gerated ways: the tight-laced spinster, forced to escape her l4l past, becomes a type of Incredibly gutty self-confidence and féminine tenacity and inventiveness. She has the auda­ city of the Innocent and the Saint. If Forester overplays, to the point of forcing us to laugh too much, Rose's new-found lusty womanhood — her flowering roundly under the impact of free self-exertion and adventure — Agee underplays it, as perhaps he was forced to. Forester gives Rose's sexual baptism a charming, melodramatic touch, and his description of the irrepressi­ ble eroticism that grows up between her and Charlie is funny: He looked down at Rose beside him, her sweet bosom close to him. He, too, was glowing with life and inspired by the awesome beauty of the place. He did not know what he was doing when he put his hand to her throat, sunburned and cool .... Rose was conscious of kisses, of her racing pulse and her swimming head. She was conscious of hands which pulled at her clothing and which she could not deny even if she would. She was conscious of pain which made her put her arms round Allnutt's slight body and press him to her, holding him to her breasts while he did his will — her will — upon her. In Agee's scenario, Allnutt does not do his will upon Rose; instead, the dirty little man and the fearless woman embrace once or twice, then proceed to order their freedom with tea and domestic pleasures before a plunge down the Ulanga Falls. Rose emerges from her "second" baptism administering tenderly to Allnutt's needs, in undisputed command of the boat, and prepared for the final strike at German official­ dom and arrogance. But before her "second" baptism is com­ plete, Allnutt has surrendered to the authority of her inno­ cence and courage. It is here tbOy in Agee's representation 142 of Allnutt's surrender, that his adaptation of Forester is masterful. Again, the triumph is the result of careful com­ position and cutting. Allnutt discovers that Rose means business, that the quietly sinful life he has been leading is at an end, that he has Joined himself to a tough-minded, unyielding woman quite able to envisage herself as the in­ strument of the destruction of German rule in central Afri­ ca. At first confident that Rose will break under the as­ saults of the rapids, he is driven to astonishment and dis­ may, then to cringing despair, and finally to fear — craven, abject, and shuddering — on discovering that Rose all too quickly becomes their master. Allnutt is driven to gin, and Rose, unaware of his fear but outraged by his drinking, sits in absolute silence. At this point, Allnutt craves the com­ fortable squalor of his stogies and gin — the good life that has been denied him by Rose's extravagance of imagination. There follows a piece of near-Chaplinesque virtuosity that ends in Rose's triumph over Allnutt's abject fears. In the scenes that follow Allnutt's realization that Rose is deadly serious, the camera moves between them, fairly close up, as we see Rose force Charlie to resolve to sink the Louisa. Allnutt speaks the blasphemous, unutterable words, "You crazy, psalm-singin', skinny old maid" (p. 200), and Rose, driven to the edge of tears, steels herself and fi­ nally emerges hard and immovable. After sleeping his drunk off, Allnutt wakes to find Rose throwing his precious gin 143 ' overboard. But he does not wake at once; he awakes almost pantomlmlcally, and only bit by bit makes out the glaring, sunlit Rose carefully disposing of his treasure-chest. All­ nutt 's every gesture is enlarged: his eyes struggling with the light, his mouth feebly trying to articulate the anlmal- llke whimpering that comes out of him. Excruciatingly sen­ sitive to sound, he Is all but destroyed by the screeching movement of the gin cases; and he appears to be on the verge of lunacy — frozen In shock and disbelief, then jarred piteously by every movement that Rose' makes, and finally reduced to a whimpering beast by her total silence. Nothing Is seriously challenged In the film, neither evangelical Christianity, celibacy, or war, since every­ thing has a merely formal place within the pattern of the adventure as a whole. Even the Germans are not made to ap­ pear thoroughly odious — the brutalized and absurd ninnies of the English folk Imagination. They are merely cardboard figures, and at the end of the film they tumble Into the sea In their starched, be-medalled ducks, the victims of the audacity and Imagination and good luck of the English. The Forester novel is, in large part, an English fantasy projec­ ting the destruction of overweening German pride and mili­ tary power. Of course the specifically English quality of the novel Is considerably attenuated In the American film, and therefore the latter celebrates more directly than the 144 novel the rewards of physical experience and release, of risk, imagination, and courage. In any case, the romantic plot and the stylized fantasy of both the novel and film allow the affirmation to have the purity and grace of a fairy tale. In the Agee adaptation the foundered African Queen, its home-made torpedoes still intact, explodes a- gainst the Louisa, and the film ends as we see Rose and Charlie swimming safely toward shore.

(iii) The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky

In "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," Stephan Crane acts as gentle parodist, teasing and at last deflating the melo­ dramatic convention he uses. Throughout the story, in his amused omniscience and in the deliberately exaggerated seri­ ousness of his attitude toward Potter and his bride. Crane adroitly stylizes the action so to prepare for the final mo­ ment of Scratchy Wilson's pathetic defeat and Potter's al­ most undeserved triumph. The disbelief of Scratchy, at the end of the story, as he recognizes that marriage has de­ stroyed the little piece of Western melodrama to which he has clung, is completed in the "funnel-shaped tracks" that take him, sulkingly and pathetically, away from Potter and his bride. The moment of his pathetic disbelief is regis­ tered and then dissolved as consciously as Crane invokes the embarrassed glances and clumsiness of Potter and his bride on their way home to Yellow Sky. The ironical "recog­ nition" scene, as well as the comic helplessness of the 145 townspeople bullied into submission by Scratchy*s violent outbursts, is viewed against a contrived, stylized Western background. Yellow 8Icy is fast becoming a substantially civilized town, its varmints having been largely subdued, and it sets store by the new civilities of duty and loyalty, and by marriage. It takes an interest particularly in the marriage of Potter, as Potter guiltily supposes, and the townspeople are apt to think unkindly of a marshall who be­ trays their trust. Crane practices deliberate exaggeration, as he repre­ sents Potter's guilty forebodings, "jack Potter was begin­ ning to find the shadow of a dead weight upon him like a leaden slab .... He knew full well that his marriage was an important thing to his town. It coul.d only be ex­ ceeded by the burning of the new hotel." Crane views Potter with an amused, sardonic, self-conscious air; the Marshall has robbed the town of a necessary pleasure, and his negli­ gence is likely to be thought a betrayal. Of course. Scratchy Wilson, literally disarmed by the word "marriage" at the end of the story, feels himself in truth betrayed by Potter. Consequently the humor that Crane gently evokes in the first section of the story — "Histori­ cally there was supposed to be something infinitely humorous in their situation" — and in the richly embarrassed Potter and his bride, is underscored in the exaggerated "play" on social duty and on the moral guilt Potter experiences 146 contemplating the moment of revelation at Yellow Sky. The language of melodrama is poised against the simple fact of marriage: "He had committed an extraordinary crime." The crime is merely that Potter has not allowed his friends to enjoy the spectacle of his marriage. The gentle comedy of the forthright marshall hurting over his lack of forthright­ ness prepares us for the final, deftly managed irony of the story. The effectiveness of this final irony depends on our seeing the characters as types, engaged in playing roles that well or ill befit them. Potter is a competent, forth­ right town marshall forced to be a clumsy, ineptly tender husband, while Scratchy is the prisoner of his role, fran­ tically working himself up to another drunken march on the town and a shooting duel with Potter. At the end, he can not break free of it, and gets his comeuppance in being re­ duced to mere wretchedness. Potter's case is somewhat dif­ ferent. In the first section of the story his moral sense is brought comically into question since he has ignored a loyalty he owed the community. Marriage is less momentous than is loyalty and duty among men; in fact, it is harmless enough if a man does not ignore his friends. They must have a chance to enjoy his betrayal. Crane's tone of exag­ gerated seriousness invites us to enjoy Potter's dilemma; we may share the point of view of those sophisticated people 147 in the railroad car who laugh somewhat derisively at his inability to manage his role. And surely the comëdy goes further. Potter enters and is confirmed in a "new estate" through the rites of marriage, and thus renounces his sin­ gle, solitary existence on the frontier. Crane introduces just enough suggestion — too much would burden the story — of the civilizing, otherworldly aspect of marriage, to war­ rant our viewing Potter in this way. His capacity both for tenderness and moral guilt is aroused, a sure sign of the transformation of the West. But it is not aroused so much that Potter threatens to become an individual, breaking the bonds of his type. In the third section of the story, the Western desper­ ado manque, the rebel without a cause who has been reduced to sheer orneriness, appears in a "maroon-colored flannel shirt which had been purchased for purposes of decoration, and made principally by some Jewish women on the East Side of New York . . . ." Here the character of Crane's story becomes clear. Scratchy Wilson, the last of the local bad- men, is a parody of the conventional badman. He plays at being a badman and can only rise to the occasion when he is drunk; and except for Potter, there is no one who will ac­ cept the challenge. Scratchy has not simply fallen on tame days; he is a thoroughly tame man himself except when he is drunk. Therefore the story does not involve a clash of 148 polar values such as Eastern respectability against Western bravado. The respectability of Yellow SlStephen Crane," in Major Writers of America (New York, 196O), II, 3 9 6. 149 that she had cooked, and that she expected to cook, duti­ fully;" she is the chief reward of his conscientiousness. Symbolizing the emerging refinement of civilization in the West, the bride's establishment in Yellow Sky spells the end of the likes of Scratchy Wilson in the life of Potter. Setting one stock type against another, and holding a dis­ tance from them that allows for gentle satire. Crane ends by standing the convention on its head; the expected vio­ lence does not occur, since it is unimaginable in the face of the new culture of feeling and domesticity that Potter and his bride have brought to Yellow Sky. Agee's scenario makes some relatively minor changes in the story to the end of fleshing it out and making more of its comedy. The bartender of the Weary Gentleman Saloon becomes a woman, Laura Lee, of whom there is a general sus­ picion that she cares for Potter. The Drummer of Crane's story is given some amusing scenes in which he tries unsuc­ cessfully to peddle his wares, the "super-sheer, elaborate­ ly clocked dark stockings" to Laura. She tells him that he is in the wrong territory: "this is a man's country. It's hard country" (p. 374). Agee uses her, then, to represent the proverbially "tough" frontier worn an living in a man's world; men seem all the tougher for her toughness.

Scratchy too is filled in. At the outset of the film he is shown in the Weary Gentleman Saloon, angry with

Potter for having shot him in the leg during one of their 150 encounters; "You know It was all in fun." In large part, Agee's Interpretation of Crane is in this line; it emphasi­ zes the kids-garae theme, just as Potter's meeting with Dea­ con Smeed, who wishes Potter to attend to appearances by coming to church, emphasizes Yellow Sky's emerging respecta­ bility. The desperado is represented, then, as an over­ grown boy, sunken into petulance, an anachronism in the midst of a western town newly aware of the forms of respec­ tability. Scratchy: Next time. I'll make you dance. Potter: Better not be a next time. 'Cause next time, instead o' the meat o' the leg, I might have to pop you in the kneecap. Scratchy: You wouldn't do that. . Potter: I wouldn't want to. But I might have to. Scratchy, just to learn you. You don't know it but you're gettin' dangersome when you drink, lately. (p. 3 6 1) Scratchy goes out of his head when he is drunk, so that he is made out to be a desperate as well as pathetic old cow­ boy. He is shown at home, cleaning his revolvers and shoot­ ing Indians on a calendar: "Got ye that time, ye dog]" He sings "Brighten The Corner," his voice described by Agee as "happy and innocent as a baby talking to itself in its cor­ ner" (p. 3 6 6). He has the reckless innocence, if also the nuisance-creating abilities, of a baby, the "child of the plains" that Crane describes at the end of the story. A po­ tentially dangerous man. Scratchy nonetheless is attractive because he is pathetically an outcast and innocent. Agee, 151 however, does not make the pathos too heavy and obvious; it ought to be a touch, a suggestion underlying the situation

of the man, to dissolve at the comic resolution of the ac­

tion. Indeed, Agee expertly preserves the distance, the

frame in which an old-fashioned melodrama comes to life,

that Crane wrote into the story. The film uses the devi­ ces of the silent movies, particularly in the rapidity of cuts and dissolves and in the way it depends on glimpses —

the glimpses we get of rotter and his bride on the train,

for example, from the point of view of some sophisticated

passengers — and suggestions and touches of characteriza­

tion. In this way, Agee works within the melodramatic con­

vention and uses it to frame the narrative. And he keeps

the vignette under control — it ought not become a tale whose theme is the marshall's courage. The close-ups frame

the man, or the man as identified with a conventional style,

not the man inside the mask. Again, the technique is appro­ priately that of the silents, always weighted heavily on

the side of style as against character study. Man identi­ fied with a visual style, based on conventional gesture, is

the subject, by and large, of comedy. In Agee's scenario,

although the pathos of Scratchy's situation is represented,

it does not become over-bearing because Scratchy is held

within the range of the game, the comedy of manners, that

is the subject of Crane's story. "All right. Jack Potter. 152 Yore time has come !" announces Scratchy, comically naming his man in the accredited style of the Western badman.

Even the tension the movie creates is the stylized, movie-time, sustained, and abruptly collapsed tension of the

Western melodrama. He can hear the clock beating in the background as the train. Juxtaposed against shots of the preparations in the Weary Gentleman for Scratchy's terror­ izing, approaches Yellow Sky. As Potter and his bride make a fast exit from the train, hoping to avoid the citizenry of Yellow Sky, they run smack into the maddened, tormented, sorrowful Scratchy. It is precisely a sorrowful occasion since in Agee's scenario it is preceded, as we have seen, by Potter's warning Scratchy that he cannot go on acting irresponsibly and by Potter's attempt to make up to him:

"Ain't still sore, are ye. Scratchy?" The dance of images comes to an end in the magnified image of man facing man, but not in unparodied splendor, in brave outline against the natural environment. Potter has his bride with him, of course, and thus he is lost to Scratchy who needs him more than does his bride:

Scratchy: fa little more comprehension) Married? You mean, you? (hebacks off a pace; the arm and pistol dropl No. (he studies Potter cagily and shakes his head)

Then literally for the first time he sees the Bride.

Scratchy: (continuing) What's that ye got there? Is this the lady?

A silence. 153 Scratchy: Well, I ‘spose it's all off now.

Potter: It's all off if you say so. Scratchy. You know I didn't make the trouble.

He picks up both valises.

Newshot -- Scratchy — over Potter He studies Potter up and down, slowly, incredulously. Then he looks at the ground.

Scratchy: Well, I 'low it's off. Jack, (he shakes his head) Married »

He looks up with infinite reproach, sadness and soli­ tude. He picks up his fallen revolver. He hefts it and turns both revolvers in his hands, looking at them, then puts them with finality into their holsters. Then he again meets Potter's eyes.

Scratchy: (continuing; almost inaudibly) G 'bye. Jack.

Close shot — Potter He begins to comprehend; he is moved.

Potter: 'Bye, Scratchy.

The slow huge goodbye, preceded by large close-ups alterna­ ting among Potter, the Bride, Scratchy, and the pistol bar­ rel, brings the game to a melancholy end. " In Agee's scenar­ io, it is a touching moment but not one to brood over.

Agee sees the story as making up the action of a game.

Potter is discomforted in the time-honored style, the groom the victim of sarcasm, his bride sweetly deferential and cutely embarrassed by the new world of matrimony and its attendent niceties of feeling. As a result, they exist as familiar types and all the more so in Agee's scenario be­ cause the cuts and dissolves bring them into view rather than view them steadily, with concern over what their style 154 has to reveal about their character. Of course Scratchy himself plays a game that threatens to become a grisly comedy. Nevertheless, he is a nuisance to endure, since he needs the game so badly. In Agee's scenario, he cleans out cess-pools and so a handy man with a gun has been re­ duced to a handy man; he is a frustrated badman, reduced to indignity. The game has its content in Western melo­ drama gently satirized. The stale conventions of the "pen­ ny dreadful" tales of Crane's time are exploded in the anti-climactic end.^^ But the result is not the triumph of a real world of civilized values. The new values are as much "propertied" in Agee's design as are Scratchy's pseudo­ villainy and Potter's fearless manner. At the end of

Agee's scenario. Potter takes his bride up into his arms, shoves open the door to his house, and disappears.

(iv) The Night of the Hunter

Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter is a novel about the plight of two children, John and Pearl Harper, who are hunted (and haunted) by a psychopathic preacher, Harry

Powell. The novel combines fantasy and melodrama in a very deliberate way, as if influenced by the underworld of

Faulkner's novels. Dominating everything is the figure of the Preacher — impotent, sadistic, demented — who pursues

10 See S. C, Ferguson, "Crane's 'The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky,'" Explicator, XXI, No. 7 (March I963), 5 9. 155 John and Pearl so to force them to disclose the hiding place of ten thousand dollars stolen by their father, Ben

Harper, and placed in their keeping before his capture and subsequent hanging. Grubb makes it clear that his subject is the predicament of innocent children caught in a world that inflicts its evil on them, where they must somehow find the strength to endure their initiation. The children find the necessary strength, and at the end of the novel their steadfastness is celebrated as the prototype of human virtue.

In a sense, the novel is the record of a nightmare. Shrouded in darkness and shadow, and characterized by à kind of late Cà'lvinistic mental atmosphere, it conjures up from out of the bible-reading culture of the Ohio River a dramatically grotesque devil in the person of the Preacher.

Harry Powell is represented as a man who holds an intense attraction for people corrupted by sentimentality, for whom his fervid Old Testament rhetoric persuasively drama­ tizes the eternal conflict of love and hate (the fingers of his left hand are inscribed with the word "hate," those of his right with the word "love"), good and evil. Actual­ ly, of course, he is a murderer, his special victims being sentimental widows. Hearing the voice of the wrathful Old

Testament God, he reaches for his stick knife and achieves the monomaniacal fury that sets him to the Lord’s business, the murder of back-sliding, whoring womanhood. Presumably 156 his orgiastic Old Testament fervor substitutes for his in­ capacity to achieve orgasm. In any case, once he appears in their country town, he proves irresistable to Icey and

Walt Spoon, who quickly urge Willa to marry him before he gets away. They do not know, of course, that the Preacher has shared a jail cell with Ben Harper and intends to get his hands on the ten thousand dollars Ben hid in Pearl's doll, about which he had sworn the children to secrecy.

The Preacher marries Willa and quickly sets about his busi­ ness of finding the money. In the course of doing so, he murders Willa; but the children escape him, and he rides the countryside searching for them.

