The Comic Element in the Works of James Agee

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 20^th century American gentlewoman with the sperm of an 11^th 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

H.A. PEGASUS[iv]

            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]

---

[i] Letters, p. 105.

[ii] Letters, pp. 135-136.

[iii] See note 6, p. v.

[iv] Letters, p. 48.

[v] Letters, p. 29.

[vi] Kazin, p. 186.

[vii] Phelps, p. 4.

[viii] See note 2, p. iii.

[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.

[xi] See note 5, p. 17.

---

[i] See page 4.

[ii] Letters, pp. 60-61.

[iii] Hartford Advocate, CXVIII (March, 1932).

[iv] Advocate, p. 5.

[v] Advocate, p. 6.

[vi] Advocate, p. 4.

[vii] Advocate, p. 20.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Advocate, pp. 20-21.

[x] See page 16.

[xi] Richard Garnett, “Satire,” Encyclopedia Britannica (14^th ed.), XX (Chicago, 1959), 5.

[xii] Agee on Film, p. 153.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Ibid.

[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.

[xix] Kazin, p. 186.

[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.

[xxiii] See page 35.

[xxiv] Remembering Agee’s later obvious inability to “take care of himself,” one shudders at reading the last line of this quotation.

[xxv] See page 9.

[xxvi] James Agee, “Dedication Day,” New Directions 15 (Parsippany, New Jersey, 1948), p. 252.

[xxvii] “Dedication Day,” p. 258.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[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.

[iii] Bergson, p. 97.

[iv] Bergson, p. 79.

[v] Death in the Family, pp. 219-20.

[vi] W. H. Auden, “Notes on the Comic” Thought, XXVII (Spring, 1952), 64.

[vii] Bergson, p. 121.

[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.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Letters, pp. 45-46.

[xvi] Agee On Film, II, p. 154.

[xvii] Agee On Film, II, p. 357.

[xviii] Agee On Film, II, p. 254.

[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.

[viii] Agee On Film, p. 46.

[ix] Agee On Film, p. 53.

[x] Agee On Film, p. 61.

[xi] Letters, p. 25.

[xii] Letters, p. 36.

[xiii] Letters, p. 47.

[xiv] Letters, p. 81.

[xv] “The U.S. Commercial Orchid,” Fortune, XII (December, 1935), 108.

[xvi] Letters, p. 192.

[xvii] Letters, p. 229.

[xviii] Freud, p. 802.

[xix] Freud, p. 803.

[xx] James Agee, The Morning Watch (Boston, 1951), p. 32.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Bergson, p. 135.

[xxiii] Death in the Family, p. 196.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] The Morning Watch, p. 34.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Bergson, p. 133.

[xxviii] The Morning Watch, p. 43.

[xxix] The Morning Watch, p. 46.

[xxx] The Morning Watch, p. 47.

[xxxi] The Morning Watch, p. 49.

[xxxii] The Morning Watch, p. 50.

[xxxiii] The Morning Watch, p. 10-11.

[xxxiv] The Morning Watch, p. 12.

---

[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.

[viii] Letters, p. 75.

[ix] James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Agee on Film (New York, 1958), pp. 2-19.

[x] Agee On Film, p. 2.

[xi] James Agee, A Death in the Family (New York, 1957), pp. 17-18.

[xii] Letters, p.48.

[xiii] Letters, p. 77.

[xiv] Letters, p. 60.

[xv] Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York, 1962), p. 162.

[xvi] Macdonald, p. 163.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Letters, p. 75.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Letters, p. 77.

[xxi] Letters, p. 64.

[xxii] W. M. Frohock, “James Agee: The Question of Unkept Promise,” Southwestern Review, XLII, 221-229.

[xxiii] Letters, p. 89.

[xxiv] Letters, p. 185.

[xxv] Letters, p. 229-231.

[xxvi] Letters, p. 231.

[xxvii] Macdonald, p. 164.

[xxviii] White, p. 173.

---

[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.

[iii] Letters, p. 47.

[iv] Letters, p. 47.

[v] Letters, p. 64.

[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.