by DouglasMesserli
James Agee A Death in the Family (New York:McDowell, Obolensky, 1957)
As a teenager, I owned apaperback copy of Tad Mosel’s dramatic version and the screenplay for All the Way Home, and Ibelieve I saw portions of the film itself years later; but I had never foundthe 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 havecommented in My Year 2004 and elsewhere in these cultural memoirs. From myyouthful readings of the play and my memories of the film, moreover, I had feltthe work to be both terribly commonplace and sentimental—a work of Frostianproportions; in short the kind of US writing to which I am least attracted.
Yet I did feel it somehow necessary, inthe context of talking about my father’s death, to acknowledge that my ownexperience was shared in various ways by millions and millions of others.
Soon after finishing “The Death of theFather” in 2008, a work about my father’s own death, I began reading the Ageenovel; simultaneously the media announced that the University of Tennessee hadpublished a newly edited version of that novel, expanded and radically altered,by Michael Lofaro.
Howard and I had attended graduate schoolwith Michael, and knew him quite well from “the bullpen,” the jungle ofgraduate student desks packed into a cavernous university basem*nt room. Atthat time, Lofaro was known to us as the class clown, a large and quite funnyman, who seemed to take his education none too seriously. Yet of all theEnglish Department graduates—many of whom later joined the faculties of otheruniversity English Departments, some becoming Chairs—Lofaro now seems to me tobe the most academically successful. Howard and I have heard him do severalinterviews 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 ADeath in the Family is clearly—as its back cover announces—a moving andpoetical 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 ofa*gee’s own father, the novel was perhaps destined to become an immediate“American Classic”; it won the Pulitzer Prize upon its publication, and haslong been an American literary favorite.
In some senses,however, the book—at least in terms of its plot—is nearly uneventful. Protectedby the love of his mother Mary and father Jay, his great-aunt Hannah, his uncleAndrew, and numerous other family members, the young boy Rufus is presented asgrowing up, encountering an ever-confusing world around him and his sisterCatherine. The only major event ofthe novel is at the heart of the work, his father Jay’s death in an automobileaccident as he hurries home to his family from a visit his own father’s sickbedwhere he has been summoned by his alcoholic brother, Ralph.
Accordingly—at least in the McDowell version of Agee’s work—the threadsof narrative and memory are woven together through the family’s reactions andinteractions concerning the event, and in this respect, it is one of the leastplot-driven works of modernist American literature.
Add to that factthat the fiction begins with a walk home from the movie theater with father andson saying little to each other, focuses on long periods in which the childrenare told to simply sit still and be quiet, and ends with another silent walkwith Rufus and his uncle Andrew in which the narrator closes, “all the way homethey walked in silence”—as if everything, both plot and dialogue, were centeredon what Charles Bernstein described to me [concerning an essay in My Year 2007] as the Southern andMidwest sense of “withheldness”—it seems strange that the work gained suchpopularity
As much asAmericans hate to admit that they are interested in the psychological aspectsof their beings, one quickly recognizes that this work’s appeal is nearlyentirely psychological. For what this family does and says nearly all relatesto how family members and friends perceive themselves and each other and howthey think themselves perceived. Of course, the author’s reliance on innerperceptions is a common method of relating childhood experiences; and Agee is amaster of demonstrating the illogical logic of childhood perception of adultbehavior, one of the most brilliant examples of which lies in the last pages ofthis book wherein Rufus attempts to understand Andrew’s hateful outburstagainst his sister’s and aunt’s religiosity:
He was gladhe did not like Father Jackson and he wished his mother did
not likehim either, but that was not all. …It was when he was talking
abouteverybody bowing and scraping and hocus-pocus and things like
that, thatRufus began to realize that he was talking not just about Father
Jackson butabout all of them and that he hated all of them. He hates
Mother, hesaid to himself. He really honestly does hate her. Aunt Hannah,
too. Hehates them. They don’t hate him at all, they love him, but he hates
them. Buthe doesn’t hate them, really, he thought. He could remember
how manyways he had shown them how fond he was of both of them, all
kinds ofways…. 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 andother emotions become interwoven into powerfully compelling poles of emotionalresponse.