We see John and Pearl as they live in a fantasy world that becomes all too monstrously real. The Preacher first appears to them as a shadow that supplants the gaily heroic - figures — the brave soldier and the merry clown — who flicker in the shadows cast onto their bedroom wall by the gas lamp outside their window. Soon the Preacher becomes their stepfather and finally their hunter. All the while John is unable to free himself of the vision of his father's capture by the "blue men," and so his life is given over to solitary fright and forbidden knowledge. I quote Grubb:

Since the day when the blue men had taken Ben away the burden of this solitary knowledge was almost more than he could endure .... It was a secret that was a little world of his own. A terrible little world like an island upon whose haunted beach he wandered alone now, like 157 a solitary and stricken Crusoe, while everjnhere about him his eyes would find the footprint of the dangling man. On the screen. The Night of the Hunter descends into an

occasional moment of the JeJeune and the arty. On the other

hand, the allegorical Calvinist morality proves a fit vehicle for movie exploitation. There are many seizures of fright to

be experienced in responding to the dark vision of the preach­

er stalking his innocent prey. Against this figure out of a

Calvinist nightmare, Grubb sets Rachel Cooper, whose tough­

mindedness and compassion for human frality make hera genuine

shepherd, a kind of Mother figure who embodies the power of

love in a quiet, uninsistent way. The novel exists, then, in

a simplified Calvinist framework: the maddened Old Testament

God, as it were,- set against a figure of pastoral purity and

love. The myth makes the novel a kind of morality play but at a level not so complex that a movie could not present its

figures with a great deal of force. At the end of the novel

(and likewise in the movie) the myth crystallizes a tradition­

al happy optimism in the figure of Rachel Cooper who counter­

balances the vision of corrupted human nature. All children, Rachel Cooper reflects, live through a night of the hunter, a

time when the shadowy beings of fantasy become frightful real­

ities, and they are haunted by evil imagination. The conclu­

sion does not evade any moral problems. The presiding Mother

spirit affirms the children's capacity to endure, after which

they go off to bed to be enchanted once again by the brave 158 soldier and the merry clown. The reality of life is not slight­ ed since the myth leaves everything between good and evil, or good-and-evil, out of account. The universe of Grubb's novel has the abiding simplicity of fairy tale and nightmare, where everything has been reduced to a clash of archetypal figures of startling clarity, beneath which the experience of modest moral problems and tangled questions of motive and character disappear.

The mythic-allegorical qualities of the novel make very fine material for movie treatment. Grubb is a kind of histor­ ian of the country along the Ohio river, and in The Night of the Hunter he creates what is in effect a dark folk tale (once there was an evil Preacher who killed I don't know how many women) that becomes a small parable of good and evil, lighten­ ed at the end by the appearance of a woman of good sense, toughness of spirit, modesty and love, who cannot be duped (as Icey and Walt and Willa are duped) by the display of a sternly moralistic vision that satisfies the emotional need for evan­ gelical thunder. The decrepid Calvinism that makes good folk

(if dully conventional folk) victims has no appeal to Rachel

Cooper, whose knowledge of life has been cultivated on the farm and who is acquainted with the folly and weakness of human beings, even as she protects a flock of homeless children from destitution and manages to make life possible for them.

Agee's adaptation is good where one would expect it to be good. He makes the figure of the Preacher a literally 159 terrifying apparition, but this is an accomplishment that does not demand too much skill. Agee merely indicates a

largely blackened screen, across which the Preacher, his total malice sublimated, so to speak, into a nearly terrible silence, moves on his horse in search of the children, chant­ ing, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." By the same token,

the tension and suspense that fill the book are pretty much a possession of standard film technique, and are preserved and extended by Agee in a mounting series of shocks and coun­ tershocks, momentary sublimations, and terrifying images: the Preacher, for example, as he appears in the illuminated center of the darkened screen as John enters the nouse and all but stumbles into him (p. 288). Moreover, the dialogue which Agee prunes from Grubb but to which he adds nothing of his own, always manages to strike the proper tone. In the scene just referred to, for example, the Preacher's words, quieted and drawn out against the monstrousness we feel with­ in him, have a thoroughly murderous quality: Preacher: I had a little talk with your mother to­ night, John; and your mother decided it might be best for me to — let you know the news. From John, just a questioning helpless reaction. Preacher: Your mother told me tonight she wanted me to be a daddy to you and your sister. We're going to get married, son. John is still. Preacher: Did you hear what I said, son? John: Huh? i6o

Preacher: Married! We have decided to go to Sisters- ville tomorrow, and when we come back — John (just breathing it): You ain't my Dad! You won't never be my Dad! Preacher (obsessed, disregarding him) — and when we come back, we'll all be friends — and share our for­ tunes together, John! (p. 288) Agee could be faithful to Grubb's novel because it for­ tunately contained a style and myth that he did not have to manipulate (so to "whip the novel" as the Hollywood saying has it), but which he could use to achieve the blend of fidelity to appearances and "poetic" effect that he demanded of film.

In addition, the attitude the novel embodied toward children was, of course, very much Agee's own. Consequently, he found material that was highly congenial to his temperament and, at the same time, in a form close enough to "ritual" to lend it­ self to stylized camera angles and a quasi-expre’ssionistic setting — to the charged visualization that Agee thought could become the means to "poetry," or at least to something more than simple realism.

There are a number of touches in the screenplay, parti­ cularly in Agee's notations for given scenes, that indicate graphically the style and quality of feeling he aimed to bring to the film. For example, at the moment when the Preacher prepares to murder Willa, and she knows what is coming, Agee notes :

Willa lies in profile on the bed along the bottom of the frame. A trim, old woman's nightdress makes her look like a child. Her hands are clasped. Preacher, fully dressed, stands at the window, which l6l

Is In BACKGROUND toward foot of bed. His coat, hung over a chair, is in silhouette. River mist outside window halated by exterior gaslamp. Tfie window shade is up. She is mumbling in prayer. She stops. Preacher; (his back still turned) Are you through praying?

Willa: I'm through, Harry. He turns. Willa is calm and immobile with the ecsta­ sy of a martyr, (pp. 300-301) Willa has accidently discovered the Preacher's true motives, that he has married her to be near the money; and as he lis­ tens for the voice to command him to kill her, Wil]a— now the image of a pathetically chaste little girl — lies frozen in a

"saint-like" posture and asserts her faith that the Lord gave her the Preacher bo show her the way to the salvation of her soul. The Preacher proceeds to kill her, as Willa, her head in close-up, looks at him "with foolish, ecstatic eyes." The scene is very deliberately composed and stylized, and this makes Willa's dumb pathetic insistence on God as she submits to the knife seem at once horrible and blasphemous. Here the style of the scene comments on and underscores the horror, and this is properly the function of film style.

Occasionally, however, the images are too insistently symbolic, in an openly contrived way. There is an underwater shot of a gar, for instance; and Birdie, the old river char­ acter who is John's friend, describes it as the "meanest, orneriest, sneakinest critter in the whole river . . ." (p.

295). The image points too obviously. And when the children l62 escape the Preacher and head down the Ohio In a skiff, there

is a kind of "nature" accompaniment to their journey (in the

movie blown-up beyond Agee’s description in the screenplay)

in the form of hoot owl and frog noises, a whippoorwill’s song, and the appearance of a turtle and rabbits, the symbolic

effect of which, I suppose, is to signal the children's alone- ness, their return to the anonymity of nature, and the haunted

quality of their lives. In the movie the close-ups of the animals are merely grotesque, an inflated form of film rhetor­

ic the intention of which is fogged by its self-consciousness.^^

When the film technique, on the other hand, is genuinely

impressionistic rather than fake montage or vaguely surrealis­

tic, the stylizations work well and the myth arises in images

of terrible grandeur. And, of course, when Rachel Cooper ap­

pears on the scene there is no room for any attempts at pathe­

tic fallacy. Here Agee is content, while he keeps the images moving, simply to have us fall in love with her. Far from be­ ing embarrassed over what she so obviously signifies, he says about her quite comfortably that "this is our heroine at last"

(p. 327). A reader can infer that Agee delights in (rather

11 Charles Laughton, who directed the film, said that he did not try for any symbolism: "It’s really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale we were telling . . , . We tried to surround the children with creatures they might have ob­ served, and that might have seemed part of the dream. It was, in a way, a dream for them." Quoted in Hollis Alpert, "Terror on the River," Saturday Review, XXXVIII (August 13, 1955), 21. 163 than gently mocks) her country speech, as in the following:

Cattle Dealer: Howdy Miz Cooper — you goin’ to sell me yer hog this year?

Rachel doesn't stop walking.

Rachael: With the price o' pork what it is?

Close tracking shot — Rachel She keeps walking.

Rachel: (talking to herself) I'm butcherin' my hog my­ self, smokin' the hams, and cannin' the sausage, (she calls to children over her shoulder) You-all have your work cut out! (p. 328)

In comparison with the maudlin sentimentality of the other wo­ men (of women generally it is Rachel Cooper's opinion that they are "durn fools"), her plain dealing and commonsense ap­ pear noble; and to make her appear naively noble is precisely Agee's intention. She ought to appear "almost comically lov­ ing and bounteous," perfectly identified with the task in 1 p which her life is realized.^ With her appearance, we are ready to have the nightmare disintegrate, the innocence of the children and their power to endure affirmed and celebrated, and sanity and love discover an apostle and witness. For ex­ ample, when she discovers that Ruby (one of the homeless chil­ dren for whom she cares) has been having sexual experiences with the boys in town, she says to her:

Rachel: You was lookin' for love. Ruby, the only foolish way you knowed how. (she lifts Ruby's face cheek to cheek beside her own) We all need love. Ruby, I lost the love of my son — I've found it with you-all. (p. 336)

12 The phrase in quotation marks is from Norman Holland, "Agee on Film: Reviewer Re-Viewed," Hudson Review, XII (Spring, 1959), 150. 164 Indeed, The Night of the Hunter ought to force us to be absorbed in its parable to the point of having us respond with fear to the Preacher's "The Lord God Jehovah will guide my hand in vengeancei" and with simple affection to his "bounte­ ous" adversary's "It's a hard world for little things." The Preacher becomes an image of a certain kind of perverse reli­ gious monomania, while Rachel Cooper affirms the hard but stea­ dy growth of each vulnerable thing in God's creation. It is wrong, I believe, to be embarrassed by the pastoral purity of Rachel Cooper: in the emblematic world of the film, she stands for the principle of mercy and love and fecundity, affirming the timeless realities against the nihilism and monomania and simple evil of which men are capable. At the end of Agee's scenario, the starry sky is seen filling the whole screen, and thus is celebrated the beauty and order of God's creation as well as those pastoral deities like Rachel Cooper who some­ how contrive to remain one with it.

( V) Noa-Noa

Agee's scenario (as yet unproduced) based on the life of Gauguin is a "narrative" in what now may seem an old-fashioned way. It is the narrative of the life of a hero, and it sets out to represent Gauguin's character, his-motives, his life and death, and his tragic, triumphant end. Agee assumes that all are of a piece, that none are simply fascinating or bizarre. What the scenario avoids is worth mentioning. Agee is quite 165 pious, pious enough to take Gauguin at his own evaluation of himself — as the artist as Christ-figure; but that piety saves him from what could have been a greater fault: the temp­ tation to trim, to cut Gauguin down to size, to underplay the violence, the yearning for the "primitive" that characterized the man. Surely the "primitivism" of Gauguin is a standing invitation to kitsch; one can well imagine the loving atten­ tion that the "primitive" would get from Hollywood and especi­ ally the "primitive" as painter, a man breaking the death-hold he felt bourgeois culture had over him. The fate of the poet maudit in a Hollywood film would be a garish, demeaning fate, the fate of a curiosity, an odd-ball living at a strange hys­ terical pitch. But this is an important problem that the scenarist faces, for he has to reckon with an audience that may find Gauguin's fierce rejection of bourgeois culture merely appal­ ling or odd. Will it help to make Gauguin's rejection and paradoxical fulfillment Christ-like, a commitment to a super­ natural world? Gauguin was capable of steely self-abnegation as well as of immense cruelty; he could neglect the claims of human feeling, and he could — as in his brief encounter with Van Gogh in Arles — become furious with what he considered artistic fraud. He sought, in part, a world without man, and consequently he despised the religious sentimentality of Van Gogh and his adoration of Millet. Only a severe decorative l66 purity could seemingly attract him. In Agee's scenario, with reference to Millet's "The Angelus," he says to Van Gogh: No thanks. Brigadier: I abominate this idea of using Art, of all things, as a kind of wet-nurse for all the lonely hearts and pious old women and slobbering idiots and simple souls in this world. An artist's only message is the message of beauty. And the only people who are fit to look at his work are those who are capable of perceiving beau­ ty. (p. 27) So he is made out capable of great ruthlessness; he had a strong ego, the ego of an artist defining himself as he sought to find his vision of life, even as he wished to be­ come one with, and then to recreate in art, a paradisiacal world. Agee makes no effort to de-mythologize Gauguin; he has no queasy consciousness over Gauguin's outrageous legend. And he takes the risk of the natural bent of the medium to­ ward a high-blown, kitsch romanticism -- the trappings (the mystery of the Tahitian landscape) lovingly pseudo-realistic and the treatment of the hero evasive, watered-down, and heavily pictorial. He takes Gauguin's quest for being, for blessedness, as simply involving the typical paradox that a civilized man would face: blessedness does not come easy and it is at best a temporary condition, followed by one's involvement with imperfection, disease, and death. The primordial Christ suffers and grows into a larger, more hu­ mane man — moving from an exclusive devotion to art to love of man. At the end of the scenario he has learned the wis­ dom of Van Gogh's words to him at Arles: "The only true 167 good is suffering" (p. 40). The quest for paradisiacal innocence, the rejection of the thinness and materialism of civilization, brings him face to face with the "knowledge of good and evil" rather than "the lost innocence of the hu­ man race" (p. 20). The innocence proves to oe irrecovera­ ble and Gauguin becomes, as he struggles to return the

Tahitians to their idyllic, barbarian past, a strictly mor­ al man. He suffers greatly, he is victimized by friends, he becomes a cripple and addict, and he paints in poverty and torment. His experience of ecstasy, his discovery of the man he thought he could become, and his moments of self- realization, however sharply experienced, are small as a- gainst the squalor and deprivation that overwhelm him; but these justify him as a man who has grown beyond his exclu­ sive commitment to an otherworldly art.

Agee had sought to flood the screen before with images of frenzy and self-destructiveness. The last scenes in The

Blue Hotel come to mind. There the Swede suffers from a nameless, consuming hurt, and dies in the collapse of moral responsibility in the violence-engendering atmosphere of the all but empty plains of the mid-West. In G&uguin Agee found a man with a highly developed sense of himself, a man with a moral style, courage and commitment, but nonetheless unaware of his own humanity and driven by an obsessive im­ age of the innocence of paradise. In the end, he becomes a 168 tragic hero, aware of what It has cost him to be himself; at least Agee sees him as a tragic hero. We can as^c what kind of tragic hero he becomes, and to what In fact his art tes­ tifies. Agee surrenders to Gauguin and hence takes risks out­ side of those I have already mentioned. The superficially romantic career, touched by Images of self-destructiveness, an enlarging hysteria, the collapse Into deepening melan­ choly and helpless guilt, make dangerous material. It can substitute for the narrative of an effort at greater and greater command over a medium, and hence an Increasing sac­ rifice of one's purely egotistical needs. Of course Agee had necessarily to be concerned with the man and his legend; but he sought to get beneath It, Inside the man, so to re­ late Gauguin's quest for a vision of life that would Inform, Indeed create, his paintings to the man who suffered. Do­ ing so, Agee creates a sense of the marvellous Impersonal­ ity of the man; "You know very well what I have to do, whether you understand It or not. You know. That's all"

