Vistas of Perfection The self-dissatisfied life and art of James Agee Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 -by Adam Kirsch- di[fj[cX[h 1928, James Agee moved in to his freshman for his attention. The freshman whose first act at Harvard was to dorm at Harvard—room B-41 in George Smith Hall, a visit a monastery would spend the next four years exploring all building that is now part of Kirkland House. Decades manner of worldliness: sex and friendship, ambition and poetry, later, after Agee had become a kind of legend—for his and of course, in those Prohibition years, drinking. His appetite tormented life and early death, no less than for his great books, for experience—any and all kinds of experience—was bottom- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family—his room- less. Agee’s roommate recalled that “Jim did not especially love mate, Robert Saudek, remembered what it was like to catch a Harvard,” but “he did appreciate its people and its atmosphere of first glimpse of the 18-year-old Tennessean. Already, he wrote, personal freedom.” Agee seemed somehow larger than life, more like an apparition or A few of those people were professors, like Theodore Spencer, a force of nature than a college freshman: a young English department instructor who became Agee’s men- The door burst open and in strode the roommate—tall, tor, and I.A. Richards, the great English literary critic, whose shy, strong, long arms and legs, a small head, curly dark lectures struck him with the force of a revelation. “It’s perfectly hair, a spring in his heels as he bounded past with a impossible for me to define anything about him or about what he wicker country suitcase in one hand and an enormous, taught,” Agee wrote, “but it was a matter of getting frequent and raw pine box on his shoulder. He turned his head sud- infinite vistas of perfection in beauty, strength, symmetry, great- denly, squinted his eyes in an apologetic smile, said softly, ness—and the reasons for them, in poetry and in living….That “Hello, Agee’s my name,” swept through to an empty sounds extravagant—well, his power over people was extrava- bedroom and deposited his belongings, bounded back gant, and almost unlimited. Everyone who knew him was left in a through the gabled, maroon-and-white study, murmured clear, tingling daze, at the beginning of the summer.” “See you all later,” waved an awkward farewell and didn’t Yet looking back on his undergraduate education, Agee was show up again for several days. Such was the magnetic skeptical about the value of the experience. According to Dwight field that had rushed through the room, that I didn’t even Garner, a daily book critic for the New York Times who is at work think to introduce myself. Now that I had seen him, heard on a new biography of Agee, he “was as conflicted about Harvard him, and learned to pronounce his name, he was more of a as he was about nearly everything else in his life. Clearly, he was stranger than before. proud to be there. Just as clearly, he loved to mock its sober and Saudek might have been even more surprised if he had known stuffy side. (In an unsigned editorial in theHarvard Advocate, he exactly where his roommate had disappeared to. According to his referred to ‘that high-falutin flub-drubbery which is Harvard.’)” biographer Lawrence Bergreen, Agee “in all likelihood” spent his Three years after graduating, he wrote that education means first days of college making a retreat at the monastery of the So- “everything which can open clear & sharpen [one’s] appetite and ciety of Saint John the Evangelist—the Cambridge outpost of the feed it, and I don’t know at all that that is best to be had at Yale Cowley Fathers, a religious order of the Anglican Church. The or Harvard….Thinking of it now I would give anything to have Agee likely spent his first days in college making a retreat at the monastery of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. monastery, which still welcomes pilgrims at 980 Memorial Drive, had access to a good library and perhaps also to lectures, and was familiar territory to the young Agee. Even before coming to to friends & acquaintances of all sorts and & to have let it go at Harvard, he had spent some of his vacations from Phillips Exeter that.” Academy with the Cowley Fathers. Their Anglo-Catholic ritual Indeed, Saudek recalled, it was the private life of the College was a powerful link to his early childhood, when he attended an that Agee really relished. He would “sit up all night writing a Episcopal school, St. Andrew’s, in rural Tennessee. Even decades poem or talking and smoking so that his fingers were stained to later, when he could no longer believe in the religion of his youth, the color of a horse chestnut”; or he would see a favorite movie, the rhythms of the Anglican hymnbook still echoed in the deep- Coquette, starring Helen Hayes, seven nights in a row; or he would est stratum of his mind. In The Morning Watch, an autobiographical take a girlfriend and a bottle of gin to Revere Beach on a Saturday novella published in 1951, Agee conjured up his 12-year-old self: night, singing and laughing until the police arrested him for dis- The leaden melodies of the Lenten hymns had appealed turbing the peace—and beat him bloody in the process. The next to him as never before; lines in certain hymns seemed, dur- morning, however, Agee went as usual to sing in the First Church ing that time, to have been written especially for him. Jesus, choir. “He felt no shame,” Saudek wrote. “He believed that the I my Cross have taken, he would sing, already anticipating the city of Revere should have wanted him to have a good time that lonely solace of tears concealed in public: all to leave and fol- night…That they did not want him to—that instead of protect- low Thee; destitute, despis’d, forsaken, were words especially dear ing him they should have pummeled him—was beyond Jim’s to him; Thou from hence my All shall be….he saw crowned God comprehension, and he was more confused than outraged by that and Heaven shining and felt, in a humble kind of way, that brutal assault.” he literally owned them. It was a classic example of the dualism that would always Yet if Agee the child luxuriated in the mysteries and music of define Agee’s life, and that animates his best writing. Saturday religion, by the time he got to Harvard, they had powerful rivals night and Sunday morning, recklessness and responsibility, the FehjhW_jXoMWba[h;lWdi"'/)-$9ekhj[ioe\>WhlWhZ7hjCki[kc"<e]]7hjCki[kc >WhlWhZCW]Wp_d[(/ Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard world and the soul: Agee was ous film criticism. According to passionately drawn to both, and film critic and historian Michael never found a happy medium Sragow ’73, Agee “established a between them. Indeed, there new tone for criticism…I doubt can be few writers who have Pauline Kael would have gone excelled Agee in the arts of sec- so far into a movie criticism ond-guessing and self-dissatis- based on personal sensibility if faction. “I realize that I have an she hadn’t had Agee’s example. enormously strong drive, on a He forged more connections universally broad front, toward between high and low culture self-destruction,” he once told than any critic of his time.” Father James Flye, a teacher at In the last few years, Agee’s Saint Andrew’s who became status as an American classic his lifelong friend, “and that I has become clearer than ever. know little if anything about its In 2005, the Library of Amer- sources or control.” ica put out a two-volume edi- If Agee had been a better gov- tion of Agee’s work, edited by ernor of his life and talent, he Sragow, making him a peer of might have written more and Whitman and Faulkner; last lived longer; but he would not year, the Library even included have written at the particular Agee’s poetry, the earliest writ- pitch of desperate sincerity and ten and least read part of his fearful compassion that makes work, in its American Poets him so beloved. When he died, Project series. The University at the age of 45, in 1955, he of Tennessee Press has begun seemed to many of his friends to publish a scholarly edition and admirers like a case of of Agee’s works, complete with tragic unfulfillment—a victim manuscript variants. In 2009, If Agee had been a better governor of his life and talent, he would not have written at the particular pitch of desperate sincerity and fearful compassion that makes him so beloved. of journalism, his not-quite-chosen profession, or of uncontrol- the centenary of Agee’s birth, he seems as securely ensconced in lable alcoholism, or of the sheer impossibility of being an artist the American pantheon as all but a handful of twentieth-century in America. The critic John Leonard ’60, writing about Agee, writers. As Garner puts it, “when you look at what he did ac- pointed out that the 1950s were “a time when postwar American complish, in so many fields, it’s mind-boggling.