 |
| James Rufus Agee 1909-1955 |
The Comic
Element in the Works of James Agee
James
Agee wrote no prose - save certain journalistic articles for Time and Fortune -wherein there is not at least a trace of comedy. An
examination of his work will reveal what might be termed his “comic vision.”
This “comic vision” seemed to have come to him naturally, for he conceived it
as a part of reality. Of the many forms that comic writing might take, Agee was
most adept at wit and satire. An understanding of the comic element in his work
can be gained by analyzing his work from three angles: (1) comedy of language,
(2) comedy of action, and (3) satire.
His
fascination for words is obvious in the comic descriptions present in his
novels, and his keen wit is masterfully displayed in his movie reviews. In
addition, his frequent use of dialect is evidence of his comedy of language.
A
love for the low comedy antics of the silent film comedians and an extraordinary
knowledge of the techniques of the motion picture might well be the bases for
the dramatic quality of Agee’s writings—particularly the novels. His awareness
of the effectiveness, as well as the ingredients, of a comic situation provided
him with a useful prose technique.
From
his earliest letters and creative writing ventures, Agee felt inclined to
satirical writing. As a Harvard student and editor of the Advocate he demonstrated his ability as a satirist by “engineering”
a parody of Time that appeared as a
special issue of the Advocate. His
satire is at its best in such short works as “Dedication Day”; it is at its
worst in parts of Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, where it degenerates into invective and name-calling. Among
the many projects which occupied his
last days was a semi-allegorical movie idea about elephants that are taught to
dance.
Agee expressed a profound
fondness for comedy at an early age. This fondness was eventually responsible
for the formation of his “comic vision” which he never lost.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
FOREWORD…………………………………………………………………………...
I.
COMIC
TERMS AND PRINCIPLES…………………………………………………
II.
COMEDY
OF LANGUAGE……………………………………………………………
III.
COMEDY
OF ACTION…………………………………………………………………
IV.
SATIRE…………………………………………………………………………………
V.
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………
VI.
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………
FOREWORD
When James Agee died in 1955 he was
not a particularly well-known writer. Today—less than ten years after his
death—his “genius” is a frequent subject of critics, many of whom regard him
one of the most powerful and original writers of his age. Before he died, Agee
had published a book of poems, Permit me Voyage; a curious and
commercially unsuccessful volume of “Depression reportate,” Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men; and a novelette of adolescence, The Morning Watch.
Practically everything of any apparent significance that he wrote has been
published: a novel, A Death in the Family which won the Pulitzer Prize;
two volumes of Agee on Film; a reissue—this time more than commercially
successful—of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and a volume of letters to
his childhood teacher, Father James Harold Flye. A biography of Agee by David
McDowell, publisher of A Death in the Family, is in progress.
A so-called “Agee legend” has sprung
up during the eight years since his death. “Something about the man—as well as
the work—has captured the imagination of many people,” observed Edmund Fuller
in a New York Times review of the Letters. “Perhaps he is an archetype of the
perplexed writer of the Nineteen Thirties and the following decade and a half.”[i]
This is obviously true in one particular respect: Agee was unable to win the
war with economic necessity; he was not able—like dozens of other talented
writers of his day—to make a living for himself and his family through efforts
at serious writing. This one thing was the source of much of Agee’s anxiety,
for it compelled him to “sell his soul” to the Luce Publications. It is this
that admirers of Agee’s work know and regret, for one can only regret that Agee
did not write more like his best work. It is this that critics bemoan when the
speak of Agee’s “unkept promise” or “those quarter of a million unsigned words”
written for Time and Fortune.
He had had an early and persistent
ambition to be a serious and great writer. While still at Exeter Academy, after
some minor literary successes with poems and a Greek play, he wrote: “The
general verdict certain writers had judged his work is that I can do a lot if I
don’t give up and write advertisements…I’ll croak before I write adds or sell
bonds—or do anything except write.”[ii]
Later, from Harvard he wrote: “I’m from now on committed to writing with a
horrible definiteness…I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer.[iii]
He had thought while writing Permit
Me Voyage that poetry was the only medium through which he could express
what he wished to express. He had aspired to some brilliant combination of Chekov and Shakespeare: “That is,
to move from the dim, rather eventless beauty of C. to huge geometric plots
such as Lear…It’s got to be narrative poetry.”[iv]
Even a casual glance at the letters written at Harvard and immediately
afterward will reveal Agee as a talented young mind eager to experiment with
many literary forms and techniques in an effort to arrive at a medium which
would express his feelings exactly, and, at the same time, be unique and great.
“My own misfortune,” wrote Agee in
1933, “is that Seriousness is Gloom to me.”[v]
Fortunate in having graduated from Harvard a year earlier and in having landed
a reporter’s job on Fortune, Agee is writing to Father Flye, his friend
and former teacher, about his approaching marriage to Olivia Sanders. He is
deeply concerned over the seriousness of marriage which he feels he cannot
enter into lightly.
Agee’s statement is noteworthy in
that the anticipated marriage was destined to fail as was a subsequent one. At
the same time it is noteworthy because it tells us something about Agee, and
for our particular purpose here, it tells us something about the source of
Agee’s comic expression; for he was—in the greatest sense of the word—a comic
writer.
As his letters clearly show, Agee
was extremely “serious,” emotional, and sensitive—about everything. It is this
“seriousness” which shows itself in Agee’s satire, parody, burlesque, and most
of the other forms that comic expression might take. Apparently, it is natural
for one to detect something paradoxical about such a statement. How does comedy
generate from seriousness?
Historically, seriousness has
frequently been a source of comedy. It is characteristic of the American comic
tradition. Constance Rourke, speaking of John Greenleaf Whittier in American
Humor, states:
…humor
is a matter of fantasy, and the fantasies of the Puritan Whittier, viewed with
the most genial eye, remain sufficiently dark…Between these many shadows and
the persistent humor of the Yankee the gulf seems wide. But humor bears the closest
relation to emotion…An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man
usually had deep pockets of emotion, sometime tucked away or forgotten.[vi]
This characteristic was also
apparent to a successful English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who observed in a
comment on the nineteenth century American comic writers—Ward, Twain, even
Irving—that “there is generally present an undercurrent of a melancholy, in
which pathos and satire are intermingled.”[vii]
Agee is of this tradition.
It is, of course, debatable whether
Agee ever achieved greatness, but there is little doubt as to his uniqueness.
Perhaps the prime factor contributing to his greatness as an American writer is
his ability as a comic writer, This ability for comic expression may also be
that “something about the men…that,” according to Fuller, “has captured the
imagination of many people” and created the “Agee legend.” An examination of
his writings will show an ever-present consciousness of the comic. It is the
object of this study to examine the comic element in Agee’s prose.
CHAPTER I
COMIC TERMS AND PRINCIPLES
Comedy – A Definition of Terms
Before discussing the comic elements
in Agee’s works, one is face with the difficult but necessary task of defining
terms relating to the genre: high comedy, low comedy, wit, farce, irony,
burlesque, parody, satire, humor, etc. This is particularly important in a
discussion of comedy, because of the age-old disagreements regarding comic
terminology.
Even for Henri Bergson, one of the
great writers on comic theory and practice, defining comedy was difficult.
“What does laughter mean?” asked Bergson in the first line of his great essay Laughter.
“What is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find
between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play on words, an equivocal situation
in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy?”[i] he
asks. He is quick to point out that although arriving at a definition of comedy
has been the task of “the greatest thinkers, from Aristotle downwards…” it has
never been satisfactorily accomplished. He states that his only excuse for
tackling the problem is that he does not intend to “imprison the comic spirit
within a definition,” for he regards it, above all, as a living thing which is
constantly changing, growing and expanding.
Defining comedy (in this case,
humor) has proven to be something of a problem for at least one noted
lexicographer as well. H.W. Fowler in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
is compelled to include—in place of adequate definitions—a chart of the terms
wit, humor, satire, sarcasm, invective, irony, cynicism, and the sardonic. Each
term is classified as to its motive or aim, its province, its method or means,
and its proper audience. Along with the chart he notes the ever-present
confusion surrounding the terms but predicts that his classification will serve
as a workable standard “to those who wish for help in determining which is the
word that they really want.”[ii]
Probably the earliest comments on
comic theory are expressed in Aristotle’s Poetics. Comedy is, says Aristotle,
“an imitation of lower types…”
Though
it does not include the full range of badness, nevertheless to be ridiculous is
a kind of deformity. The causes of laughter are errors and deformities that do
not pain or injure us; the comic mask, for instance, is deformed and distorted
but not painfully so.[iii]
In view of this problem of
definitions, one is compelled to arrive at workable definitions upon which subsequent
remarks regarding Agee’s comic expression can be based. These definitions will
be confined to those which generally apply to Agee’s writings.