(p. 5 0). He relates the paintings to what It cost Gauguin to make them, and In this way shows how he becomes a man who knows what It means to be an artist. The education that Gauguin himself narrates In Noa Noa In sentences of the fol­ lowing kind: "Life each day became better .... Civiliza­ tion Is falling from me little by little. I was reborn; or rather another man, purer and stronger, came to life within 169 me" — this education, as Gauguin Is transformed by It, proves merely a kind of excursus Into the self, followed by his understanding at the end of his life In the Marque­ sas of how civilization has destroyed the life of the na­ tives and how his own vision of the regeneration of man Is 13 cruelly disappointed. It Is easy to find Gauguin an embarrassment. Since his journey Is part of the symbolic consciousness of Western ci­ vilization, we have heard It all before; and perhaps at this late day we find It all too heavily archetypal, the symbols burdened with relevant and Irrelevant associations, easily debased. The risk of their becoming further debased, mere­ ly picturesque or high-blown, as I say. Is one that Agee had somehow to take. Another problem must have presented Itself, too. Agee Is committed. In advance, to represen­ ting Gauguin's discovery of release and recreation, and the joy-producing consequences. This Is a delicate subject. How does one represent such a discovery, through Gauguin's paint­ ings or with reference to episodes In his life, realistical­ ly or expresslonlstlcally. In montage or In glimpses? Agee chooses to use Gauguin as narrator, so that Gau- galn tells us of the experience whose outcome literally con­ stituted him In a new life and sensibility. Somehow the 13 See Noa Noa, trans. 0. F. Thesis (New York, 1927), p. 13. 170 Images must support the telling, underscore rather than undercut it. I doubt that Agee is successful here. Rap­ ture is a state of being hard enough to represent, pictor- ially or verbally, and like the firey baptism that Gauguin so much desired, of an experienced intensity that may look fraudulent, or merely flat, on the screen. Somehow what happened to Gauguin must be thought of as unique, beyond transcription, or pictorial representation, an affair of the soul. Narration is a poor necessity, I believe — a poor way of apprehending those vital changes that trans­ formed his personality and art. Agee is much more success­ ful in representing Gauguin's sense of loss, the unimagined life which he had chosen, and his determination in the face of it to do what he had come to do. The scene I speak of involves Gauguin and his new mis­ tress, Tehura. The script reads as follows: Close Shot — Gauguin The face is tight; as much erotic as aesthetic or workman. He glances up from work to her, deeply excited and uneasy. Med. Shot — Tehura We dolly very slowly in as her face fulfills Gauguin's lines; stop dollying; pause. Closer Shot — Gauguin His face is intense, his forehead damp, his eyes bril­ liant as he looks to her o.s.; now, less as an artist. He receives something from her, o.s., which causes him to get slowly and shyly, yet confidently, from his chair, and to advance. Close Shot — Tehura Resume the slow dollying in, coming first into eye close- up. Pause, then tilting downward to mouth closeup. The mouth opens . . . Dissolve 171 A brief series of dissolves and melts . . . in which, indirectly, we epitomize erotic and emotional release and through them, the release and clarifying of the senses and the creative faculties — and link these, further, to Gauguin's painting. These will be ultra-sensuous detail shots, almost orgiastically rich in form and color, of flowers, foli­ age, fruit, portions of faces and bodies of men, wo­ men and children; and of the most voluptuous of Gauguin's paintings of that period . . . in that or­ der. We lead with perhaps five seconds of visual. Gauguin's voice (very quiet): Now that at last I had won my new wife, it was through her that I be­ gan to understand this Island and its mysteries. She opened for me a childlike world; — the per­ fect candor and courage of the senses. I began to know how to live — and how to paint, (p. 77) At the end of Agee's scenario, Gauguin in "deep exalta­ tion and exhaustion" still seeks the Joy and courage he be­ lieves fast becoming rationalized out of existence. And here Agee's own rather diffuse religious sense brings him to a characteristic vision. Over Gauguin's dead body Agee imposes the Christ ("split and weathered, crowned with thorns, very beautiful, profoundly victorious in utter defeat, the dying Head is fallen to the left . . ." (p. 147). It may be too much to identify Gauguin with Christ, since it places what may be thought to be merely a pseudo-religious halo around Gauguin's head and makes him a saint rather than a hero. But Agee himself is very much identified with Gauguin, at this point, it is clear; and, placed within the context of Agee's work as a whole, the vision clearly suited his conception of the meaning of life; and whether or not it is perfectly ap­ propriate -to life, it is appropriate to Gauguin. Moreover, 172 Agee sought to represent a crowning end, the indignity of life consumed in the triumph of suffering; this sense of life, much like the evocation of the ”eternal" incorruptible sources of life at the end of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is what Agee had left of his high Protestantism. His gener­ alized Christian devotionalism touches Gauguin, the faith­ ful artist. The climax of the scenario comes in Gauguin's acceptance of suffering and death, and in his estimate of his life; You see, essentially I'm a very limited and stupid man. When I left my family I was sure that was tem­ porary. And so it has gone, straight through: a steady stripping away, like the taking apart of an onion to its center. I used to have a very good o- pinion of myself. I was foolish enough to believe that I could become a savage. But in Tahiti I was Just a sympathetic tourist; and here I've become Just a crank .... I've lost even the faith in my­ self as an artist; and the desire to be one. Some of ray work is good; some is very good. Some may change the course of Art, ever so little; some may give a vision of possibility to men who suffer in a time even worse than ours. All of it is honest .... But beside the vision, it is only a glimmer; and be­ side the sublime works of art . . . (he smiles and shrugs) And now, I am going to lose my life. And yet in all this lifetime's accounting of losses, I feel a kind of peaceful Joy I had never dreamed could exist for me. I've always tried to be true to my vo­ cation, come what might. But I begin to realize that — if I could properly use your language — the real effort has always been, simply, to be true to my own soul. And that I have been and now I know the price, (p. 139) In this speech Gauguin maintains a sublime indifference to the past, in the face of death, and recognizes that his out­ ward failure — or what he takes to be the relative inade­ quacy of his success — matters little next to the effort to 173 be faithful to the imaginative possibilities he was given to see in the world. The last third of Agee’s scenario brings Gauguin to this statement; it represents his experi­ ence of the Marquesas, his conviction and sentencing to jail, and his death before he can lodge an appeal. Gauguin talks with Toika, an old man who had been a sorcerer, who remem­ bers the old days of simple sensuous freedom and who suffers from inhuman treatment at the hands of the French. At this point Agee is less interested in the frustrated attempt of Gauguin to save the natives from their masters than in the "steady stripping away," the descent into a consuming suffer­ ing, that Gauguin experiences as his life slips away into sickness and approaching death. It is easy to sentimental­ ize him here; but Agee avoids this. He looks at Gauguin as Gauguin had looked at himself, with his generous talent for stripping away from his sense of himself what was merely the extravagance of his genius. Approaching death Gauguin claims the impersonality that genius somehow unfailingly appropri­ ates; he is no longer a bohemian, a dramatist of the self, or even the man who had sought to make himself one with the world, in an enabling wholeness of spirit. He is an old, sick, stripped man, who can barely experience any more the ecstasy of creation, a man who has wrenched an agonized tri­ umph from an insufferable world. The generalized Christianity at the end, as it is evoked at Gauguin's death, is lushly sensuous; the crucified Christ, 174 "split and weathered, crowned with thorns, very beautiful, profoundly victorious in defeat," is superimposed above Gauguin's simple grave. Honey seeps through the wooden Corpus. It is as if we were at a festival of the Palms: "they seem to march triumphantly toward us, proudly, yet in tremendous successive lines bowing their heads like line upon line of surf, flashing the light" (p. 147). A giant white flower blooms out of the darkness, suffusing every­ thing with its fragrance and freshness. The symbolic richness of nature is the richness of grace, touching life, and affirming Gauguin's quest for re­ creation and wholeness. The end, then, according to Agee's vision, is properly touched by light. The arrogance as well as the idealism have disappeared into the consuming end, the effort to prove faithful to the deepest consciousness of the inner life and its unappeasable craving for a blessed condi­ tion of the spirit. Agee concludes that such an effort de­ serves a consecrated end, an image of saintly dignity, and he becomes, surrendering to it, Gauguin's witness. Indeed, what Agee seeks to represent is well pointed up in a comment on Gauguin's painting, "Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ," by the art critic, Robert Goldwater. The pose and the glance reveal those qualities of actor (at times of cabotin) which were innate, and which Gauguin played up. The accompanying Crucifixion is no accident. By it Gauguin sure- ly means to suggest suffering, as he did in tie self-portrait dedicated to Van Gogh and inscribed 175 "Les Misérables." There is here perhaps both bravado and egotism. But in another sense there is also humility. This is a symbolic portrait, in which his head is no longer than that of an individual, but stands for all neglected artists who in a fashion not unlike religious devotion, suffer and sacrifice for an ideal of art.l^ It is obviously difficult speculating about the effec­ tiveness of an unproduced film scenario; but the last scenes of the scenario, 1 believe, suggest what are likely its weaknesses. Until that climactic, consecrated end, with its radiance and beauty, Agee had followed Gauguin, episode after episode, on his pilgrimage; He had managed to account for all the important episodes of Gauguin's life after the decision to leave his Job and seek a career as a painter. And since the "inner direction" of Gauguin's life, after that decision, shaped everything he did, of necessity the episodes impinged on one another; the narrative direction of the scenario coincided with the inner direction of the biography of Gauguin, at once inward toward self-discovery and outward toward Involvement, finally in desperation, with the Europeanized culture he found on the islands. Nevertheless, there is something schematic and unneces­ sarily retrospective about the point of view from which Agee sees the unfolding of Gauguin's life. Perhaps he surrenders too slavishly to the image of Gauguin that moves him, and 14 Robert Goldwater, Paul Gauguin (New York, 1956). The quotation is from the frontispiece. 176 that he wishes to honor, as he does at the end, in a kind of beatific vision. It is almost as if Agee were conducting a memorial service for Gauguin. He opens on Gauguin’s death; when the camera moves away from the body, preparing for a flashback to Gauguin's decision to renounce the business world, it "is so moved and cut as to make the sign of the

Cross over Gauguin." (p. 6). We then move to a scene with his wife and children; then to ArleS with Van Gogh; then to Tahiti (the first trip); then to Paris, etc. Half-way through the scenario, during the Tahitian adventure, Gauguin becomes the narrator-writer, using the words he wrote in Noa Noa. This device makes for a certain actuality, but also for a possibly embarrassing literalness. For example, Gauguin speaks (as he sits writing) of his decision to leave Titi, whom he concludes cannot help him know the wild past of Ta­ hiti. I felt she could not teach me any of the things I wanted to know. I told myself that here in the country, I would find what I was seeking; it would only be necessary to choose. Thus at last I have begun to cure myself of civilization, and initiate myself into savagery, (p. 6 7) It is revealing that the dream sequences persuade us of the anxiety Gauguin felt, whereas the set speeches, taken from Noa Noa, in which the awesome determination of the hero is represented tend by comparison to be merely flatly corro- bative of the movement toward release we see in Gauguinb life. In any case, a final judgment may well hold that Ageeb ' 177 conception of Gauguin as artist-salnt forced him to write too many self-consciously "significant" speeches into the scenario, and that his representation of Gauguin's suffering in the real world of good and evil is the most convincing and rewarding aspect of Noa Noa.

With the exception of Noa Noa the scenarios all have something to say about melodrama and the convention of melo­ drama. They spoof a piece of incredible melodrama, some­ times gently and tenderly, or use the melodrama and string images on it, as in The Night of the Hunter, or turn the mel­ odrama on itself, collapsing it into anti-climax, as in The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky. And the style is much the same. The style of The African Queen, for instance, is shaped by the camera's moving rapidly from surface to surface; there are no heavy selves that need plumbing and revealing; in­ stead, manner and gesture that need visual representation,. and a kind of Protestant fantasy (or myth) that needs blow­ ing up. In The African Queen Agee is concerned with balan­ cing what is serious against what is comic, and with always leaving room for a good deal of downright low comic, quasi­ vaudeville humor. The surface of the movie is to be hot, clear, and moving, constantly shuffling between people and objects, evading any stand-still seriousness, and always playing off the comic against the vehicle — romantic melo­ drama. Withal, the metamorphosis of Charlie and Rose is to 178 be treated with respect: Charlie and Rose become human be­ ings, saved from their wasted lives, free to become respec­ table in a more humane way. In The Night of the Hunter Agee dealt with another melo­ dramatic tale, a terrifying and brooding allegory on guilt and innocence, good and evil, appearance and reality. The vehicle had the myth built in, and Agee did not tamper with it. The aim was to take the vehicle as far as it would go in filmic terms, and to duplicate its affirmations of inno­ cence and endurance. In this case the myth had a pair of allegorical figures who became antagonists, and there was little underneath them in the way of psychological complex­ ity to cause the film-maker trouble. The main problem was to condense speeches, alter the time sequence of the novel, and create a visual style. None of these problems proved insuperable; and particularly the visual style could easily adapt itself to the dream images of the novel, which were translated into the hand-me-down expressionism of the film. The psychopathic preacher of the novel had simply to be visu­ alized in order to be convincing, although the scenarist would have to be careful not to turn him into a parody of the &evil. The almost subconscious terror that he embodies could have an exact outward filmic form, as could the figure of the earth-Mother who rescues the children from the ter­ rors of the night and affirms their incommunicable innocence and endurance. 179 In Noa Noa Agee obviously identified himself with Gauguin, so much so that his scenario would be in effect a kind of epic tribute to a genius who had found himself a human being only to be hounded to death in a corrupt soci­ ety. But except in this scenario, Agee worked with comic and melodramatic plots that demanded of the scenarist a film style that would preserve, parody, or gently burlesque them. This was particularly true, for instance, of The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, although not so true of The Blue Hotel. In adapting "The Blue Hotel" Ages was faced with a story about a man prepared to be the victim of his fantasies, which find their embodiment in a melodramatic convention no longer applicable to the society in which he finds himself. The problem here was somewhat different, but again the hea­ vily visual emphasis of Crane's style well lent itself to filmic representation, and in particular to the projection of the Swede's fantasy in swift cuts, fade outs, and juxta­ positions of images. In the Swede's case there is the inward fantasy, at one with his sense of the terror of life, and it moves the Swede toward self-destruction. Agee had to balance the inward ter­ ror against the seemingly innocent and reasonable behavior of the other characters, and at the same time suggest how the terror was precipitated by the environment (including the other characters) in which the story took place. But he 180 did not have to get "Inside" the Swede, since the Swede's fantasy imposed itself on the action. Nor did he have to get "inside" the other characters with whom he had to deal. Forester's innocent blend of melodrama and romance in The African Queen allowed Agee the freedom to concentrate on a developing line of adventure in which shifts of character did not have to be accounted for in terms of individual psy­ chology, and hence the scenario could arrive at a straight­ forward affirmation of values in which Agee deeply believed, such as courage and endurance. In short, Agee had stories to adapt in which the conventional elements were strong, whether mythic and allegorical, or comic and melodramatic. And he could allow these elements to carry the action, while he would exaggerate iraplausibilities, as in The African Queen, so to impose a gentle current of parody on it; or, as in The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky, allow the burlesque of western melodrama its fully anti-climatic resolution. One further thing ought to be observed. Agee designed a highly mobile camera into all the movie scenarios; in fact, in % e African Queen it darts very quickly, freezing some moments of comic business in close-ups that milk them almost beyond what they can stand, or lighting up faces in a series of rapidly moving shots. The comic-impressionistic tech­ nique frames the action as if it were a game, and views the I8l characters as types whom we observe from the outside.Of course, the characters are types, and for this reason the movement of the film can be at times very racy, at times al­ most stopped, and at times close to the movement of slap­ stick. The story Agee took over from Forester freed him from having to be realistic; and the important thing then became the arc of the adventure — the fairy tale which would affirm imagination, courage, and endurance, and at whose end Rose and Charlie would gain their real selves. Moreover, what makes The African Queen first-rate entertain­ ment is precisely the double perspective that the movie manages to sustain: the gentle comedy constantly asserts itself against the melodramatic adventure. It would be fatuous to argue that the scenarios belong in any category of work which can be called popular culture. The African Queen and The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky come clos­ est; they have an uncommon charm and tenderness and poignan­ cy that would well befit popular art of all varieties. Even when Agee gaily satiricizes his characters, he is obviously fond of them. Scratchy may be a pseudo-villain, but he is also a pathetic old man, and Agee reveals the pathos of his situation.

15 Gilbert Seldes. for example, is troubled by the low comedy of the film: "But so much is sacrificed to the easy laugh that the whole picture becomes, like the characters, a brilliant series of surface impressions, exciting most of the time, but without depth and distinction." "John Huston in Darkest Africa," Saturday Review, XXXV (Feb. 23, 1952), 30. 182 Our temptation, I should suppose. Is to find all of this Inconsequential; the human condition Is wider than the likes of Charlie and Rose Indicate. Exactly. Charlie and Rose are "unreal," and German Central Africa of the novel and film Is a mythical country, a fairyland populated by mis­ sionary English, uncertainly converted blacks, and stiffly disciplined German military types. Charlie and Rose receive a beguiling metamorphosis but they are by no means Individu­ alized. They are purely heroes of adventure, as unlike real people as the prim, fearless spinster and the Immoral cock­ ney Islander under whose character they appear during the opening scenes of the film. But their unreality, and the cle­ ver unreality of the film as a whole, serves the modest and attractive virtues In*which serious literary criticism refu­ ses to believe except when they arise out of some mortal con­ flict — measured by what opposes them. In The African Queen the opposition Is the wooden Germans, a movie version of slt- tlng-ducks. The film makes It easy for us to believe In the reality of courage and skill, and I should think that we would want something of this kind from popular art, and par­ ticularly from "entertainments" In which the comic styliza­ tions of character and episode prove humorously Irreverent toward the old conventions. Of course The African Queen Is not a norm of popular art, nor Is Noa Noa a norm of the so-called "serious" film. 183 There Is a familiar kind of popular art that parodies the conventions of the genre to which it appears to lay claim, but such parody is not an indispensable ingredient of genu­ inely entertaining popular art. Apparently Agee found the novel in need of a measure of parody in order to be success­ fully adapted to the screen. In any case, beneath the paro­ dy and the near-caricatures that Agee delightfully builds into the scenario, his reverence for his characters' pertin­ acity and courage registers clearly and sweetly. But what makes The African Queen popular art is that it does not make our recognition of the reality of courage, in­ genuity, and perseverance depend on our evaluating their worth in relation to anything outside the world in which they are represented. These virtues are confirmed by the results the characters get by holding to them through thick and thin. It is as simple as this. Real divertissements have a fine detachment from the real world, and very often strike us as fables or fairy tales. One can assert, of course, that the simplicity of fable or fairy tale makes for evasions, but this criticism obviously would be irrelevant for the genre romantic melodrama, and especially for the genre spoofed romantic melodrama. The evasions are author­ ized by the convention, and when they themselves are paro­ died, then there is no point at all to worrying about them. It would be more to the point to argue that the important 184 evasions are perpetrated in books which are obviously about real life — that treat of contemporary problems so to allow us to "come to grips" with them. One may suggest that Agee's scenarios have in common a certain simplicity of form, verging on parable or morality play. Agee turns The Blue Hotel into c morality play, cer­ tainly; and The Night of the Hunter as novel was already a morality play or parable. Obviously certain advantages be­ long to the scenarist who works with materials of this na­ ture. I have referred to one of them, namely that he need not worry about the vexing problem of duplicating the psy­ chological complexity of character that tends to belong to the serious novel. Hence he can create a cinematic reality wholly self-contained and distinctive to the conventions of the medium. We can see Agee doing this in The Blue Hotel and Noa Noa. In the former scenario, the whirring noises, the characters' rapidly cut glances at each other, the stret- to of flashbacks, the movement of the ritualistic dance, ape instances that show Agee using the resources of the cinema. And in Noa Noa, when Agee wishes to represent the relation between Gauguin's life and his art, he places examples of the paintings into the frame to show us the effect on his art of Gauguin's experience of personal liberation in T&hiti. Agee may have found indeed that the form most congenial to him was some version of the parable or fable. The African 185 Queen comes closest to the form of the comic fable, while The Blue Hotel and The Night of the Hunter are closest to that of the parable or morality play. Agee found that The Blue Hotel could be made into a parable whose point would be the tragic consequences of the weakness and moral fail­ ure of men. In Noa Noa, the scenario in which Agee attempts to represent a tragic pilgrimage toward fuller humanity, Gauguin’s life is seen as a cruel and awesome struggle to prove faithful to his perceptions and to his growing sense of human dignity. His death is that of an artist-hero and martyr. There are moments in both The Blue Hotel and Noa Noa when the film rhetoric that represents the experience of un­ bearable cruelty or something quite like martyrdom seems of a questionable intensity. One feels about Agee that he was anxious to bring to bear on his heroes all the imaginative resources of his beautifully devout sensibility. The result is that he tends to devour them. But this aside, the form of the parable or morality play allowed him both to create a very formalized realism and to be free enough to gain effects through using a variety of filmic means. In Noa Noa he was obviously trying to put to work everything he had learned a- bout film. But final judgments on both The Blue Hotel and Noa Noa must wait their film production. I turn now to the work that Agee wrote concurrently with the film scenarios. 186 the novel A Death In the Family and the long story The Morn­ ing Watch. I wish to claim that A Death in the Family brings to a fit conclusion Agee's concern with filmic form and its potential uses in popular art, and that the disciplined prose of the novel is in effect a tribute to what Agee htid learned as film critic and film scenarist. CHAPTER V

