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James Agee: the World of His Work 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 Yellow Sk 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.
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