For our purposes the term comedy is
used as an all-encompassing term of which all the other noted elements—satire,
wit, humor, burlesque, parody, etc.—are parts. There are certain things one can
safely say about comedy: it is generally the opposite of—although it may
frequently overlap with—tragedy. It is sometimes defined merely as the
ludicrous, that which arouses laughter, or at least a smile. “The test of true
Comedy,” said George Meredith, “is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.”[iv]
Few writers on the subject fail to
note the close relationship between comedy and tragedy—to put it simply,
between laughing and crying.[v]
“The true balance of life and art,” said the late James Thurber, “the saving of
the human mind as well as the theatre, lies in what has been long called
tragicomedy.”
For
humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human
character and achievement, inseparable.[vi]
The numerous sub-categories of
comedy can be seen most clearly at their extremes. At one extreme in the range
of comedy there is that sophisticated form of high comedy in which much
of the fun is present in the witty dialogue and in the fact that the leading
characters are sufficiently intelligent to be quite aware of the follies or
absurdities of others, as well as themselves. Good examples of this type are
Congreve’s The Way of the World or Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
At the other extreme, there is the
far-from-subtle low comedy or farce in which stock characters are
involved in pie-throwing, slipping on banana peels, splitting the seat of their
pants, and other types of slapstick or horseplay.[vii]
Between these extremes lie the
various forms of satire and burlesque: invective, irony, parody,
mock-heroic. The aim of satire is to expose man’s weaknesses, his minor follies
or major vices, in all possible spheres, from social to political to moral
conduct, or as Pope put it, “to shoot folly as it flies.”
Next to outright name-calling there
is the more clever form of ridicule known as invective. At the other
extreme from such outright denunciation are some of the forms of irony
with which satire abounds—simply saying one thing while meaning something
entirely different.
Another highly effective way of satirizing
something is to imitate it in such a way as to suggest its ridiculous side. Two
examples of this technique are burlesque, usually applied to any
mimicking designed to ridicule, and parody, whereby the favorite
subjects or techniques of a writer are imitated so as to still be recognized
although exaggerated or distorted. A more complex form of burlesque is the mock-heroic
or mock-epic, wherein characters and situations are treated more
seriously, more heroically, than is warranted. The classic example of this form
is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
With the exception of a brilliant and
lively expression of wit (an intellectual sharpness or brightness), Agee
makes greatest use of satire, a definition of which he provides in his
letters.[viii]
His love for the lowest comic forms is obvious in his essay on the silent
screen comedians[ix] and in his constant
references—both in his letters and other writings—to various individuals,
techniques, and principles associated with what he termed “comedy’s greatest
era.”
Agee’s Comic Principles
“Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Agee’s
essay on the silent screen comedians, was published in Life in
September, 1949. The opening paragraph reads:
In
the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter,
the yowl, the bellylaugh and the buffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl
is a runaway titter. Anyone who has had the pleasure knows all about a
bellylaugh. The buffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly
constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by
cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble,
shake, wave, and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. Then, after
the shortest possible time out for recuperation, he would feel the first wicked
tickling of the comedian’s whip once more and start up a new ladder.[x]
The essay—thought generally to be
the definitive statement on the subject—provoked one of the greatest reader
responses in the history of the magazine. It represented the culmination of the
author’s love for comedy, a love which began as early as 1915 when “Rufus” Agee
was taken by his father to see “that horrid little man,” Charlie Chaplin, at a
picture show in Knoxville, Tennessee.[xi]
Less than six years after the publication of this essay, Agee died at the age
of 45. His intense appreciation for comedy remained with him throughout his
life and lives today in his works.
As far as can be determined, at no
time did Agee set forth his “comic philosophy.” He did, however, in his letters
for Father Flye, remark occasionally concerning the importance of comedy in his
writing, his admiration for various comedians and comic writers, and—to a
lesser degree—his own comic prose techniques.
Upon arrival at Harvard in the early
thirties, Agee began immediately to write for the Lampoon, Harvard’s
humor magazine. He clearly expressed his continued interested in comedy in a
letter to Father Flye concerning the development of “a poetic diction”:
And
this style can’t, of course, be incongruous, no matter what I’m writing about.
For instance, I’m quite determined to include comedy in it—of a sort that will
demand realistic slangy dialogue and description.[xii]
Agee’s
posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, is evidence enough of his
achievement of this “poetic diction.”
While still at Harvard Agee
“engineered” what was to be, in many ways, the high point of his college
career: an Advocate parody of Time which, ironically, later
brought him a job with Luce Publications, first as a reporter for Fortune
and later for Time itself.
During his college years Agee became
increasingly interested in writing—especially satirical writing. He spoke in
his Letters of his usual method of “trying this that and the other
thing, finishing little or nothing.”[xiii]
He read the works of Jonathan Swift for the first time and was deeply impressed
by Swift’s philosophy. “I can’t say the love and dumb reverence for him," said Agee to Father Flye:
I
don’t think many people have ever lived with as little compromise to the
cruelties in human nature, with such acute pain at the sight of them, and such
profound love for what the human race could or might be. People
who call him a Hater of Humanity make me writhe—they are likely to be the very
hardest of all human sorts to show true humanity to—because they are by
intention kind and easy-living, and resigned to the expedient corruption
of living quietly and happily in the world.[xiv]
Agee
could hardly have suspected that similar accusations would be thrust at him a
decade or so later by none other than his long-time friend and Fortune
associate, Dwight Macdonald. In 1936 Agee had written to Macdonald revealing a
“wild” idea for a movie version of The Brothers Karamasov wherein he
lists famous personalities—of the movies, theatre, and other fields—to fit
specific parts.[xv] Artificial snow would be
provided by Jean Cocteau. A troupe of selected ushers would throw epileptic
fits during intermission, and President Roosevelt would plant a tree. Agee
concluded the “idea” with the following “suggested tieins for hinterland
exhibitors”:
…arrange
to have your theatre picketed by your local chapters of the American Legion,
the Catholic Church, the Parent-Teachers Association, the Sheetmetal Workers
Union and the Youth for Peace Movement. Set up Jungle Shrubbery and a Stuffed Gorilla
in your lobby (your Police Station will be glad to furnish latter in return for
a mention). If you are in the South, stage Negro Baptism (in white gowns) in
front of your theatre. If in the North, an Italian Saint’s Day or a Jewish
Funeral will do as well. Plug this feature hard. It will richly repay you.[xvi]
Macdonald, who includes this
letter in his essay on Agee in Against the American Grain, concludes with the
following statement:
Until
I came to transcribe this, I had not realized how tasteless it is, calculated
to offend the sensibilities of every right-thinking and wrong-thinking group in
the country, minority and majority. It goes beyond buffoonery to express a
nihilistic, destructive, irreverent, vulgar, alienated, un-American and
generally lousy attitude…There is something very old fashioned about the whole
thing, more 1926 than 1936—and certainly not at all like 1962.[xvii]
Macdonald
is probably right about one thing: it is old fashioned; although it would
appear he has his years wrong. A satire entitled Gulliver’s Travels,
published in 1726, received similar—but more violent—criticism. Agee was only
imitating that technique which he admired and thought effective.
What was to be his clearest
expression of his satiric technique was written from New York shortly after
graduation. He expresses interest in doing “a picture-caption-chapter-head”
history of the United States, “a mixture of lyric, quotation, statistic, and
satire; essentially satire.”[xviii]
He thinks the basic idea has possibilities:
Taking
a body of facts which are very generally known in terms of very general
traditions and conventions: assuming that your reader knows these facts
(whether he does or not): and instead of expositing them, cutting in at the
sharpest possible angles, and playing variants across their structure:
essentially the same as (a) laying down a theme and (b) doing obscure
variations on it: except that the theme—except as a subject, a general
subject—is never stated.[xix]
Agee
never expressed his basic theory of satire better than in this statement. It is
this technique which he later used so brilliantly in his move reviews and in
such short pieces as “Dedication Day.”
He later expressed half-hearted
regret that he was unable to rid himself of the satirical urge. Of his own
writing, he said:
Most
of it has hung somewhere between satire and what I suppose would be called
“moralistic” writing: I wish I could get both washed out of my system and get
anywhere near what the real job of art is: attempt to state things as they seem
to be, minus personal opinion of any sort.[xx]
He
was never able to rid himself of it. It is difficult to believe that he
sincerely wanted to, for, in another letter he admits: “My own misfortune is
that Seriousness is Gloom to me.”[xxi]
While at Fortune Agee spent
his time writing feature material of everything from race tracks to baldness to
art. The life of the professional adult journalist did little to squelch his
childhood love for raw comedy, but did much to provoke charges of “wasted
talent.”[xxii]
He writes to Father Flye from Florida: “Saw the new Charlie Chaplin movie a
while back. If it comes and if it doesn’t conflict with Lenten rule, it’s a
wonderful thing to see—a lot, to me, as if Beethoven were living now and had
completed another symphony.”[xxiii]
During his last terrifying years
which were punctuated by heart attacks and threats of alcoholism, Agee went to
Hollywood to write for the movies. While completing several highly successful
screen plays—The African Queen, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The
Quiet One—he fulfilled a lifelong desire when he developed a close
friendship with Charlie Chaplin of whose genius he was convinced. He expressed
his intention to treat The African Queen “as high comedy with deeply
ribald undertones…trying to blend...poetry, mysticism, realism, romance,
tragedy, with the comedy.”[xxiv]
Five days before his death in a New
York taxi, Agee wrote—but never mailed—his final letter to his “dearest
friend,” Father Flye. In it he sketched “a movie idea,” a satiric, allegorical
fantasy which typifies the sort of dark, grim, almost Poe-like comedy of which
he was capable. The sketch[xxv]
is about circus elephants which are caged and abused for the amusement of
humans. Some elephants are taught to dance by choreographer George Balanchine
but are ashamed by being made fools of. Some are shot for no reason. One is
hanged “in a small Tennessee town…while 5,000 cats looked on.” The “Grand Finale” has the wisest
of the dancing elephants picking up a dying cigar-butt with his trunk and
dropping it into the fresh straw. “All 36 elephants die in the fire. Their huge
souls, light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret cemetery back in
Africa—And perhaps God speaks again: “The Peace of God, which passeth all
understanding…”[xxvi] He felt he was dying and this was to be, in the
mind of at least one of his friends and critics. “his last, most extraordinary
insight.”[xxvii] For in many ways Agee
was, like the elephants of which he wrote, a large powerful being who was put
to base uses. At any rate, his awareness of the comic remained with him until
the end.
