More Faith, Better Grounded

Letters of James Agee to Father FlyeMelville House, 2014The image of the modern, aggrieved writer—besotted with alcohol, anguished but also artistically inspired by his suffering—is familiar, if shopworn. Every student of literature is versed in infamous tales of talent both buoyed and crushed by dissipation: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Rimbaud, Cheever, Kerouac, Lowell—the list is as long as it is depressing. Some famously addled authors were better known for their binges than their prose.Nevertheless, the notion that greatness entails drugged despair has become a trope so widely and easily accepted it’s worth fresh scrutiny, if not outright skepticism. A new edition of James Agee’s correspondence is an invitation to do precisely that.Though he enjoyed only modest critical and commercial success as a writer during his lifetime, Agee was posthumously valorized as a genius whose productivity was chronically impaired by existential angst and relentless imbibing. Robert Phelps, the editor of the new collection of Agee’s letters, crowns him a “born, sovereign prince of the English language.” Lionel Trilling lauded Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee’s best-known work, as “the most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” Much of the literary establishment eventually seconded both judgments, posthumously awarding Agee a Pulitzer Prize for “A Death in the Family” in 1958. In 2005, The Library of America has collected two volumes of his work to immortalize in its canon.Nevertheless, Agee’s oeuvre is made mostly of anonymous, quasi-journalistic pieces written over the course of sixteen years for popular periodicals like Fortune and Time. A good deal of that work is comprised of film reviews but Agee covered quite a diverse expanse of subjects, including horse racing, interior design, ocean cruises, machine-made rugs, and the commercial orchid market, a meandering tour of the quotidian. In those years, he was stymied more by penury than despair, relegated to being a writer-for-hire to make the rent. He loathed the banality of this work, was dispirited by its time-consuming tedium and by the way it siphoned from him the energy to pursue more artistically ambitious projects.And Agee certainly didn’t suffer from a dearth of literary ambition. As he writes in one of the letters to Father James H. Flye that have been newly reissued by Melville House, he hoped to “combine what Chekhov did with what Shakespeare did—that is, to move from the dim, rather eventless beauty of C. to huge geometric plots such as Lear.” He seems incapable of penning an epistle that doesn’t expound upon what he’s either reading or writing, incessantly discussing his “unhealthy obsession.” Even in the very first letter of the collection, written at the fledgling age of sixteen, Agee is most excited not about girls or new friends but the poetry he’s writing, or the prospect that Sinclair Lewis might visit his school. For such a young aspirant to the world of letters, his single-minded devotion to a craft he has barely just discovered is impressively precocious.It remains unclear, though, how much of Agee’s now heralded legacy is due to the quality of his work rather than the result of his infamously Herculean attempts, eventually successful, at all-too-early self-destruction. Despite some truly impressive writing—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men alone is testament enough to his talent—Agee is sometimes lionized more for his allegedly boundless potential than any particular accomplishment, and the gulf between what he really did and what he could have done is interpreted as ever more evidence of his promise.Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, originally published in 1962, provides a startlingly clear aperture into the writer’s beleaguered mind, by rapid turns woolly and razor sharp. The letters span three decades, extending from his sixteenth year to his premature death at the age of forty-six. All of them are written to a single recipient, Father James Harold Flye, Agee’s history teacher, mentor, and substitute father, who met the budding writer at the Tennessee boarding school to which he was shipped after Agee’s father died. Flye gathered the letters into a single collection but exercised no curatorial discretion, including all the letters Agee ever sent him. Other than the addition of a foreword by editor Robert Phelps, this edition is identical to the original.While the publication of an author’s letters is now a common homage to a writer’s significance and an equally common scholarly tool, this particular collection is rare in both its comprehensiveness and intimacy; these exchanges provide glimpses into each year of Agee’s short life and are all addressed to a man he frequently calls his closest confidante and intellectual next of kin. We’re not privy to Father Flye’s letters but it’s clear he sometimes tutors, sometimes challenges, sometimes counsels, and sometimes reproves Agee. He can even be deferential, obviously dazzled by what he seems to view as Agee’s singular gifts. Father Flye is an abiding source of spiritual succor and therapeutic guidance, as well as a demanding intellectual critic. Agee cherished their friendship above all others.In 1945, he wrote:

I have never known anyone, and never expect to, to whom Montaigne’s wonderful essay on friendship could completely apply; -and wonder whether he did; but I never expect a relationship dearer to me, possible, than that I have nearly all my life had with you.

