Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee

Preface

PrefaCe Why am I here? Why do you look at me Triumphantly and lovingly and long? When were we captured? When shall I be free From your delight and this delicious wrong? Not by your will I trust, nor by my own I swear, nor by any close device of reason Are we engulfed by thicker walls than stone, Mismated victims of unfounded treason. Forbear, forbear to look at me with joy. I would not do you hurt who will no harm, But that sure smile I surely shall destroy— Its covert meaning and its patent charm. Awakened to our love’s surprising hell. Your dream-struck sleep befits it hardly well. James Agee’s Shakespearean sonnet from his book of poems, Permit Me Voyage (1934), presents ample ambiguity for the reader. As always with the autobiographically inclined Agee, it is tempting to seek parallels to and echoes of his personal life in his work, yet such an inaccurate approach is at best far too limiting and tamps down the power of his verse. It is a love poem, but its lovers are imprisoned, “Mismated victims of unfounded treason,” and the one who now dreams is soon to be “Awakened to our love’s surprising hell” by the speaker. Are these simply star-crossed lovers, or two-thirds of a love triangle, or is the sonnet also one of Agee’s attempts to wrestle with the inherent, intimate conspiracy of art and artist Preface ~ xii ~ or author and reader, a conspiracy that is, at least in part, doomed to failure , “that sure smile I surely shall destroy”? All these and more interpretations are possible. At his best, Agee is a gifted, provocative writer who engages both broad human issues that have endured through the ages and the immediate issues of his day in ways that capture the reader’s full attention. His questions often are ours and have a uniquely wide range. Agee was a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist , film reviewer, and screenplay writer and, at least in this regard, like the speaker in his sonnet not one to be “engulfed by thicker walls than stone.” His continual exploration of new fields led critics and friends alike to bemoan his supposed dilution of his talent by not concentrating on the type of writing which they preferred. He was, however, posthumously judged successful in all the genres that he engaged. When James Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five, all his major works were out of print or not yet published. After his friend David McDowell’s editing and publication of A Death in the Family in 1957 and its subsequent winning of the Pulitzer Prize, however, the time for recognition had come, and the posthumous assembly and reconstruction of the Agee canon began. Over the next three decades, McDowell and other literary friends and followers served as Agee’s editors and gatekeepers by publishing very selective, sometimes highly thematic, volumes of his screenplays, film criticism, poetry, short prose, letters, journalism, and scattered pieces of fiction and juvenilia.1 Of all these limited and selected views, perhaps most noteworthy was that David McDowell had significantly altered the manuscript of A Death in the Family to produce a novel quite different from the text that Agee had completed before his death, even though he stated in his brief introduction that essentially the novel “is presented here exactly as he [Agee] wrote it.” Overall these editors excluded approximately 50 percent of his available manuscript and published work. Once a complete and accurate series of Agee’s texts is made available through the ongoing scholarly edition of his works,2 it will become clear that no other then-contemporary writer scrutinized America from the 1930s to the 1950s from as many perspectives and in as many forms, that few did so as incisively, and that his work deserves careful consideration. Preface ~ xiii ~ The present essays in Agee at 100 mark another step in that direction .3 These authors reconsider his work in light of the ongoing publication of his previously unavailable manuscript material and through the application of new critical approaches and views. The purpose of all these essays is a simple one—to bring Agee’s writing to fuller public and scholarly attention. Eight of the thirteen articles were first aired over eleven days on four fall weekends of films, lectures, performances, readings , and exhibitions from October 23...