Time and againin his fiction, Agee reveals the obstinate attempts of young questioning mindsto comprehend unfathomable adult realities. But Agee’s psychological approachis just as dominating for the adults of this work; his presentation of Jay’sbrother Ralph’s desperate feelings of inadequacy are equally powerful. After along period of “rage and despair” over his need to leave his father’s sickbedagain and again for a drink, Ralph closes this section with these thoughts:
Andlooking at himself now, he neither despised himself nor felt pity for
himself,nor blamed others for whatever they might feel about him. He
knew thatthey probably didn’t think the incredibly mean, contemptuous
things ofhim that he was apt to imagine they did. He knew that he couldn’t
everreally know what they thought, that his extreme quickness to think
that heknew was just another of his dreams. He was sure, though, that
whateverthey might think, it couldn’t be very good, because there wasn’t
any verygood thing to think of. But he felt that whatever they thought,
they werejust, as he was almost never just.
This intenseself-scrutiny and each character’s complex analysis of each other are madeparticularly clear in the quiet wisdom of Aunt Hannah. As she determines to buyher great-nephew a hat, Hannah attempts to let the decision of which hat hechooses to be his alone, despite her deep reservations of his choice:
Hesubmitted so painfully conservative a choice, the first time,
that shesmelled the fear and hypocrisy behind it, and said carefully,
“That isa very nice, but supposed we look at some more, first.”
She sawthe genteel dark serge, with the all but invisible visor, which
she wassure would please Mary most, but she doubted whether she
wouldspeak 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 seton a thunderous fleecy check in jade green, canary yellow,
black andwhite, which stuck out inches to either side above his ears
and had agreat scoop of visor beneath which his face was all but lost.
It was acap, she reflected, which even a colored sport might think a
littleloud, 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 hewould laugh; even the boys in the block, she was afraid, might
easilysneer at it rather than admire it—all the more, she realized sourly,
if they did admire it. It was going to cause noend of trouble, and the
poorchild might soon be sorry about it himself. But she was switched
if shewas going to boss him!
The pages andpages of Agee’s characters’ inner scrutiny ultimately becomes the subject ofhis fiction, and we realize eventually that the “death” in this family is notsimply represented by the father’s body lying in the open casket near thework’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 ofone another in order to survive the horror of the darkness they most fear.
The authordemonstrates those “daily deaths” most strongly in the opposition in this workbetween how these men and women face their fears. Seldom has there been such apopular American novel that so clearly represents the polarizing forces ofscientific logic and religion. Mary’s father, her brother Andrew, and her ownhusband all must daily fight her and her Aunt Hannah’s religiosity, and uponJay’s death, her father warns her strongly not to hide behind her religion as asalve to her husband’s death.
It seems a nearmiracle, accordingly, that this book has survived on the shelves of whatsometimes appears to me to have become an increasingly unthinking and religioussociety such as ours.
Yet miracles—orat least near miracles—with or without God, occur in A Death in the Family in at least three occasions, transforming itscharacters in their relationships to the spiritual, cultural, and naturalworlds.
The firstinstance, right after Andrew reports to the family the cause of Jay’s death, isregistered by the reactions of several family members, including the skepticalAndrew, who suddenly feel a presence in the house, a sound as if someone werequickly entering like a force determined to protect them and the children; evenMary’s nearly deaf mother “hears” what they are convinced is the father’sspiritual return.
The secondmiraculous moment occurs during another silent night time walk, as Andrew, hisfather, and his mother return from Mary’s house to their own home; throughoutthis scene Andrew inwardly sings the lyrics to “O Little Town of Bethlehem,”which reveal hidden and appropriate meanings of that Christmas song to theircurrent concerns with life and death:
Howstill 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’sburial to Rufus, and as such, is a loving gift to the child:
Right when they began to lower your father into the ground, into
hisgrave, a cloud came over and there was a shadow just like iron,
anda 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 toRufus, “It’ll be what happened this afternoon.”
Faith in themidst of doubt, love in the face of hate are the true revelations of Agee’ssimply-expressed prose-poem to the memory of his father.
Los Angeles,August 18, 2008
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions(August 2008).
