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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