By Susan Huetteman" Read Agee slowly. His style is to wander, then come down hard"
--Dwight Macdonald in
Remembering James Agee (133-134)
With the sudden death of Jay Agee, the time, the place, and his loss became permanently etched in the mind of his six-year old son, James Rufus Agee. Although for two
centuries the Agees lived near Knoxville, it was his mother's family that became Agee's primary influence. The affluent and highly artistic Tylers surrounded Rufus Agee with the classics, literature, and music in a late
Victorian turn of the century setting.
His Aunt Paula Tyler was an accomplished musician and under her influence young Agee became a dedicated pianist. His mother's twin brother Hugh was a prominent Knoxville artist
who held liberal viewpoints, while Agee's mother was an erstwhile religious poet devoted to the dogma of her Anglo-Catholic faith.
Without the financial security of her husband's income, Laura Agee moved with her
children to a smaller house, where they were supported by Laura's father, Joel Tyler, an established Knoxville business owner. Despite his objections to his daughter's marriage to the self-educated Jay Agee, Joel Tyler
hired Jay as a secretary in his machinery company, TY-SA-MAN.
Uncomfortable with family charity, Laura Agee moved to Sewanee in Middle Tennessee's Cumberland Mountains, where she enrolled her son in St. Andrews
School. The school was founded by monastic priests of the Holy Cross Order and attended by lower-to poverty-level income children. Agee's mother and sister Emma lived near the school property while he became a boarding
student. His mother wanted him to have a male influence. Fearing he would be a "mamma's boy," she innocently rejected her son's attempts to visit her at her cottage, leaving the ten year old Rufus confused and
rejected. It was then that a teacher, Father Harold Flye, stepped into Agee's life. Fr. Flye and his wife became his mentors and life long friends.
The year was 1919 and industrialization was welcoming the modern era
at break neck speed. Young Rufus, however, remained surrounded by the centuries old liturgy and daily religious observances at St. Andrews School and Victorian sensibilities during the summers at the Tyler's.
A day in the life of a twelve-year old at St. Andrews School is told in Agee's first autobiographical novel The Morning Watch.
The novel provides insights into Agee's perceptions of liturgical dominance and pubescent emotions and how "boys will be boys," as told in his short story "Slaughter of Birds". Both of Agee's
novels have strong themes of peer pressure and, as in most of his works, an unrequited search for acceptance. (MW)
When Joel Tyler became ill in 1924, Laura and her children returned to Knoxville. Rufus was
enrolled mid-semester in Knoxville High School. At St. Andrews School Rufus was dreamy and procrastinated; at Knoxville High he hid his unhappiness with sarcasm. After returning to Knoxville Laura Tyler married Fr.
Erskind Wright, the bursar at St. Andrews and of a prominent Philadelphia family. When the Wrights moved to Rockland, ME, it was Fr. Wright's decision to enroll Rufus in the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New
Hampshire. It was the fall of 1925 and he was fourteen years old, experiencing a new school, a new culture, and his first real immersion in the 20th century.
~At Exeter he was no longer called "Rufus," but "Jim."~
Jim Agee found himself in a school among students who were more prosperous than he and in a part of the country quite unimpressed by, if not unaware of, his East Tennessee mountain roots. Not wealthy, not
well connected, awkward in style, and unkempt in appearance, Jim was unique. While he once again faced an abrupt change in his life, Phillips Exeter Academy was an environment that permitted independent choices and
nurtured his creativity. He later felt that his years at Exeter were his happiest.
He appeared to be a friendly country bumpkin. It was a parody he often deliberately played out, complete with mountain talk in a
Tennessee drawl. He liked being compared to another poor boy, the lanky awkward Abraham Lincoln, but inside a plan was simmering. How could he be accepted and recognized? He had something that was unique and admired at
Exeter: he could write. Throughout his life Agee would never understand that he was cherished for his ingenuity, generosity, and kindness.
Agee's writing reflected the complexity of his personality and was filled
with obsessive detail of his perceptions. He felt confusion in his relationships with men and women. He could not shake the immense feeling of the loss of his father and was unable to clearly categorize his creativity.
It was self-imposed purgatory from which he never found relief. At Harvard University, his friends respected him and his talent was held in high regard. Yet, his insecurity sought a balance with a strange combination of
obsessive writing, political iconoclasm, religious devotion, all night sessions with friends, and a growing dedication to alcohol and cigarettes.
Jim Agee was a good and generous friend and his devotion was
reciprocated. A support group of roommates and coworkers surrounded him--loyal friendships that continued long after his death. Wherever Agee went he found and kept friends: whether it was the splintered porches of an
Alabama tenant farmer's house or a gathering of literary intellectuals at the prestigious Saunder's home in upstate New York home or an all night reading of his work or just sitting under a tree on his farm. He had an
honesty, an innocence. It was his essence. And when Jim wrote, he searched deeply and visually to find the moment and give it new life. That was his essence, too.
