'It Came to Nothing'

“The talent was great; it came to nothing.” 

The persistence of some literary reputations is baffling. In 1969, fourteen years after Agee’s death, Turner Cassity reviewed The Collected Poems of James Agee for Poetry.  The poems are minor stuff, buoyed by Agee’s former fame. Cassity’s review is a model of criticism written with refreshing savagery and good humor. He even compliments Agee’s work at several points in his review. Cassity’s sentence quoted above serves as a fitting epitaph. He came to bury Agee, not to praise him.

 

When young I was quite taken with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which started for Agee and Walker Evans (whose photos are excellent) as an assignment for Fortune magazine, and soon grew obese and nearly unreadable. A story about Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression is a natural. It ought to be riveting. Agee’s failure can be attributed not to sentimental politics, the usual sabotage for such work, but self-indulgence. Agee’s inner-editor was comatose. Nearly every sentence is overwritten.

 

He later worked for Time magazine, where Whittaker Chambers, who reviewed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and called it “the most distinguished failure of the season,” was among his colleagues. In the same review, Chambers noted “Agee’s bad manners, exhibitionism and verbosity.” Agee wrote film criticism and screenplays. Among the latter, The Night of the Hunter is quite good. Some favor his sole novel, A Death in the Family (published posthumously in 1957). Cassity will have none of it. His opening salvo:

 

“A pity that, in Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal savages Parker Tyler instead of James Agee. Mr. Agee is really much worse. In this review,  however, we shall omit ‘film’ and confine ourselves to the poetry. We are also trying to repress Mr. Agee’s eight-page dedication, which is bad enough to be the text of a cantata.”

 

Cassity quotes a quatrain from one of Agee’s poems, likens it to Richard Crashaw’s verse and adds, “Who like this sort of thing call it gift for language. Who do not, think of "Savonarola Brown.” This verdict could be rubber-stamped on much of the poetry written today and probably in 1969:

 

“The poems are full of love, death, nature, and all that, but what actually, are they about? The theology of the early work is rudimentary as is the sociology of the later. One remembers, maliciously, that when Mr. Agee was young Edna Millay was a very famous poet, and Appalachia was going through one of its periodic cycles of chic.”

 

Note the small, fatal phrase: “and all that.” Cassity’s final post-mortem: “The volume is discreetly edited, handsomely produced, and there is a very poetic photograph of Mr. Agee on the dust jacket.”