by Douglas
Messerli
James Agee A Death in the Family (New York:
McDowell, Obolensky, 1957)
As a teenager, I owned a
paperback copy of Tad Mosel’s dramatic version and the screenplay for All the Way Home, and I
believe I saw portions of the film itself years later; but I had never found
the time to actually read the novel, outside of the five pages of the prologue
“Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” a work set to music by Samuel Barber on which I have
commented in My Year 2004 and elsewhere in these cultural memoirs. From my
youthful readings of the play and my memories of the film, moreover, I had felt
the work to be both terribly commonplace and sentimental—a work of Frostian
proportions; in short the kind of US writing to which I am least attracted.
Yet I did feel it somehow necessary, in
the context of talking about my father’s death, to acknowledge that my own
experience was shared in various ways by millions and millions of others.
Soon after finishing “The Death of the
Father” in 2008, a work about my father’s own death, I began reading the Agee
novel; simultaneously the media announced that the University of Tennessee had
published a newly edited version of that novel, expanded and radically altered,
by Michael Lofaro.
Howard and I had attended graduate school
with Michael, and knew him quite well from “the bullpen,” the jungle of
graduate student desks packed into a cavernous university basement room. At
that time, Lofaro was known to us as the class clown, a large and quite funny
man, who seemed to take his education none too seriously. Yet of all the
English Department graduates—many of whom later joined the faculties of other
university English Departments, some becoming Chairs—Lofaro now seems to me to
be the most academically successful. Howard and I have heard him do several
interviews on various topics of American Literature on National Public Radio
(including a discussion of the frontiersmen, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone),
and he has now achieved national attention for his work on Agee.
James Agee’s novel A
Death in the Family is clearly—as its back cover announces—a moving and
poetical work, a book which, upon its publication after Agee’s death in 1955,
was edited and published in 1957 by David McDowell. Based on the death of
Agee’s own father, the novel was perhaps destined to become an immediate
“American Classic”; it won the Pulitzer Prize upon its publication, and has
long been an American literary favorite.
In some senses,
however, the book—at least in terms of its plot—is nearly uneventful. Protected
by the love of his mother Mary and father Jay, his great-aunt Hannah, his uncle
Andrew, and numerous other family members, the young boy Rufus is presented as
growing up, encountering an ever-confusing world around him and his sister
Catherine. The only major event of
the novel is at the heart of the work, his father Jay’s death in an automobile
accident as he hurries home to his family from a visit his own father’s sickbed
where he has been summoned by his alcoholic brother, Ralph.
Accordingly—at least in the McDowell version of Agee’s work—the threads
of narrative and memory are woven together through the family’s reactions and
interactions concerning the event, and in this respect, it is one of the least
plot-driven works of modernist American literature.
Add to that fact
that the fiction begins with a walk home from the movie theater with father and
son saying little to each other, focuses on long periods in which the children
are told to simply sit still and be quiet, and ends with another silent walk
with Rufus and his uncle Andrew in which the narrator closes, “all the way home
they walked in silence”—as if everything, both plot and dialogue, were centered
on what Charles Bernstein described to me [concerning an essay in My Year 2007] as the Southern and
Midwest sense of “withheldness”—it seems strange that the work gained such
popularity
As much as
Americans hate to admit that they are interested in the psychological aspects
of their beings, one quickly recognizes that this work’s appeal is nearly
entirely psychological. For what this family does and says nearly all relates
to how family members and friends perceive themselves and each other and how
they think themselves perceived. Of course, the author’s reliance on inner
perceptions is a common method of relating childhood experiences; and Agee is a
master of demonstrating the illogical logic of childhood perception of adult
behavior, one of the most brilliant examples of which lies in the last pages of
this book wherein Rufus attempts to understand Andrew’s hateful outburst
against his sister’s and aunt’s religiosity:
He was glad
he did not like Father Jackson and he wished his mother did
not like
him either, but that was not all. …It was when he was talking
about
everybody bowing and scraping and hocus-pocus and things like
that, that
Rufus began to realize that he was talking not just about Father
Jackson but
about all of them and that he hated all of them. He hates
Mother, he
said to himself. He really honestly does hate her. Aunt Hannah,
too. He
hates them. They don’t hate him at all, they love him, but he hates
them. But
he doesn’t hate them, really, he thought. He could remember
how many
ways he had shown them how fond he was of both of them, all
kinds of
ways…. But he hates them, too.
If Rufus’s oppositions of love and hate are somewhat naïve,
they represent a complex notion of family feelings, feelings in which those and
other emotions become interwoven into powerfully compelling poles of emotional
response.
