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seeIng agee In lInColn: a short story daVId madden Dear Father, Too long, so long, much too long since my last letter to you, you above all, above all my friends and even my family, yet another letter to add to the vast store of them over the years, since my first, which must have been about 1927, when I was 18 or so—enough to make a book really —but I have been caught, caught in a kind of web, the spider’s bite now deadly, now benevolent, writhing on a web, writing the Lincoln script for Omnibus, finished now, but writhing still in that anxiety that I have—as you of all people will know—overindulged myself in, mayhap from within the womb to this apartment, a five-deadly-flight climb up from the streets of Greenwich Village. When I am in New York—you will remember my old friend from the Fortune magazine days, Whittaker Chambers—we may be seen loping along on Fifth Avenue from time to time, two heart failures, conversing as if we have world enough and time. He’s one of the very few friends I see these days. He who is in fearful shape, fears for me. I have still not quite recovered from that heart attack. I spent a few days in the hospital recently. I turn with agonized reluctance—forgive me, Father—to this infernal machine, this damned new thing, the wire recorder, as easier than writing a real letter, given this morning’s grim evidence that all my resolves have failed once more to cut down—for I dare not say quit—the The inspiration for this work of fiction is the collection of letters that Agee wrote to Father Flye, his longtime mentor and friend, from 1925 to 1955, collected in Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962). In 1953, he also spoke a letter to Father Flye into a wire recorder. I have imagined Agee recording an earlier voice letter to Father Flye on November, 2, 1952. DaviD maDDen ~ 266 ~ drinking and the smoking, the smoking down to 6 a day, the drinking still heavy, aggravating my craving to smoke. I may not live long, so I wanted you to know how I see, or think I see, or wish I see, this film, which you will see in your own way, a way I wish I also could see. You may have heard about Omnibus, a new television series. My Lincoln film will be the first production of this first season. I wanted to let you know, Father, that the first episode of what we are now calling Abraham Lincoln, The Early Years will air November 9, which you will know to be within ten days of the anniversary of his Gettysburg Address , each Sunday at four o’clock, in all, five episodes, the last on February 8 of next year. Well, not television’s finest perhaps, my Lincoln script, funded not by America’s finest toothpaste or laxative, if you will, but the Ford Foundation’s Radio-Television Workshop. Work for hire, if ever I did it, but more satisfying really than work for Forbes Magazine, partly because I have worked with fine talent at Omnibus, Robert Saudek the producer and Richard de Rochemont, and you’ll know of this man—Norman Lloyd, world famous for falling off the empire state building at the end of Hitchcock‘s film Saboteur really not only the fine actor, but a fine director, whom I chose—Norman Lloyd, veteran of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater of the 1930’s, who I met through Charles Chaplin. Norman’s played many roles, in many films and television shows, and has much directing experience. Robert Saudek, my former roommate at Harvard, put this challenge to me. Saudek remembered our late night talks at Harvard about Lincoln, my lifelong fascination with him. And since my first memories I have carried clear images of the Civil War in my mind. Did I tell you—surely I did—about my 60 pages treatment about the Civil War in Middle Tennessee, called Bloodline—that I submitted to Twentieth Century Fox? More atmosphere than narrative, they will probably tell me. Stephen Crane’s muse two-timed him with me. Knowing how I loathe television, you may wonder that I have embraced it so fondly, until you remember that it is deeply rooted in my temperament to respond to the lure of a subject and always...

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