Cultural Cohesion (26 page)

As a traveller through ordinary space, Lawrence got back on slanging terms with his repudiated Europe. Baden-Baden, for example, was a
Totentanz
out of Holbein, “old, old people tottering their cautious dance of triumph:
wir sind noch hier
. . . .” As a traveller through time and thought, he moved on a grander scale.
Etruscan Places
is a gentle book, endearingly characteristic in its handy division between Etruscan and Roman and disarmingly uncharacteristic in its emphasis on delicacy and humour: it's the book of a strong man dying. “We have lost the art of living,” he writes, “and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses.” The Etruscans weren't like that. Their art had the “natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.” The contrast, as always, is asserted with a degree of confidence which is bound to draw forth a preliminary nod of assent. It remains a fact, however, that this kind of argument has practically nothing to do with post-Renaissance art or pre-Renaissance art or any kind of art, since art is more likely to depend on those two sorts of proportion being in tension than on one getting rid of the other. Lawrence's binomial schemes were useless for thinking about art, as those of his disciples who tried to employ them went on to prove. Without them, though, we wouldn't have had
his
art.

In January 1928, Lawrence told Dorothy Brett that he still intended coming back to the ranch. “It's very lovely,” he wrote to Lady Glenavy, “and I'd be well there.” But his seven-league boots were worn through, and he was never to get out of Europe alive. We have only to read “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” or the last part of
St. Mawr
to realize that his ashes ended up on the right spot. The mountains were a cherished place. They weren't home, though. Home was at the Source, and the Source—he said it himself—is past comprehension.

D. H. Lawrence
, edited by Stephen Spender, 1972

POSTSCRIPT

Stephen Spender kindly asked me to write this piece for one of those collections of articles by many hands which are supposed to celebrate the many-sided genius of a great writer. Inevitably they end up remaindered, but the opportunity to write at some length can be beneficial for critics grown too accustomed to composing in a thousand-word breath. I thought Lawrence was a greatly gifted writer. I just didn't think he was a great writer. To put it another way, I thought he could write but didn't like what he wrote. In this piece I managed to express both halves of the antinomy with sufficient illustrative material to get beyond mere contentiousness and into the realm of reasoned argument. Since one of the principles I eventually developed as a critic was that a limiting judgement of an artist should be offered only after full submission to whatever quality made him remarkable in the first place, I count this piece as an early success. I ought to have ended it, however, with the logical conclusion that because Lawrence commanded a power of poetic evocation far beyond his capacity for prose argument, his most characteristic work should be sought amongst his poetry, where indeed it can be found: his animal poems are among the unignorable ignition points of twentieth-century literature, and no syllabus of modern poetry that leaves them out can be trusted as a guide to what it puts in.

The Metropolitan Critic
, 1994

14

THE PERPETUAL PROMISE
OF JAMES AGEE

The two volumes of Agee's bye-writings called
The Collected Poems of James Agree
and
The Collected Short Prose of James Agee
don't add anything revolutionary to our picture of the author, but what they do add is good and solid. The
Collected Poems
volume reissues the whole of the long-lost “Permit Me Voyage” and tacks on about three times as much other material, thereby vastly enlarging the field in which Agee can be studied as a poet. The results of such a study are likely to be mixed, since his disabling limitations as a poet are revealed along with the continuity of his dedication and seriousness: poetry just didn't bring out the best in him. The
Collected Short Prose
volume, on the other hand, is a book which demands to be considered—some of the pieces collected in it are as weighty and as rich as scraps and shavings can well get.

“He had so many gifts,” Dwight Macdonald once wrote of Agee, “including such odd ones, for intellectuals, as reverence and feeling.” Very true, and what is more he had them at an early age. The early
Harvard Advocate
short stories included here are quite astonishing in their moral maturity: the emotional wisdom that other men must strive to attain seems to have been present in Agee as a gift, and it's easy to see why he impressed his contemporaries as some kind of Rimbaud of the understanding—the range of sympathy inspires not just awe, but a certain dread. Indeed it's possible to argue, in the light of these early efforts, that to have it all is to have too much. Men whose minds and talents grow through the recognition and correction of error probably find it easier to shape their lives. Agee had a deficient practical sense, largely bungled his career, completed only a tenth of what was in him and habitually overwrote—economy, for an artist with a faculty of registration as fertile as his, didn't mean weeding the garden so much as chopping the orchids down with a machete. Only the kind of sensitivity which develops can come up with a novel like
The Great Gatsby
—to produce a book like that in its maturity, it has to be capable of writing
This Side of Paradise
in its youth. A saving obtuseness was simply never part of Agee's equipment. With his entire creative life stretching ahead of him, he had almost nothing left to learn.

