James Agee was a writer and poet par excellence, but to a
devastating degree. This guy bleeds his subjects in a slow, tortuous death; and
the reader doesn’t fair much better. His work has been critiqued by some as
“repetitious and crazy”, and even his collaborating photographer described him
in the book’s foreword as diffident, imaginative, having an inward “paralyzing,
self-lacerating anger” and an “unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply
principled” rebellion against institutionalism and upper class society in
general. He hurts, and he inflicts us with his shame, guilt, and confusion regarding
which details of his observation are important and which aren’t. He continually
feels that he has betrayed his subjects, himself, and the world by attempting
to categorize in his mind objective reality and—more importantly to him—other
people, as his biased mind sorts it all out according to good-and-bad,
revolting-and-appealing. Agee’s self-deprecation surfaces so intensely at times
that he goes so far as to write that he feels he has sacrificed these our
country-cousins as specimens to endure, however unconsciously, “the murdering
of museum staring” at the hands of complacent readers who are moved only to curiosity
and not to empathy.
The title is taken from the Jewish Scripture of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 44: 1 – 15, which is
a hymn in honor of heroic ancestors. It is Agee’s nod to the hard-to-kill
branches of one’s lineage who, although they may have lived in squalor,
ignorance, and suffering, have still brought their progeny to the ‘other side’
and have sired a future race because of their hardy endurance of the worst life
has to offer. This warrior race of forbears who have survived the heat of many
suns may not have understood what they accomplished because their minds were
sweated out in labor, but they accomplished it nonetheless, and our existence
is due to their indefatigable flesh and spirit.
The book is steep and
‘gloppy’ from the beginning, with interminable stretches of poetic orgasms,
some of it great and incomparable to be sure; and with rambling,
quasi-philosophical justifications for the author’s melancholic empathy for the
poor and ignorant, and oppressive guilt over his wealth and intelligence. It just
barely managed to stay interesting and comprehensible enough for me to keep reading,
and I love rank poetry. It was a spiraling mess at times, full of run-on sentences
and pendant thoughts that end abruptly. Was it profound, or madness? Probably a
little of both. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how in the world this was
widely read at any time. Who (besides me of course) would spend their time on
it? It’s a struggle with the author to understand him or sympathize with him at
points. And then, there are times when he tries to give you just the facts: simple
descriptions stripped bare of embellishment or interpretation. Odd. Anyone reading
are not the ‘just-the-facts-ma’am’ kind of people, so it’s actually a turn-off
when it comes mid-way through the book.
And my, how Agee
travails to share his agony over the suffering of his brothers and sisters on
this planet. He aches to relieve them of their crushing responsibilities, to
honor them for their lives, and to awaken them from their sleep-walking
existence. He wants us all to live better together, to share our awakenings and
triumphs and joys; and he wants the wealthy to perceive the beauty in their
impoverished brethren, which can only be in “proportion as [the rich] recognize
the ugliness and disgrace implicit in their privilege of [such a] perception.” How
loudly and lugubriously he moans over all the sad and doubled-over souls
in the world whom he views as “tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost
as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense,
the enormous assaults of the universe.” His highest salute to them was
comparing them to a “scab” that grows on the wound of the earth, as if it was
oozing these sore lives, “expressing themselves upon the grieved membrane of
the earth in the symmetry of a disease.” It is very obvious he feels the pang
of torment of what others are feeling as they eke out their pathetic existence
with “…the burden of being upon them.”And he’s good to insist we feel it too.
But despite even my own feelings of sorrow for Agee’s
subjects, I refuse to surrender to such a view of humanity. How could I pity
someone so, without likewise, at some point, demanding pity for myself? I would
rather a person admire the strength of my character in suffering, and see
something redeemable and really communicable in the sweetness of my resolve, something
so brave and beautiful that it would evoke in my onlookers a desire to come
join me and be loved by me, rather than merely weep for my wretchedness. I
simply don’t believe anyone is so pathetic, or weak, or poor, or futile as Agee
would have us accept. Every person has the light of a god radiating from his
hurting eyes, walking erect atop the supine earth, defiant against gravity’s urging
to mix his atoms with the senseless soil. Man has awoken from his mineral coma,
breathes against the pressuring atmosphere, works the begrudging ground to yield
life to him, multiplies himself into a host to weather the elements, and dies
with a curse on his lips against death, with a promise to return, declaring with
every thought a present victory over inertia. And I’m sure God smiles, and does
not pity his sons and daughters for their plight, however meager their situation
is. The more destitute, the more noble a man’s or woman’s resistance to the
cold and hunger. Agee bemoans the assaults of the universe? The way I see it, it
is man instead who assaults the universe by virtue of his very birth, and not the
weight of a thousand solar systems has succeeded in preventing or smothering
him. He’s born a king, seizing the crown of higher order, even if for a few
moments, from the usurping blind cosmos that governed while he was asleep. And
we pity this wakened being for his wakefulness? We pity that he has arisen only
to find that he has the ‘burden’ to set his kingdom in order? I say: the
greater the fight, the greater my adoration for a life that towers over its
environment in mind, spirit, ingenuity, endurance, and sheer power of will if
only to scratch his name on the bathroom stalls of the cosmos. No, I do not
pity my suffering brothers and sisters. I pity those folks who do not love,
respect, and honor them for the god-like striving against the spin of the
earth’s mindless mass, as they stand as lords over the rest of mute creation. I
pity those who whimper over what they should worship. There. I feel better.
What? You’re still here?
I don’t know if it’s a sad thing or not that this book will
probably be lost to antiquity very soon. It seems that it has played its role
in history, and I hope it woke people up to the suffering and ignorance of
their fellow man, even if Agee’s sobbing was a bit theatrical. I will certainly
walk away with a few nice nuggets of excellent writing that I managed to
unearth in this long and laborious text. Enjoy a few of them:
“Each [person] is intimately connected with the bottom and
the extremest reach of time: Each is composed of substances identical with the
substance of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard,
and the hot centers of stars…tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost
as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense,
the enormous assaults of the universe.” (56)
“…but [theirs were] the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of
a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings.” (100)
“A falsehood is entirely true to the derangements which
produced it.” (230)