THE NOVELIST

(i) A Death In the Family

For Agee the world was In fact holy, of a reality to be observed, absorbed, and enjoyed — to be constantly wit­ nessed in the well-observed notation of style. In every­ thing he wrote, whether it was about the silent screen co­ medians or about the clothing worn by the sharecroppers, we sense the pressure he felt not only to be faithful to the world as he saw it, but to see it immaculately, lovingly, in commitment to its wholly real existence. Agee's difficulty with relatively complex dramatic forms is probably to be explained by this commitment, which explains also why he was little affected by the attitude to­ ward experience that became highly regarded in his time; he was little concerned with "tension," "complexity," or "iron- y," and he obviously felt no need to prove that he was tough- minded. In fact, he strikes us as a peculiarly old-fashion­ ed writer, for whom writing was above all an act of revela­ tion, a constant effort to prove faithful to the richness of observation and to fact. But Agee's sense of the richness

187 188 of the world was not a protest against the over-simplifica­ tions of bad poems or bad writers. Instead, it seems to have been an almost wholly instinctive response to the worth of the ordinary world and of ordinary human beings, begin­ ning in wonder and awe, and completed in the testimony of scrupulous style. When we measure A Death in the Family a- gainst the obsessive themes of recent American fiction, it seems a peculiarly quiet, gentle, and tender novel, without any claims on the dramatic imagination, and without any de­ sire to impress, or even to affirm anything in the least way novel or complex.^ The novel accords very well with what Lionel Trilling notes about Agee, that he sullenly refused to believe in Freud's notion of "ambivalence." Agee was obviously little Interested In attesting to the spiritual power of ambivalence or ambiguity, and his refusal to be]lew In It can be Interpreted as an Indication of the Ideal In which he did believe: to celebrate the wholeness of human lives, and to make the wholeness a continuously felt presence "A Death In the Family (New York, 1957). Citations from this texf are T3‘entlfied by page reference. 2 See Lionel Trilling, "An American Classic," The Mid- Century, No. l6 (September, I960), 3-10, reprinted with a postscript from his review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "Greatness with One Fault in ït,^' ^ n yon Review, IV (Winter 1942), 99-102. It is in the postscript that trilling ob­ serves that Agee spoke to him in disgust about Freud's con­ ception of ambivalence. Trilling makes the same observation In his review of A Death In the Family, "The Story and the Novel," The GriffTn, Vlï TJanuary l^^o), 11. 189 in the experience of the reader, and certainly at the cost of proving unfaithful to the modernist sense of fragmenta­ tion in the personal life, of good-and-evil, and of the tenu­ ousness and obliquity of experience. In A Death in the Family one can see the consequences of this ideal. It is a novel nearly anonymous, charged with the language of gesture, with Agee's steady respect for "be­ ing” as against action, for the flow of experience as against plot, narrative development, and characterization. Certain­ ly Jay's death in an automobile accident and the process of Mary's adjustment to it constitute the central event, or at least the starting point of the novel. But although what happens to Mary is obviously important, literally everything else is no less important, so that nothing in the novel seems subservient, functioning in the way of novelistic contrast, or exposition, or background detail. Probably this is the case because Agee was writing autobiographical fiction, and above all wanted to give what he remembered a kind of conse­ cration. As the novel stands, it is a collection of indivi­ dual scenes, some of which are almost set-pieces.3 And each 3 At Agee's death the novel was not yet finished, although the anonymous editors of the novel say that Agee had brought the narrative proper to a close. Several scenes remained to be adjusted to the narrative line of the novel, and these (as it turns out) are predominantly lyric and heavily Whitmanesque in style. The editors decided to italicize and to place them after Part I and II of the novel. That A Death in the Fandly is an autobiographical novel would be clear even”Tf we did not know, as we do, that Agee's given name was Jamer Rufus and that his father died in I916 when he was seven years old. See, in addition, the prose poem, "In Memory of my Father," Transi­ tion, No. 26 (1 9 3), 7 7. 190 is written not to explore a point of conflict that is at the center of the narrative, but rather so that every aspect of the experience will be honored: Aunt Hannah's wisdom and "hard" piety as well as her brother Andrew's disbelief and final rage. At its best, the style is filmic, presentation­ al, and abstractive; the meaning and significance of indivi­ dual scenes do not derive from their relation to other scenes. The whole of the meaning is in what the words evoke, in what they make us see, hear, and feel. The novel lacks, that is to say, a center, and therefore it is not able to generate a sense of novelistic movement; everything has its own care­ fully individualized quality. The first two chapters of the novel — perhaps its best chapters — illustrate, the kind of filmic flow that Agee could achieve. They represent the flow of experience between Jay and Rufus, and then between Jay and Mary, and among the chapters in the novel they are the least dramatic and the most nearly filmic and presentational. Everything that Agee notes about the characters appears measured against the si­ lence, so that the sentences move in a pure, abstracted, over­ whelmingly vivid present, the noise of the outside world hav­ ing been abolished. The result is that the characters appear luminiscent as Agee describes the precise way that Jay lays his hand on Rufus' head, or the manner in which Jay gets dressed before he leaves for his father's bedside. We do not get full-bodied portraiture but filmic impressionism, a 191 style appropriate to the celebration of being rather than to the dramatization of conflict. What we learn about Jay, for example, does not have much to do with the impact that his death makes, except insofar as Rufus' instinctive understand­ ing of his father's loneliness helps define its pathos. The emotions to which Agee is really attentive are registered be­ neath the level of the characters' awareness of themselves, and they are controlled superbly by the prose, so that there is neither false restraint nor self-indulgence. Indeed, the quietness and exactness of the prose resists the implicit sentimentality of its subject, as in the follow­ ing passage which describes something like a ritual enacted between Jay and Rufus on their trips to the city: They waited while the man came by, intruding on their privacy, and disappeared, as someone nearly always did, and then relaxed sharply into the pleasure of their privacy; but this time Rufus' father did not hum, nor did he say anything, nor even touch the rock with his hand, but sat with his hands hung between his knees and looked out over North Knoxville, hearing the restive assem­ blage of the train; and after there had been a silence for a while, raised his head and looked up into the leaves and between the leaves into the broad stars, not smiling, but with his eyes more calm and grave and his mouth strong and more quiet, than Rufus had ever seen his eyes and his mouth; and as he watched his father's face, Rufus felt his father's hand settle, without gropping or clumsiness, on the top of his bare head: it took his forehead and smoothed it, and pushed the hair backward from his forehead, and held the back of his head while Rufus pressed his head backward against the firm hand, and, in reply to that pres­ sure, clasped over his right ear and cheek, over the whole side of the head, and drew Rufus' head quietly and strongly against the sharp cloth that covered his father's body . . . . (p. 21) 192 Jay and Rufus experience an exquisite sense of dependence on each other as they sit on a rock and look down at the lights of Knoxville. The action ritualized, the prose measures its smallest dimensions, to the end that a filmic flow of pre­ cisely noted gesture communicates the underlying sadness and the father's intense need of his son. The tone of the novel as a whole (excepting for the most part the italicized passa­ ges) is shaped by Agee's scrupulous attention to the detail of gesture and sight and sound, and although this results in . some overwritten passages, the best chapters are efforts at a highly controlled objective representation and are saved from the possibly too heavy nostalgia and sense of blessed­ ness that inform the prologue, "Knoxville: Summer I9 1 5," where the biblical cadences, the incantations, and the lyric present tense are perhaps too abstractive and memorializing. When Agee tries to develop a modified stream of con­ sciousness line, the prose becomes soft, cloying, and overly musical, and Agee's heavily involved feelings sometimes ex­ press themselves in purple passages of an embarrassing quali­ ty. The prologue faithfully represents the direction of his temptation, although it is a much more successfully mannered piece of poetic prose than, say, the passages in which Jay muses in vague discomfort on his life: How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? 193 All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for? . . . Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he ever deserved; only, what­ ever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart. (p. 95) The drift of the prologue was toward an elegiac image of life — the evocation of a sense of family routine, habit, and ceremony, touched by a sense of the poignant separation of child and adult, and the mystery of human identity and isolation. The "fathers of families" are mythic fathers — one sees them from above, as God sees them: "each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns" (p. 4). They reveal their "nearly anonymous" dignity in the gestures of pantomime, and we see them through a hazy, grey, falling light, as if in an old photograph. In writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee discover­ ed himself and his subject, as well as the problem of form that plagued him whatever he wrote, outside of the film criticism and scenarios. When he tried to set down what he could of the experience, his feelings nearly overwhelmed him, so that on occasion he could do little else than rhap­ sodize. Everything in his experience of the people and the land was real and immediately compelling, yet at the same time elusive and mysterious, informed by his sense of awe. 194 As a result, Agee was led inevitably to worship, that is to say, to make everything that he touched, examined, and ho­ nored, somehow expressive. The problem of form — however much he worried it — was only a problem because he con­ ceived of his work as ideally a monument and a history (bearing on the problem of existence) rather than a group of commentaries on Walker Evans' photographs. However much a novelist wishes to create a string of photographic images, each of them testifying to his sense of "how it was," a novel cannot be made up out of a set of photographic images. When Agee came to write A Death in the Family, he had to discover at least a minimally drama­ tic and narrative dimension in his experience. Clearly he still wanted to present and memorialize the moments of bles­ sed peace and security and the scintillating visual images that he found in memory; but in addition he wanted to drama­ tize Mary Follet's coming-of-age as a human being. The two impulses, one lyric, its end pure evocation, the other dra­ matic, its end narrative action and conflict, proved to be at loggerheads with each other. There are moments of poten­ tial conflict in the novel: the pious Catholicism of Mary and her Aunt Hannah is set against the skepticism or agnos­ ticism of Joel, Mary's father, and Andrew, her brother. But these moments are not brought to climax and resolution, and in fact they are exploded in protracted verbal fencing. 195 Likewise, the various, conflicting attitudes that the fami­ ly adopts toward Jay's death, which look deceptively like the matter of a major theme, are set down only in fragments. And although Andrew's rage is well represented in the final section of the novel, by this time the family has disappear­ ed, and the action is comprehended from the point of view of the children. Apparently Agee was unable to decide how to use the hea­ vily Whitmanesque, rhapsodic passages that are so different in tone from the rest of the novel. Stylistically, one part of the novel is written in the manner of dark, musical poet- ic-prose, its subject being the children's burden of fear and anxiety; while the other part, more potentially novel- istic, its prose measured and quiet and its syntax that of ordinary language, centers on the crisis that the adults must live through. Since Agee was very much identified vrith Rufus' sense of estrangment and his attempt to adjust to the fact of his father's death, it seems logical to con­ clude that he wanted to register the action from the chil­ dren's point of view. At any rate, the book is split into two parts, each with a different point of view and tone, with the result that both suffer. When Agee's identification with Rufus is most obvious­ ly intense, Rufus appears as an image of the archetypally innocent child rather than a real child, the product of a series of desperately self-conscious Whitmanesque images. 196 his innocence inviting outrage from the neighborhood boys. He looks too much like a child created by a writer obsessed with the end of innocence. But when the action is clearly registered from Rufus' point of view, and the language is that of ordinary prose, Agee is able to create fiction rath­ er than pseudo-dream sequences. For instance, there is a powerful scene during which the priest. Father Jackson, ad­ ministers to Mary's grief, and the children, moved by dark intimations of tension and trouble, eavesdrop but cannot clearly make out the voices they hear. They are stirred, however, by a sense that some damage is being done their mother as she yields to Father Jackson's hypnotic tone. The priest allays Mary's doubts, muffles her anxiety, and, as it were, mesmerizes her, so that she returns to her chil­ dren, all passion spent. I quote Agee at his best, as the children overhear the colloquy among Mary, Aunt Hannah, and Father Jacksnn; She never understood him nor believed him but she realized, with puzzlement, that now the man was being nice, though she did not even want him to be nice to her mother, she did not want him to be anything, to anybody, anywhere. But it was clear to both of them that things were better now than they had been before; they could hear it in his voice, which at once enchanted and obscurely disturbed them, and they could hear it in the voices of the two women, which now and again, when he seemed to pause for breath, chimed in with a short word or two, a few times with whole sentences. Both their voices were more tender, more alive, and more inhuman, than they had ever heard them before; and this remoteness from hu­ manity troubled them. They realized that there 197 was something to which their mother and their great-aunt were devoted, something which gave their voices peculiar vitality and charm, which was beyond and outside any love that was felt for them .... And they felt that although everything was better for their mother than it had been a few minutes before, it was far worse in one way. For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently. But now she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transi­ tion to prayer was the moment and mark of her surrender, (p. 2 9 8) But except when the children seek to comprehend the world from which the adults have excluded them, they are too obviously the offspring of Agee's compulsions. And they re­ spond to their father's death in a modified stream of con­ sciousness style that, as far as mental notation goes, is thoroughly unoriginal. Here is Catherine; What it was was that he wasn't there. Her mother wasn't either, but she was upstairs. He wasn't even upstairs. He was coming home last night but he didn't come home and he wasn't coming home eith­ er, and her mother felt so awful she cried, and Aunt Hannah wasn't saying anything. Just making all that noise with the toast and big loud sips with the cof­ fee and swallowing, grrmmp, and then the same thing over again and over again, scary . . . it meant it was all over and there was nothing to do about it or say or even ask, and then she would take another bite of toast as hard and shivery as gritting your teeth, and start the whole thing all over again. Her mother said he wasn't coming home ever any more. (pp. 256-257) The technique is to reiterate and conjoin apparently simple, unyielding facts, to the end that they are reduced practically to nonsense symbols, and then to catch the struggle of the child's mind, necessarily frustrated, to break through their 198 meaningless factuality. Much the same technique is observa­ ble in Rufus' interior monologue; He died last night while I was asleep and now it was already morning. He has already been dead since way last night and I didn't even know until I woke up. He has been dead all night while I was asleep and now it is morning and I am awake but he is dead and he will stay right on being dead all afternoon and all night and all tomorrow while I am asleep again and wake up again and go to sleep again and he can't come back home ever any more but I will see him once more before he is taken away. Dead now. He died last night while I was asleep and now it is al­ ready morning, (pp.263-2 6 4) Rufus is possessed by the naked realization that his father is dead, but he experiences neither shock nor disbelief, and he has not yet come even as far as recognition. There is only the paralyzing realization, the mind being unable to absorb the fact that moves, as it were, at the surface of the mind, touching but not altering consciousness, existing merely in the reiteration of the phrase, "He died last night." Although Agee succeèds in illuminating the crisis of the adults, he has difficulty extending it narratively. A- gain, it is fragmented rather than unified, and occasionally it thins dangerously, so that Agee is reduced to contri­ vance. An unrealized sense of the significance of their experience haunts the sections in which the adults figure, and this is possibly the result of Agee's efforts to sv^- gest that unsuspected mysteries belong to it, challenging Joel and Andrew, the rationalists and non-believers, and 199 confirming Mary and Aunt Hannah, who are able to surrender to intuition and mystery. Jay Follet is killed, as Mary puts it, "in his strength" (p. 174), as he drives home from a visit to what his drunk­ en brother Ralph has mistakenly led him to believe is the deathbed of his father. Jay's death is an extraordinary death, it is touched by a sense of the miraculous, and it inspires awe and wonder. Except for a.slight bruise on the chin, he is unmarked in the automobile accident that kills him, dying immediately in a sharp convulsion of the brain. The obvious point is that death is gratuitous and unpredic­ table, and that the small happiness human beings manage to create is terribly vulnerable. But Agee tries to make a dramatic episode at this point. Mary feels Jay's presence in the house, entering the children's rooms, and seeking comfort. Her intuition is the occasion of dispute, for her father will not believe in it, having concluded that he must hold to his rationalist faith. He is something of a scien­ tific liberal, and his daughter's Catholicism has always seemed inconceivable to him. But what matter, after all, that Mary is not her father's daughter, or that not every­ one is hospitable to intuition? Again, one suspects that Agee had conceived a novel that was intended to deal with such matters at length, and that in the novella he finally wrote they were perforce reduced to fragments.^ ------il On this point, see Leslie Fiedler, "Encounter with Death," The New Republic, CXXXVII (December 9, 1957), 25-26 200 On Jay's death, Agee represents the process of Mary’s adjustment, her nearly crazed attempts to come to terms with it so to endure. As she waits with Aunt Hannah for news of Jay, all the time knowing that he is dead, she thinks she can prove worthy of what she must live through. As long as Agee represents the sheer incongruous minutia that fill the hours during which Mary and Aunt Hannah wait, he is success­ ful; but he wants to do more than represent the painful movement of Mary's adjustment to and final acceptance of the death. He seeks to dramatize something like a spiri­ tual triumph — Mary’s coming-of-age as a human being. But he does not render very deeply the trial by suffering that Mary undergoes. Where there ought to be a sense of devel­ opment, of gathering momentum, there are only several fine­ ly written paragraphs that represent Mary at moments of in­ tense realization, or as he is shattered by a sudden move­ ment of terrible anguish. Moreover, these are somewhat mi­ nimized in their effect by the interpolated materials that Agee’s editors did not want to waste. Mary’s father says of her suffering: "It’s a kind of test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all"(p. 156). But after Mary experiences the presence of Jay in the house, Agee says about her: "And her heart 201 was restored from Its desolation, into warmth and love and almost into wholeness" (p. 194). She experiences painful lapses of faith, but they are stages in the fullness of her passion, so to speak. She finds herself saying, at last: "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit," after which she is able to move beyond her suffering toward acceptance, and then ever beyond acceptance: She thought: this is simply what living is; I never realized before what it is. She thought : now I am more nearly a grown member of the human race; bearing children, which had seemed so much, was Just so much apprenticeship. She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the strength that human beings have, to endure; she loved and revered all those who had suffered, even those who had failed to endure. She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God. She thought that she had grown up almost overnight. She thought that she had realized all that was in her soul to realize in the event, and when at length the time came to put on her veil, leave the bedroom she had shared with her husband, leave their home, and go down to see him for the first time since his death and to see the long day through, which would cover him out of sight for the duration of this world, she thought that she was firm and steady, (pp. 304- 305) It may well be that Agee's characteristic valuation of human beings necessitated Mary's sense of "extraordinary hope," and that his need to believe in the virtue and beauty of or­ dinary life forced him to identify her endurance with almost a biological act of the spirit. People wither away in suffer­ ing only to emerge and grow; the insufferable conditions of life are found to make up the happy occasions of growth. Some 202 such meaning is the burden of A Death in the Family; but it is a meaning that is rather ill-imposed on the novel, since for a good part of the second section (when the family is at the center of things) Agee really seems interested in the sheer movement of Mary's suffering, particularly as it is set off Incongruously by strange moments of exhilaration that take her mind off what she is living through, and by the whole wayward and unpredictable process of ordinary life: Ralph's maudlin self-pity, for example, and the gentle, com- mensensical utterances of Mary's hard-of-hearing mother — a character, by the way, whom Agee treats affectionately but whom he over-uses for certain kinds of wry or mildly ironi­ cal effect. It is no accident that at the end of Part II, when the drama of the adults is actually complete, Agee re­ turns to the children, and that Part III is concerned almost solely with them. Agee came back, that is to say, to him­ self, and conceived the story anew from the point of view that he found most natural and sympathetic, and that allowed him to represent Rufus' relationship to the world of adults. Agee had at his disposal the materials of a novella, and these could have been shaped and severely delimited to a three-part arrangement: the registering of a shock that Mary cannot support; her discovery that somehow she can sup­ port it; and the change this discovery works on her. But apparently Agee wanted to write a novel about his family, not 203 merely a story about Mary's comlng-of-age. At any rate, his essentially religious and romantic sensibility was ill at ease in a form that, although it can represent or accommo­ date moments of nearly sacramental intuition, and a variety of poetic effect, nonetheless is at least conventionally de­ pendent on narrative movement, accumulation, and growth, as well as on a fairly well-sustained point of view. Agee was able to celebrate a series of compelling ima­ ges, or a flow of feeling, with marvellous effect, and there­ fore able to prove faithful to a sense of his past from which had been abstracted everything that might have proved unruly, or gritty, or simply difficult to absorb, as it were, photo­ graphically — all the possibly unaccommodatable stuff of ambivalence, or at least of mixed feeling. The result is that A Death in the Family has a kind of parabolic signifi­ cance, and even universal import, but no achieved weight and depth, movement and development. What is potentially novel- istic exists in fragments, and these are anyway less impor­ tant to Agee than the celebration of feeling — the evocation of a poignantly felt connection between father and son, or the representation of the sacred routine of family life as a child experiences it from the distance that his smallness opens up between himself and his family. As far-as the doc­ trinal meaning of the novel is concerned, it is clear that it is given Agee by his wish, so much inseparable from his 204 humanistic faith, to affirm the hidden sources of energy and strength that exist in human beings which enable them to en­ dure the ordinary catastrophes of life. Judged as a novelist, Agee's limitations are self-evi­ dent. His vision of life was shaped by a strong nostalgic and lyric impulse, and given his manifest need to ennoble and celebrate, and his heavily pictorial imagination, he could not create in the conventional modes of the novel. Even the style of the first chapters of A Death in the Family, where the prose is quiet, scrupulous, and objective, and where the nostalgia is disciplined or subdued altogether by Agee's dedication to detail — even here the style is still clearly that of a poet. The problem of form that Agee encountered in writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was not solved ; the division in the hovel between the objectlye and subjective indicates as much. Apparently Agee had difficulty finding forms in which his unorthodox poetic talent could be embodied. Certainly his interest in documentary forms suggests that he sought a relationship to a subject that allowed him to evoke a quality of feeling or the texture of a moment for something already visually established — as firmly established as the past re­ ality that he wished to consecrate in A Death in the Family.^ ^In the last paragraph I am indebted to some remarks by Irving Howe made during a WGBH-FM (Boston) talk on A Death in the Family, Feb. 2, 1958. 205 (11) The Morning Watch

