Most early American authors are respected and given high praise for their proper behavior and way of life. One exception to this standard is James Agee. He caused waves by leading turbulent years of early life that included alcohol, drinking, and all night parties that would eventually lead to his premature death James Agee’s rocky childhood, the loss of his father, and the feelings of neglect from his mother contributed predominantly to his unique style
Agee was born in Knoxville in 1909. His father, Hugh James Agee, was killed on May 28, 1916 in an automobile accident while in the prime of his life. After the death of his father, he became more absorbed in his mother’s Anglo-Catholic faith, which he would struggle with for the rest of his years. In 1916, James was sent to Saint Andrews Seminary, an Episcopal boarding school in the Appalachians. His mother’s reason for sending him was so he could have more company of men and religious training that she felt was very important. He grew up with an overwhelming sense of failure and guilt due to his father’s death and his mother sending him away.
James’ mentor at Saint Andrews, Father Flye, became his closest friend, surrogate parent, and spiritual inspiration for his entire life. In 1924, his mother married a bursar at Saint Andrews. Flye recognized Agee’s flair for writing and introduced him to classical literature and music. Flye helped him get into the prestigious Exeter Academy and later into Harvard. The couple grew very close and during the summer of 1925 visited France. James began at Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire after returning from Europe. This is where he first became really interested in writing.
Agee attended Harvard from 1928 until 1932, where he became committed to his literary career. During this time, he began to write poems, short stories, and articles for the Harvard Lampoon, the Crimson, and the Harvard Advocate. James graduated Harvard in 1932. His parody of Time in a 1921 issue of the Advocate attracted Henry Luce and resulted in an offer to write for Fortune. In 1934, while working as a journalist for Fortune Magazine in New York, he published his first and only volume of verse “Permit me Voyage”. Agee embarked with photographer Walker Evans on an assignment to document lives of poor Southern farmers. He and Walker traveled through Tennessee and Alabama. The oral and visual histories were published first in Fortune and then in the book Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Let us Now Praise Famous Men was a milestone classic on social injustice in America. In the book, Agee writes about the hardships the tenant families face. He tries to get the reader to compare the families’ suffering, forsaken by the powers that be, to Christ’s suffering. Walker Evans wrote that Agee, although he masked it, was “A poet, an intellectual, an artist, and a Christian.” Evans also described his faith as “A punctured and residual remnant, but it was still a naked, root emotion.”
James’ last major Fortune assignment was a trip to Havana in 1937. Agee and Olivia “Via” Saunders divorced in 1938. She had some of the same characteristics of his mother, Laura. Before the divorce, he had already started living with Alma Mailman, a close friend of Olivia. In 1938 Agee moved to New Jersey and married Alma Mailman. Alma was the opposite of Olivia. James’ restlessness intensified in the late 1930’s.
The trauma of his father’s death and his confused childhood emotions greatly affected the motif of James Agee’s works. As an author, he felt a special responsibility to those whose lives he tried to depict. James left Fortune in 1939. Agee’s writing style was informed chiefly by the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. After writing Let us Now Praise Famous Men renewed the contact with his Southern roots, he was inspired to write The Morning Watch and Knoxville Summer 1915, both sensitive depictions of a Tennessee boyhood. In the summer of 1939 James began reviewing books for Time. One of his coworkers was the famed Robert Fitzgerald. In the late 1940’s Agee completed several hundred reviews and numerous scripts and wrote the short story The Morning Watch. The Morning Watch is about a young boy’s experiences on a Good Friday morning while attending a boarding school. His major interest focused on the many insecurities of childhood. In 1940, Agee’s first son, Joel, was born in Brooklyn. Agee reconstructed a record of his childhood that involved an ambivalent relationship to his father. He suffered his first serious heart attack in 1951 while working on The African Queen. Against the doctor’s orders, Agee kept drinking and smoking in excess even with his health declining rapidly. His style is the strongest in A Death in the Family. Both Let us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family open with extended, dreamlike descriptions. He tried repeatedly to reconstruct a nostalgic image of an ideal family life. In A Death in the Family, he added a layer of spiritual concerns over the physical details of the story. James’ style was also influenced by psychoanalysis. He admired Marcel Proust’s and James Joyce’s use of the subconscious in their writings. In preparation for some of his writings, he kept notes of his dreams and experimented with psychoanalysis. In A Death in the Family, he tried to create a subconscious dreamscape similar to what Proust or Joyce had done. He used symbols such as a telephone ringing in the middle of the night and waking up a family to try to achieve multiple spiritual layers. A heart attack on May 16, 1955 in a taxicab in New York City led James Agee to his death. A Death in the Family was never completed for publication (Collection 1). Agee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for A Death in the Family (Collection 1).
James Agee’s bizarre style and painstaking obsession with perfection made his works leave you with a sense of completeness. The trancelike mood in A Death in the Family is a perfect example of his yearning for a faultless family image that could not be achieved in his own life and his distinctive approach to literature.
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