In James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ now-classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (which he dismissed as a “fragment, experiment, [and] dissonant prologue,” an assessment not-quite-widely shared when it was published to resounding silence in 1941), Agee described the “book,” the assemblage, he’d rather have created:
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.
A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.
Such was the dream; the book he made was the fact. And a good thing, too, he assures us, for if he’d been able assemble his true book of the real, a book as big as the power of human perception, it would incinerate its readers; “you would hardly bear to live.”
Much has been written about Agee. But little or none of it has considered the book that Agee actually cared about most: The book that isn’t there. A book that couldn’t be there, Agee thought, until we made a new set of terms. In the new language, imagination itself would became a function of perception. That is, imagination as fact. “Imaginary gardens,” as the poet Marianne Moore put it, “with real toads in them.”
For in the immediate world, wrote Agee, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.
Some years ago, writing an introduction to an anthology of literary journalism—the so-called “art of fact”—I was struck by the realization that this manifesto in miniature, so moving to me as a young writer, is the imagined, the revisive. What else might we say of the fact of “street in sunlight” that might “roar in the heart of itself”—much less “as a symphony”? It is nothing if not metaphor, the translation of light into sound into language. Perhaps that’s why, after Famous Men, Agee turned to A Death in the Family, an autobiographical novel of his childhood in which he sought the 1:1 ratio of life to art.
He had come close before, in the screenplay he’d written for The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Charles Laughton, released just months after Agee’s death in 1955. There’s a night scene on a river in which the film’s heroes, an orphaned brother and sister, flee Mitchum’s villain in a boat without oars. Mitchum is the titular hunter, and yet also a man of the cloth, an evil preacher with L-O-V-E tattooed across one set of knuckles and H-A-T-E across the other, as if either could ever be so simple as a fist. As the children float away on the current, the little girl begins to sing: an eerie, lovely song, the girl’s voice that of a child and yet older, too, thick not with regret but a kind of knowing. The moon dazzles the river in black and white; the girl’s older brother, who has fought the evil preacher for their freedom, falls into a sleep of utter stillness; a spider regards their passage; and the song is as if a dream. Like the children’s song, yes, gently down a stream, which is wiser than its words. And like the language Agee ached for in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which, sitting by the light of an oil lamp late at night at the kitchen table of the tenant farm family that had taken him in, after they had fallen into a sleep as deep as the boy’s in Night of the Hunter, he returned in thought again and again to the image of a boat.
“They are led,” he wrote of the sleeping family, “gently, quite steadily, quite without mercy, each a little farther toward the washing and the wailing, the Sunday suit and the prettiest dress, the pine box, and the closed clay room whose frailly decorated roof, until rain has taken it flat into oblivion, wears the shape of a ritual scar and of an inverted boat….” And another night, in yet deeper silence: “There was no longer any sound of the settling or ticking of any part of the structure of the house; the bone pine hung on its nails like an abandoned Christ. There was no longer any sound of the sinking and settling, like gently foundering, fatal boats, of the bodies and brains of this human family through the late stages of fatigue unharnessed...”
These are just fragments of the riverine sentences Agee floats as much as writes in Praise, long, beautiful moon-dazzled streams. And yet they inevitably ended in his frustration, his sense—not entirely wrong—that he was talking over what he really meant to say. He wanted to be under; he wanted to write from beneath the surface of the river. He tried, in a novel made from the death of his own father, A Death in the Family.
After my own mother died, 47-years-old, I found among her things a woodblock print of a small city’s skyline, and beneath it the first sentence of Agee’s Death in the Family as it would eventually be published: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee”—Agee’s hometown, and my mother’s—“in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
Agee thought that if he could penetrate this disguise, if he could, as a grown man, truly describe the mind of himself as a boy—not an adult’s imagination of a boy, or what a child looks like even to a subtle observer, but the boy himself—he would by necessity call forth the new language that had ultimately eluded him in Praise. At times he did; at other times, the novel was just that, a novel. A book, not a body.
Agee died unable to make his peace with the possible. Death remained unfinished when his heart stopped in the back of a taxi in 1955.
That did not prevent his publisher from releasing a version in 1957, nor the Pulitzer committee which Agee would have held in contempt from awarding it the prize for fiction the following year. The Pulitzer trick was repeated when a play adapted from the novel won the prize in 1961. Since then there have been two movies, an opera—and, in 2005, a dramatically different edition produced by an Agee scholar who claims to have at last given us the “true” story Agee intended. Agee’s unfinished novel is at the mercy of the living. We use unfinished stories to our own ends. We impose endings that aren’t there. I love dearly what remains of Agee’s hopes, the documentary experiment he deemed a failure and the novel he left undone. But I long for the book that isn’t there.
Jeff Sharlet is a professor of creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College and the bestselling author and editor of eight books including The Undertow, The Family, and This Brilliant Darkness, which begins in the clock tower of the Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction and ends in Norwich, where he lives with his family and creatures.
