Assorted Prose (33 page)

Had James Agee been more productive of the poetic fiction he seemed destined to write, this book of letters—dispatched over a period of thirty years to his boyhood teacher and lifelong friend the Episcopalian priest James Harold Flye—presumably would not have been published. Both the flap copy and Robert Phelps’ introduction invite us to lament over Agee’s aborted and distracted career. Phelps quotes an especially precocious early letter, written from Harvard, and asks, “How then did Agee do with his gifts what he did do? Why did he not write a dozen Chekhov–Shakespeare novels [the letter describes such an ambition] instead of a quarter of a million unsigned words for
Time
and
Fortune
?”

Why not indeed? It is a good question; yet to ask it, in the form of a five-dollar book, is to reduce Agee to a question mark. A subtle insult hides in such homage. Phelps explains, “In Europe, works are all that are required of [authors], and they are honored accordingly. Here they must also use their bodies and personal histories and failures (above all, their failures) to make us
emblems
,” and goes on to install Agee in the American
pantheon “with these letters as his testament, and the image of his scattered vocation as his didactic emblem.”

Rather unwittingly, these sentences take the pulse of a very sick literary situation. A fever of self-importance is upon American writing. Popular expectations of what literature should provide have risen so high that failure is the only possible success, and pained incapacity the only acceptable proof of sincerity. When ever in prose has slovenliness been so esteemed, ineptitude so cherished? In the present apocalyptic atmosphere, the loudest sinner is most likely to be saved; Fitzgerald’s crack-up is his ticket to Heaven, Salinger’s silence his claim on our devotion. The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. I resist Agee’s canonization by these unearthly standards. Authors
should
be honored only for their works. If Agee is to be remembered, it should be for his few, uneven, hard-won successes. The author of the best pages of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
and
A Death in the Family
owes no apology to posterity. As to “the quarter of a million unsigned words,” surely a culture is enhanced, rather than disgraced, when men of talent and passion undertake anonymous and secondary tasks. Excellence in the great things is built upon excellence in the small; Agee’s undoing was not his professionalism but his blind, despairing belief in an ideal amateurism.

The truth is that we would not think of Agee as a failure if he did not insist on it himself. “Meanwhile I am thirty and have missed irretrievably all the trains I should have caught.” “Or briefly, though the impulse is OK, / I haven’t, really, a damned thing to say.” “I am depressed because whether I am to live a very short time or relatively longer time depends … on whether or not I can learn to be the kind of person I am not and have always detested; and because, knowing my own character pretty well, I know pretty well what my chances are, even though I will try.” These letters brim with self-accusations. “I have a fuzzy, very middle-class, and in a bad sense of the word, Christian mind, and a very clouded sensibility.” “I knew I had some self-pity; I even defend it, in moderation. But I didn’t realize how much I have, and still don’t sufficiently.” “Another [fault] is the whole habit of physical self-indulgence; the only degree of asceticism or even moderation I’ve ever given a hoot for, let alone tried briefly to practice, has been whatever might sharpen
enjoyment.… Another is in some way caring much too little whether I live or die.” “… I have nothing good to say about myself.…”

Of course, in writing to Father Flye, Agee is addressing not only a priest but the embodiment of his boyhood aspirations. Agee was religious in preferring self-disgust and even self-destruction to any downward adjustment of these aspirations. “I would certainly prefer death to reconciling myself.” Among the things he refused to be reconciled to was his own nature as a writer.

Alcohol—which appears in the first Harvard letters (“On the whole, an occasional alcoholic bender satisfies me fairly well”) and figures in almost every letter thereafter—was Agee’s faithful ally in his “enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction.” But I think his real vice, as a writer, was talk. “I seem, and regret it and hate myself for it, to be able to say many more things I want to in talking than in writing.” He describes his life at Harvard as “an average of 3½ hours sleep per night; 2 or 3 meals per day. Rest of the time: work, or time spent with friends. About 3 nights a week I’ve talked all night …” And near the end of his life, in Hollywood: “I’ve spent probably 30 or 50 evenings talking alone most of the night with Chaplin, and he has talked very openly and intimately.” And what are these letters but a flow of talk that nothing but total fatigue could staunch? “The trouble is, of course, that I’d like to write you a pretty indefinitely long letter, and talk about everything under the sun we
would
talk about, if we could see each other. And we’d probably talk five or six hundred pages.…”

He simply preferred conversation to composition. The private game of translating life into language, of fitting words to things, did not sufficiently fascinate him. His eloquence naturally dispersed itself in spurts of interest and jets of opinion. In these letters, the extended, “serious” projects he wishes he could get to—narrative poems in an “amphibious style,” “impressionistic” histories of the United States, an intricately parodic life of Jesus, a symphony of interchangeable slang, a novel on the atom bomb—have about them the grandiose, gassy quality of talk. They are the kind of books, rife with Great Ideas, that a
Time
reviewer would judge “important.” The poignant fact about Agee is that he was not badly suited to working for Henry Luce.