The predicament of Richard, the twelve-year old boy In The Morning Watch, for all the somewhat needlessly baroque 6 detail of the story. Is simple and clear-cut. Standing a Good Friday watch In the chapel of his school, Richard seeks to meditate on the agony of Christ, but repeatedly he catch­ es himself meditating on himself meditating the agony of Christ. When he comes to the line of the prayer, "Within Thy Wounds hide me," for example, he cannot help thinking of a "rawly Intimate glimpse" he once had of a girl climbing a tree; and when he Inwardly censures a schoolmate for his over­ ly dramatic piety, he recalls guiltily that a year earlier he himself had sought a kind of conspicuously Inconspicuous suffering, forlornness, and melancholy, and that he had dreamt of sainthood and even of crucifixion. Again and again Richard tries to break free of the In­ ordinate self-consciousness that brings him to the edge of blasphemy and to gross demonstrations of pride. But his Ima­ gination Is wayward, and he constantly finds himself distrac­ ted by fantasy, or by his own stringently literal readings of prayers, or by the helpless seriousness of his devotion. His very Intensity of spirit paradoxically makes true contrition and self-abnegation largely Impossible. Repeatedly Richard

6 The Mornlr^ Watch (Boston, 1951). Citations from this text are Identified bypage reference. 2 Ç 6 fails to achieve the perfectly selfless Identification with Christ's agony that he seeks, and his sacramental medita­ tions end in his own sense of disabling anxiety, spiritual defeat, and a terrible inward emptiness. He is prideful, he concludes, even when momentarily he achieves a proper sense of his evil or wickedness, since then he is too much aware of having achieved it. He discovers, then, the paradoxes of faith and the need for self-transcendence. In the first section of the story Richard rises from bed at three forty-five on the morning of Good Friday after hav­ ing vowed "in hidden vainglory" to remain awake the entire night, unlike the disciples who "gave way to sleep on this night of all nights in their life, leaving Him without one friend in His worst hour . . . ." The story opens, then, with a reference to his pride. He greets the day with "tears of contrition, of humility and of a hunger to be worthy ..." (p. 3). He is momentously aware of the nature of the day; it makes up a trial of his devotion, and he wishes it to answer fully ta his need to know Christ's suffering in his own penance and submission: "0 God, he silently prayed, in solemn and festal exaltation: make me to know Thy suffering this day. 0 make me to know Thy dear Son's suffering this day" (p. 5). Richard's need to know Christ'a agony in a kind of ra­ vishing concreteness is introduced in the first pages, and 207 of course it provides the background against which Richard's subsequent sense of failure, his increasing frustration, and his final release from extreme self-consciousness takes place. In the first section, moreover, are introduced minor themes that play a significant part in the second and third sections, and which become interwoven with the image of the locust and the snake, and of Christ crucified, that occupy the fore­ ground of the third section. For example, Richard finds it difficult to recreate mentally the image of the crucifixion, and his difficulties mount during the ordeal of his watch in the chapel, an ordeal that makes up the matter of the second section of the story. Richard's nominal friends, Kobe Gullum and Jimmy Toole, of whom he is envious for their rough, care­ less ways and who have nicknamed him "Socraktes," begin the day in blasphemy; their forthright profanity contrasts with Richard's eager and devotional sensibility, but Richard bad­ ly needs their acceptance. In the third section, Richard gains their acceptance, and he momentarily becomes their lea­ der. The sacred and the profane, Richard's spiritual needs and his social needs, are brought together repeatedly and are kept steadily in view. Of special importance in the first section is the image of Richard's dead father, which is associated in his mind with the special solemnity, the

"strange stillness and power in the air" of the day (p. 9). Lastly, as the boys leave their dormitory for the chapel. 208 the "aliveness" of the spring night registers on Richard, and his response here prepares the way for the sense of re­ lease he later experiences as he moves through it: He had forgotten all about the shoes he carried and now that unexpectedly, for the first time this year,' he felt the ground against the bare soles of his feet it was as if, fumbling among clothes in a dark closet, he had put his hand on living flesh. Even though the ground in this schoolyard was skimmed with dusty gravel, its aliveness soared through him like a sob and lift­ ed his eyes in wonder upon the night. There was no moon and what few stars were out, were made faint by a kind of smiling universal milky si­ lence, not fog, or even the lightest kind of mist, but as if the whole air and sky were one mild supernal breath, (pp. 12-1 3) The first section introduces, then, the motifs of a story with the texture of a poem. Recurring images bind the story together, and in the third section, when Richard emerges from what is in effect his baptismal, and identi­ fies himself easily and almost proudly with suffering and death, they are fused together. In the third section there is enacted Richard's rites de passage, his movement from the world of the school and of his helpless fantasy life to a new world where he may take some simple pride in himself, and where his father may be thought finally to be dead. In the chapel during the second part of the story, as Richard prepares to pray, he identifies the death of Christ with the death of his father: . . . and at the instant of stepping into this hot and fragrant gold, going upon one knee and gazing upon the blind rondure of the monstrance and the thousand-pointed blossoming of fire and flower, his 209 heart was lifted up and turned vague and shy as the words broke within him, upon each other, God: Death; so that the two were one. Death; Dead, the word prevailed; and before him, still beyond all other stillness, he saw as freshly as six years before his father's prostrate head and, through the efforts to hide it, the mortal blue dent in the impatient chin .... Dead, the word came again, and shutting his eyes he prayed swiftly for his father the prayer of all his childhood, God bless daddy and keep him close to Thee and may light perpetual shine upon him. Amen; and casually, obliviously, as a trout into shadow, the image and memory vanished. It is Our Lord's death today, he said to himself, but at this moment he could see neither face, that of his father, or that of his Lord; only the words returned, God: Death, (p, 28-29) The identification is natural enough, yet its effect is to prevent Richard from experiencing the reality to which he so eagerly wishes to give himself. He is in its grip, and only after he kills and is blessed with the rewards of his initiation, can Richard free himself of the obsessive image of "the mortal blue dent in the impatient chin," But at that point, as far as the story as a whole is concerned, the problem is that he may be too free, free of everything that in the first two parts of the story constituted him as a person,? It is in the second section, in addition, where Richard helplessly remembers, and vividly recreates, the gross forms of his pride: his quest for self-abasement, his imagination of possible sainthood, and his efforts at self-mortification. 7 On this point, see the excellent remarks by P, W, rupee, "Pride of Maturity," The Nation, CLXXII (April 28, 1951), 401, 210 all of which culminated in his wish to be crucified. Richard's boyish fantasies represent themselves to his mind: "There he hung, the iron bars and edged slats of the bed acutely painful against the flesh and bone alike; but he made no com­ plaint, Rather, his eyes were fixed steadfastly upon the expiring eyes ofhis crucified Lord, and his own suffering was as naught" (p. Ij.8), His prideful fantasies and his intol­ erable self-consciousness make him appear a sensitive and pre­ cocious child. But obviously he possesses the virtues that are the other side of the coin of his vices: there is a beautifully serious yearning for submission and knowledge inseparable from the histrionics and (as Richard interprets it) the sinful sense of self, Agee relentlessly dramatizes the fantasies, Richard imagines himself gaining new respect from his friends and teachers who witness his crucifixion; the football coach looks at him newly, and Richard knows that "even if it was no more than politeness , , * he would never be lastagain, when they chose up sides," Hence, the archetypal fears of the young boy for his manhood (he takes music lessons and is good at languages) and his need for admiration from his friends are dramatized as they converge on an event of the highest seriousness and grandeur, and from which Richard hopes to derive sublime fulfillment. Again and again, instead of gaining fulfillment, however, Richard is brought to knowledge of his sinfulness, of his "inordinate heart": 211 Now he remembered the images and emotions into which he had awakened, so acutely, that they were almost his again; but now in some way they had hardened, they stayed at some distance from him, and he began to realize that during this entire half-hour his mind had been wandering; there had been scarcely one moment of prayer or of realiza­ tion. (pp. 6 0-6 1) Even his most apparently sincere and deeply experienced mo­ ments of contrition are damaged, he finds, by his conscious­ ness of his experience; temptations crowd him, and he is caught in a vicious circle: "Everything goes wrong, he real­ ized. Everything anyone can ever do for himself goes wrong. Only His Mercy .... Only His Mercy can be any help." The activity of imagination, paradoxically inseparable from tra­ ditional Christian meditation, leads him to an insufferable self-consciousness, damaging to genuine humility and penance. He tries to pray: Let me Just try to be good, don't let me feel good. Don't let me even know if I'm good. Just let me try. And in this humility, aware that it was of a true and pure kind which was new to him, he felt a flash of relief, well-being, pride: and tightening his shut eyes, cried out in despair within himself. There it is againi 0 God make it go Away. Make it not mean anything. O' God wïïaT~ T" can't help, please forgive it. (pp. T 9-6o) At the end of the second section, Richard leaves the chapel, having gained partial spiritual fulfillment and feeling exhausted — "empty and idle." He concludes that there is nothing more he.can do, and a strange inner peace­ fulness touches him, so that he state of being is analagous 212 to "the dead hours" that Christ experiences between the Judgment and His death. As Richard meditates on the still point between life and death, he imagines the triumph of the resurrection: "And then the rich raidmorning and the blind­ ing blaze of Easter. *Tis the Spring of Souls today, Christ hath burst His prison, and from three days' sleep in Death, like a Sun hath risen" (p. 84). And at this point it is clear that Richard, eager for release and transformation, and having lived through his repeated failures of disciplin­ ed meditation, will emerge from the prison of his self-con­ sciousness and achieve a new state of being. Symbolically, he moves from the darkness of the chapel and the overpower­ ing odor of the dying flowers that surround the altar, into the Spring night, which is the sign of new life and energy, as well as of Christ's triumph. Indeed, the figure of the risen Christ dominates the last part of the story, as the symbol of the release of spirit in triumph. The release that Richard finally experiences is something like its pure­ ly human counterpart. O The third section is heavily symbolic, Hobe, Jimmy, and Richard leave the chapel and decide to take a swim. Richard experiences very intensely the quickening spring night. Discovering a locust shell, he sees it as an image --- Q For a close analysis of the symbols in the third part of the story, see John Phillipson, "Character, Theme, and Symbol in 'The Morning Watch,'" Western Humanities Review, ‘XV (Autumn 1 9 6), 1 359-367, on whom I have drawn. 213 of crucifixion and suffering, and (as he contemplates it) his mind is moved to a sense of the huge expanse of histori­ cal time. He crosses himself; "With veneration, talon by talon, he re-established the shell in its grip against the rigid bark" (p. 100). Later, Richard dives deep into the water, experiencing a "fatal exhilaration" and "an ardent and serene energy," and as he holds his breath so to suffer and to know the suffering of Christ, he comes close to tak­ ing his life, finally to emerge with a sense of intense pleasure in his bodily existence and with "thankful wonder" that he is alive. Immediately he sees a snake which has just emerged from underneath its old skin, and the snake be­ comes an almost too obvious symbol of change and transforma­ tion: In every wheaten scale and in all his barbaric patterning he was new and claar as gems, so gal­ lant and sporting against the dun, he dazzled, and seeing him, Richard was acutely aware how sensitive, proud and tired he must be in his whole body, for it was clear that he had just struggled out of his old skin and was with his first return of strength venturing his new one. (pp. 107-1 0 8) But the snake is not only a symbol of change and transforma­ tion; he embodies everything that is vital, dangerous, and primitively beautiful. Hobe aims a rock at the snake, but Richard momentarily prevents him from striking, feeling "some­ thing new . . . which he could not understand" (p. 1 0 9). Fi­ nally, after Hobe and Jimmy bungle the job of killing the 214 snake, Richard finishes it off, squatting beside the snake and pounding at its head with a small rock: . . . but he cared only for one thing, to put as quick an end as he could to all this terrible, ruined, futile writhing and unkillable defiance, and at length he struck and dazed, and struck and missed, and struck and broke the head which nevertheless lifted senilely, the tongue flittering and the one remaining eye entering his own eye like a needle; and again, and the head lay smashed and shifting among its debris; and again, and it was flattened against the stone, though still the body, even out beyond the earlier wound, lashed, lay resting, trembling, lashed, (p. 110) Richard gains the respect of Hobe and Jimmy, and of course he gains a sense of new power: he is newly baptized with the blood of the snake, and decides that he will not wash the blood off his hand. Agee makes the meaning of the ritual very clear; the veins in Richard's arm stand out like those of a man; he has achieved the promise of manhood, and likewise he has allayed all doubts that his friends might have had about his masculinity. Equally important, he has found release from sinful self-consciousness, in a moment of physical courage almost orgiastic, and certainly baptizing and redeeming. The pattern is almost too clear, reminding us of the properties of the genre in which Agee worked. When the ritual of the killing of the snake is over, it is past seven oclock. Richard remembers Christ: "He would not start carrying the Cross until nine" (p. Il6). And as he passes the tree on which he had left the locust shell, he 215 detaches the shell and places it in his pocket; presumably it is the outward sign of his knowledge of suffering; The day lifted ahead of him very long and hard, a huge unshaded hill. The climbing of it would go on in the heavy sun without rest throughout this livelong day and for ever so long as he might be alive and there at the top there was dying: His, his; so hard and so long. (p. Il8) He seems to have achieved at last a natural and spontaneous identification with Christ in the recognition of human mor­ tality. And although he is reminded once more of his dead father when he thinks of the snake alive in the bellies of the hogs to which he has been tossed, the meaning of death has changed; it has become a fact that gives the boy a sense of his kinship with the world, and he gives it simple recog­ nition and acceptance: When the boys turned from the sty he followed them toward the Main Building carrying, step by step, with less difficulty, the diminishing weight in his soul and body, his right hand hanging jith a feel­ ing of subtle enlargement at his thigh, his left hand sustaining, in exquisite protectiveness, the bodiless shell which rested against his heart, (p. 120) At the end, then, Richard is free of his compulsions; the burden of what he knows is felt to be the necessary bur­ den of his emerging manhood. He has experienced both physi­ cal release and identification with Christ. Furthermore, he has won a place for himself with Hobe and Jimmy. At the be­ ginning of the story when he had prepared to stand his Good Friday watch the meaning of Christ's agony and sacrifice had eluded him because every death was but the death of his 216 father. At the end of the story, presumably he has exor­ cised the father, and In so doing a phase of his life has come to an end and he may face his manhood less encumbered by the past. So the story ends in quiet triumph, as Richard stands a distance (perhaps too great a distance) from the boy he was at the beginning of the story, when he was aware of having failed to keep his vow to remain awake throughout the night of Christ’s temptation. Yet there is something disappointing about The Morning Watch. The symbolic resolution enacts Richard's triumph but it is doubtful that Richard himself exists' so that we can believe in him as anything more than a surrogate for Agee's critically involved ego. The symbolic journey from the chapel into the spring night changes Richard, but the change is registered wholly in terms of image and symbol, as an assertion of what a critic of the story has called "semantic gestures."^ There is a disparity, that is to say, between our sense of the quality of an experience that is lived through and the elaborate symbolic artifice of the story. It may well be that Agee had to enact the triumph at the end, to claim maturity for the boy. It is clear that in part the story exorcises a fixation on the dead father. 9 Richard Chase, "Sense and Sensibility," The Kenyon Review, XIII (Autumn, 1951), 691. 217 Rufus in A Death In the Family has become Richard, and both suffer from the same wound. In The Morning Watch Richard's triumph gives him freedom to become himself. The splendid violence of which he finds himself capable, the ritual kil­ ling of the snake, asserts selfhood and power, and It Is the action In which his new authority as a human being Is embod­ ied. But beneath the assertion there Is little sense of the quality of the experience he has lived through, so that the masterful design of symbols In the climactic section of the story Is achieved at the cost of a certain abstractness. Richard does not quite exist; and we can conclude that the story Is not so much about the growth of a boy Into an "I" as about Agee's need to record the way In which he gained his freedom. It Is as If Agee was driven to autobiography to understand the process of his freeing himself from:the trauma of his youth that was the death of his father. In The Morning Watch It may be that the symbolic design Is a device to keep some distance between Agee and Richard, and Agee may have succeeded too well. Richard tends to be sacrificed to the design and to the sheer force of poetic Image, to the detail that threatens to create a surface so opaque that one cannot see through It to Richard. At any rate, the conclusion has the quality of being willed, as If Agee were comprehending the origins of his magnificent free­ dom to be himself. 218 (ill) The Film-Maker as Novelist

