City poet

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on May 16, 1955, James Agee's heart stopped in a Manhattan taxicab as he was on the way to a doctor's office. He was only 44, but had already suffered several heart attacks. Despite his illness, he had managed to all but finish his novel, ''A Death in the Family," in which he recreated the inner world of a 6-year-old boy whose father dies suddenly, just as Agee's own had done. The book would be published in 1957; it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Even among the remarkable characters of the New York intellectual scene of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Agee's energy and charm made him extraordinary. Not even the heart attacks had slowed the pace of his drinking, smoking, talking, or womanizing. Walker Evans, the photographer with whom Agee collaborated as a young man, would remember him as one who ''worked in what looked like a rush and a rage," and as one whose ability to win the trust of others was worrying--or would have been, except that for Agee ''human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls."

Last week the Library of America released a two-volume selection of his work, edited by the film critic Michael Sragow, thus placing Agee on the nation's canonical shelf between Henry Adams and Louisa May Alcott. One volume is devoted primarily to his narrative writing, both fiction and nonfiction, including ''A Death in the Family" and ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," his impassioned account of rural Southern poverty and dignity that was published, along with Evans's photographs, in 1941. The other volume is primarily devoted to his journalism, especially his writings about movies.

Indeed, during his lifetime Agee was best known as a film critic, writing for Time and The Nation, and since his death perhaps only Pauline Kael has matched the energy and style of his reviews. (W.H. Auden, in a letter to the editors of The Nation in 1944, wrote that, although he cared little for movies, Agee's column was ''the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today"; it was journalism, thought Auden, of ''permanent literary value.") Agee's love of the cinema led him to Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for ''The Night of the Hunter" (which premiered just after his death) and co-wrote ''The African Queen" with John Huston. But his greatest fascination was Charlie Chaplin, with whom he became friends and for whom he wrote his first, but never to be filmed, screenplay, ''The Tramp's New World" (which has just been published in John Wranovics's remarkable new book, ''Chaplin and Agee.")

But before Agee began the task of transforming weekly film journalism into an art form, he had already written ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"--about the weeks he spent with three northern Alabama families barely subsisting, in the hot summer of 1936, as tenant farmers and day laborers--and in that book he had worked a similar transformation on documentary journalism. Walker Evans understood where the power of the book came from: Agee's belief that people are ''sacred souls." It is the most strenuous imaginable attempt to show us the religious--indeed sacramental--meaning of the poorest and most miserable lives.

The book fails; Agee knew as he wrote that he was failing, and perhaps even intended to fail. Throughout the book, the syntax is desperately contorted: ''this beauty is made between hurt and invincible nature and the plainest cruelties and needs of human existence in this uncured time, and is inextricable among these, and as impossible without them as a saint born in paradise." We can't see the beauty because we aren't there, and anyway don't have Agee's deeply religious, perhaps mystical, vision; even Evans's powerful photographs are powerless to remedy that.

Evans would remember that the accent of Agee's speech fluctuated oddly. Agee had been educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, and had lived most of his adult life in New York, but when he came among the dirt-poor tenant farmers of northern Alabama the tones and rhythms of his native Tennessee emerged in his talk. Perhaps to Evans he sounded like one of those farmers--but Agee's upbringing was a radically different one, and not just because he had more money and more education.

Agee was a city boy, born and raised in Knoxville, Tenn., and even before he had finished his account of the tenant framers he had begun to sketch accounts of life in Knoxville in the early years of the 20th century. William Faulkner speaks for a decaying aristocratic world, rooted in the power of land and power over those who work the land; Flannery O'Connor chronicles a rural South that has forgotten its aristocratic ambitions and aspires to be nothing more than a collection of ''good country people." But Agee, in ''A Death in the Family" (which is what those sketches would become), presents us with something quite different: the emergence of Southern city life. Looking back on his work a half-century after his death, it seems to me that Agee's great achievement was to chronicle the social world of his childhood. James Agee is the first poet laureate of the urban South.

. . .

When Agee died, he had effectively finished ''A Death in the Family," with just a few decisions left to be made about where to put certain passages. In 1938 he had written a brief, lyrical sketch called ''Knoxville: Summer 1915"--it was published in Partisan Review, and in 1948 was set to music by Samuel Barber--and his editors wisely chose a version of that sketch to preface the novel.

It is telling that Agee's account of the life he knew as a 6-year-old centers on middle-class men in white businessmen's shirts watering their lawns in the summer dusk, ''tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths," with the sound of the street car ''raising its iron moan...the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks." Likewise, the first scene of the book proper describes the young boy Rufus going with his father to the movie house to see a Charlie Chaplin short and a Western starring William S. Hart.

