Captive Poet

By Melvin Maddocks

JAMES AGEE: A LIFE by Laurence Bergreen Dutton; 467 pages; $20

One May night in Tennessee, when James Rums Agee was six years old, his father drove off the Clinton Pike. One wheel of his Ford was still spinning in the air when the first witness arrived. Jay Agee lay face down about a foot from the car, his clothes scarcely mussed. The only sign of violence was a small cut on the chin.

James Agee spent the rest of his life trying to understand his father's absurd end, spinning his own wheels as he hurtled to an early death. But what Laurence Bergreen's solid, unassuming biography makes clear is how much Agee managed to accomplish during that ride. While he was drinking himself to the edge of alcoholism, while he was compulsively womanizing, while he was further wasting himself by lamenting this waste in allnight soliloquies, Agee was also producing.

From his days as critic for TIME and the Nation in the 1940s, Bergreen shows, Agee left a collection of brilliantly discursive film reviews that helped establish the standards for the art. He wrote two moving and complex novels. He composed at least five screenplays, including that shaggy Bogart-Hepburn classic, The African Queen. He turned out reams of verse, published and unpublished, and won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award.

During his first stint for Time Inc., as a writer for FORTUNE, Agee was assigned a story that let him weld his overheated rhetoric to a social theme: the lives of '30s sharecroppers in the South, with photographs by Walker Evans. Agee later appraised his own work as "a sinful book at least in all degrees of 'falling short of the mark.' " The critical and popular response reflected his view: published as a book in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had sold only 600 copies by the end of the year. But Agee's collaboration with Evans refused to die. The years seemed to diminish the excesses--autobiographical discursions, adolescent stridence--and to ratify Critic Lionel Trilling's appraisal: "The most realistic and important moral effort of our generation."

Along the way, the "captive poet," as his editor at TIME called him, wrote hundreds of letters--to Father James Harold Flye, his high-church Episcopal mentor at St. Andrew's School in Tennessee, who remained his confidant from the time Agee was ten, to old classmates at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, to his three wives and countless lovers, to all the women who satisfied what he confessed was a "run-to-Mama" complex.

Laurence Bergreen, a magazine writer and former teacher at New York City's New School, spent three years in research and interviews amassing the minute data of Agee's life. From the age of 18 on, Bergreen assures us, Agee had fairly set work habits and style. He wrote late at night in tiny script with newly sharpened pencils, chain smoking, sipping gin, listening to jazz. Agee did not know the meaning of a throwaway line. Even when he wrote prose, he tended to operate by the laws of a romantic poet--packing in all the vivid details, then going for broke. He was a prodigious sufferer. He managed to embrace all the guilt there was to religion, all the shame there was in sex. He dressed in his own kind of sackcloth--sneakers, work pants, sweat-stained shirt. He allowed his teeth to rot. When anger and frustration built up in him, he would smash his fist into the nearest wall or bloodily shatter the glass he was holding. "Nearly all the time," he wrote after one bender, "I am incompetent for work, or for thinking of work, or of anything except crawling around in a whisky-logged blur."

Yet Agee had a canny sense for self-preservation that almost, though not quite matched his talent for self-destruction. He was forever negotiating with a series of authority figures: God, Father Flye, Time Inc. Indeed, Bergreen concludes, Agee cast Time in the multiple roles of "his home, his school, his monastery," to the bewilderment of fellow employees like Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin and Robert Fitzgerald.

Agee suffered his first heart attack in 1951 after playing tennis with John Huston while at work on the script of The African Queen. It was too late for a prince of excess to slow down. He went on spinning out great ideas for the future, as he always had. At one time, a partial list of projects included two full-length historical films. One would concern Tories vs. Loyalists, the other the age of revolution. Both would be "mystical," "Virgilian" epics of a "prenatal nation." These were in addition to an "antiCommunist manifesto," a "new form of movie short roughly equivalent to the lyric poem," and some "pieces of writing whose rough parallel is the prophetic writing of the Bible."

But no matter how far Agee's imagination ranged, he always seemed drawn to the central image of a country road and a wheel spinning and a dapper man stretched out serenely under the stars. It became the obsessive theme of A Death in the Family, his autobiographical novel. After Agee died of a heart attack in 1955 at the age of 45, that work won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958, and as adapted under the title All the Way Home in 1960, a second Pulitzer in the theater. That same year, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued and went on to sell more than a quarter-million copies.

James Agee has become a minor cult, as well he should. But he should not be considered one of those classic romantic failures so adored by adolescents and academics. As much as most artists, he achieved what he was capable of, and it was enough. --By Melvin Maddocks