invention serves remembrance
by
Douglas Messerli
James Agee A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text, edited
by Michael A. Lofaro (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007)
In
a year (2008) in which I had determined, after writing about my father's death
in 2002, to read James Agee's A Death in the Family, it seemed that I
was fated to read the newly released "restored" edition of that book.
I admit that I was not completely enthused by the idea, particularly after
having read, in March, the review of the "restoration" in the Los
Angeles Times Book Review which argued that David McDowell's editing of the
original publication of the Agee work in 1957 was "superior" to the
Lofaro text:
“Lofaro
conjectures that McDowell ‘changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the
1950s and increase the book’s marketability’; he does not consider that
McDowell might have made his decisions for a simpler reason: to create the best
possible book. The new chapters, while interesting, don’t add much to our
understanding of Jay or Mary or young Rufus. In fact, everything that needs to
be established – the tenderness and conflict within the marriage, Jay’s
drinking and tendency to drive too fast, Rufus’ deep sensitivity and his
near-worshipful relationship with his father – is handled perfectly, and more
economically, in the original version.”
The critic goes on to argue that Lofaro's
"most egregious" decision was to remove the "Knoxville: Summer
1915" section, replacing it with a nightmare sequence, which, "with
its graphic violence and religious symbolism, is heavy-handed and not nearly as
effective."
In short, he concludes, "Lofaro has
made a mess of it."
My own intuition, moreover, was that what
Lofaro argued was Agee's intention of a straight-forward,
chronologically-ordered narrative seemed far less interesting than the
flashbacks and other modernist narrative devices introduced by McDowell. The
sheer size and heft of the "restored" edition, along with these
reservations, led me to put off reading the Lofaro edition until late in the
year.
Fortunately, the time in early December
in which I came to the fiction also allowed me to slow down the pace of the
reading and to more carefully consider Lofaro's voluminous series of notes and
annotations—nearly as long as the work itself.
I have now come to feel that the restored
version, contrary to the reviewer's insistence, is far superior: clearer, more
emotionally engaging, and, most importantly, in concert with the author's
desires.
Agee, it is apparent, never intended his
beautiful set piece, "Knoxville: Summer, 1915," first published in Partisan
Review in 1938, to be included in A Death in the Family. And the
situation he describes in that prose poem, although it may remind one of the
poetic tone and certain incidents in the fiction, makes it seem as if the young
boy's uncle and aunt, "living at home," were residing within his own
house. Emma, his sister, appears nowhere in that short piece. And the poem ends
with a dilemma of self-identity that is not at all an issue in A Death in the
Family.
Lofaro admits that there is no way of
definitively knowing that Agee intended to begin his work with the horrifying
dream sequence about a John the Baptist-like being, killed by the mobs of the
city; but it is also clear that there is no other place for it in the work,
despite it being contained in the original manuscripts.
The dream episode seems quite obviously
that of an older man, still haunted by the death of his father; and Agee's own
analysis at the end of that dream that the corpse was the father and his
recognition that "He [the narrator]
should go back into those years. As far
as he could remember; and
everything he could remember; nothing he
had learned or done since;
nothing except (so well as he could
remember) what his father had been
as far as he had known him, and what he
had been as he had known
himself, and what he had seen with his
own eyes, and supposed with
his own mind....
all
seem to point to the very beginning of the imaginative voyage upon which the
rest of the work will take the reader. As Agee wrote in 1948 to his dead
father:
Let me explain what I am trying to do
here [in this work].
I have lived, now, a year longer than you
were given to live. I feel
very heavy in the sense of life and
death, and very heavy in my
sense of uncertainty and of failure in my
life so far.... My way of
trying to handle these things is to try
to recall and understand
my life, as well as I can, and to try to
write it down as clearly and
as well as I can.
As
Agee wrote his mother:
I am trying to write a short book, a
novel, beginning with the first things
I can remember, and ending with my
father's burial. The whole closing
section is to be as clear an account as I
can make of everything I can
remember, from the morning I woke up and
learned that he had died
the night before, through to the end of
the afternoon of the funeral.
He
notes elsewhere that he is trying to write a narrative that is as
chronologically correct and clear as he can make it. "In most novels,
properly enough, remembrance serves invention. In this volume," Agee
proclaims, "invention has served remembrance."
More importantly, Lofaro shows us that Agee saw this work less as
"a novel"—even though he himself, as I have noted above, refers to
the work as "a novel"—than as an autobiography, a work, had he lived
longer, that might have been embedded within other writings about his
ancestors, his mother and father's relationship, and his own later education
and writing experiences.
The Lofaro edition adds ten chapters and restores versions of three
other chapters, as well as bringing parts of the text together which were
previously divided. The newly-found chapters that Lofaro includes slow down the
work and draw the reader into the detail of Agee's world. Indeed, it is this
series of details wherein this work has its deepest meaning. As I have written
elsewhere, A Death in the Family
virtually has no plot. We know from the outset what the major event of the work
entails: the father's death. And anyone who has experienced the death of a
family member can imagine the effects on a family. What is remarkable about his
writing is how Agee makes his family members (Lofaro restores the actual family
names, Agee and Tyler, to his text) so immediate and real: the way they cook,
shop, worry for and about each other, and share and disagree with each other
regarding viewpoints on various issues such as sexuality and religion. The
familial details of life are at the heart of Agee's work, and Lofaro's version
not only enhances these, but allows the reader to better understand the
relationship of husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, and brother
and sister.
Had the original editor, McDowell, more transparently admitted his
radical editorial changes, I think no one might blame him for his decisions; I
agree with Lofaro's analysis that "he changed the novel to suit the
popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book's marketability." The
decision to produce a shorter work, the various flashbacks in time and space
are quite understandable in a decade in which readers were assimilating
Faulkner's great experiments and reading new works by Nabokov, Salinger, Bellow
and others. Within this context, Agee's work, as he intended it, does seem
somewhat "old-fashioned."
But McDowell felt it necessary to disavow any major changes, insisting
in his "A Note on This Book":
There has been no re-writing, and
nothing has been eliminated except
for a few cases of first-draft
material which he later re-worked at
greater length, and one section of
seven-odd pages which the editors
were unable satisfactorily to fit
into the body of the novel [apparently
the prologue of Lofaro's edition].
If nothing else, however, Lofaro definitively shows just how extensive
McDowell's changes were, revealing in many respects how different this book is
from the original publication and, just as importantly I would argue, how
different is a novel from an autobiography.
Admittedly, there are a few problems with this "restoration."
Agee did not title any of his sections or chapters; Lofaro has chosen to title
sections, some with words from the text that seem, within the context of Agee's
poetical writing, rather awkward, such as "This little boy you live
in," "Perceptions c. 1911-1912" and "Enter the Ford:
Travel, 1913-1916." Lofaro also occasionally explains some of Agee's
dialect word choices, placing them in brackets within the text, while I feel
this might have been better handled through a discrete asterisk with a
same-page note. But these are minor quibbles in what has clearly been a long
labor of love.
Rather than "making a mess of it," I would argue, Lofaro has
utterly clarified Agee's intentions and revealed an astounding contribution to
American autobiographical writing.
Los Angeles, December 28, 2008
Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XIV (Spring 2009).
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