“Humor can be dissected as a frog
can,” said E. B. White, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are
discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”[xxviii]
The risk involved in an attempt to “dissect” Agee’s humor—to place it in
categories—is recognized, and caution will be maintained in hopes that the
subject will survive the operation.
For purposes of analysis this
“operation” will be conducted in three stages which can be termed (1) Agee’s
comedy of language, (2) comedy of action, and (3) satire. A sounding-board for
the first two stages will be the comic principles of Henri Bergson, Sigmund
Freud, E. B. White, James Thurber, and others whose principles seem to be the
most complete and workable available.
CHAPTER II
COMEDY OF LANGUAGE
Dylan Thomas once described his
early and constant fascination for words as “blood bursts of a boiling boy in
love with the shape and sounds of words.” This statement could as well be
applied to James Agee. That both Thomas and Agee died early and tragically is
not the sole reason for their startling resemblance as writers; their mutual
fascination for and ability with words is another. In describing Agee’s writing
in A Death in the Family, Alfred Kasin referred to the novel as “the
work of a writer whose power with words can make you gasp.”[i]
The powerful “poetic diction” to which Agee aspired is undoubtedly responsible
for much of the novel’s success. In addition, there is his power of
description; his senses seem to work overtime. Much of the description of
sight, sound, odours, etc., is comical
Consider, for example, his
recollection in A Death in the Family of his father’s departure on the
fateful journey from which he was never to return. The scene is a re-creation
of sounds centered around his father’s staring the car and driving away as his
mother looks on:
Uhgh—hy
uh yu hy why uhy uh: wheek-uh-wheek-uh:
Ughh—hy
why uh: wheek:
(now
the nearly noiseless, desperate adjustments of spark and throttle and choke)
Ughgh—hyuh
yuhyuh wheek yuh yuh wheek wheek
Wheek
yuh yuh yuhyuh wheek:
(which
she never understood and, from where she stayed now, could predict so well):…
(like
a hideous, horrible constipated great brut of a beast: like a lunatic sobbing:
like a mouse being tortured.):[ii]
At times it is obvious that Agee
cannot avoid toying with the sound of a word. In the same novel, shortly after
his father’s death, Rufus and his sister are told about the wonders of the
gramophone. Rufus replies that it sounds like “grandma phone.” This sets the
wheels turning:
A
gram-o-phone. See? It sounds very much like grandma phone, but it’s just a
little different. Gram-o-phone.
Can
you say It?
“Gram-uh-phone.”
“That’s
right. Can Baby Sister say it, I wonder?”
“Catherine?
He means you.”
“Gran-muh-phone.”
“Gramm-uh-phone.”
“Gramm-muh-phone.”
“That’s
fine. You’re a mighty smart little girl to say a big word like that.”
“I
can say some ever so big words,” Rufus said. “Want to hear? The Dominant
Primordrial [sic] Beast.”[iii]
There is a point, however, where a
writer’s senses are of little help, since the senses can only serve as witness
to a situation. It is at this point that—supported by a power for words—wit
enters the picture. According to Sigmund Freud:
Wit
is made, while the comical is found. We know, too, in the case of wit that it
is not a strange person’s, but one’s own mental processes that contain the
sources for the production of pleasure.[iv]
In none of his various writing
ventures did Agee find a greater outlet for his wit than in his film reviews,
which revolutionized this journalistic medium. The quality of these reviews was
well evaluated by W. H. Auden in a letter to The Nation, one of the
magazines for which Agee was movie critic. In stating his admiration for Agee’s
column, Auden terms it “the most remarkable regular event in American
journalism today…”
What
he says is of such profound interest, expressed with such extraordinary wit and
felicity…that his articles belong in that very select class…of newspaper work
which has permanent value.[v]
Typical of Agee’s witty style in
these reviews is a notice of a 1943 movie entitled Mission to Moscow,
which he considers “not entirely without skill.” He continues:
This
first film is likely to hasten and intensify our cooperation with the Soviet
Union. It may even help frustrate those who—if my naïve impression is
correct—plan to win this particular peace by destroying the Soviet Union, dominating
Europe with the help of Bryn Mawr graduates and domesticated democrats, and
reducing China to an Anglo-American-owned Japanese-policed laundry…For it is
indeed…a mishmash: of Stalinism with New Dealism with Hollywoodism with
journalism with opportunism with shaky experimentalism with mesmerism with
onanism, all mosaicked into a remarkable portrait of what the makers of the
film think that the American public should think the Soviet Union is like—a
great glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by
the Institute of Good Housekeeping.[vi]
Generally, Agee had something
favorable—be it ever so slight—to say about the movies he reviewed, but he
always had a grand time saying it. In a review of Stage Door Canteen he
remarks: “The love-making is strictly church-supper…A lot of the dialogue is
dragged in by heels who never should have been hired even to drag it out.”[vii]
Speaking of the movie adaptation of Hemingway’s novel, Agee states: “Horses may
send their children to see For Whom the Bell Tolls without fear. That
offensive word ‘stallion’ (not to be confuse with Joseph Stallion)…has been
changed…to read ‘blasted face’…You may easily get the impression that Gary
Cooper is simply fighting for the Republican Party in a place where the New
Deal has got particularly out of hand.”[viii]
Of a war movie, Sahara, he says: “Humphrey Bogart and several less
high-salaried but no less talented soldiers, stranded at an oasis, hold off and
then capture a full Nazi battalion. Anyone who can make that believable, even
for so long as you watch it, knows how to make a good war melodrama.”[ix]
Cooper’s novels on film, like Hemingway’s, also seem displeasing to Agee. “Deerslayer…can
be recommended to anyone who would not feel that an eight-year-old boy who
gallops up howling ‘Wah-wah, I’m an Indian’ needs to consult a psychiatrist.”[x]
Other examples of Agee’s ability
to turn a clever phrase are present in his Letters. His earliest
published letters were written from New York in 1955, shortly before his death.
These letters are—with few exceptions—filled with what appears to be a
compulsive wit.
From Exeter he writes of having
played the role of Baptista, “that wheezy old man” in The Taming of the
Shrew. The performance “went off quite well, and so did our director, immediately
after the show.”[xi] Upon graduation he is
delighted that there is none of that “threshold-of-life bellywash” and speaks
of his love for the school: “I’ll never be nearly so much a part of the school
again—not even if I give a couple of million for a baseball cage or a boiler
plant.”[xii]
From Harvard he becomes
increasingly interested in writing. He aspires to greatness but realizes his
“intellectual pelvic girdle is simple not Miltonically wide.”[xiii]
Later he writes concerning a Fortune article on orchids. He quotes from
his manuscript:
The
orchid gest its name from the Greek orchis, which means testicle and
there are those who condemn that title as understating the case, since the
flower resembles nothing printable so much as a psychopathic nightmare in technicolor.
It has also been favorably compared in sexual extravagance to the south apse of
an aroused mandrill, and it sports a lower lip that qualifies to send the
Bourbon Dynasty into green visceral spasms of invidious love’s labors lost.[xiv]
He
closes with the suggestion that although this was written or the orchid
manuscript, it probably would not be included. It was not included, needless to
say, in the published article.[xv]
In an answer to one of Father Flye’s
letters requesting his opinion on some experiments in artificial insemination,
Agee replied: “I’d like to try it…”
I’d
be exceedingly curious to see controlled experiments on, say inseminating a 20th
century American gentlewoman with the sperm of an 11th century
French serf. Or to figure that you and I are among the last more-or-less
libertarian humanists, to try that out and see where it got in the kind of
frozen bee-life…200 years from now.[xvi]
In another letter Agee replies
concerning an incident in which a group of men who owned racing dogs would collect
cats (under the pretext of finding homes for them) and take them out to be
chased by the ravenous dogs who would tear them to pieces and devour them. Agee
answered: “The clip you send about dogs and cats is beyond comment: except my wish
to be present, not with an A.S.P.C.A. badge, but with a machine gun.”[xvii]
Apart from the letters and movie
reviews, the most effective of Agee’s works deal with activities of childhood.