Time and again
in his fiction, Agee reveals the obstinate attempts of young questioning minds
to comprehend unfathomable adult realities. But Agee’s psychological approach
is just as dominating for the adults of this work; his presentation of Jay’s
brother Ralph’s desperate feelings of inadequacy are equally powerful. After a
long period of “rage and despair” over his need to leave his father’s sickbed
again and again for a drink, Ralph closes this section with these thoughts:
And
looking at himself now, he neither despised himself nor felt pity for
himself,
nor blamed others for whatever they might feel about him. He
knew that
they probably didn’t think the incredibly mean, contemptuous
things of
him that he was apt to imagine they did. He knew that he couldn’t
ever
really know what they thought, that his extreme quickness to think
that he
knew was just another of his dreams. He was sure, though, that
whatever
they might think, it couldn’t be very good, because there wasn’t
any very
good thing to think of. But he felt that whatever they thought,
they were
just, as he was almost never just.
This intense
self-scrutiny and each character’s complex analysis of each other are made
particularly clear in the quiet wisdom of Aunt Hannah. As she determines to buy
her great-nephew a hat, Hannah attempts to let the decision of which hat he
chooses to be his alone, despite her deep reservations of his choice:
He
submitted so painfully conservative a choice, the first time,
that she
smelled the fear and hypocrisy behind it, and said carefully,
“That is
a very nice, but supposed we look at some more, first.”
She saw
the genteel dark serge, with the all but invisible visor, which
she was
sure would please Mary most, but she doubted whether she
would
speak of it; and once Rufus felt that she really meant not to
interfere, his tastes surprised her. …It was clear to her that his heart
was set
on a thunderous fleecy check in jade green, canary yellow,
black and
white, which stuck out inches to either side above his ears
and had a
great scoop of visor beneath which his face was all but lost.
It was a
cap, she reflected, which even a colored sport might think a
little
loud, and she was painfully tempted to interfere. Mary would have
conniption fits; Jay wouldn’t mind, but she was afraid for Rufus’s sake
that he
would laugh; even the boys in the block, she was afraid, might
easily
sneer at it rather than admire it—all the more, she realized sourly,
if they did admire it. It was going to cause no
end of trouble, and the
poor
child might soon be sorry about it himself. But she was switched
if she
was going to boss him!
The pages and
pages of Agee’s characters’ inner scrutiny ultimately becomes the subject of
his fiction, and we realize eventually that the “death” in this family is not
simply represented by the father’s body lying in the open casket near the
work’s end, but continues in all of the thousands of small questions, doubts,
compromises, and silences each family member endures for their love and hate of
one another in order to survive the horror of the darkness they most fear.
The author
demonstrates those “daily deaths” most strongly in the opposition in this work
between how these men and women face their fears. Seldom has there been such a
popular American novel that so clearly represents the polarizing forces of
scientific logic and religion. Mary’s father, her brother Andrew, and her own
husband all must daily fight her and her Aunt Hannah’s religiosity, and upon
Jay’s death, her father warns her strongly not to hide behind her religion as a
salve to her husband’s death.
It seems a near
miracle, accordingly, that this book has survived on the shelves of what
sometimes appears to me to have become an increasingly unthinking and religious
society such as ours.
Yet miracles—or
at least near miracles—with or without God, occur in A Death in the Family in at least three occasions, transforming its
characters in their relationships to the spiritual, cultural, and natural
worlds.
The first
instance, right after Andrew reports to the family the cause of Jay’s death, is
registered by the reactions of several family members, including the skeptical
Andrew, who suddenly feel a presence in the house, a sound as if someone were
quickly entering like a force determined to protect them and the children; even
Mary’s nearly deaf mother “hears” what they are convinced is the father’s
spiritual return.
The second
miraculous moment occurs during another silent night time walk, as Andrew, his
father, and his mother return from Mary’s house to their own home; throughout
this scene Andrew inwardly sings the lyrics to “O Little Town of Bethlehem,”
which reveal hidden and appropriate meanings of that Christmas song to their
current concerns with life and death:
How
still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.
The third instance is Andrew’s description of the father’s
burial to Rufus, and as such, is a loving gift to the child:
Right when they began to lower your father into the ground, into
his
grave, a cloud came over and there was a shadow just like iron,
and
a perfectly magnificent butterfly settled on the—coffin, just
rested there, right over the breast, and stayed there, just barely
making his wings breathe, like a heart.
“If anything ever makes me believe in God,” Andrew admits to
Rufus, “It’ll be what happened this afternoon.”
Faith in the
midst of doubt, love in the face of hate are the true revelations of Agee’s
simply-expressed prose-poem to the memory of his father.
Los Angeles,
August 18, 2008
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions
(August 2008).