Jim's friends said he wasn't an alcoholic:
he was just obsessed with his writing and he drank all the time. He repeatedly was destructive to his marriages, his talent, and, finally, his life. He was James the author in search of his own identity. He was Jim the
friend, husband, and father. To himself he was Rufus, longing for the comfort of his father, desperately wanting to understand his own life. In his writing, he recalled childhood visions of Knoxville and the sensual
beauty of the blue hued Smoky Mountains. He brought detail and depth to all he perceived. Who he was eluded him.
Agee was a successful magazine journalist, writing for
Fortune, Time, Life, Nations, and Paris Review, but he felt suffocated. He was a recognized poet, winning the prized Yale Series of Younger Poets for Permit Me Voyage, but felt that poetry was part of
his early life and turned to prose. He was a novelist and a short story writer. Although Agee brilliantly interpreted the world he saw and felt, he couldn't grasp where he belonged as a writer and, finally, as a man.
There is a Tennessee saying: Three generations from plow handle to silk hat. The only hat Jim Agee valued was the cap that he bought when he was six, when his father died. (JA 4)
Agee's advancing career and
rising renown careened off casual relationships and consummate drinking. The all night sessions of drinking and reading aloud to his friends, soon evolved into openly drinking at work. Agee experienced extended bouts of
depression and obsession with death. He sought offhand relationships without guilt. Then, at the height of his journalistic career, he had the opportunity to become the screenwriter he always wanted to be. It was while
working with John Huston on The African Queen
that Agee experienced the first heart attack. In true Jim Agee style, he ignored the warning, writing scripts in the hospital and making writing commitments that would intensify and jeopardize his life. It was the first of frequent heart attacks and finally one of many daily heart attacks. Yet, he continued his intense lifestyle.
Over the years Agee sketched ideas for a novel--the one about the six days following his father's death in 1916. The idea came to him when he was at Exeter. Between 1934-1935 he wrote 10,000 words of an
autobiographical novel. Agee read Frances Wicker's The Inner World of Childhood, about how children come to terms with death. Now he knew what he must write. He tried five times; five times he discarded it. Then
he wrote the words: "on the rough wet grass" and 15,000 words later he wrote "parents on porches." (JA 148-153)
He had recurring dreams about his father--his "brief smile, much as
it had always been, and then he was gone." Agee no longer felt alone. (JA 306) He returned to St. Andrews School in 1933 and to Knoxville in an "hour's anguished walk" in 1943. It "revived the
sights and sounds of his earliest years: accents, mountains, fields (the) inner continuity of his life." It was as he remembered it. Life had changed little since the death of the Confederacy (JA 4,
136) Tennessee--with its gently rolling hills, rich clay, uneven shaped fields and its blue-green grass--was his favorite part of the world. He longed for it. There was "something of a frontiersman or hill man
about him." (DM 95-97; JA 14, 155,277)
~The places I feel really at home are Tennessee (and more or less
anywhere in the South) and upstate New York.~
James Rufus Agee (AR 155)
Agee loved his 200 acre broken down farm in Hillsdale, NY. It was the only place he felt peace and he could write without interruption. The novel about his childhood wasn't really
a novel: no plot, no suspense, no development. It was really a long poem and the end was already written. He wrote in fourteen-hour stretches. Agee cut "Knoxville: Summer 1915" to 2,000 words, a fifth of its
original length. It was 1935; he was twenty-six years old.
He was in Jung therapy when he could begin to see the novel's completion. (DM 128-129, AR 173)
Curiously, in the first chapter of his novel, Agee recounts
standing in a bar watching his father down several glasses of whisky, perhaps seeing a likeness of himself. (JA 392)
~Hugh James Agee died while driving an auto on May 16*, 1916; he had a habit of
driving too fast. James Rufus Agee died in a taxi on May 16, 1955; he had a habit of living too fast.~
Jim Agee left three wives and four children. He had no will, no insurance, and only $450 in
the savings. (JA 405) While Jim Agee's death was the end of a brilliant and searching mind, it was not the end of his prodigious work. His devoted wife and friends rallied together, ensuring his words would continue to
speak of soft summer evenings under vast skies that embrace the mountains in blue mists. Late Victorian Knoxville--where James Rufus Agee began and forever remains in the hearts of readers.
~...he lived each day as if it was a gift, as if it was his last, and he wrote that way.~ (AR 183)
* Alt. May 18, 1916
Compiled from primary sources: (AF; AR; AS; D; DM, JA: FF; FM; MW; NA)
Susan Huetteman is a retired teacher from Rhode Island.