“Death in the Desert,” from the October 1930 issue of the
Harvard Advocate
, is the story of a young man hitch-hiking through the slump. At first glance it's anybody's story of a college boy going on the bum to discover America, and turns on the seemingly elementary moral point that the kind couple who pick him up won't stop for a Negro in serious trouble. But the control of the narrative, the modulations of the tone, the registration of speech patterns and the presentation of character combine to turn the story away from neatness and towards complexity, judgement permanently suspended. The narrator (Agee in thin disguise) has a boil in his ear. At the beginning of the story, where he waits an eternity to be picked up while crippled hobos get lifts with ease, the boil looks like a comic device.

For a while I talked with a peg-legged man of perhaps sixty; he spent his winters with his niece and her husband in St Louis. In the summers he got out of their way. His luck was always good, he said—too damned good. This summer he'd been through St Louis twice already. Unless he did something about it, he'd be there again inside of a week. Did I have a cigarette? Thanks. . . . All the while, as he talked, he watched the cars come up the road, and flicked his thumb eastward as each one approached. He stood always with his peg leg towards town. Before long a Chandler, after running a half-mile gauntlet of men, slowed down for him. He took another cigarette and was gone.

For the rest of us, rides came more slowly. My ear was too sore, by now, to make talking a pastime. I sat down on my coat and decided that it was rather less than necessary on days like this. After a couple of hours, I considered the manifold advantages of being conspicuously a cripple. After another hour I had the idea of holding up a sign:

SORE EAR
PLEASE

The humour reminds us of one previous writer, Lardner, and of several subsequent writers, especially Salinger, whose early stories like “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” echo the tone precisely (consider the way that story's platoon sergeant translates his man-management problems into movie marquee slogans like
FOUR MUST GO—FROM THE TRUCK OF THE SAME NAME
). But the sore ear turns out to be a lot more than just a comic device. It's because of the nagging twinges he is suffering that the narrator decides to make no protest when the driver who picks him up eventually steps on the accelerator instead of the brake and races past the desperate Negro's outstretched arms. Agee is making the subtle point that we are likely to treat ourselves as a special case when we are in pain, and defer our duties on the assumption that the Fates, or our better selves, will understand. Like the bad tooth in
Darkness at Noon
, the boil resists all attempts to make something symbolical of it—it's just a fact, leading to more facts, in a sequence of marvellously analytical probings and worryings. Agee was twenty when he wrote the story. An ounce more talent and he would have sunk into the earth.

Another
Advocate
story, “They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap,” is similarly . . . well, precocious is the wrong word: prodigious. The young Agee character is immured in a dreadful boarding house, whose master is an ageing and barely repressed queer. They strike a silent bargain, in which the old man is allowed to adore but not to touch, beyond the occasional friendly squeeze of the shoulder. Agee introduces a young acquaintance into the boarding house. The old man tries the friendly squeeze and gets slapped in the mouth. All the tacit understandings upon which the house has previously run, and especially the relationship between the old man and his wife, promptly collapse. Agee the character is reduced to tacit agonies of self-recrimination and regret, while Agee the writer records the to-ings and fro-ings in the shattered household with customary mastery. Supposing Agee had dropped dead the following year—wouldn't we be justified, on this showing, in the conjecture that he might have been one of the great writers of the century?

The real tragedy, looking back, is not in the presence of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
or
A Death in the Family
or all the other part-realized things, unsatisfactory though they are, but in the absence of that sequence of novels which might have recollected his life—a sequence for the writing of which he had qualifications rivalling Proust's. Unfortunately an “autobiographical novel” (his quotes) was only one among many of the long-term Agee projects. Recollection was fundamental to the cast of his mind, but it wasn't his creative obsession. He wasn't neurotic enough. If people had hated him more he might have taken revenge; if he had hated himself sufficiently, he might have made redress; as it was, he had only love to drive him forward, and love makes poor fuel in its pure state. It's a heavy irony that through Agee the “positive” creative attitude which people like Archibald MacLeish were currently calling for could well have established its own tradition. That it failed to come about was not just MacLeish's loss but everybody's, not least those who had seen the disingenuousness of the “positive” propaganda but who would be compelled in the future to watch the American novel wave goodbye to everything Agee represented. It's been said that Agee wasn't bored by virtue—another way of saying that he could see what was interesting about normality. When he went down, he took three or four decades of ordinary American life with him, and the middlebrow salvage operations—O'Hara, Cheever and the like—got nowhere near lifting the hulk.