The protagonist in both of his novels (assumed by most critics to be Agee
himself) is a young boy. In A Death in the Family he is about six years
old; in The Morning Watch he has reached adolescence. Although the
themes of both novels are serious—if not tragic—the boy in both cases is
presented comically. It appears that the natural comic element, forever present
in children and childhood, never failed to escape Agee’s eye. According to
Freud, this seems to be natural enough. “Only in childhood did we experience
intensively painful effects over which today as grown-ups we would laugh,”[xviii]
said Freud.
As for the origin of wit, humor, and
the comic, Freud felt that all three modes of activity of our psychic
apparatus—inhibition, thought, and feeling—derive pleasure from economy:
For
the euphoria which we are thus striving to obtain is nothing but the state of
bygone time, in which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight
expenditure. It is the state of our childhood in which we did not know the
comic, were incapable of wit, and did not need humor to make us happy.[xix]
Frequently it is a word that
triggers the humorous dialogue constantly flowing from the over imaginative
lips of Rufus (A Death in the Family) and Richard (The Morning Watch.)
“Blood of Christ inebriate me,” prays Richard as he takes his turn at the
Easter watch in the chapel. “Carefully as he tried, he could not avoid it.
Inebriate meant just plain drunken, or meant a drunken person.”[xx]
He is unable to say it sincerely in his prayers:
He
could only get past it without irreverent or skeptical thoughts by saying it so
fast or so shallowly that it was impossible to hear its meaning in mind, and
that was no way to pray.[xxi]
“A comic effect is obtained,”
said Bergson, “whenever we pretend to take literally an expression which was
used figuratively.”[xxii]
A similar situation develops in the minds of both Rufus and his sister Catherine
when their aunt Hanna tells them their father has “had an accident” and God has
“put him to sleep.” In their childish naivete they both misunderstand.
Catherine thinks immediately of a horrible occasion when unwanted kittens were
“put to sleep”:
Like
the kitties, Catherine thought; she saw a dim, gigantic old man in white take
her tiny father by the skin of the neck and put him in a huge slop jar full of
water and sit on the lid.[xxiii]
Rufus
associates the word “accident” with the only kind of accident he knows:
Rufus
felt his face get warm and he looked warningly at his sister. He knew it could
not be that, not with his father, a grown man, besides, God wouldn’t put you to
sleep for that, and it didn’t hurt, anyhow. But Catherine might think
so. Sure enough, she was looking at her aunt with astonishment and disbelief
that she should say such a thing about her father. Not in his pants, you
dern fool.[xxiv]
Like inebriate, the word “wound”
uttered in his prayers causes Richard’s mind to wander wildly but
imaginatively: “He saw more wounds than one, and this had instantly become
identical in his mind with a rawly intimate glimpse he had had, three or four
years before, of Minnielee Bensley when they were climbing a tree.”[xxv]
At this point his imagination becomes obscene:
Yet
there in his mind’s eye, made all the worse by all the most insipid and
effeminate, simpering faces of Jesus that he had ever seen in pictures, was
this hideous image of a huge torn bleeding gulf at the supine crotch, into
which an ant-swarm of the pious, millions of them, all pleading and rolling up
their eyes, laden souls, by thousands meekly stealing, struggled to crowd
themselves, and lose themselves, and drown, and dissolve.[xxvi]
Bergson has also noted that a
comic meaning is invariably obtained when an absurd idea is presented
seriously.[xxvii] As Richard gradually
attempts to re-live—in his mind—the entire sequence of events leading to the
Crucifixion, he is tempted to say to his mother: “Woman, what have I to do with
thee? Mine hour is not yet come.”[xxviii]
He pictures his own body on the cross:
But
it was of course out of the question that in a deep country part of Middle
Tennessee, in nineteen twenty-three, he could actually manage to have himself
nailed to the Cross; and although (if he should have the courage) could
undoubtedly nail his own feet, and even one hand (if someone else would steady
the nail), his right hand would still hang free, and it would look pretty
foolish beside a real Crucifixion.[xxix]
He considers hanging himself on a
cross, but there is none available. He considers the possibility of
constructing one in the Manual Training Shop, “only every body knew he wasn’t
any good with his hands and simple as a Cross must be to make, they would just laugh
at any that he would be likely to make.”[xxx]
He finally decides that the best substitute for hanging on a real Cross would
be to hang himself on his bedpost in emulation of the Crucifixion. He imagines
himself stripped “except for a loincloth” and hanging on the iron pars of his
bed. His friends and teacher gaze at the scene, and he is warned to come down
or else. “Scourge me,” he says, “paddle me with the one with holes in it; put
me in bounds all the rest of the year; expel me even.”[xxxi]
A friend holds up a sponge soaked in vinegar which he refuses, and from the
looks of his friends, he knows “he will never be last again, when they chose up
sides.”[xxxii]
Even a photographer appears and Richard can see the headlines: STRANGE RITES AT
MOUNTAIN SCHOOL.
Another example of Agee’s comedy of
language is found in his use of dialect. The use of dialect as a comic medium
is definitely in the American comic tradition. This technique of odd—often
illiterate—spelling of words is present throughout Agee’s novels and is added
evidence of his fascination with basic sounds and words.
In the opening scene of The
Morning Watch the boys are being awakened for their turn at watch. They
awake amidst a hail of profanity and rough-housing wherein a shoe is thrown at
one of the young (obviously southern-born) students:
“All
right some mothuf-----sonofabitch is agoana git the livin s--t beat outn him if
I find out who throwed that!”
“Shet
your God damn mouf,” said a coldly intense deeper voice at the far end of the
dormitory.
“Yeah
fer Chrise sakes shut up,” said another.[xxxiii]
Later,
on the way to the chapel, Hobe (the offended boy) has not forgotten the
incident:
“Sonofabitchin
mothuf-----bastud,” said Hobe.
“At
shoe bettah be gone by mawning or some bastudly cocks-----‘s agoana be sorry.”
“Aw
shut up Hobie,” Jimmy said. “This ain’t no time to talk like that.”
“Hell
do I keer,” Hobe said. “I hain’t been to Confession yet.”[xxxiv]
CHAPTER III
COMEDY OF ACTION
There is a dramatic quality in
Agee’s writings, especially the novels. In face, it would appear that his work
is easily adapted to the stage. That a movie has been made of A Death in the
Family is little evidence of its dramatic quality; however, that the novel
was made into the Pulitzer Prize winning play, All the Way Home, is
indicative of the novel’s dramatic quality. Agee’s understanding of drama and
the effectiveness of “the scene” made his novels little more than a series of
powerful vignettes.
The Morning Watch comprises actually only three
scenes: (1) the dormitory, (2) the chapel, (3) the swimming hole. A Death in
the Family is, of course, longer with more scenes—including several of
Rufus’ flashbacks—and what one remembers about the novel, other than its
over-all mood, are specific scenes. Agee’s technique of drawing his reader to a
scene, allowing him to witness it, then fading it out abruptly, echoes the
“stream of consciousness” technique and suggests the author’s father in a
concept used most effectively by the movies. A considerable number of scenes in
the novels are comic, in one way or another ranging from relatively high comedy
to the most obvious farce or slapstick.
Agee thought the moving picture
was the greatest art medium of his century and maintained a life-long desire to
direct movies. This passion began while he was still a child, and it was just
becoming a reality at the time of his death. A television film, a Lincoln study
sponsored by the Ford Foundation, was directed with tremendous success by Agee
for the now defunct Omnibus series. The film, which had numerous re-showings,
was thought by most critics to be a revolutionary example of the untapped
capabilities of television. This particular program, filmed in 1952, was not
primarily comical; it had, in fact, few comic incidents. It was, however,
Agee’s only opportunity actually to direct a film (even though he was hired
only as a writer-consultant.) Its success is evidence of his ability as a
director as well as a scenario writer.
Two of Agee’s screen plays, The
African Queen and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, can be classed as
comedies. The first is, as Agee intended it, high comedy; the second is
outright farce.
During his stint in Hollywood as
a screen writer, Agee worked with only a few of its famous personalities. Of
these the one whom he most admired (Charlie Chaplin excluded) was the
writer-director John Huston. The two first met while Agee was preparing an
article on Huston for Life.[i]
They later worked together on The African Queen and became close
friends. It was during an early morning tennis match with Huston that Agee had
his first heart attack. Among Huston’s more admirable qualities, according to
Agee, are recklessness and action. “Because action…is the natural language of
the screen and the instant present is its tense, Huston is a born popular
artist.”[ii]
It would appear, then, that Agee knew well the effectiveness of a scene, in
prose as well as on film, which included any of a number of classic comic
situations.
Writers on comic theory have
pointed out certain situations which, when created, provoke a comic response.
Among these are (1) any situation in which man appears to become either a
machine or a thing.[iii] This is one of the
reasons we laugh at circus clowns, or for that matter, Charlie Chaplin.