And though Agee was known to be a difficult man, intestinally antagonistic to authority, he writes to Flye with a unique mixture of candor and adoration, expressing a deep respect that motivates him to go beyond dismissive philosophical salvos to rigorously parse his frequently intemperate views of the world. A lesser interlocutor might have merely served as a passive witness to Agee’s wild flourishes, an awed audience of his greatness. Father Flye’s elevated stature in Agee’s life chastened the latter’s tendency toward savagely unrestrained theorizing, and his affection for trafficking in hopelessly broad generalities.Unfortunately, Father Flye seemed impotent to curb Agee’s darker predilections to depression and substance abuse. What begin as mentions of a nagging “spiritual atrophy” and the “occasional alcoholic bender” at the age of twenty eventually devolve into constant references to his intractable “melancholy,” and the small measure of solace he sometimes finds in intoxication. Agee’s sadness eventually brought on a sense of artistic torpor, rendering him serially “heartsick and useless.” Already at the age of twenty-nine, even the reassurance he once found in Christianity begins to wane and lose its power to reassure him:

I trust nothing else save a feeling of God, and love, but here too I know my ignorance is such that I am handling and eating medicines and poisons blindfold and indiscriminate.

Agee becomes so dependent upon alcohol as a salve that he confesses, when considering a restorative retreat to a Trappist monastery, that he’s become fearful of clear-eyed sobriety. In 1953, at the age of forty-two, he wrote:

The effects of sobriety are intoxicatingly rewarding; but that is beside the point. Unless I should have broke the addiction, or would have gotten into a degree of control which still seems unlikely, I am afraid that several days of sobriety would bring me to such a pitch of tension that my stay would be much less like the relative apprehension of all that might be good that I can imagine, than hell on earth.

His creative efforts increasingly hamstrung by his depression, Agee’s overall worldview began to take a melancholic turn, too. More and more, the letters are laments on the futility of life and the gloomy future of man; one stridently declares the “human race incurably sick.” Even the kind of optimism Agee aspires to is narrowly, even fatally, circumscribed by grimly low expectations. Discussing his attraction to socialism, he articulates his crippled form of hope:

My conception of socialism is of something in which absolute victory is unthinkable; what one works for is the least disastrous and most honorable defeat available against great odds. Within those limited terms, and in that kind of humility, I generally prefer hope and faith and one’s best efforts, to despair and resignation.

Still, much to his credit, Agee sometimes reflects on the possibility that his depression is the result of an unearned cynicism, of a kind of intellectual immaturity: “Someday I’ll know how young it was to be 35. But right now it is a terrifying age.” Reassuring Father Flye that he will not take his own life, he tries to muster enough perspective to recognize the causes for gratitude in his life:

Also, be sure I am sorry and ashamed for this letter, in every way but one, that being that between friends even the lowest cowardliness is not to be shut away and grinned about, if worst comes to worst. Aside from all these things, there is much to enjoy and more to be glad for than I deserve, and I know it, but they are mostly, by my own difficulty, out of my reach.

And while the inexhaustible esteem Agee had for Flye seemed to chasten his penchant for wild hyperbole and sweeping generalization, it also seemed to restrain the account he gives of his troubles as well. There’s very little in the letters about his marriages—sordid entanglements about which the letters remain conspicuously silent. In fact, he announces his second marriage in 1938 casually after the fact, as if he was noting the purchase of a new car. Agee eventually left his first wife, Via Saunders, for his mistress, Alma Mailman, who he also abandoned after she became pregnant with his child. He would marry once more to Mia Fritsch, with whom he would father three more children, and he was certainly unfaithful to her as well. Agee also never discusses the morbid circumstances under which he met Flye, namely, the untimely death of his father, despite the fact that it seemed to be a heavy grief that hobbled him for the remainder of his life.Agee’s immoderation extended to his philosophical views, too, though he claims to have tried to cultivate an “extreme distaste for absolutes,” a paradoxical formulation that, against his intentions, only serves to reinforce his extremism. He even championed, at the age of thirty-seven, in the context of discussing political matters, a system that would temper one’s tendency towards dogmatism:

Why can’t be there a whole method and science of mere skepticism, meaning more faith better grounded? which shall try establishing at least a little more clearly what is taken for granted or overlooked.

Agee is capable of lucid self-reflection, too, often discoursing on the sources of what he called his “total lack of discipline.” He also has genuine reservations about his own abilities, which he expresses with admirable humility:

I have a fuzzy, very middle-class mind, and in a bad sense of the word, Christian mind, and a very clouded sensibility. To use my mind cleanly is as intense but also as rare and brief a desire to me as occasional returns of religiousness. Good minds, like good souls, don’t have to make that elementary, childish sort of distinction.

