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why agee matters dwIght garner There’s a big part of James Rufus Agee, born one hundred years ago this month, that would have detested this warm and appreciative gathering in his honor. “When the historians get to work on anything,” he wrote in The Nation in 1946, “arteries begin to harden, in the subject and in the people interested.”1 He would have commiserated with the poet W. H. Auden, who in 1944 foresaw the “sad day, indeed,” when Agee’s collected film criticism would “be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis.”2 The funny thing about Auden’s comment, so many decades later, is his assumption there would be only one of those theses on Agee’s criticism, instead of dozens or even hundreds. Someday there will surely be thousands. Agee wouldn’t have read them; he loathed what he called “the emasculation of acceptance.”3 But if James Agee’s own arteries had held up, and if he’d managed to defy the actuarial tables and could be present tonight and at the events held here in Knoxville for the past month in his honor, he’d almost certainly have happily been here—but also perhaps not quite here. He’d mostly, I suspect, be sneaking out to the lobby, in a proper but slightly stained suit, sheepishly smoking unfiltered cigarettes. He’d be taking in the fall night air, looking out over the twinkling lights of his hometown. When he did poke his head in, I think he’d like what he was hearing, and also what he’d read in recent years. This is not just because of the increasingly high esteem in which his work has been held. It’s also because he’s has been lucky enough to have attracted, over the past few decades, some the most engaged and alert scholars and writers alive. You can’t talk about Agee in 2009 without talking about some of them. First, there’s Michael Lofaro. Thanks to his recent and painstaking reconstruction of Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, first published, Dwight garner ~ 2 ~ posthumously, in 1957, we now have before us—as if by secular miracle— the book Agee intended to write. Michael has shorn the novel of its editor David McDowell’s well-meaning but often hapless and heavy-handed tinkerings and shufflings and has supplied us with a darker book but also a more supple, a more southern, and a more morally penetrating one. I was once of the opinion that you would have to pry the McDowell version of A Death in the Family out of my cold, dead West Virginia–born fingers. It’s among those rare American classics—alongside Moby-Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Lolita—in which the title alone instantly and invariably evokes in your mind the novel’s first sentence. In the case of A Death in the Family it was, of course: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”4 The last lines of that opening section come unbidden as well: “After a little while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”5 I have read the McDowell version so many times since I first discovered it as a teenager that I—as do so many others—practically have it memorized. I did not want to give it up. But I am here to say that successive readings of Michael Lofaro’s edition of A Death in the Family are forcing me to give it up. No doubt, the first line of Michael’s edition is not so lilting. In fact, it is a sentence that commences a nightmare scene in which the protagonist, now grown up, drags though the streets of Knoxville the body and disembodied head of John the Baptist. Instead of the hissing of summer hoses in this introduction we read about “woe and fear and injustice.”6 But the chapter is a newly organic beginning to a newly rooted book, a different but definitive American masterwork. As my friend Will Blythe has written in the New York Times Book Review about the nightmare scene: “That...

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