Remembering James Agee Book

If James Agee only had written “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (a prose poem that would later become the preamble to the posthumously published A Death in the Family), it would be enough for me to have considered him a great writer. As it stands, he created other works that have stood the test of time: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his film criticism and the screenplays to The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. Agee died of a heart attack at age 45, reasonably well-known and frustratingly full of promise. This 1974 collection of essays, Remembering James Agee, provides a fine introduction. David Madden, the “other” Knoxville writer, edited and contributed his own original essay about a 1972 weeklong conference on Agee at St. Andrews Episcopal School near Sewanee. The essays are the works of Agee friends and colleagues, usually introductions to other books by or about Agee. You might think this would lend itself to hagiography, but the contributors couple their fondness with memories of his excesses with alcohol, smoking and temper. When an author dies young, there can be a lot of romanticism about “what could have been” and there’s some of that here, too. But most contributions are fair appraisals of the man and his work. I don’t know if college students read Agee now, but at one time he was popular in certain circles. Dwight Macdonald refers to “an Agee cult,” comparing the Agee followers to those of James Dean: “In their maimed careers and their wasteful deaths, the writer and the actor appeal to a resentment that intellectuals and teenagers alike feel about life in America, so smoothly prosperous, so deeply frustrating.” The best of the essays, oddly enough, is from a man known better for his photography than his writing, Walker Evans. In an introduction to a later edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans writes eloquently: “All you ever saw of [Agee’s Christianity] was an ingrained courtesy, an uncourtly courtesy that emanated from him toward everyone, perhaps excepting the smugly rich, the pretentiously genteel, and the police. After a while, in a round-about way, you discovered that, to him, human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls.” Long out-of-print, this is recommended if you can find a library or bookstore copy.