Bergson thought of the
“mechanical” as anything related to rigidness. In its extreme form this would
be the mechanical man—Chaplin, the mechanical toy, as he toddles off into the
horizon, kicking every few steps. “The attitudes, gestures, and movements of
the human body are laughable,” says Bergson, “in exact proportion as that body
reminds us of a mere machine…”[iv]
The priest who visits the Follett
home in A Death in the Family is just such a mechanical man whose every
gesture and response remind us of a pre-set machine. The children, Rufus and
Catherine, describe him:
Father
Jackson strode efficiently across the room, set in their father’s chair,
crossed his knees narrowly, and looked, frowning, at the carefully polished toe
of his right show…Father Jackson held his long, heavily veined right hand palm
outward, at arm’s length, and, frowning, examined his nails…Father Jackson
changed knees, and, frowning, examined the carefully polished toe of his left
shoe…Father Jackson, frowning, looked all around the room and smiled, faintly,
as his gaze came to rest on some point above and beyond the heads of the
children…but there was nothing there except the picture of Jesus when Jesus was
a little boy, staying up late in his nightgown and talking to all the wise men
in the temple.[v]
Later
Father Jackson looks at the children “just as he had looked at his nails,” and
reprimands them for staring at “their elders.” The children understand little
of what he means by “stare,” “ill-bred,” “elders,” and Father Jackson replies
with all the clichés and banalities characteristic of the insensitive
“mechanical” individual that he is. “The cliché-user is comic,” says Auden,
“because the illusion of being identical with others is created by his personal
act. He is the megalomaniac in reverse.”[vi]
Another classic comic scene is
created when the roles of certain characters in certain situations are
inverted.[vii]
Such a scene is enacted in A Death in the Family as Rufus, at his
mother’s request, is helping his sister dress. He is aware of playing his
mother’s role and tires his best to imitate her:
He
got her clothes. “Take off your nightie,” he said. “Sopping wet,” he added, as
nearly like his mother as possible…She got on the panties and…the
underwaist…too, except that it was backwards. “That’s all right,” he told her,
as much like his mother as he was able, “you do it fine. Just a little bit
crooked”…“Stand still,” he said, because to tell her so seemed only a proper
part of carrying out his duty.[viii]
We
need only to be shown one of these roles; the other is clear in our minds.
In writing for the screen Agee saw a
unique opportunity to put into practice his knowledge of comedy, and he took
full advantage of the flexibility of the film medium. The high comedy scenes
“with deeply ribald undertones” of The African Queen, as well as certain
scenes from A Death in the Family, are good examples of Agee’s attempts
at this classic form.
The gradual process whereby Rose, in
The African Queen, is transformed from a prudish, organ-playing,
teetotaling missionary into a somewhat rowdy second-mate-mechanic’s-assistant
of Allnutt’s dilapidated old river boat is typical of this high
comedy—especially the bathing scene[ix]
and the one in which she pours all of Allnutt’s precious gin overboard.[x]
On the evening of Jay Follett’s
death, in A Death in the Family, most of the family sit up with Mary
Follett for the remainder of the night during which several members have “hot
toddies” at Aunt Hannah’s suggestion. After the other members of the family
have left, Mary and Aunt Hannah remain to clean up the place. Hannah suggests another
toddy:
“Great—goodness!”
Mary exclaimed. She lifted the bottle.
“Do
you mean to say I drank all that?” It was three-quarters empty.
“How
on earth!” she held the low whiskey close to her eyes and looked at it as if
she were threading a needle. “Well I most certainly don’t need a hot
toddy,” she said.
“I
never heard of such a thing!” she exclaimed quietly.[xi]
In an earlier scene Rufus is taken
by his Aunt Hannah—one of the most delightful characters in the novel—into a
downtown Knoxville store to buy one of the then-popular visored caps which he
desperately desires, but which his mother deplores. The scene is as beautiful
as any of Agee’s descriptions:
…she
compressed her lips and…steered round to Market Street and into Harbison’s,
which sold clothing exclusively for men and boys, and was regarded by his
mother as “tough,” “sporty,” and “vulgar.” And it was indeed a world most alien
to women; not very pleasant men turned to stare at this little boy in tow; but
she was too blind to understand their glances and, sailing up to the nearest
man who seemed to be a clerk (he wore no hat) asked briskly, without
embarrassment, “Where do I go, please, to find a cap for my nephew?”[xii]
Aunt
Hannah allows him to choose the one he likes, and he decides on
a
thunderous fleecy check in jade green, canary yellow, black and white, which
stuck out inches to either side above his ears and had a great scoop of visor
beneath which his face was all but lost.[xiii]
Rufus
leaves the store elated at the thought of just how “tough it was going to look
after it had been kicked around a little.”[xiv]
Although essentially a poet, Agee
was a man of many talents and enthusiasms. Because of the broad scope of his
interests, his decision to become a writer was a difficult one.[xv]
The movies gave perhaps the widest range of artistic expression. His knowledge
of the technicalities of the process—camera angles, lighting, sound, color—was
extraordinary. This tremendous attention to detail resulted in scripts which,
when read, enable one to see the movie.
The African Queen opens with a scene in a remote
jungle mission where a missionary (Brother) and his spinster sister (Rose) are
carrying out a religious service. In the middle of a hymn, Allnutt, the owner
and captain of the only boat travelling the nearby river, arrives, and the
noise of his boat’s engine causes Rose to play louder than usual in an attempt
to maintain proper atmosphere in the service. The information and description
of the scene provided by Agee is vivid:
LONG
SHOT – INT. CHAPEL
Rose
pulls out all the stops, spreads her knees, and pumps like mad in her effort to
drown out the ENGINE SOUND. Brother sweats and sings even harder, scowling,
shaking his head. The singing is fraying out half to hell; the congregation is
a solid black wall of wandering eyes; and a few pious converts frown or nudge
at the less pious; a little group is coalescing toward the window. Past it,
framed by window, we see the boat tie up and Allnutt lands, booting one of his crew in the
bottom.[xvi]
Released under the title Face
to Face (in which Agee played the part of the town drunk) The Bride
Comes to Yellow Sky is set in a small western town where there resides a
marshal, who maintains the town’s jail in his home and allows his prisoners
free run of the town but who reprimands them if they come back to the jail
late. As the first scene opens, Marshal Potter is leaving his
house-office-jail.
PRISONER
(in upper window) So long, Marshal
Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do.
POTTER
Don’t you do nothing I wouldn’t, s’more like it. You lock yourself in
right after mealtimes.
PRISONER
You can trust me, Marshal.[xvii]
After the marshal has left town,
a friend of his gets wildly drunk and storms the marshal’s home threatening to
kill him—for a reason which is never quite clear. Although he shoots up the
place—and most of the town—he is finally convinced that the marshal is not at
home, but out of town, and he sits down to wait for him.
In the meantime, the marshal
arrives back in town by train with his new bride—of all things—and, seeking to
avoid public recognition of this fact right away, attempts to sneak back to his
house without being noticed. In the process of slipping around a building he
runs face to face (exactly as in a silent comedy) with the drunk who vows to
shoot him on the spot. Potter informs the drunk that he was not trying to avoid
him but only trying to sneak home with his new bride. At this point, the drunk
calls the whole thing off, and everybody goes home happy.
There is still another side to
Agee’s comedy. One sees it in his idol, Chaplin, and in other low comedy
American film comedians. It is this segment of comedy which is closely
associated with violence and cruelty—in Agee’s phrase: “Making comedy cut to
the bone.”[xviii] His appreciation of
and familiarity with this form of comedy is clear in scattered incidents
throughout his longer works; it is the theme of his story, “A Mother’s Tale,” a
grim, nihilistic allegory involving cows.
There is a strong history of this
type of comedy in American literature—from Longstreet and the Southwest
humorists to Faulkner to (in a slightly different way) Walt Disney. Kenneth
Lynn, in The Comic Tradition in America, refutes the suggestion that
such comedy was peculiar to the American frontier, that it is gone forever:
Efforts
have been made to explain away this fact by assigning the coarseness and
violence of our comic tradition to the grotesque taste of the frontiersman, now
happily a thing of the past. But the sadism of the animated cartoons, in
mangling of animals dressed up as human beings, is proof enough that as a
people we still retain our peculiar sense of fun.[xix]
CHAPTER IV
AGEE’S SATIRE
It has been noted in this paper that
satire may appear in many forms, and that its primary purpose is “to expose
man’s weaknesses, his minor follies or major vices, in all possible spheres,
from social to political to moral conduct.”[i]
Agee’s satirical urge showed itself in many forms throughout his works.
