In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”
  • J. C. Hallman (bio)

We are talking now of the small masterpiece that James Agee produced at age 26, a short meditation from an alcoholic, misogynistic, and sometimes frightening mind that appears here intent on disguising itself as loving and soulful. It’s a mixed sort of “essay,” if it’s that; the author’s early childhood neighborhood is first documented with stark ethnographic detachment, a cartographer’s bird’s-eye view assumed so as to map the place and fix it socioeconomically as “fairly solidly lower middle class.” The “gracefully fretted” houses and “softwooded trees” and “mostly small businessmen” are set in place as if by the lonely hand of a model-train enthusiast. It is nostalgic diorama; it is journalism. Even the language at first is passive, documentary. This is ironic, to my mind, because its title, like poem titles that chart temporal and spatial coordinates, puts me in mind of George Orwell’s “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” Ironic because Orwell was critiquing journalism—and perhaps all of “nonfiction”—when he suggested that history itself might be saved if we aimed less at facts and documentation than at images and sensations that, taken as a whole, might offer up a portrait of “the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.” This phrase, or something like it, echoes throughout Orwell’s work, and one is hard pressed, I believe, to find a more concise description of the goals of the literary uses of language (a possibility: Nabokov—“beauty plus pity”) than that tight explanation of the quiet instants that are both the subject and the strategy of “Looking Back on the Spanish War.”

But it is of “Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” I speak. [End Page 103]

The piece was produced coincidentally with the start of an “autobiographical novel”—what would become A Death in the Family many years later, after Agee’s own death—and it was complete after a quick furious struggle of writing and cutting, though not as quick as the standard lore suggests. In this, it served as overture to the unfinished symphony of Agee’s career, a mission statement that articulated his vision for what language can and should set out to achieve. And after that first documentary paragraph, the language of the essay begins to change; it becomes more meditative and contemplative, like someone walking on a beach who pauses to pick up a shell—a nautilus, say—and who does not stop with a casual taxonomical perusal of a curious species, but quickly begins to see in it something like metaphor, something like a vacated tomb, and perhaps traces a finger ponderously over the fleshy, porcelain inner walls of the creature’s home. The essay, like the beachcomber, continues in that way, turning the shell over and over, mulling the gradually smaller and smaller compartments: we zoom first from the distant bird’s-eye view to the perspective of a neighborhood voyeur, a sneak thief creeping among the carbon lamps at dusk, dodging fireflies and frogs to peep in windows at mothers buzzing through chores like bees, and observe children playing at evening games. It would be incorrect to too closely liken this zooming process to passage through a telescope’s range of magnifications. We’re not simply getting closer and closer. The essay zooms multidimensionally, through time, space, topic, and language, and in doing so transcends the journalist’s rigid sextant prose and arrives via astral journey to language that is moody and visceral and suggestive. And even though we’ve now drifted down to ground level, enough to see mothers’ skirts, blotchy from the work of dishes, and hear the calls of children’s names, we’re not aiming, the essay tells us, for microscopic detail. Like Orwell, Agee wants to speak now of an “atmosphere” merely adjacent to those women and boys.

But it is not of the atmosphere of “fathers of families” that Agee goes on to describe—the “anonymous” fathers who are generally believed to be the stand-in for Agee’s own father, whose death by car accident when Agee was six is the death of A Death in the Family, and...

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