He half knew it. “The only writing I do which approaches decency is on this job [for
Fortune
]—and on other stuff I seem to be pretty well
congealed.” Twelve years later, Agee
wants
“to write a weekly column for some newspaper or magazine—very miscellaneous but in general, detailed topical analysis of the very swift and sinister decline and perversion of all that might be meant by individualism … etc., etc.” In praising Kafka, he observes with curiosity that Kafka appears “in a way totally uninterested in ‘literature’ or ‘art’ except in so far as they are his particular instrument for studying, questioning and suggesting more sharply than he otherwise could.” Whereas Agee was far
too
“much moved and excited by Ideas—related with general existence and with art.” Ideas—particularly the American idea of the Great Novel, literature as a Puritan Absolute—obsessed Agee, and hounded him out of contentment with his genius, which was for spontaneous, gregarious commentary rather than patient, eremitical invention.

In the last of these letters, mostly written from the hospital bed where his overstrained heart had taken him, there are hints of reconciliation. His work with the movies—the coöperative art
par excellence
—affects him rather cheerfully. His prose takes on crispness. The tortuous, grinding note of self-reproach diminishes. Looking back on his career, he is pleasantly “surprised I have gotten done even the little that I have.” He coherently and masterfully sketches several script ideas—a scene from
Candide
, a moral (and satiric) film fantasy about elephants. His versatility, his ardent interest in “this that and the other thing,” were beginning to find channels; perhaps there
was
some use in talking. But his body was ruined, and abruptly his magnanimous spirit and eager intelligence vanished from the world of American letters, to whose Manichaean stresses he had been so sensitive, and whose opportunities he had been so ingeniously reluctant to seize.

 
STUFFED FOX

T
HE
F
OX IN THE
A
TTIC
, by Richard Hughes. 352 pp. Harper, 1961.

Described in a prefatory note as the first installment of a long opus entitled
The Human Predicament
and concerned with Europe between the World Wars, this novel suffers from its condition as a curtain-raiser. The author is so busy setting the stage that the actors can scarcely be heard above the noise of carpentry. The prose, though occasionally brilliant and rarely careless, is generally wooden; the characterization, though it gives evidence of a broad experience of life and a genial, humane world view, is badly cramped by the exigencies of panoramism. The action shuttles back and forth between the England and the Germany of 1923, between the rich and the poor, between historical figures and fictional characters. Mr. Hughes has taken Tolstoy and Stendhal to heart; his rendering of the frustrated Munich
Putsch
pays an open debt to the Waterloo of
The Charterhouse of Parma
. But the overriding message of his masters—the essential
idiocy
of history—has eluded him, with the result that his personae seldom break free of the points they were created to illustrate. In its intervals of straight essay and speculation, the book is interesting, and it contains a daring attempt to make a “character” out of Hitler. The shocking fact is that, reduced to the intimate dimensions of fiction, this Chaplinesque, tormented outcast engages our sympathy and steals the show.

 
HONEST HORN

T
HE
G
ATES OF
H
ORN:
A Study of Five French Realists
, by Harry Levin. 554 pp. Oxford University Press, 1963.

Among the formulae of faint praise, none is more galling, and in a sense more futile, than the assertion that a book has the faults of its virtues. Yet Professor Levin’s massive and intensely meditated critical study does seem to me limited by the very elegance, balance, and scholarly scrupulosity that make it, within limits, wonderful.
The Gates of Horn
, the product of twenty-five years’ intermittent labor, is concerned, at its narrowest, with the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. More broadly, it surveys, through the windows of nineteenth-century French fiction, the social history of France itself. And its broadest subject, announced in the first sentence, is “the relation between literature and life.” As the exposition advances outward through these spheres from the specific to the general, its encyclopedic apparatus of quotation, allusion, and paraphrase explodes into a kind of wildly detailed vagueness. Nowhere, in these half-thousand packed pages, is there any statement about the relation between art and reality as incisive and memorable as, say, T. E. Hulme’s famous metaphor of the architect’s curves:

Ungrammatical, undocumented, and dogmatic, Hulme hits the mark. Professor Levin, with his eye on the same target (“the movement of realism, technically considered, is an endeavor to emancipate literature from the sway of conventions”) eschews the intuitive rifle in favor of the scholarly shotgun. Having mentioned Stendhal’s crucial definition of the novel as “a mirror riding along a highway,” he not quite relevantly busies himself with a brisk survey of the mirror/art image from Plato, through Cicero and Shakespeare, to Wilde and Joyce. The reader too frequently overhears the rustle of index cards. At times the exposition takes on the texture of a
Saturday Review
literary quiz: