The Resurrection of James Agee

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

The most recent number of The Oxford American, that quintessential harbinger of all good writing Southern, devoted itself to Southern literature. True to the Gothic character of much Southern literature, the OA’s cover features a haunting cover of two Southern women navigating their way up and down the rickety staircase of an old Southern country house. Titles of articles such as “Who Loves Big, Bad Thomas Wolfe?”, “Is William Faulkner Too Rowdy for the Classroom?”, “What’s Up with Modern Southern Fiction?”, and “Southern Literature is Never Dead; It’s Not Even Past” scream loudly from the front cover. The cover also announces a list of the best Southern books of all time: “From Agee to Zora: The Best Southern Books of All Time.” Since I’m a Southerner and since I have been reading Southern literature all my life and writing about Southern literature for over twenty-five years, I was certainly interested in OA’s list of the books that the magazine’s panel of judges considered the “best” of all Southern literature.

Now, of the making of lists of best books there is no end, to paraphrase the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. Such lists certainly provoke arguments as divisive as the War Between the States, and most Southerners indeed have deep allegiances to particular books. In addition, how is it possible to choose the “best” Southern books of all time from a wealth of writing that ranges from William Gilmore Simms and Henry Timrod to Marjorie Kinan Rawlings, Harry Crews, and Bobbie Ann Mason. How do you determine whether Lee Smith’s novels rather than Jill McCorkle’s make the list? Should James Dickey’s poetry or his Deliverance be included on the list? Are the books on the list “classics,” that is, books written before 1960, say, whose singular beauty and universal themes have endured the test of time? Given the broad range of choices from which the judges could pick, the list is a little disappointing. The best Southern novel of all time is Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Now, who’s going to stand in the way of the Dixie Express as it comes barreling down the track, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor. Faulkner’s novel does indeed capture the depravity of humankind in his depiction of his postage stamp Mississippi hamlet and he develops universal themes on a grand Biblical scale. Some readers might question the choice of the particular Faulkner novel that stands atop the list, but, let’s be honest, just the mention of Faulkner’s name dredges up images of Gothic Southern mansions, miscegenation, incest, drunkenness, and nobility and pride that many readers associate with Southern literature. The rest of the books on the list include: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

There’s no doubt that these are great Southern books; in fact, no one should go to their graves (or “buy the farm,” as say down South) without having read Harper Lee’s only novel or Faulkner’s tale of sound and fury told by an idiot or Jim and Huck’s sojourn on the Mississippi. However, there are books on this list that could just as easily be replaced by another great Southern novel. Where, for example, is Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel? Or Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter? The most glaring omission from the list, however, is James Agee’s A Death in the Family.

Agee would have turned 100 this weekend (on November 27), and his untimely death on May 16, 1955 (the same day his father was killed, thirty-nine years earlier) robbed us of one of Southern literature’s greatest and freshest voices. In his introduction to the first edition of Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (James Harold Flye was Agee’s teacher and a kind of foster father at St. Andrews boarding school near Sewanee, Tennessee.), Robert Phelps sums up Agee’s life and writing: “A writer first and foremost—a born, sovereign prince of the English language—James Agee was also a prodigal and unself-preserving man, who imparted his extraordinary gifts to many forms, from verse to novels, film scripts to book reviews, friendship to marriage; who, at thirty-two, published a 450-page prose lyric called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which is at the same time one of the most vulnerable perversities of surest glories of American literature; and who, at forty-five, died leaving a new novel on his desk, a film script in progress, committals as a man and poet on every side.” Agee began his writing career while he was a student at Exeter, where he published poetry, fiction and nonfiction in the school’s literary magazine. At Harvard, he wrote for The Advocate and became its president in 1931. In 1932, after his graduation from Harvard, he began writing for Fortune magazine, where he wrote the first of the profiles of poverty in the South that would eventually become the basis for his and Walker Evans’ photoessay of the South, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In 1934, Agee, who had been writing poetry all his life, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets award and Yale published his poems under the title Permit Me Voyage. During the 1940s, Agee embarked on a career as a book critic—writing unsigned book reviews for Time—and a film critic—writing signed reviews for The Nation. Agee’s film criticism helped establish the reputation of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and his revolutionary essay on comedy has been compared with the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s essay on the same subject. During these years he worked on the script for The African Queen with John Huston. In the 1950s, Agee published an autobiographical novella, The Morning Watch, about a young boy’s sexual coming of age. He continued to work on film scripts, and he wrote what has become his most famous script for The Night of the Hunter, which stars Robert Mitchum in his acclaimed role as the notorious murderer turned duplicitous evangelist. In 1948, Agee began an autobiographical novel about the death of his father and the effect of that death on his son. When he died of a heart attack in the back of a taxi cab in New York City in 1955, he left this novel unfinished.