The two “satiric” pieces included in
The Collected Short Prose
are from later in the day and are in a familiar Agee vein of phantasmagoria: the letter from Agee to Macdonald quoted in Macdonald's “Jim Agee, A Memoir” (printed as an appendix to the excellent critical essay on Agee in
Against the American Grain
) gives a better idea of the referential lushness of his intelligence when he allowed it to run wild. There was something compulsive about the way he piled on the detail, and friends who received such letters might well have frowned through their delight—why take so much time and trouble, and to what purpose? Here are some scraps from the letter to Macdonald:

I think
The Brothers Karamazov
deserves the co-operation of all the finest talents in Hollywood and wd. richly repay all research & expenditure. A fullsized replica, complete down to the last topmizznmst, of the Mad Tsar Pierre (Charles Laughton). Papa Karamazov (Lionel Barrymore). His comic servant Grigory (Wallace Beery). Grigory's wife (Zazu Pitts). Smerdyakov (Charles Laughton). Smerdyakov's Familiar, a cat named Tabitha (Elsa Lanchester, the bride of Frankenstein). Zossima (Henry B. Walthall) . . . Miusov (Malcolm Cowley) . . . in Alyosha's Dream: Alyosha (Fred Astaire). Puck (Wallace Beery). Titania (Ginger Rogers or James Cagney). . . . Routines by Albertina Rasch. Artificial snow by Jean Cocteau. . . . Entire production supervised by Hugh Walpole. . . . To be played on the world's first Globular Screen, opening at the Hippodrome the night before
Jumbo
closes. . . . Artificial foreskins will be handed out at the north end of the Wilhelmstrasse to anyone who is fool enough to call for them.

Stuff like this reminds us of the many reasons why Perelman was unassailable—to begin with, he was far funnier. And Perelman wrote his madcap collages as therapy: Agee at this time (1936) was not involved in Hollywood and had no frustrations to work off, except perhaps the frustration of not being part of it all. There is something cancerous about this side of his talent. It produces cells uncontrollably, and the longer satirical piece included here (called “Dedication Day,” and nominally given over to goosing the scientists and politicians responsible for the first atomic bombs) runs away with itself in a fashion simultaneously boring and worrying.

As convincing demonstrations of just how sensitive Agee was, there are two small fragments—“Run Over,” about a cat hit by a car, and “Give Him Air,” about a human car-crash victim dying—which are strictly unbearable: you'd need nerves of steel to read them twice. At the end of the first piece Agee notes in parenthesis that “Things like this are happening somewhere on the earth every second.” It's one of the peculiarities of Agee's writing that he can achieve delicacy and subtlety but never distance. He took everything right on the chin. This doesn't mean that all his material presented itself to him as having equal value, but it did present itself with equal impact. If he'd cared less, he might have been able to shape things more easily. A man who doesn't know which way to turn finds it hard to get his head down. His doomed application for a 1937 Guggenheim grant is printed here—there are forty-seven separate ­projects.

For the Guggenheim people it must have been like trying to estimate Leonardo da Vinci in an early period. What were they to make of “Extension in writing; ramification in suspension; Schubert 2-cello Quintet”? (“Experiments, mostly in form of the lifted and maximum-suspended periodic sentence. Ramification [and development] through developments, repeats, semi-repeats, of evolving thought, of emotion, of associates and dissonants.”) Don't ring us: we'll ring you. The awkward truth is that the capacity for general thought which Macdonald praised in Agee worked mainly as a drawback, blurring his creative focus. His comparatively low productivity isn't sufficiently explained by pointing to his chaotic style of life, and it's even possible to suggest—tentatively, remembering we are strangers—that the style of life might have been in part a reflection of a gift continually troubled by the search for the one idea that would temporarily suppress all the others. Where can will-power come from in a mind so short of limitations?

Travel notes and movie projects end the book. The fragments of filmscript bear out Macdonald's acute remark that Agee's scripts were the work of a frustrated director—details of camera angles and lighting (precisely the stuff that no film director ever wants to see in a script) are gone into at numbing length. As it happened, Agee spent the 1930s a long way away from the Hollywood salt mines, toiling naked in a salt mine of another type—the Luce magazines. The long (fifty-seven-page) and praiseworthy introduction to the
Collected Short Prose
book is by Robert Fitzgerald, a friend of Agee's, and valuably complicates the story of Agee's connections with
Time, Life
and
Fortune
(or
Dime, Spy
and
Destiny
as Philip Barry called them) which Macdonald recounts with forbidding plangency in his memoir. (As demonstrated most notably by his embalming job on Hemingway, Macdonald has a tendency to wrap up a dead body and throw away the key to the sarcophagus: all done in the name of preservation, but a touch too slick.) “Under a reasonable dispensation,” Mr. Fitzgerald writes,

a man who had proved himself a born writer before he left the university could go ahead in that profession, but this did not seem to be the case in the United States in 1932. Neither in Boston nor New York nor elsewhere did there appear any livelihood appropriate for a brilliant President of
The Harvard Advocate
, nor any mode of life resembling that freedom of research that I have sketched as ours at Harvard. In the shrunken market the services of an original artist were not in demand. Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay took their lives that spring. Great gifts always set their possessors apart, but not necessarily apart from any chance to exercise them; this gift at that time pretty well did. . . . Agree thankfully took the first job he could get and joined the staff of
Fortune
a month after ­graduation.