No one recognized more fully the
weaknesses and follies of man, himself included, than did Agee. At the same
time, no American writer has presented his satire with a greater love for his
subject than did he. In this respect, he felt he was in total agreement with
Swift’s philosophy. “I get two such feelings as strongly as I have the capacity
for them,” he states in a letter:
…one
feeling of that music—of a love and pity and joy that nearly floors you, and
the other of Swift’s sort, when you see the people you love—any mob of them in
this block I live in—with a tincture of sickness and cruelty and selfishness in
the faces of most of them, sometimes an apparently totally and universal
blindness to kindliness and good and beauty. You have a feeling that they could
never be cured and that all effort is misspent—and then you also know it would
be more than worth dying for.[ii]
However, if it had developed at the
time, such an attitude as the one suggested above was not the motivating force
behind Agee’s earliest attempts at satire. Apparently, his earliest expression
of any consequence was the parody of Time done while he was editor of
the Hartford Advocate.[iii]
Published in the exact style and format of Time, the issue is dated 800
B.C.-100 A.D.
Although Agee speaks in his letters
of his “engineering a parody of Time,” and although his name appears on
the masthead as editor, one cannot be certain just what parts of the work Agee
wrote and what parts were written by others of the dozen or so names listed on
the same masthead. Nonetheless, one can be assured that Agee wrote a
considerable portion of the copy and in his capacity as editor, selected most
of the material included.
Dated as it is, the issue shows not
only an enormous amount of clever and witty writing, but a more-than-schoolboy
knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology, as well as ancient history. A Mark
Twain-like “WARNING” appears on the first page:
Anyone
attempting to find coherence, consequence, or continuity of idea, character, or
history in the following pages will be sued, persecuted, and extremely
disappointed. In our operations upon TIME, we have murdered CHRONOLOGY. Kindly
omit flowers.
Respectfully
The style of Time, with its
various “Departments,” as well as its advertisements is cleverly mimicked.
Under a department heading, “WAR,” is found the following:
Started
Something: Six
months ago, Helen, wife of Agamemnon, chief of Greece, eloped with Paris,
Trojan sportsman and Beauty Contest Judge. As a consequence, last week a mighty
Greek force left for Troy in a gigantic Armada. Leaders include Agamemnon,
Odysseus, attorney and master of military tactics, the Ajax brothers, Big and
Little Jack, and Achilles, one-time Olympic javelin thrower and weight lifter.
Said Agamemnon,* (*Later, ‘ghost’ writer for W. Wilson.) leader of the invaders,
“I want it distinctly understood that we are not at war with Troy. We are
merely seeking to protect our own interests and do not intend to revoke the
Mediterranean Peace Pact.[v]
On the preceding page, there appears
an advertisement for “CAESARIAN OPS., INC., Cash on delivery; delivery
on the slightest provocation.” The add is designed to promote births by an
obviously new method:
SINCE
Major-General CAESAR’S brilliant return from Gaul, all patriotic young couples
of discrimination and taste are saving their pinmoney to give babykins the same
wonderful break that great patriot had at the hands of CAESARIAN OPS., INC.[vi]
Frequently the writing becomes hilariously
involved in puns, witty statements, and footnotes, in true Time fashion.
An example concerning Europe appears in the “PEOPLE” column:
Europe, comely and popular subdeb
heir-of-parent Agenor, together with brothers Cadmus & Callinus
disported over seaside meadowlands. Nearby browsed a Bull, broad-hulked,
long-horned, with docile but libidinous eye, lowing and blowing quietly,
(Funny-man Aristophanes avers that he hummed “Won’t someone please Pasiphae* my
mind.”)[vii]
The
asterisk calls attention to this explanation at the bottom of the page:
*Pasiphae,
Cretan dowager, although rich, royal and robust, was so unaware of the natural hierarchy
as to make overtures to another Bull; gigolo Bull retaliated with a one-act
tragedy. Result: international complications because of Minotaur, mantorsoed,
bull-headed, labyrinth-hidden. (See TIME, Aug. 20; B.C. 800)[viii]
And, not unlike dozens of other
college magazines, this issue has just enough spice-between-the-lines to make
it interesting to the more sophisticated campus humorists, but not enough to
make it appear outright vulgar. Another “name in the news” is that of
Pygmalion, “bachelor, artlover, ruler of Cyprus,”
…sculpted
statue, nude, glamorous. Whimsical, regal Rodin petnamed work “Galatea”.
Exhibited figure in annual Pan-Hellenic Academy show, copped first prize.
Aesthetic appreciation changed to something deeper, sex reared its not
unbeautiful head. Pygmalion, full of faith, prayed hard, believed, coued
marble to flesh, married the girl. Wisecracked friends: “Of course, he made
her.”[ix]
Although much of the writing in the Advocate’s
parody of Time “sounds” like Agee’s writing in much of his movie reviewing,
one can not be certain that he wrote it, but only that he found it acceptable
for such an issue. That he wrote those portions which were his favorite
interest areas, “Theatre” and “Movies,” would not seem improbable; but one can
only speculate.
It is in the Nation and Time
movie reviews that examples of social and moral satire can be found. As a
reviewer for these magazines, Agee had a unique opportunity and privilege; he
was free to say just about anything he wished on any subject. Although it was
difficult for him to avoid it, Agee seriously tried not to abuse this privilege
and to make it worthwhile and beneficial. At least one worthy critic, W. H.
Auden, thought he succeeded. Auden wrote that he admired very much Agee’s movie
criticisms since he Auden was “suspicious of criticism as the literary genre
which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight,
intellectuals without love.”[x]
It has been said that “without
humor, satire is invective; without literary form, it is mere clownish
jeering.”[xi] Generally, Agee is unable
to avoid at least a touch of humor in even the most serious discussion. In a
review of God Is My Co-Pilot, as with many other war movies, he
satirizes the Hollywood treatment of war. This particular movie deals with
pilots and planes and a character who expresses some evidence of guilt
feelings, or at least concern, at having killed a hundred men in one day. He
seeks the advice of a priest who gives him nothing like a satisfactory reply.
In Agee’s opinion, since the priest did not answer him in any way about his
problem, it “is regrettable, not to say nauseating, that they bothered to bring
up the problem at all.”[xii]
Aside
from these religious conversations…there is a good deal of air combat on
process screens, obstructed by the customary close-ups of pilots smiling grimly
as they give or take a death in a studio, for considerably more than soldier’s
pay, a yard above the ground.[xiii]
He
closes this discussion with: “God is my best pal and severest critic, but when
He asked for this touching March afternoon off, I didn’t have it in my heart to
refuse Him.”[xiv]
In this same column, dated March 31,
1945, he discusses another movie, The Affairs of Susan, in which he
satirizes Hollywood’s preoccupation with the sex-appeal of its leading ladies.
In
this interminable film, which might be describes as a Make’s Progress, Joan
Fontaine is photographed as Joan of Arc; the Maid looks as if she were
testifying, for a handsome fee, to every nice thing the Voices told her about
Lysol. Miss Fontaine also appears as a lakeshore innocent, in trousers and a
thinly knit jersey; in a series of gowns and negligees which are still more
earnestly calculated to refute the canard that, if the Hays office permitted,
she would be ashamed to make a clean breast of her “development” (I think the
word is.).[xv]
Perhaps
the most interesting elements of this statement are its puns, a form of comic
expression which Agee frequently used, as has been indicated, in the Time
parody.[xvi]
In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
as in certain movie reviews, Agee’s satire degenerates into invective or, in
its extreme form, name-calling. This book, which Robert Phelps has called “one
of the most vulnerable perversities and surest glories of American literature,”[xvii]
is a 450-page prose lyric about tenant farmers in Alabama in the thirties. The
book is unique, to say the least. In some ways, it is bitter. In the “Preamble”
what could have been satire has developed into a bitter attack on the world.
