Agee, James (1909-1955)

When James Agee died on May 16, 1955.
the world lost a writer capable of amazing lyrical beauty. Agee's novel A Death in the Family is an incredibly strong and moving work. And I consider his work of non-fiction entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men a masterpiece of both beautiful prose and humanity. In it, Agee and a photographer, Walker Evans (great in his own right), lived for months with dirt poor white southern sharecroppers and chronicled their lives. It is very difficult to write about Famous Men objectively. It's difficult to read objectively -- it's so full of raw emotion. I have never encountered another writer quite like Agee, especially in non-fiction. He combines fact with feeling. The closest I have ever come to writing like Agee is in my personal journal, which I would hesitate to let others read, because it reveals some very intense, naked emotions. Yet Agee reveals these emotions. I greatly admire him for that. Below are my thoughts on his writings . . . A religious tone is ever-prevalent in Famous Men. It seems that Agee is questioning, searching for something. "How were we caught?" he asks. I think that he feels that there is a purity about the lives of these people, and a purity in the soil of the earth. Agee's eloquence and beauty of language certainly contributed to his acceptance in the literary world. His honesty also has a great deal to do with the success of the book. As he says, he is not trying to entertain the reader or create a work of art; he is putting forth a "human effort which must require human co-operation." Agee really feels for these families, and wants to get this across to the reader. I think he wants to motivate his readers to seriously consider the problems of human life and do something to contribute to the betterment of man. A Death in the Family and Famous Men are very similar in style and content. A Death is largely autobiographical, which probably accounts for the close similarity in style with Agee's nonfiction. In both works there is a reverence and dignity in Agee's description of the land and ordinary people present. He elevates them to a higher plane; he speaks of them tenderly. In A Death, the description of the father in the coffin reminds me of sculptures of the Greek or Roman gods. "The head, the hand, dwelt in completion, immutable, indestructible: Motionless. They moved upon existence quietly as stones which withdraw through water for which there is no floor . . . . The hand was so composed that it seemed at once casual and majestic. It stood exactly above the center of his body. The fingers looked unusually clean and dry, as if they had been scrubbed with great care . . . . The eyes were casually and quietly closed, the eylids were like silk on the balls, and when Rufus glanced quickly from the eyes to the mouth it seemed as if his father were almost about to smile. Yet the mouth carried no suggestion either of smiling or of gravity; only strength, silence, manhood, and indifferent contentment (289-90)." 
And in Famous Men: "Her body also was brass or bitter gold, strong to stridency beneath the unbleached clayed cotton dress, and her arms and bare legs were sharp with metal down . . . . The fine wood body [of the man] was ill strung, and sick even as he sat there to look at, and the bone hands roped with vein . . . (33)." 
Land, Earth, is very special to Agee. In both works, religious undertones were very strong. Word choice such as innocence, lucid, thrilling brooks, grave, spread hands, created, serene, savage, peace contribute to these undertones. In both works a profound sense of loss and emptiness is present. The loss is obvious in Death: a child has lost his father. But in Famous Men , Agee seems to be highlighting the loss of humanity. He seems to be asking, How can we allow this to happen? As I read the following passage, I was especially moved. "In what way were we trapped? where, our mistake? what, where, how, when, what way, might all these things have been different, if only we had done otherwise? if only we might have known. Where lost that bright health of love that knew so surely it would stay; how, how did it sink away, beyond help, beyond hope, beyond desire, beyond remembrance; and where the weight and the wealth of that strong year when there was more to eat than we could hold, new clothes, a grafanola, and money in the bank? How, how did all this sink so swift away, like that grand august close who gathers -- the day quiets dark and chills, and the leaves lather -- and scarcely steams the land? How are these things? (78)"

How, indeed. Sadly this passage is still relevant, more than sixty years later.