It is impossible, of course, to precisely locate the true causes of Agee’s agitation, but he was surely vexed by his unrealized aspirations to greatness. Agee was undoubtedly a writer of unusual talent, but a clear-eyed account of his achievements has been forestalled by the strange way in which his legacy is burnished by the romanticizing of his personal difficulties, and even of his failures. The modern reader seems so enamored of the connection between madness and artistic afflatus that a nervous breakdown is interpreted as evidence of brilliance. The discipline that undergirds all creative labor, the will to painstakingly meticulous work, is thereby demoted in its relation to manicepiphany.Another view, maybe a less romantic one, is that discipline is a part of artistic mastery, and that true creative expression requires not only moments of transcendent revelation, but the self-restraint to translate them into measured work. Indeed, Agee acknowledged that discipline is integral to consummating artistic vision:

The ‘genius’ is a mixture of these things with tremendous self-discipline and technical mastery and hard work, with incandescent feeling and intuitiveness, when he is working. The roots are emotion and intuitiveness; the chief necessity is discipline.

Agee describes his own mind, though, as an ungovernable welter of ideas, too feral to be tamed into good writing:

Another is that without guidance, balance, coordination, my ideas and impressions and desires, which are much larger than I can begin to get to paper, are loose in my brains like wild beats of assorted sizes and ferocities, not devouring each other but in the process tearing the zoo to parts.

Sadly, Agee also understood that moderation, and the discipline that such moderation permits, are not only the essential ingredients of literary labor but of a happy life as well. Discussing a new friend he made in 1930, he admiringly gushed about his “calm, beauty and fortitude”:

I don’t know how brilliant a man he might have been, if he’d grimly fought out of one of his talents (music most likely, or painting): at any rate, he evidently decided, when he was quite young, not to try it: rather, to work calmly and hard, but with no egoism, on all the things he cared most about—and he’s resolved his life into the most complete and genuine happiness I know. He has the perfect balance between intro- and extraversion, the Greek moderation—and about everything, except religion.

No once can know what else Agee might have accomplished if he had done the same, if he had managed to domesticate his formidable but unruly talents. He might have produced more prolifically, or perhaps he would left another work of the same imperishable value as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Maybe he would have devoted more of his energies to poetry, an art he was powerfully drawn to but also found intimidating. (“I wish also I had the courage and stamina to write poetry.”) Or, he might have finally cornered some elusive peace, some deliverance from a lifetime of depression. Agee simply must have written a good deal drunk and so, at the very least, it’s worth wondering how sobriety would have affected his more mature work.Of course, it’s just as possible that tranquility would have led Agee to write even less, if artistic creation was, among other things, a salve for his unhealed wounds. Inspiration is always fundamentally inscrutable and so no easy or confident predictions can be made about how Agee’s legacy would have been transformed if he had been less burdened by addiction. Discovering more secure sources of happiness could have just as easily extinguished his passion for writing as kindled it.It’s understandable that a reader would be seduced by the biographical details of a writer’s life, to threadbare clues that might help illuminate the otherwise elusive conditions of creativity. Agee’s forty-six years were, after all, genuinely eventful and dramatic. Still, his putative greatness can only be judged by the work he left behind, and whatever distracts the reader from a serious consideration of that work itself is a betrayal of his, or any, true artist’s deepest intentions.Fetishizing the grief that crippled Agee’s ambitions or the self-sabotage he recognized and bemoaned is a kind of belittling. The impulse to glamorize the writer’s suffering is a peculiarly modern one, driven by an egalitarian compulsion to pity a bedraggled soul rather than register awe at artistic martyrdom. That version of appreciation, which emphasizes unconsummated potential over an existing body of work, is closer to condescension than celebration. Agee longed to be remembered for the greatness of his writing, not for his personal hardship. He was allergic to pity. In 1951, he wrote, more presciently than he likely knew, of the less charitable ends to which pity could be applied:

I imagine, though, that my mental disease, if I have one, or ever collapse into one, is melancholia—in which one is distinctly too liable to self-pity, naked or in any one of its ten thousand disguises. In one way I can’t see why on earth one shouldn’t pity oneself. Nearly everything I see or can conceive of is terribly pitiable: I can’t suppose I’m an exception. However, I’d rather pity myself than be pitied by others—and, knowing the nasty uses to which pity can be put, think it may well be better to squirt it on oneself than on others.

____Ivan Kenneally is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.