Agee is talking to his readers:
One
by one, you have…distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all your
poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to
relax; Cezannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh
is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window
decoration; Swift loved individuals but hated mankind; Kafka is a fad; Blake is
in the Modern Library; Freud is a Modern Library Giant; Dovschenko’s Frontier
is disliked by those who demand that it fit the Eisenstein esthetic; nobody
reads Joyce any more; Celine is a madman who has incurred the hearty
dislike of Alfred Kazin, reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune book
section, and is moreover, a fascist; I hope I need not mention Jesus Christ, of
whom you have managed to make a dirty gentile.[xviii]
He felt the deepest sympathy for
these Alabama tenant farmers who lived in agony, degenerating into a
lower-animal of existence. He wrote of the sharecroppers, says Alfred Kazin
(who apparently ignored Agee’s attack on him), “with such love and rage that it
is impossible to read the book without sharing his suffering.”[xix]
It was his emotional involvement with his subject which caused him to leave the
Fortune project and subsequently the magazine itself.[xx]
Instead he wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This emotional connection
had its source in pity. At one point in the book, the daughter of one of the
tenants is leaving her family to go to work in another county. She does not
wish to go, but knows that she must if the family is to survive. “I would have
done anything in the world for her,” says Agee,
(that
is always characteristic, I guess, of the seizure of the strongest love you can
feel: pity, and the wish to die for a person, because there isn’t anything you can
do for them that is at all measureable to your love), and all I could do…for
this girl…was not to show all I cared for her and for what she was saying…[xxi]
For the tenant, he felt pity; for
the landowners, he frequently felt contempt. It is the crude, vulgar landowner,
and all that he represented in his associations with the Negro, whom Agee
satirizes in a scene from this book. This scene is one of the book’s early
scenes, when Agee first meets the people in this rural area. The landowner is
showing Agee and Walker Evans the various farms. The first people they meet are
a group of Negro famr hands. The foreman speaks to the Negroes in what might be
termed a comically obscene manner:
And
you, you ben doin much coltn lately, you horny old bastard?—and the crinkled,
old, almost gray-mustached negro who came up tucked his head to one side
looking cute, and showed what was left of his teeth, and whined, tittering, Now
Mist So-in-So, you know I’m settled down, married-man, you wouldn’t—and the
brutal negro of forty split his face in a villainous grin and said, He too ole,
Mist So-in-So, he don’t got no sap lef in him; and everyone laughed, and the
landowner said, These yer two yere, colts yourn ain’t they?—and the old man
said they were, and the landowner said, Musta found them in the woods,
strapping young niggers as that; and the old man said, No sir, he got the both
of them lawful married, Mist So-And-So; and the landowner said that the eldest
on em looks to be ready for a piece himself, and the negroes laughed…and
meanwhile the landowner had loosed the top two buttons of his trousers, and he
now reached his hand in to the middle of the forearm, and squatting with bent
knees apart, clawed, scratched and rearranged his genitals.[xxii]
Agee
deplored this ridicule of human beings and would have completely agreed with
Lynn: Some people still retain a peculiar sense of fun.[xxiii]
In 1939, the Partisan Review
sent to Agee and numerous other writers a questionnaire of certain “questions
which face American writers today.” Agee’s reply was never printed in the
magazine on the grounds that no magazine is obligated to print an attack upon
itself. His answers to the questionnaire are, however, included in Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men. In answer to a question relating to a writer’s making
a living writing in America, and the place in American for “literature as a
profession,” Agee states:
A
good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can
happen to an enemy, now matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No
society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist
without mortal danger to that artist. Only no one need worry: for this same
artist is about the one sort of human being alive who can be trusted to take
care of himself.[xxiv]
Apparently
Agee thinks a writer must remain detached from society in order to maintain his
objective attitude as a critic of society. This is not to say that an artist
must be “a hater of mankind,” however.
Certainly one of his most brilliant
social satires is a story, “Dedication Day,” published in New Directions 15
in 1948. It might well be termed the first example of what has in recent years
become known as the “Anti-Bomb” school of contemporary writing. In the minds of
critics like Dwight Macdonald, this, like Agee’s letter to Macdonald, can be
classified as expressing a “nihilistic, destructive, irreverent, vulgar,
alienated, un-American and generally lousy attitude.”[xxv]
A paraphrase and a few selections from the story will undoubtedly confirm such
an opinion for many readers.
The story, which Agee sub-titled
“Rough Sketch for a Moving Picture,” is set in the spring of 1946 in
Washington, D.C., between the Obelisk and the Lincoln Memorial where the
dedication of “ the new heroic Arch” is about to take place. The purpose of
this Arch is to memorialize the greatest of human achievements for all time to
come. It has been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, constructed of fused uranium,
and proofed against frost, earthquakes, and the inscription and carving of
initials.
From loudspeakers concealed about
the Arch is pouring a special performance of the choral movement of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, “in a new translation by Louis Aragon and Harry Brown, done
under the supervision of Robert E. Sherwood, conducted by Arturo Toscanini in
Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Centre.”[xxvi]
Extending from the base of the
monument are a few inches of white cord which is lit by a little girl—the
healthiest three-year-old in the United States—“from a taper which had been
lighted from a light which had been taken from the light which burns eternally
in Paris, above the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”
Thousands are there to witness the
unveiling which reveal the legend: “THIS IS IT.” Below the legend the “Eternal
Fuse” continues to exude and to consume itself, one inch above the pavement at
the rate of one inch per second. The fuse is manufactured on the spot from an
air-conditioned, irradiated, underground workshop “so ingeniously contrived by
Norman Bel Geddes.” The manufacturing of the never-ending fuse is economically
fortunate in that it provides jobs for those “rendered redundant by the
termination of hostilities.” These individuals are called “Keepers of the
Flame.” Two shifts man the flame around the clock.
One
of those twelve-hour shifts (for the work was light) was composed of such
disabled winners of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Congressional Medal of
Honor, and the Navy Cross, as did not wish to be a burden on their communities
or to languish in Veterans’ Hospitals, and as were alert to the immense therapeutic
value of honest work. It was required of them only that they wear their
uniforms and decorations, during working hours, and, as a reminder and incentive
to youth, show their wounds, scars, or stumps…The other shift was composed of
depreciated but surviving collaborators in the experiments at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, who had been forgiven, and were, indeed, aside from a few unfortunate
incidents which marred the course of their journey across the less progressive
reaches of the nation, treated with marked civility, even being permitted to shake
hands with the Secretaries of State and of War, who laughingly apologized,
through an interpreter, for wearing radiation-proof gloves and masks throughout
the little ceremony.[xxvii]
It is required of these Japanese
only that they keep on display, during working hours, those strange burns which
have excited, in Americans, so much friendly curiosity. They are treated in
strict accordance with the rules of the Geneva Convention which, among other
things, requires them to eat exactly that which the men in our own armed forces
eat. Therefore, they are forced to ingest
one
can of K Rations, two four-pound porterhouse steaks, one carton of Camels,
eight squares of Ex-Lax, two boxes of Puffed Rice, the juice of twelve oranges,
a tin of Spam, a cup of Ovaltine, a prophylactic, a tube of nationally
advertised toothpaste, a macerated or liquefied overseas editions of Time,
Reader’s Digest and the New Testament, each per day, plus roast beef,
apple pie and store cheese on Sundays and proper supplements, including third
helpings, spoonlickings and ejaculations of “Gosh, Mom,” of the special dishes
traditionally appropriate to the major Holidays; all to be administered orally,
rectally or by intravenous injection, as best befitted the comfort of the
patient—a task which many of the little fellows found so embarrassing, and
which the tourists found so richly amusing to watch, that even after the first
few days, feeding time created something of a traffic problem.[xxviii]
One incident, however, mars the
otherwise perfect day. One of the more elderly of the scientists who
contributed his genius towards the perfections of the bomb, appears and asks
permission to become one of the keepers. He is thought mad by his fellow
scientists: he is known to have attended Mass and has written to Gandhi
concerning what he calls “atonement.” He does not last long at this job since
the operation is visible to tourists through an unbreakable glass and, although
he could not be heard by the observers, “it was only too clear, to the more
observant of these onlookers, that as he worked he spoke, and that his speech
was evidently a terrible blended stream of self-vilification and of pr-y-r.” He
is asked to retire. He agrees, but requests permission to throw the main
switch—a task originally delegated to Gen. Leslie Groves—which will start the
fuse on its eternal journey. He is granted this privilege, only to commit suicide
at the moment he throws the switch, leaving a note to the effect that he felt
his suicide obligatory.
He is buried at the centre of
that area in New Mexico in which he and his colleagues first saw the light of
the New Age. The story ends on this ironical note:
And
it does not seem too much to hope that perhaps he will be remembered, not,
surely, as he had intended, yet a little wistfully, in the sound of the fuse
itself as it increases upon the world. For misguided and altogether regrettable
though his last days were—a sad warning indeed to those who turn aside from the
dictates of reason, and accept human progress reluctantly; he was nevertheless,
perhaps, our last link with a not-too-distant past in which such conceptions as
those of “atonement”, and “guilt”, and “individual responsibility”, still had
significance.[xxix]
In the lines of the sixteenth-century
English poet Joseph Hall: “…The satire should be like the porcupine,/ That
shoots sharp quils out in each angry line.”[xxx]
Certainly these are angry lines which Agee utters. Not the dullest of the
quills of “Dedication Day” is the fact that, in all the goings-on in the story,
the people taking part have no idea why they are doing what they are doing—and
do not care.
…for
it was not clear either to the speakers or to the listeners precisely why or to
what purpose or idea the Arch had been raised, and was to be dedicated; they
labored, rather, purely under an irresistible obligation both to indicate their
recognition of a great event by erecting a permanent altar to it, and to sign
their names to the moment in a few authorized words—as is still found necessary
by many people…when a dead man is buried.[xxxi]
If,
indeed this is Agee’s central point in the story—that people are taking part in
matters which they neither understand nor care about, that the world is too
much with us, that we are all being led willingly to our own doom—one doubts if
there are more serious listeners fifteen years later than there were then.
CONCLUSION
Agee wrote no prose—save certain
journalistic articles for Time and Fortune—wherein there is not
at least a trace of comedy. Ironically, he frequently appeared personally as a
tormented individual.[i] At
the same time, however, he could write concerning a book by Lionel Trilling:
“He [Trilling] quotes Stendhal as observing that Gaiety is the sign of the intelligent
man—a statement which ought to be written across practically every
‘“intelligent”’ forehead I know of.”[ii]
There is little to be gained from
attempting to find the source, or reasons, for Agee’s comic expression. After
examining his work one sees the results of what might be called his “comic
vision.” Constance Rourke’s statement about the humorist’s being always deadly
serious[iii]
might be valid in this case; if so, Agee is not unlike some earlier tormented
American comic writers—Irving, Longstreet, Poe, Twain, to name a few. His
“comic vision” seemed, however, to come to him naturally. He could not help but
include comedy in his writing. It was part of reality as Agee conceived it.