White-collar workers watering their lawns and taking their sons to the movies: this is neither William Faulkner's South nor Flannery O'Connor's, but rather a highly recognizable ancestor of today's South, which like the rest of this country is dominated by its cities.

The ''death in the family" is that of 36-year-old Jay Follett, husband and father, who dies in an automobile accident as he is driving out into the Tennessee countryside to visit his own father, whom he mistakenly thinks to be dying. Everything about this death is modern--down to the repeated references to a small piece of machinery, the ''cotter pin" that worked its way loose and left Jay unable to steer the car.

Jay had been informed of his father's illness by telephone, the same means by which his wife Mary is informed of Jay's death. Nothing could be more familiar to us, but in 1915 it was all new. Previous generations of Southern men died at home, which is where they also worked; all members of the family were equally present to one another, because they all lived on the farm, and one's parents were likely to be no more than a field or two away. Here we see technology stretching a Southern family, increasing the distance separating the various members--and not just the physical distance. The loss that Mary and her children feel is the loss of someone who was but an occasional presence in their lives, at least in comparison to previous generations of Southern fathers: When Jay takes young Rufus to the movies, he is compensating for his own daily absences in the way urban fathers tend to do.

Jay's wife, Mary, is a Christian, though not of the stereotypical Southern-evangelical variety: She is a passionate Anglo-Catholic. Yet even the way the book treats religion seems more appropriate to our own time than to what we imagine life in Tennessee must have been like in 1915. Mary's father proclaims himself an agnostic and reads The New Republic, at that time a daring and brand-new intellectual journal. And her brother, who as a teenager had modeled himself after the famously atheistic poet Shelley, shares his father's unbelief. Jay himself had no religion, something which Mary can hardly bear to think about until, in an extraordinary scene, she discerns Jay's ghostly invisible presence among them and then among their sleeping children. This world may be haunted, but it is not the ''Christ-haunted South" described by O'Connor; it is the skeptical, pluralistic world of the modern city.

Agee himself, who lived in that pluralistic world, corresponded all his life with an Anglo-Catholic priest, Father James Harold Flye, whom he had met, at age 9, as a boarding student at St. Andrew's School for Mountain Boys in Sewanee, Tenn. In 1945 he would tell Flye, ''It seems incredible to me not to be a Christian and a Catholic in the simplest and strictest senses of those words." Yet however incredible, such was his condition. ''A Death in the Family" ends strangely but appropriately, with the newly fatherless Rufus poised uneasily between his mother's faith and his uncle's hatred of priests and their religion. The last word of the book is ''silence," and the silence Agee leaves us with--leaves himself with--is meant for contemplating the mysteries of belief and unbelief, too deep for words.

. . .

Agee's style is perfectly suited to this moment of poise, this unresolved tension. In ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" it had been florid at times, if also memorable and powerful. Here at the end of his life its torsion had relaxed, and he had achieved an elegance so transparent that you rarely notice it. It adapts itself effortlessly to each mind it represents: Jay's (clear and straight), Mary's (weaving but determined), Rufus's (alert, passionate, confused). In a virtuoso moment the narrative enters the inner world of Jay's foolish, drunken brother Ralph, and in a few pages opens him to us shockingly. The style is masterful, at once empathetic and ruthless.

Though Agee's prose is more lucid than it was earlier in his career, the silence which the book, in the end, recommends to us, especially in the face of death, suggests that he is no more confident about the power of language to express the mystery of human value than he had been when writing ''Famous Men." Indeed he could scarcely name that value at all, though if he believed in anything he believed in that particular sanctity. When he described for Father Flye his ''incredible" spiritual condition, he was no doubt recalling the intensity of his childhood belief, when, ''in the innocence of faith," as he wrote in ''Famous Men," he would ''serve at the altar at earliest lonely Mass, whose words were thrilling brooks of music and whose motions, a grave dance...." But in adulthood that faith had become, in Evans's words, only a ''punctured and residual remnant."

Through technology and through sheer multiplicity the city tends always to dissolve bonds. Whether those bonds are tethers to the Divine, or just the chains of superstition, Agee (like countless others) could never be sure. But in describing Knoxville in 1915, he was tracing the lineaments of an urban environment in which that early ''innocence of faith" was gradually transformed into some unnameable sense of sacredness. All his life he felt it; his writing strives always to indicate it.

Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois. His book ''The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis" will be published by Harper San Francisco next month.