Agee as novelist was much dominated by Agee the film critic and would-be film-maker, and it is the would-be film­ maker who triumphs in the early pages of A Death in the Fam­ ily. In fact, underlying everything Agee wrote was his quest for an ideal of passionate documentary realism that he had wished to achieve in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He assumed (with the faith of the film-maker) that if he saw clearly and deeply enough, revelations would generate of themselves, and that he had but to shape the concatenation of images that his material gave him. In A Death in the Fam­ ily Agee tried, in part, to create a cinematic vision — in effect, to fill out a scenario. The early moments during which Jay and Mary are seen together are felt cinematically— gesture, movement, and atmosphere combining to give us an image of their tender regard for each other. There is little talk in the early pages; the moment-by-moment notation of how Jay and Mary appear to one another, or how Jay and Rufus find completion in one another, reveals who and what they are. Meaning and character are communicated less in what is said than in what is not said, or in what is only "present­ ed." Of course the scenes persuade because they are exqui­ sitely visualized; but more important, their visual quality yields a kind of magic. Scrupulous recording of detail yields the blend of poetry and naturalism that Agee held to be a standard for movie excellence. 219 Agee seemed to have believed that the visual accuracy of film was the proper analogue for any writing whatsoever. At least he wrote as if he were trying to approximate a filmic ideal of very carefully sustained visualization. In A > Death in the Family, for instance, the small dramatic action of the adults seems out of proportion to Agee's care­ ful representation of the qualities of style and tone that constitute them for us. The representation of the latter is available to Agee's love, while that of the former is dealt with unsurely. As long as Agee keeps the children at the center of the action or creates images that communicate the grace and poignancy of life, the novel is successful. But when he moves to the adults, he appears uncertain what to do and he is able to evoke only a sense of controlled hysteria and sudden moments of terror and exhilaration. One could hold indeed that the novel is poetic elegy disguised in the form of a long story and that what is best about it is shap­ ed by elegiac sensibility combined with precisely modulated description, the result of which is a hybrid form existing somewhere between the photographic representation of certain sections in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the lyric poem. Apparently Agee's fiction arose out of his need to li­ terally "possess" his past by evoking it in the greatest de­ tail but not so much to make it "dramatic" as to give it "presence" — to bring it beyond drama so to see it as 220 somehow pure, immaculate, and Impersonal.Perhaps the fiction is limited by the very force of the need that Agee experienced. In any case. It is the product of Agee's life­ long obedience to the demands of fastidious and "poetic" re­ presentation. His characters tend to have merely a visual life, the life of grace; they exist and are justified. This may be a happy belief for a human being but not necessarily for a novelist. It could be that Agee was overly impressed by what he took to be the inherent power of the image as a vehicle of "poetic" representation. For example, he says about Georges Rouquier, the maker of Farrebique, that he realizes the.camera "can be made . . . to perceive, record, and communicate, in full unaltered power, the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing . . . The assumption that "poetic vitality" blazes in every real thing governs Agee's attitude toward experience in general, and it gives him his understanding of the responsibility of

10 Cf. in Letters of James* Agee to Father Five (New York, 1 9 6), 2 p. 115; "At nigïït starting to draw, heads of Alma and copies of postcard American city streets. I would never have known how much even a little of it sharpens your eye and gives you more understanding and affection for even some small part of a human or architectural feature . . . . 1 now "possess" and "know" Alma's face and a Brooklyn street in 1938 as if they were a part of me, as much as mv hand, the same with one of the tenant houses from memory. ^^Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee (New Yorx, l95ü), p. 2WÎ 221 the writer toward the real world. But it also places an obvious limitation on the possibilities of the novel. Prom another point of view, however, one can argue that precisely the conception of the responsibility of the writer that his love of film gave him allowed Agee to become a maker of popular art. On this view it is not the limita­ tions but the positive achievement of A Death in the Family that we should emphasize. I should like to pursue this no­ tion somewhat more fully, for it seems a potentially fruit­ ful way of considering, at the close of our study, the impli­ cations of Agee's career. POSTSCRIPT :

ATTITUDES TOWARD MASS CULTURE

(1) Poetics of Popular Art

It may well have been that Agee was trying to work out the poetics of a new kind of popular novel, and that he was adapting his experience of film-making to this task. We cannot be sure. Yec the evidence of A Death in the Family suggests that he was struggling to find a new form in which his sense of the filmic could be represented, one that would cut across the boundaries between elite and popular art. We should observe, however, that the notion of the filmic was inseparable from the natural humanistic attitudes that in­ formed Agee's life and work; and that, moreover, the reli­ gious consciousness of which he spoke undoubtedly underlay and helped articulate (rather than, say, shore up) both the humanism and the notion of the filmic. In effect, then, the filmic was a way of expressing and celebrating the reverence for life that is felt everywhere in Agee's work. Distinctions should be made, furthermore, between film­ ic representation and stream-of-consciousness techniques. The latter tend to disintegrate character, since the language 222 223 becomes the vital thing, and it receives possibly too great a freedom to be itself — moving, as it seems, autonomously through time and space. At least such is the illusion that the writer creates. Of course the language does not move autonomously, but in annihilating the conventional past so to absorb everything at the point of present consciousness, it creates the illusion that language is the overwhelming, active thing: not merely a medium of consciousness but the medium ^ consciousness. Agee was tempted to write stream-of-consciousness prose; his bad passages characteristically err on the side of self- conscious lyricism, verging on song. But, as I have argued above, the best sections in A Death in the Family are neither loosely evocative or incantatory; they preserve rather than transform ordinary language but stylize it in the direction of poetic-filmic impressionism. We may suppose that Agee experienced difficulty finding a language appropriate to filmic form, and certainly it is not a fully achieved lan­ guage in the novel, as the split between the subjective and objective and Agee’s attempts to wring some dramatic con­ flict out of his material well testify. But we can see in what direction he was moving. He had begun by attempting, in Permit Me Voyage, to write in traditional forms, in the formal sonnet and epithal- amium, for example. For whatever reasons (and the reasons 224 can be guessed at), except for a number of fugitive poems, he gave up the attempt early in his career. Then, under the influence of his childhood fascination with filmic form, and the powerful feeling he had for the real (crystallized in the experience of writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), he become increasingly concerned with discovering a form that, not quite abandoning the concentrated images of the poem nor his own felt need to salvage something of realistic repre­ sentation, could attest to his intuitive sympathy for life. The religious-rhapsodic consciousness of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that provoked the lists, random poems, psalms, and choral invocations (almost in the manner of an epic as transformed, say, by Ezra Pound), was finally disciplined in A Death in the Family. The "cruel radiance of what is" that Agee had exalted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men into a vision of the dignity of man as he exists in the actuality of his life, is no longer the matter of a series of more or less unstructured approaches to matter-of-fact notation, on the one hand, or to visionary prose-poems, on the other. The distinction between the two collapses, fact and vision hav­ ing been concentrated in the flow of experience, person to person. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the existence of the sharecroppers had precipitated endless discussions of a poetics of the real; and occasionally the sharecroppers them­ selves were assimilated to a dark vision of the inevitable 225 tragedy of human life. In A Death In the Family, the people exist (on the whole) in their own right. But not in any conventional novelistic sense, with the proper "solidity of specification" defining the context in which they move. The representation is non-dramatic, or beyond drama, its form corresponding most nearly to the still photograph — the snapshot of memory, its detail preserved and its moment fro­ zen in the present. We can see then the beginnings of such representation in A Death in the Family, particularly in the first three chapters. What the novel fleshed out according to this mode of filmic representation would look like is hard to say; but it would not resemble an anti-novel, in the current fashion of some French novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet. Agee's aim was not to reduce the novel to a value-free form of de­ tailed notation. In any case, Agee would have considered, I suspect, that this would have been merely another way of getting rid of the burden of our humanity — of getting rid of the world by perversely refusing to see it as anything more than a body of randomly constituent fact. This would never have been enough for Agee. The two ways of literary representation, then, that he almost certainly would have rejected are in effect two ways of escaping from the real: stream-of-consciousness technique and the aesthetic of the anti-novel. 226 Agee wanted people in novels and movies, and seen as part of an environment, but his tendency was to want them in highly selected environments: in a quasi-pastoral set­ ting, or in one where life is comprehended wholly under the aspect of grief, fear, and separation. But his literary primitivism, supported by his attraction to simple modes of being, worked well for him as critic and creator. Precise­ ly this bias made him repeatedly look for popular art that would be true to the ordinary, elemental experiences of life. And it saved him from the misanthropy of the left — nowa­ days craving an elitism that has never existed in America — that characterizes a good part of the discussions of popular culture. Indeed, it is clear that Agee was fighting against two cultural styles that he found threatening: that of the avant-garde, with its techniques for dealing with the speci­ alized difficulties of modern life, and that of Luce Journal­ ism, with its impersonal documentary techniques and its dis­ plays of empty fireworks. He was possibly unfair to the avant-garde, but he was annoyed by its self-conscious pro­ prietorship over modern literature and its extravagant seri­ ousness about its fate. He wished, it appears, to be a free­ wheeling, unspecialized, unrecruited writer, and this ideal, combined with the large, loosely lyric, generous, open tal­ ents, made trouble for him, particularly in finding forms that he could use. Yet his antipathy to both the avant-garde 227 and the middle-brow was the symptom of his dedication to the living and the real. Where was the living and the real to be known, and how was it to be perceived and communicated? Agee's work as a whole suggests that the answer was in the filmic, in the analogy to filmic form that could be achieved, if always in­ completely, in writing. As he began to achieve this kind of form, Agee found a way of resisting his temptation to overly rhetorical writing. Attending to the flow of experience, person to person, to the real as it is related to Being and as Being is related to wonder, he found a new discipline. More important, the form allowed him to leave out just e- nough — what Lionel Trilling called "ambivalence"; it could not very well comprehend the discontents of marriage, or the abrasive quality of personal relationships, or the search for identity. But in its limitations were its strength. The filmic was placed in the service of wonder, locating feeling within the choreography of gesture, in a style more concern­ ed with moments as they flow into each other than with the complexity of individual lives. It was as if Agee believed that filmic form could be used so to reclaim and restore to consciousness moments of a simple overpowering reality and so help us to know them as miraculous; and that these moments, as they belong to the experience of every man, every man must learn to possess through art. One may speculate, indeed, that a good deal of 228 the meaning of Agee's career rests in the fact that near the end of his life he began to discover a way of writing an im­ mediately intelligible novel that could administer to the needs of the general audience.

(ii) A Note on the Problem of Mass Culture

But Agee's significance does not end with the attempt to discover a filmic form for his talents as a writer. His concern with popular culture ought to be compared with that exhibited by the critics who worry about, mass culture in the myriad symposia that fill our intellectual Journals. The main lines of Agee's development are sufficiently clear. His criticism of mass culture — he used the term "popular art," not having conceived it as a problem with his­ torical roots — was almost wholly that of a writer who wished to use the forms of popular culture and who thought they could add significantly to the humanity of the audience. Prom 1948 until his death, he spent the greater part of his time working in the popular media. Moreover, obviously he was a less politicalized intellectual than someone, say, like Robert Warshow, and he was thus able in the film cri­ ticism both to attend closely to the imaginative workings of the object and to constantly speculate on what the fully realized object of popular art would look like. But it is important to notice the issue of his temperamental anarchism and his suspicion of the intellectuals: these left him 229 without any theory; it was as if he had decided to do with­ out theory. The result was that he had a kind of access to the object that Warshow did not have; but the lack of theory makes for difficulties in Judging Agee's significance in re­ lation to the debate over mass culture. I propose to adduce some characteristic statements a- bout mass culture, to judge of them and the various concept tions of modern society with which they are allied, and then to return once more to James Agee. It may be that both the significance of his career and the limits of its signifi­ cance will then become clearer, I should add, however, that the larger context into which I wish to place Agee is not necessarily one in which his work places him. Instead, it is the context into which his career — or the career as we should like someday to have it documented — places him; its variousness gave him access to American life at its points of highest tension. Much of the debate over mass culture vs. elite culture is not concerned with individual works of art, with whether they are good or bad, but with the attitudes of which they seem representative. When the critics worry about mass culture, they seem mainly to be worrying about the fate of individuality in a highly organized, crowded, industrial society. The terras are those of Arnold, Carlyle, and Mill in the 19th century, combined with existentialism and psy­ choanalysis in our own time. The question about the fate of 230 the individual life places a mark on the writings about mass culture, and although it is obviously a legitimate question, it means that (a) the quality of given works is largely ig­ nored in favor of cultural generalization, and, more impor­ tant, (b) the assumption that "serious" art serves individu­ ality is never defended, or the sense in which this' proposi­ tion holds is little clarified. It is taken for granted that the dichotomy between elite and mass culture is at bot­ tom expressible in terms of the individualizing possibili­ ties of the two. Elite culture helps the audience to recov­ er a sense of the remarkable depth of individual experience that ordinary life tends to block out; whereas mass culture empties experience of distinction, of weight and texture, emasculating it in formula, and serves to make the sense of individual identity thin or altogether negligible. The theories of mass culture that support this view, however, are theories about modern society; and characteris­ tically they are concerned with the quality of life in mass society, so that the products of mass culture function as no more than a useful index to this quality.^ Many of these theories, moreover, are overly politicalized, by way of a generalized Marxism; or they are too much in thrall to some obvious analyses of the products of mass culture. They are

1 For a critique of the theory of mass society, see Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, 1 9 6). 1 231 driven to a kind of simplistic historicisra, with the result that they produce cliche after cliche, all of them finally attesting to one obvious truth: namely, that modern socie­ ties, shaped by technology, are mass societies in which mass culture is an inevitable consequence. They carry, in addi­ tion, a heavy baggage of quasi-historical description that, . on the whole, functions not merely descriptively, or analyti­ cally, but polemically. And since American society is obvi­ ously the archetypal modern society, marked by mass consump­ tion, mass leisure, and mass education, mass culture in America is diagnosed to the end that it is seen to reinforce a pattern of > alienation (from ot ers, from one's own experi­ ence, from oneself) that has already been deduced from the existence of industrialized society. Thus the circle is tightly knit, and the problem of mass culture is shown to be par excellence the problem of industrialized society — that is, of modern history since the Industrial Revolution; or, on a quasi-psychoanalytic view, the problem of alienation. A good deal of the discussion of mass culture simply deplores its existence and emphasizes the threat it poses to genuine art. The conclusions are deeply pessimistic, but this is merely a logical consequence of the description offer­ ed of modern society. If there is a central point in the theory, it is that as the audience for spurious art and en­ tertainment increases — and it must increase off the momen­ tum generated by the communication industries — an audience 232 for serious art becomes more and more impossible. Bad art drives good art out of circulation; it blots out, as it were, whatever visibility elite art otherwise might have en­ joyed. When an audience member gets the habit, he has pas­ sed beyond the possibility of responding vitally to genuine art. Allied with this notion is another, namely that mass culture is, in effect, a corruption of elite culture, that it feeds off it parasitically and robs it of value. Every­ one wants a bit of culture, and a hugè, constantly expanding industry for the marketing of bits of culture, under appro­ priate prestige labels, arises to fulfill this need. Indeed, the critics of mass culture are almost unanimously worried by the spectre of a culture robbed of the weighty distinc­ tions of value that we have inherited from the past, where the second-rater, the merchandisers and popularizers and culture-mongerers, come on the scene to "process" art and thought so that it causes the least possible difficulty to anyone. Some of these propositions are open to question. Elite culture is not wholly defenseless, since there does exist a kind of university elite of teachers and critics much of whose concern is with modern literature and life. And this elite, in a quite generous, free-wheeling way, helps to indi­ cate the range of choice open to students and would ideally free them to make their own discoveries. So that if the range of choice is unduly narrowed by the communication 233 Industries at the national level, it is defined and enlarged at the university level. Not much new ^ir circulates in the large arena of the national life; but quite a bit is con­ stantly moving at various small points throughout the coun­ try. Moreover, there are enough signs today to indicate that small-group life, organized to serve a variety of lei­ sure and cultural needs, still appeals, and not merely as a nostalgic reaction to media dominance. The main point, I think, is not to over-estimate the dominance in American life of what has come to be called the "entertainment culture." Surely it is dramatically large, and it proliferates in a variety of directions with the increasing affluence of the society, but this does not mean that it wholly defines the quality of American life. Nonetheless, it is obviously true that "mass culture" exists of a kind whose quality does not depend on "traditional" literary standards, or on the demands of an articulate public, whose character is fixed by the technological-distributive apparatus, and which exploits the needs of the general audience. Now, as I have pointed out earlier, there is a growing awareness that the returns grow increasingly thin on essays whose raison d'etre is to interpret the pathology of mass culture. Critics who analyze images that they assume to be meaningful for the benighted, but certainly not for them­ selves, or who are unable to conceive of any intrinsic 234 imaginative reality in any of the popular art forms, end in a kind of steely abstractionist stupor. Their essays grow as dead as the images on which they hang their analytic shop- talk. One's point of view is of obvious Importance. One can treat mass culture as symptom, with one's true concern being the distinctive features of modern society, thereby ignoring whatever imaginative reality any given product may embody — the kind of appeal it makes in terms of the form that mediates the appeal. Or one can be concerned with a kind of "functional" sociological analysis, looking at the products of mass culture in order to discover how they order belief and feeling, or how they affirm values that belong to the concensus by which the society lives. Or, finally, like Dwight Macdonald, one may feel the need to protect a vulner­ able cultural tradition — high culture — from debasement in mass and middle-brow art. Then one might become what is called a "spokesman" for high culture, and issue witty de­ scriptions of the debasement. As Macdonald writes in the preface to Against the American Grain: "In the last two centuries, our traditional culture has been under increasing pressure from mass culture, a conflict which has reached its greatest intensity in this country." To speak of "our traditional culture" is absurd unless one thinks of culture in a rigid way, as made up of a canon of the best books. Surely Leavis and Thompson, in Culture 235 and Environment, did not think of "minority culture" as a culture Into which one gained membership with the use of the possessive pronoun. They had much to say about the modes of analysis and appreciation that could make "minority culture" worth preserving and extending In educational prac­ tice. Above all, they were acting as educators, and the books that mattered to them, they believed,could help shape an Imagination and sensibility richly accessible to the pos­ sibilities of life. In fact, "minority culture" was to be rescued from the minority Into whose control It had devolved and made relevant to the environment as shaped by mass liter­ acy, advertising, and the new forms of popular culture. Read­ ing Macdonald, on the other hand, one would never know that anything In "traditional culture" mattered enough to make defending It a worthwhile activity rather than simply an exercise In polemic. In the United States the Idea of a cultural tradition Is not a very substantial Idea, If we mean by this a body of art and general thought, and the values and beliefs In­ separable from It, that can rather easily be sustained and communicated generation to generation, or "a body of special experiences associated with persons whose taste and status p are upheld by traditional sanctions . . . ." It Is precisely

2 Malcolm Bradbury, untitled book review of Against the American Grain, The Listener, LXIX (June 6, 1 9 6), 3 9YI". 236 the lack of a viable cultural tradition that many critics of mass culture find threatening and harmful to elite art in America. Reuel Denney has shown us something of the history 3 of this problem. What, in fact, the history of our think­ ing about it demonstrates is a strange paradox: former Trotskyists and radicals of the left, alarmed by the produc­ tion of kitsch art and the blurring of all kinds of distinc­ tions among works of art and in general thought, have almost completely jettisoned the vision of a new America — an Amer­ ica somehow unified under the aspect of a new life of the imagination — that had precipitated the literary and poli­ tical radicalism of the generation of Van Wyck Brooks. Macdonald, for instance, wishes to have the separation be­ tween the elite and the mass perpetuated and enforced so that no mongrel breed of art and thought can arise to dis­ comfort him. The hopes for American culture harbored by Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Randolp Bourne, Waldo Frank, and Paul Rosenfeld, during the first quarter of the century, were of an obviously different order and quality of feeling. They shared what now appears to be the extraordinary fantasy that a national sensi­ bility could be created by a "divine literati," that America could achieve some over-reaching imaginative realization in

3 See Reuel Denney, "The Discovery of the Popular Cul­ ture," in American Perspectives, ed. Robert Spiller and Eric Larrabee (Cambridge, igblj, pp. 154-177. 237 Ij.teiature. What gave Brooks and his followers their pecu­ liarly attractive sense of mission, however, was not merely the common belief in the power of art to shape an American type of the imagination, but their all but mystical convic­ tion that the poet who could "beat the rhythm of his age" could thereby act to unify an otherwise polarized, blindly acquisitive society. A characteristic utterance is the fol­ lowing by Paul Rosenfeld: It is the poet alone who can bring all the faculties of life moving together and procure for life that all-pervasive style that is the condition of civilization. It is the poet alone who can make society take the shape which can satisfy the human soul. It is the poet alone who can end the schism in American men; can turn American life toward personal ends, and develops out of an anarchical competitive horde a community of men who give and enrich themselves in g i v i n g . 4 And we can place next to it another by Waldo Frank: What we require of leadership is clearly an integration of our chaos: its re-birth into organic life by the introduction within it of a fresh germinal force. To this end, first of all, the chaos must be accepted; then, under­ stood and transfigured. To accept is the work of the spirit: to understand is the work of mind: to transfigure is the work of art.5 The "rediscovery of America" was not to end, then, in simply the conquest of a "usable past": it was an effort to cut beneath the fatigue, the thinness, and the increasing 4 _ "Van Wyqk Brooks," in Port of New York (Urbana, I961 (New York, 192ÿ ), p. 42. 5 The Rediscovery of America (New York, 1 9 2), 9 p. 179. 238 commercialization of American life, so to discover a kind of permanently revolutionary ardor and fraternity of spirit that could stand against and ideally transform a culture un­ able to nourish either the individual spirit or genuine com­ munity life. The tone of the writers varied greatly. Prank's conception of the organic society, his cultural mys­ ticism, was emotionally charged sometimes to the point of frenzy, while Brooks was hard, unremitting, and magisterial in his estimates of the American past. But whatever their tone, all of the writers shared the belief that imaginative process could create the bonds of community — a national idea and sensibility that could resolve the contradictions of thought and action, disembodied spirit and hard material­ ism, the effete and the plebeian. Of course, their radical vision of American life was wilxed and desperate, for it en­ visaged fundamental changes in an industrial order that had long been undermining the world of Emerson and Whitman from which they had taken their inspiration. But they had begun, as Lewis Mumford put it, "again to dream Thoreau's dream — of what it means to live a whole human life. The issue was cast, finally, in a somewhat melodramatic form: the life- denying purism of mind or spirit as against the "whole"

6 The Golden Day (New York, 1926), p. 279. Mumford says about poetry that it can "crystallize our most precious ex­ periences and in turn . . . modify, by that act of crystalli­ zation, the daily routine" (p. 132). 239 man; the late disembodied Romantic spirituality of an Edgar Allan Poe as against a poetry that would "articulate the whole life of the people"; a society disabled by its tradi­ tional divisiveness as against one drawn together into an organic whole. Whereas the cultural radicalism of Brooks' early work and that of his generation was coordinate with the advent of "modernism" in the arts, with the discovery that modern­ ism was in effect a kind of testament to human freedom and liberation, the cultural radicalism characteristic of the fifties (crystallized, for instance, in the work of the late Richard Chase) is nothing more than an attitude, a lifeline, a clinging, defensive posture — a product of the belief that in the dark days ahead the "idea" of the avant-garde must (no matter what anyone writes or paints) be kept alive 7 at all costs. As Chase made clear in The Democratic Vista, the late modern tradition of the intellectual is based on attitudes fitting to an interregnum, a period when a common historical role is no longer possible, in which one sustains oneself and hope for the future not by combating an identi­ fiable conservative art or the dead hand of a moribund past or the commercialization of culture — but by standing 7 For a fine statement of the "general modern outlook" that was crystallized, say, in the Armory Show, see Meyer Schapiro, "Rebellion in Art," in Daniel Aaron (ed.), America in Crisis (New York, 1952), p. 220. 240 solidly at one's impasse and making a bogus position out of it, and by finding in the classic American writers the ten- g Sion, irony, and flexibility that one can find nowhere else. Apparently "the democratic vista" that Chase explored led nowhere else than to the problem of sustaining high culture in a flabby, bureaucratized America. What has happened historically, then, to have brought the American intellectual to the position that his "role" is to stand up for high culture against kitsch in all its forms, from Our Town to the Ford Foundation, from "Invitation to Learning" to Herman Wouk? The obvious historical fact is an expanding culture, and what it brings inevitably in its wake; the well-known forms‘of wish-fulfillment and self-in­ dulgence, vicariousness seeking ever new objects, the level­ ling and homogenization of taste, labels substituting for learning, etc. In a word, the ideals of social and cultural equalitarianism have exerted their weight, and the market­ place of culture has become a disorderly carnival in which the genuine and spurious compete side by side, and this un­ tidiness is troubling. Those who are most troubled by the unruly competition and the equalization of cultural commodi­ ties wish, like Dwight Macdonald, that commerce between high culture and mass culture would cease. Of course it will not cease, and those who know this are busy devising the terms 8 See Richard Chase, The Democratic Vista (New York, 1958). ------241 of a criticism that would take into account the needs of the audience for a "middle culture." Of those who are not busy, and who think furthermore that the only obligation of the intellectual is to champion radical values, one sometimes gets the impression that their vision of the "dehumanization of man" extends only as far as other people. They cannot believe in even the possibility of a responsible middle or popular culture because they really do not believe in society, only in the idea of soci­ ety. Society has come to figure as a catch-all metaphor — something which the self opposes, or with which it enters into "dialogue." Like Richard Chase, they cannot think seri­ ously about a middle or popular culture because they have resolved, in effect, to stand four-square on those high val­ ues of the "post-modern" intellectual — tension, irony, and contrareity. And what they know about mass culture they know only too well: how it engineers consent in the name of an amorphous grouping of consumption values, so that they tend to engage it directly only when they can prove its pro­ ducts evasive, sentimental, tawdry, or imitative. Today these protests in behalf of serious art begin to look too much like protests against the whole of modern history. Af­ ter all, to write about mass culture merely to prove the threat that it poses to genuine art is merely to exercise one's capacity for worry. And such exercises drive one inev­ itably back to the solace of those texts on which we count 242 nowadays for a hard, tragic image of human autonomy. The major historical truths of our time come to provide nothing more than evidence of the erosion of high culture. The result is a serious monomania, and it makes for near-sightedness. What were we to expect, then, in a highly mobile, industrialized society dedicated to the gospel of the standard of living and making possible increasingly higher levels of consumption? That elite culture would re­ main untroubled by the media men, the popularizers, and culture-profiteers? The truth is that the quality of the culture as a whole has been obviously affected by the be­ wildering process of discovery and invention, the profusion of art and argument, the felt need for differentiation of group and personal style of life, and the free-for-all dis­ semination of the most various and opposed visions of the possibilities of life. Standing off from it all, one gets a sort of hallucinated vision of an enormously muddled range of human possibilities, each of them mediated through disciples, and each asking for a hearing within the ever- expanding marketplace of culture. In fact, the claims of all varieties of art have been much inflated, and the conse­ quence has been an over-insistence on what is conceived to be the almost therapeutic uses of art in the mass-industrial state. Whether one paints, tells stories, or plays the ban­ jo, he is felt to be engaging in a symbolic process, the issue of which is — so the most extreme ideal would have 243 It — identity and selfhood. Art is an activity that gives the person a chance to become himself. The ordinary actions of learning, making, and communicating, tend to become sym­ bolic, abstracted, and burdened. But yet the needs that this possible over-evaluation of art shows to exist in peo­ ple — these needs are as much a fact of our time as the dis­ comfort and worry that they precipitate in some of the cri­ tics of mass culture. While the authority of art is every­ where confirmed in parody — in the Beatnik-inspired fantasy, for instance, that centers on the redemption of the personal life from everything deadening and un-recreative — novelty is generated, consummed, regenerated under other slogans, and an enormously expanded range of vicarious experience, together with the morality of "comfort and fun," produce the typical modern personality, responsive to symbols and to the experience of others, and constantly in touch with the vari- 9 ety of the world through a battery of communication devices. Obviously the full historical background of our present attitudes toward mass culture cannot be given here, but cer­ tain facts ought to be noted. The obligation of the old-time cultural-guardians in America had been construed as fundamen­ tally educative; the mission of the natural elite of talent and intelligence was to prepare the conditions under which 9 See Daniel Lerner, "Comfort and Fun: Morality in a Nice Society," The American Scholar, XXVII (Spring, 1958), 152-1 6 5. 244 the nation could reach unity and stability. Reuel Denney points out that the old elites, never too secure in America anyway, were to be broken up on the advent of a burgeoning popular culture that coincided with new patterns of urban life.^^ The question, as Denney puts it, of the relation between the mass and the elite became crucial. The new in­ formation, publicity and entertainment industries intervened between the old elites and their publics, and the problem of education then became increasingly exacerbated as these new institutions "processed" both the old and the new culture. Indeed, at the level of elite culture, the nagging, perennial concern with the question of the avant-garde (ideally to be recruited from all classes and made into a permanent move­ ment in behalf of the beleaguered elite artist) reflects the power of the new mass culture as well as, of course, the vul­ nerability of social and artistic continuity in American life. Nevertheless, if the mission of the old elites was made problematic by the rise of a mass audience being "accultura- ted to a constant pressure of media experiences," the new visual media (soon to appear to a great many people as threa­ tening to destroy a more or less conservative print culture) were felt as welcome sources of innovation and vitality.

10 Denney, p. 155. l^Tbid., p. 159. 245 The rebellion against the genteel tradition could find an outlet in the rude, freely improvised, "manic" arts that, for example, Gilbert SeIdes celebrated in The Seven Lively Arts (1924). But when the new visual-aural media were absorbed and (so to speak) domesticated into the industries of mass communication, they were seen then as distinctive features of modern life, the agents of cultural homogenization, re­ placing a popular culture that (presumably) had been self­ created, family-centered, and defined by its serving the day- to-day needs of its audience. The anxiety about the problem of mass culture shows, then, that the place of a "traditional elite" or of "tradi­ tional culture" has always been problematic; elite culture has always been threatened by the lack of social and cultur­ al continuity and by the marginal position of the arts in American life. What we have discovered is in effect a new way of thinking about this threat that coincides with our fear of administered, bureaucratized culture. In American life elites have always been self-created, free-floating and unofficial, and they have never been able to shape, prescribe, or sustain anything that could be called "traditional culture," The essayist in the Emersonian style, the "American Scholar" and teacher, have from time to time formed the nucleus of an elite, but surely not of one whose members would stand firm against democratic threats to an aristocratic ideal of culture; 246 rather one that arose under the aegis of an ideal conception of American life only to founder as the pace of technologi­ cal and social change began to errode it.

(iii) Agee Once More

We should ask, finally, what is the importance of Agee's work and how are we to place it? There are likely several answers here. Of course, a book like Let Us Now Praise Fa­ mous Men needs little defense; it is intrinsically interest­ ing, a "Work that many people think of nowadays as an American classic. And obviously the other work is to be Judged on its merits. But what makes us interested in the career as a whole, which we feel to have a meaning independently of whatever value the individual works might possess? Of course, if one is convinced that Agee was a victim of his culture, then one may conclude that the meaning of the career is identical with the meaning that we ascribe (rather ambiguously) to fallen heroes. But I am not of this view. And I have chosen merely to generalize a few other possible views. One may suppose, for example, that Agee never lost faith in man — in the name of whom art of all varieties addresses the world. In our time it is easy to lose faith. When one moves from Trotskyist politics to claiming elite art for the elite, one has lost faith, not of course in "the people," or in the democratization of art, or in the commitments of another generation, but in man — in 247 whose name presumably the inquiry into culture in the mass society had been undertaken. When one conceives — rather smugly, so it seems to me — of man as less than himself when he becomes part of an audience or a public of consumers, again one has lost faith. For all of Agee's discontents with himself, with a ca­ reer in ruins, he possessed something of the free, generous, idealistic impulses of the twenties. In spirit and tempera­ ment he was closer, say, to Gilbert Seldes and Otis Ferguson than to those who write about popular art for the Partisan Review and Dissent. And the more we study his work, the more of an anamoly does he appear to be. But that he was something of an anamoly saved him from issuing broadside after broadside affirming his status as a "marginal" intel­ lectual; he was too interested in popular art to become an­ other self-conscious spokesman for the vulnerable tradition of the elite. And precisely his alienation from both the middle-brow (represented by Luce journalism) and the avant- garde (represented by the Partisan Review) gave him access to popular art, or to an idea of popular art that his criti­ cism hoped to serve. Agee believed in what Saul Bellow in his essay "The Sealed Treasure" says about the consequences of life in mass society; "... we are like the isolated lady in Moline whose sensitivity is her ten times sealed treasure." 12 That

12 Saul Bellow, "The Sealed Treasure," in The Writer's Dilemma (London, I9 6 1), p. 6 5. 248 is to say, Agee believed that popular art could allow the submerged sensitivity of people to find release and satis­ faction in real objects embodying real feeling — if not of the kind that we baptize in the name of the dark, anarchic,

Dionysian forces that so engage the literary imagination.

In a mass culture where illusions are traded back and forth in whatever happen to be the current formulas, Agee saw a hunger for the real that had gone largely unsatisfied. In fact, much of his film criticism was devoted to distinguish­ ing the real as art can perceive it from the formulas, ster­ eotypes, and illusions that the media mass-produced for a largely uncritical audience. It is surely one of the re­ markable ironies that, after his death, A Death in the Fami­ ly should have become in Tad Mosel's adaptation (All the Way

Home) fancy soap-opera, heavy on uplift and pseudo-folkish- ness, a sweetly nostalgic period-piece testifying to the bravery and courage of ordinary people. The novel is "uni­ versalized" with a vengeance, so what remains is beyond spe­ cification: a little soft brooding on the trials that human beings of necessity undergo, and a certain disembodied won­ der and pride that human beings manage to survive them.

Where would we place Agee's own attitudes toward popu­ lar culture? During the first decades of the twentieth cen­ tury Van Wyck Brooks had hoped for a thoroughly national culture — as the saying had it, an "organic culture" — 249 neither high-brow or low-brow, but assimilating the high spirituality of the New England writers and the new forms and energies manifest beneath the happy materialism of the country as a whole. In our own time the general view has been that a "middle culture" has proven a disaster, a para­ sitic feeding off the techniques of elite culture, with the result that typical products are slick.and skillful but grossly administering to the fantasies of the new audience of college-bred, professional, largely liberal, anxiously conforming, "other-directed" types. For Brooks the manifest energies in America were about to crystallize to produce an archetypally American expression of the imagination, all regional differences spent or absorbed. For Chase, on the other hand, the "organic culture" not only had not developed; the genius of American letters was to be identified in wri­ ters who embodied the contradictions of their culture. Be­ neath them, in the middle culture that had been created under the aegis, say, of William Dean Howells, Chase could observe nothing but an unctuous, seIf-ingratiating, flabby culture for the affluent and comfortable middle-class and a mass culture potentially vital but in any case relatively harm­ less. Given this tripartite picture, the responsibility of the intellectual was clear; he was to champion the individu­ alistic, unmalleable, radical vision of the classic American writers and, living without ideology, be committed to the values of the avant-garde. 250 Agee himself was painfully sensitive to the corruption of folk or near-folk art and elite art into pseudo-folk or kitsch. In his essay "Pseudo-Folk," published in 1944, Agee noted the decay of jazz over the past twenty years, the in­ creasing sophistication of an "extremely sophisticated art 13 out of all relation to its source" (p. 405). And he re­ marked of Louis Armstrong's playing in two versions of "West Side Blues" (the first antedating the second by ten years) that in the latter one the last chorus no longer attempted "the simple, squared, heartfelt declamation of the old one (though it was built in reference to it), but sloped and relax­ ed its dwindled passion along chromatics, elisions, incomple­ tions . . ." (p. 4o6). And he took this to be a sign of cor­ ruption. In the same essay, furthermore, he found pseudo­ folk in Oklahoma, Carl Sandburg, and self-consciously "Ameri­ can" writing in the vernacular — " as dangerously 'liter­ ary, ' snobbish, affected and anti-human as the mock-Mardarin prose and the mock-Oxford speech of the self-caricatured Seaboard Anglophile" (p. 40?). In all of these phenomena, Agee saw contempt both for elite ("non-folk") and folk art, the elite condescending to the folk and the folk puffing it­ self up as elite, or destroying itself in seeking the

13 The essay "Pseudo-Folk" was originally published in Partisan Review, XI (Spring, 1944), 219-223. It is reprint- e'd in Agee on Film (New York, 195o), pp. 404-4l0, from which edition Ï have quoted. 251 approbation of the "non-folk audience." But the difference between Agee and Chase comes to this; that Agee took popu­ lar art seriously; he was not content ascribing a good deal of plebeian energy to it, all the time insisting on the radi­ cal contradictions that made Melville, Whitman, and Faulkner classic American writers.

A fuller study of Agee would, on the one hand, trace the development of attitudes toward popular art (especially in the work of Gilbert Seldes, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber) from the twenties, the high-tide of the hope for a genuinely popular culture, into our own time, so that we get a sense of the shifting concerns and attitudes, as well as of the modes of criticism, that give us something'like a history of the aspirations that took root in the twenties. And on the other hand, as I claim in the introduction to this study, it would attempt to see Agee's career from within, as it re­ lates to each of the institutions (especially the Luce publi­ cations and Hollywood) for which Agee worked, and as his efforts to use the popular media grow out of the kind of ca­ reer he designed for himself. Ideally, then, we would get a critical biography, so conceived that it allows us to place Agee among his contemporaries as poet, journalist, and movie scenarist.

It may well be that such work would come eventually to

compose part of that chapter in American literary history

(yet to be written) devoted to the hope — compromised and 252

uncertain as it necessarily had to be — for a genuine popu­

lar culture shared by Agee and his contemporaries, which a-

rose as a response during the twenties to the visual excite­

ment of the movies and which Agee never quite deserted. At

the least, it may help us to appraise this hope, which, in

some measure, is our own, as it belongs to the democratic mythos — to the American dream. Beyond this, moreover, it may help us to think more cogently, and certainly more his­

torically, about a society and culture in which literature

and journalism, the elite and the popular, have always ex­

isted in some sort of fructifying and intimate relationship

(in Dresier, Lewis, Crane, and Anderson, for example.) We

need to be less melodramatic about this relationship, and

certainly less ready to invoke the word kitsch to describe

(really to dismiss) its fruits. It will not do, for example,

to tick off Dreiser and Anderson as middle-brow writers; they were deeply sensitive to the problems and perils of the indi­ vidual life in America, to the drift, the disjointedness, the beguiling tempos of American life. For Chase, these writers

seem to occupy a sort of Plebeian limbo, apparently because

they were incapable of writing the art novel of Flaubert and

James. In fact, however, it is writers such as these who

deserve attention, and mainly because they have nothing in common with the glossy middle-class parables of Herman Wouk or Sloan Wilson, on the one hand, or with the novel of fully 253 articulated individual experience, on the other. Both

Anderson and Dreiser knew the Joumalistic-business ethos of

the early twentieth century, and Dreiser was well acquainted

with the luring, disembodied dream-life that had emerged

with a corrupted Algerisra to haunt relatively uneducated

Americans driven by the pressing anonymity of the bustling

city. It is not only that literary realism in America has

■‘roots in popular culture, but that the novel (obviously) has

never been fully metamorphosed into an elite form; and cer­

tainly a case could be made out that the heavily colloquial,

sometimes self-consciously bouncy and Jazzy idiom that one

gets in recent American fiction owes a good deal to dissat­

isfaction with the highly professionalized proto-Jamesian

novel. As the vision of life in this new fiction gets in­

creasingly more desperate, the idiom becomes grounded in

strange, wittily contrived mutations of daily speech.

The point is merely that we must be more historically-

minded than we have been so far, looking at the history of

our several arts to see how they have interpenetrated one

another; it would certainly be odd if in America there was

little or no interaction between popular and elite art. Cer­

tainly there has been such interaction, in some of Chaplin's

movies, in certain kinds of fiction, and in some forms of

Jazz. If American literature is a literature of extreme situ­

ations (as there is no end to our saying and imagining, happi-

ly, almost gleefully), it also "has a prosaic side, one piece 254 of this prosaic side being the history of the aspiration for a popular culture in America. It is fair to want to get off the peaks — the radical values combined, say, with disbe­ lief in middle-class life in organized society — so as to get under the myths, where we find writers struggling to thrive in the hurly-burly, changing, anti-traditional, heter­ ogeneous culture that urban life and mass society have given them in which to grow, where imagination and.the real world need each other for the complete vision.

One can say about Agee that although he wanted desper­ ately to be a writer, he disassociated himself from litera­ ture; he did not imagine fulfillment in the creation of an orderly oeuvre of "serious? writing, or in the fetishism of art. Both at a practical (and as his essay on pseudo-folk suggests) theoretical level, his concern with art was pretty much identical with that shared by the literary generation to which he belonged (but with suspicion and distrust): the generation of Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Richard Chase,

Isaac Rosenfeld, and Saul Bellow. Agee shared the belief that marked this group that serious art (whether popular or elite, high or low) would of necessity have to be created in opposition to middle-brow culture, to what Chase called "the middle way of feeling." Yet, unlike certain members of this group, he did not cherish "alienated" art, invariably making it yield a "No, in thunder" to the complaisance of middle- 255 brow culture represented by the New York Times Book Review,

Harpers, Herman Wouk and James Gould Cozzens.

Obviously much more remains to be discovered: clearly, the whole history of the hope for a popular culture, as It comes down to us from the twenties, when this hope was medi­ ated by a sense of the Irrelevance and timid Inadequacy of the official culture. Into our own time, when the euphoria and freedom that characterized cultural life during the first decades of the century has disappeared, and we have gone through a period of highly sophisticated Interim cul­ tural polemic and definition. This period now seems at an end; everyone seems tired of the old Issues, or at least of the old ways of comprehending them. But certainly one lesson may be taken away from the recent spate of anxiety over the fate of art In a ceaselessly changing urban culture: namely, that criticism which attends to the Imaginative workings of popular art forms Is the only kind of criticism now worth doing, but that In order to be useful this criticism must seek to understand the audience which uses and Is sometimes 14 used by them.

14 For an expression of highly relevant dissatisfaction with the theorists of mass culture, see Gerald Weales, "Give Me a Tune I Can Whistle," Hudson Review, X (Summer, 1957), 472-476. BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. WORKS BY JAMES AGEE

Permit Me Voyage. New Haven, 1934.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston, i960 (j-9^^ .

The Morning Watch. Boston, 1951.

A Death In the Family. New York, 1957. Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee., New York, ~T^5'BT------^ ------

Agee on Film: Volume II. New York, i9 6 0.

Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. New York, 1 9 6. 2

"The Project Is Important," Fortune, VIII (October 1933), 8I- 84; 8 6; 8 8; 9O; 9 2; 9 4; 971

"What D'You Mean Modern?" Fortune, XII (December 1935), 97; 100-1 0 1; 1 0 3; l64.

"The U. S. Commercial Orchid," Fortune, XII (December 1935), 108-1 1 4; 1 2 6; 1 2 9.

"August In Saratoga," Fortune, XII (August 1935), 6 2-6 9; 96; 9 8; 1 0 0. :

VSlx Days at Sea," Fortune, XVI (September 1937), 117-120; 210-212; 214; 216;' 220.

"Sun Our Father," Forum, XCVII (January 1937), II6. "Rapid Transit," Forum, XCVII (January 1937), 115. Reprint­ ed In Louis Untermeyer (ed.). Modern American Poetry, new and enlarged ed., p. 6 0 7. NeW YOFK, 1‘95'8‘.

256 257 "Sunday: Outskirts.of Knoxville, Tenn.", New Masses, XXIV (September l4, 1937), 22. Reprinted In Elizabeth Drew, Directions In Modern Poetry, pp. 243-244. New York, 1940. "In Memory of my Father," Transition, No, 26 (1937), p. 7. "Notes for a moving picture; The House," In Horace Gregory (ed.). New Letters In America, pp. 37-55. New York, 1937. "Sins and Synonyms," New Masses, XXI (November 17, 1936), r,5. "Sharecropper Novels," New Masses, XXIII (June 8, 1937), 23. "Art for What's Sake," New Masses, XXI (December 13, 1936), 48-50. ------"Dedication Day," Politics, III (April 1946), 121-125. "Gandhi," Politics, V (Winter 1948), 4. "The Marx Brothers," Films In Review, I (July-August 1950), 25-29. "Religion and the Intellectuals," Partisan Review, XVII (February 1950), 106-113. "Note on Photography," I.e., The Cambridge Review, No. 5, March 20, I9 5 6.

B. A SELECTED LIST OF ARTICLES ON THE WORK OF JAMES AGEE

Alpert, Hollis. "Terror on the River," Saturday Review, XXXVIII (August 13, 1955), 21.

Barker, George. "Three Tenant Families," The Nation, CLIII (September 27, 1941), 282. ------

Bazelon, David T. "Agee on Film," The Village Voice, IV (December 24, 1958), 12; 14-15.

Breit, Harvey. "Cotton Tenantry," The New Republic, CV (September 15, l?4l), 348-350.

Chase, Richard. "Sense and Sensibility," The Kenyon Review (Autumn 1951), 6 8 8-6 9 1. 258 Croce, Arlene. "Hollywood the Monolith," Commonweal, LXIX (January 23, 1959), 430-433. Dunlea, William. "Agee and the Writer's Vocation," Common­ weal, LXXVI (September 7, 1962), 499-500. Dupee, P. W. "Pride of Maturity," The Nation, CLXXII (April 28, 1951), 400-401. Fiedler, Leslie. "Encounter with Death," The New Republic, CXXXVII (December 9, 1957), 25-26. Prohock, P. W. "James Agee— The Question of Wasted Talent," in The Novel of Violence in America, sec. ed., revised and enD.argecTT DaTTas^ 1957 { T ^ 5 ^ . Goodman, Paul. Review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Partisan Review, IX (January-Pebruary 1942), 86-b7. Gregory, Horace. "The Beginning of Wisdom," Poetry, XXXXVI , (April 1935), 48-51. Harker, Jonathan. Review of Agee on Film; Volume II, Film Quarterly, XII (Spring 19591,38-59. Hatch, Robert. "Films," The Nation. CLXXXI (October 15, 1955), 328-3 2 9. Hays, Richard. "James Agee: Rhetoric of Splendor," Common­ weal L X V n i (September 12, 1958), 591-592. Holland, Norman. "Agee on Film; Reviewer Re-Viewed," The Hudson Review, XII (Spring 1959), 148-151. Howe, Irving. Broadcast talk on A Death in the Family, WGBH- . PM (Boston), February 2, 1953. Kazin, Alfred. "Good-bye to James Agee," in Contemporaries, pp. 185-1 8 7. Boston, 1 9 6. 2 Kauffmann, Stanley. "A Life in Reviews," The New Republic, CXXXIX (December 1, 1958), 18-19.

Kirstein, Lincoln. "First Poems, " The New Republic, LXXXII (February 27, 1935), 8 0-8 1. Larsen, Erling. "Let Us Not Now Praise Ourselves," Carleton Miscellany, II (Winter 196I), 86-97. 259 Levin, Meyer. "Abraham Lincoln Through the Picture Tube," The Reporter, VIII (April l4, 1953), 31-33. Macdonald, Dwight. "James Agee," in Against the American Grain, pp. 143-166. New York, I962I Morrison, Theodore. "Modern Poets," The Atlantic Bookshelf, CLV (March 1935), 10-12. ------Mills, C. Wright. "Sociological Poetry," Politics, V (Spring, 1 9 4), 8 125-1 2 6. ------Phillipson, John S. "Character, Theme, and Symbol in 'The Morning Watch,'" Western Humanities Review, XV (Autumn 1 9 6), 1 359 -3 6 7 . Poster, William S, "Man in the Movies," Commentary, XXVII (February, 1959), 176-179. Rodman, Seldon. "The Poetry of Poverty," Saturday Reveiw of Literature, XXIV (August 23, 194l), 6. Roud, Richard. "Face to Face" James Agee," Sight and Sound, XXVIII (Spring 1959), 98-100. ------Seldes, Gilbert. "John Huston in Darkest Africa," The Satur- day Review, XXXV (February 23, 1952), 3 0. Simon, John. "Let Us Now Praise James Agee," The Mid-Cen­ tury, No. 6 (November 1959), pp. 17-22. ______. "The Preacher Turns Practioner," The Mid-Cen- tury, NÔ7 27 (Summer 196I), pp. 18-21. Stevenson, David L. "Tender Anguish," The Nation, CLXXXV (December l4, 1957), 460-46l. Taylor, John Russell. Review of Agee on Film: Volume II, Sight and Sound, XXX (Winter l‘^6ü7‘6T7,T6^47. Trilling, Lionel. "Greatness With One Fault in It," The Kenyon Review, IV (Winter 1942), 99-102. _ . "An American Classic," The Mid-Century, NÔ7 lb (September i9 6 0), pp. 3-10. . "The Story and The Novel," The Griffin, VÏI (January 1958), 4-12. 260 Updike, John. "No Use Talking," The New Republic, CXXXXVII (August 13, 1 9 6), 2 23-24. Watkins, Vernon. "Film Chronicle," The Hudson Review, XIV (Summer 196I), 270-283. " Weales, Gerald. "The Accidents of Compassion," The Reporter, XVII (December 12, 1957), 42-43. "The Critic in Love," The Reporter, XIX (December 25, 1958), 38-39. "The Film Writer," Commonweal, LXXII (April 29, I960), 134-1 3 5. Wensberg, Eric. "I've Been Reading," Columbia University Forum, III (Fall i9 6 0), 38-42.

C. A SELECTED LIST OF OTHER WORKS CONSULTED

Bellow, Saul. "The Sealed Treasure," in The Writer's Dilemma, pp. 6 0-6 7. London. 1954.

Bluestone, George. Novels into Films. Baltimore, 1957.

Bradbury, Malcolm. Book review of Against the American Grain, The Listener, LXIX (June b, 1963), 971.

Bramson, Leon. The Political Context of Sociology. Prince­ ton, 1 9 6. 1

Chase, Richard. The Democratic Vista. New York, 1958.

Daedalus. Spring, i960 issue on "Mass Culture and Mass Media."

Denney, Reuel. The Astonished Muse. Chicago, 1957.

. "The Discovery of the Popular Culture," in Robert Spiller and Eric Larrabee (eds.), American Perspec­ tives, pp. 154-1 7 7. Cambridge, 1 9 6, 1

Donoghue, Dennis. "In the Scene of Being," Hudson Review, XIV (Summer 1 9 6), 1 232-246.

Ferguson, C. S. "Crane's 'The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky,'" Explicator, XXI, No. 7 (March 1 9 6), 3 59. 261 Prank, Waldo. The Rediscovery of America. New York, 1929. Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa, trans. 0. P. Theis. New York, 1927. Kermode, Prank. "The House of Fiction," Partisan Review, XXX (Spring 1 9 6), 3 61-82. Lerner, Daniel. "Comfort and Pun: Morality in a Nice Soci­ ety," The American Scholar, XXVII (Spring 1958), 152-1 6 5. Lynch, William P. Image Industries. New York, 1959. Macdonald, Dwight. "Masscult and Midcult," in Against the American Grain, pp. 3-75. New York, 1962. Mizener, Arthur. "The Elizabethan Art of our Movies," The Kenyon Review, IV (Spring 1942), I8I-1 9 4.

Mumford, Lewis. The Golden Day. New York, I9 6 2. Pearce, Roy Harvey. "Mass Culture/Popular Culture" Notes for a Humanist's Primer," College English, XXIII (March 1 9 6), 2 417-4 3 2. Pechter, William S. "Two Movies and Their Critics," The Kenyon Review, XXIV (Spring 1962), 351-362. Rosenberg, Bernard and White, David M. (eds.). Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Glencoe, 1957.

Rosenfeld, Paul. Port of New York. Urbana, 1961 1924 . Schapiro, Meyer. "Rebellion in Art," in Daniel Aaron (ed.), America in Crisis, pp. 203-242. Shils, Edward. "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture, The Sewanee Review, LXV (October-December 1957), 587-608/ "A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on his Work," Film Culture, No. 24 (Spring 1 9 6), 2 pp. 45-6l. Warren, Robert Penn. "Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Life Is Prom Within," Saturday Review, XLVI (March 2, 1 9 6), 3 20-21; 3 8.

Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience. New York, 1 9 6. 2 262 Weales, Gerald. "Give Me a Tune I Can Whistle," The Hudson Review, X (Summer 1957)> 472-476. Wolff, Kurt. "Surrender and Religion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, II (1962], lb-30. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I, Jack Behar, was born in 1929 in Cleveland, Ohio, and was educated in the Cleveland public Schools. 1 received

the B. A. from Western Reserve University in 1952, the

M. A, from Columbia University in 1954. in 1954 I came to

Ohio State University as a graduate assistant in the depart­

ment of English, serving consecutively as graduate assistant,

assistant, and assistant instructor. During the academic

year 1959-60 1 held a Fellowship at the Annenberg School of

Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, whe_’e 1 had

gone to begin study on problems that 1 thought would engage

me in the dissertation 1 proposed to write, and which award­

ed me the degree of Master of Arts in Communication. The

following year 1 returned to Ohio State as an assistant 'n-

structor, remaining until the Pall of I962, when 1 Joined

the department of English at the University of Nevada, in

which department 1 am currently teaching.

263