From the time he first considered
writing as a life’s work, he was “determined to include comedy”[iv]
in everything he wrote. At 18, he read Dreiser and was impressed by his work,
but criticized it because it “has no humor.”[v]
His wit, his ability to turn a
phrase, was compulsive. In his most serious letters, there are always witty
phrases. In his movie reviews, wit—plus extraordinary technical
knowledge—formed a comic style which is still being imitated weekly in the
movie column of Time, as well as other popular magazines.
Wit, along with a sensitive
appreciation of “the scene” and an ability for writing dialect, is also present
in his novels. Using these techniques and working within a setting of
childhood, Agee created the most impressive and effective elements in his first
novel, The Morning Watch.
Agee’s appreciation for low comedy
is the one comic form that—if he was not born with—he had ample opportunity to
develop. From his earliest recollections, he had vivid memories of Charlie
Chaplin and others of the slapstick comedy school. He maintained this love and
appreciation throughout his life; he wrote a definitive essay on the silent
comedians; he even employed their farcical techniques in his own screen plays.
His satire is ever-present in the
movie reviews. It is at its best in “Dedication Day,” where it reaches Swiftian
proportions in its condemnation of man’s inhumanity to man. It is at its worst
in parts of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men where it becomes little more
than childish name-calling. Agee was, however, what W. H. Auden would call, “an
intellectual with love.” He was sympathetic toward the victims of his satire.
If the samples of Agee’s “high sense
of comedy”[vi]
presented in this paper are an indication of his ability as a comic writer,
then one is even more inclined to ask, with numerous Agee critics: Why did he
not somehow manage to produce more work of such quality? Robert Phelps notes in
an introduction to Agee’s Letters that at the end of the last war, when Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men was lying unsold in Manhattan bookshops, “fugitive
references to him Agee always implied that he had been the best, absolutely,
but the best had somehow defected.”[vii]
Of course, no one will ever be able
to answer this question completely. Agee demonstrated exceptional talent as
novelist, story writer, screen writer, movie director, satirist, critic,
and—above all—poet. From the beginning of his writing career, he was
successful. Responsible writers who read some of his earliest work, written
while at Exeter, thought it showed definite promise.[viii]
At 25, fresh out of college, he published a book of poems, Permit Me Voyage,
in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In the “Foreword,” Archibald MacLeish
speaks of Agee’s “successful apprenticeship.”
What
appears is a technical apprenticeship successfully passed, a mature and in some
cases a masterly control of rhythms, a vocabulary at once personal to the poet
and appropriate to the intention and, above everything else, the one poetic
gift which no amount of ingenuity can fake—a delicate and perceptive ear.[ix]
This
is not faint praise for a young poet. Nonetheless, he might never haven written
any more verse, had he lived; he might never have revolutionized the movies, as
many expected; he might never have even written another novel; but none of this
is of any real importance.
As John Updike has accurately
suggested: “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.[x]
If the Agee legend continues to
grow and spread—and this appears certain—there will be more of his works
published and more criticism written about this work. The world will, in time, hear much more
of James Rufus Agee, and will have adequate opportunity to evaluate him as a
twentieth-century American writer. Auden predicted this as early as 1944 in
that letter to The Nation regarding Agee’s film column. “One forsees,”
says Auden, “the sad day, indeed, when Agee on Film will be the subject of a
Ph.D. thesis.”[xi]
[ii] Letters, pp.
135-136.
[ix] Archibald MacLeish,
“Foreword,” Permit Me Voyage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934),
p. 7.
[x] John Updike, “No Use
Talking,” New Republic, CXLVII (August 13, 1962), 23.
[iii] Hartford
Advocate, CXVIII (March, 1932).
[ix] Advocate, pp.
20-21.
[xi] Richard Garnett,
“Satire,” Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed.), XX (Chicago,
1959), 5.
[xii] Agee on Film,
p. 153.
[xvi] See pages 39 and 40.
[xvii] Robert Phelps,
“Introduction,” Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (New York, 1962),
p. 1.
[xviii] James Agee, Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, 1941), p. 14.
[xx] Agee and the
photographer, Walker Evans, had been sent by their employer, Fortune, to
Alabama to do a story on the tenant farmer. Obviously the finished product was
unacceptable, and was not published until 1941, appearing in book form as Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men.
[xxi] Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, pp. 64-65.
[xxii] Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, p. 28.
[xxiv] Remembering Agee’s
later obvious inability to “take care of himself,” one shudders at reading the
last line of this quotation.
[xxvi] James Agee,
“Dedication Day,” New Directions 15 (Parsippany, New Jersey, 1948), p.
252.
[xxix] “Dedication Day,” p.
263.
[xxx] Virgidemiarum,
V, p. 92, cited by Charles A. Allen and George D. Stephens, Satire: Theory
and Practice (Belmont, California, 1962), p. 8.
[xxxi] “Dedication Day,” p.
253.
[i] James Agee, “The
Undirectable Director,” Life, XXIX (September 8,1950), 128-145.
[ii] Agee On Film,
pp. 321-2.
[v] Death in the
Family, pp. 219-20.
[vi] W. H. Auden, “Notes
on the Comic” Thought, XXVII (Spring, 1952), 64.
[viii] Death in the
Family, pp. 192-3.
[ix] Agee On Film,
vol. II (New York, 1960), p. 180.
[x] Agee On Film,
II, p. 202.
[xi] Death in the
Family, p. 155.
[xii] Death in the
Family, p. 64.
[xiii] Death in the
Family, p. 65.
[xvi] Agee On Film,
II, p. 154.
[xvii] Agee On Film,
II, p. 357.
[xix] Kenneth Lynn, The
Comic Tradition in America (Garden City, 1958), p. 94.
[i] Alfred Kazin, Contemporaries
(Boston, 1962), p. 186.
[ii] Death in the
Family, p. 37.
[iii] Death in the
Family, p. 226.
[iv] Sigmund Freud, Wit
and its Relation to the Unconscious (New York, 1938), p. 762.
[v] W. H. Auden, Nation,
CLIX (October 16, 1944), 628.
[vi] Agee On Film,
p. 37.
[vii] Agee On Film,
p. 41.
[ix] Agee On Film,
p. 53.
[xv] “The U.S. Commercial
Orchid,” Fortune, XII (December, 1935), 108.
[xx] James Agee, The
Morning Watch (Boston, 1951), p. 32.
[xxiii] Death in the
Family, p. 196.
[xxv] The Morning
Watch, p. 34.
[xxix] The Morning Watch,
p. 46.
[xxx] The Morning Watch,
p. 47.
[xxxi] The Morning Watch,
p. 49.
[i] Henri Bergson,
“Laughter,” Comedy, tr. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York,
1956), p. 61.
[ii] H.W. Fowler, s.v.
“humor,” A Dictionary of Modern Usage (Oxford, 1937), p. 240.
[iii] Aristotle,
“Poetics,” Aristotle on the Art of Fiction (Cambridge, 1953), p. 23.
[iv] George Meredith, An
Essay on Comedy and the Uses of Comic Spirit (New York, 1897), p. 82.
[v] E.B. White, The
Second Tree From the Corner (New York, 1954), p. 173.
[vi] James Thurber, Lanterns
and Lances (New York, 1955), p. 143.
[vii] Marlies K. Danziger
and W. Stacy Johnson, An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Boston,
1961), p. 104.
[ix] James Agee,
“Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Agee on Film (New York, 1958), pp. 2-19.
[xi] James Agee, A
Death in the Family (New York, 1957), pp. 17-18.
[xv] Dwight Macdonald, Against
the American Grain (New York, 1962), p. 162.
[xxii] W. M. Frohock,
“James Agee: The Question of Unkept Promise,” Southwestern Review, XLII,
221-229.
[xxv] Letters, p.
229-231.
[i] Edmund Fuller, “I’d
Do Anything On Earth To Write,” The New York Times Book Review, (July
22, 1962), p. 1.
[ii] James Agee, Letters
of James Agee to Father Flye (New York, 1962), p. 37.
[vi] Constance Rourke, American
Humor (New York, 1931), p. 9.
[vii] Kenneth S. Lynn
(ed.), The Comic Tradition in America (Garden City, 1958), pp. 46-47.
THE COMIC ELEMENT IN THE WORKS OF JAMES AGEE
_____________
A Thesis
Presented to
the Graduate Council of
The University of Tennessee
____________________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
__________________________
by
Dale Paul Woodiel
August 1963
ACKNOWLEGEMENT
With sincere appreciation, I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and assistance given me by Dr. Durant da Ponte during the past three years. I am also grateful to Dr. Baine Stewart and Dr. Jack Reece for their interest in reading the thesis and serving as members of the examining committee, and to Connie Adams for typing the thesis.
D.P.W.