At his death, all of Agee’s books were out of print. Within five years, however, all of his books were back in print, his film criticism was collected and published in two volumes, and the novel he had left unfinished at his death was published in 1957 as A Death in the Family. Agee’s literary executor, David McDowell, worked with Agee’s papers, editing the novel and claiming the book was essentially finished before Agee’s death. The next year, Agee’s powers of storytelling were recognized when the novel won the Pulitzer Prize. The novel poignantly depicts one young boy’s, Rufus, struggles to come to terms with the death of his father in an automobile accident one summer evening. As Rufus and his father, Jay, are coming back from a night at the movies, they stop on the way home at a pub so Jay can have a drink. After they arrive at home and Rufus goes to bed, he hears his father leave in the early in the morning; on the next night, Rufus’ mother, Mary, receives a phone call telling her that her husband, Jay, has been in an accident and has been killed. Jay’s death sets off a series of events through which the family must struggle with loss and despair, faith and hopelessness, and grief and healing. In an almost dreamlike reverie, Rufus moves through the novel, growing from a young boy into the chaos and confusion of an adult life in which he will forever remain a child.

As beautiful and haunting as Agee’s book is, the publication of his novel has not been without controversy. When McDowell published his edition of the book in 1957, he proclaimed that the “novel is presented here exactly as he wrote it. There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except for a few cases of first-draft material which he later reworked at greater length, and one section of seven-odd pages which the editors were unable satisfactorily to fit into the body of the novel.” McDowell claimed that the prologue that appeared in the novel, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” was added as a prologue (though it had been published in the Partisan Review in 1938) because although it “was not a part of the manuscript which Agee left, . . . the editors would certainly have urged him to include it in the final draft.” Thus, every edition of the novel that has appeared since 1957 has followed McDowell’s version.

In 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, the Lindsay Young Professor of American Literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, stirred a great deal of excitement in the Agee world when he published A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text (University of Tennessee Press). The first volume in a multi-volume scholarly edition of The Works of James Agee, Lofaro’s edition offers a novel closer to the one he and the editors agree that Agee would have published. In addition to the various textual apparatuses and appendices, this version of the novel includes ten and one-third previously omitted chapters, substitutes three finished chapters for erroneously printed drafts, and is divided into forty-five chapters rather twenty. Lofaro’s edition also includes, among other materials, unfinished drafts of Agee’s letter to his father (written by Agee in his fortieth year as a reflection on having lived one year longer than his father’s age when his father died) and mother regarding the novel. Lofaro’s edition of the novel does not open with the famous prologue “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” (it is included as an appendix), but opens instead with an adult Rufus’ reverie of Knoxville. Wisely, Lofaro’s edition places the scholarly apparatus at the end of the book, after the novel, so that readers can experience Agee’s lyrical novel as Lofaro believes Agee would have wished.

Just this month, Penguin Classics has published the Centennial Edition of A Death in the Family in celebration of Agee’s 100th birthday. This edition reproduces the McDowell edition down to the “note on the text” in which McDowell explains his choices for producing the text he has produced. In the Penguin edition, you can lose yourself in Agee’s poetry and be bound up with Rufus on his quest to make sense of love and death. Perhaps the greatest addition to the Penguin edition is guitarist Steve Earle’s introduction to the book. Earle, who has spent enough years wandering in search of some meaning in life, regales us—as he does so well in his riveting songs—with the story of how he first stumbled upon Agee’s masterpiece in Knoxville, Tennessee, the setting of the novel. Earle observes that the opening words of the novel “are so indelibly etched someplace inside of me that I couldn’t reach to rub them out even if I wanted to.” In his rambunctious, yet reverential, style, Earle takes on the Lofaro edition and calls it “a scholarly triumph and a must for Agee addicts.” But, he says, “I still like the old one better.” For Earle’s money, the McDowell version is powerful and beautiful and very nearly perfect.

Although there is some argument about the definitive edition of Agee’s novel, there can be no argument that A Death in the Family is one of the most powerful of all American novels and one of the most moving and haunting Southern novels of all time. It deserves to be on the Oxford American’s list of the best Southern books of all time; hell, as much Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn might be the great American novel, I’d trade the haunting and lyrical beauty of Agee’s novel for Twain’s any day.

Books mentioned in this column:
A Death in the Family by James Agee (University of Tennessee, 2008)
A Death in the Family by James Agee (Penguin Classics, 2009)


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Contact Henry.