Back in college, I was challenged by a literature professor I really admired to find some epic piece of literature whose prose seemed almost unreadable, and then suffer my way through it from beginning to end. The merits of such an exercise have been lost to time (at least in my mind) but I assumed at the time that it was the literary equivalent of learning to drive on a straight-shift car. The piece I settled on was James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". Aside from the requisite arcane prose, I was attracted to the work by Walker Evan's striking photographs of depression-era migrant families.
Agee's erudite writing offers an interesting juxtaposition with the subject matter; those considered least in an already thoroughly-damaged American society. I devoured the book, reading and re-reading some pages to ensure I understood exactly what Agee was trying to convey to my young mind. Agee's prose, like Cormac McCarthy's, like James Fennimore Cooper's, like Fyodor Dostoevsky's... makes the reader sweat for those pearls of wisdom it contains, but the effort is never wasted. Such a book is as much a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant soul as it is a treatise on the subject matter itself. Recently I picked up a new edition of the book and began to read it over again. Twenty years later, the book still holds profound magic, for which I'm thankful.
Last night, I was invited by a friend to go to a private screening of Ross Spear's 1980 documentary Agee, which traces Agee's life from the sudden death of his father here in Knoxville when he was six years old (later chronicled in his post-humously published autobiography "A Death in the Family") up through his career as a film critic and contributing editor to Fortune and Time magazines, to his authoring of the script for "The African Queen" just before his death. The documentary, still on the original 16 mm film reels, was premiered at the Bijou theater upon its release in 1980, and hasn't been shown publicly since that year. Presenting the film last night was David Shepard, owner of Blackhawk Films and founding member of the American Film Institute. It was an intense experience.
Forever haunted by the sudden, tragic loss of his father at such a young age, Agee spent his life walking a fine line between obsession and suicide. He ultimately died of a heart attack in a New York cab at the age of 45. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded posthumously to "A Death in the Family", a distinction Agee now shares with fellow Knoxvillians Paul Y. Anderson, whose writings exposed the Teapot Dome scandal (and who was similarly haunted by the tragic death of his father at a young age and who ultimately committed suicide at age 45) and Cormac McCarthy, who fortunately does not seem to share this bent toward self-destruction, and who we therefore hope to have around for a long time to come.
