Let Me Now Praise James Agee
On the Romantic poet John Keats’ tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome are these words, which he chose: “HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”
His name is not there, by choice. Keats was twenty-five when he died. In Ode to Psyche he wrote:
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
On the American writer James Agee’s burial stone in an isolated wooded spot off a dirt road in upstate New York, there are no words, although I like to think Keats’ poetic words seem appropriate to the sylvan nature of the spot and the bird song that filled the air in praise when I and my wife “trespassed” onto land that once meant so much to Agee, and where the house he once sought refuge in lies dilapidated and mute.
I read somewhere that he wished that a bird would be carved into the stone under which he was placed, but it is absent. Perhaps a phoenix, that symbol of the triumph of life over death and immortality, so dear to D.H. Lawrence. Maybe it, like him, flew away, and maybe a young man like Keats, who died so long before him, could conjure winged words of praise – doves of the spirit – for a man who would come long after him, nearly a century and a half after, because he sensed a connection that he could send flying into the future. Like Emily Dickinson, he knew hope was a thing with feathers, and the bird of time has no limits when it is released from the sentence. Time? Not a magazine where Agee once worked – but the real mystery and obsession of true artists. Time, death, and the fact that love brought us into existence. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” wrote Keats.
Keats and Agee were pilgrims, and Agee no doubt would agree with Keats’ words that “this life is a vale of soul-making.”
Many people visit Keats’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s graves in the Roman cemetery; few ever have or will pay homage to Agee over the boulder that marks the spot where his body was placed after he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five in a NYC taxi on May 16, 1955, seventy years ago. He has largely been forgotten. If you are reading this, you may have no idea who he was and why I am writing this. I will tell you.
I am writing this because I have felt a connection to him since I was a young man, not just to his talent, but his passionate soul, beautiful writing, the religious quality of his strivings, his faith and doubt, and his sense of wonder and reverence before the mystery of existence. His deep moral outrage at the suffering forced on the poor by the rich is close to my heart, and the desperate way he threw himself into life, always aware since the age of six when his father died in an automobile accident that death shadows our every move on our short visits through life. All his work is filled with the sense of the mysterious nature of existence as described by Einstein:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Agee’s eyes were always wide-open; he saw through them the hope and hopelessness that battle in every heart.
I am a minor writer whose work is essentially ignored, which I understand but wish wasn’t so. But I know also that recognition is not why I write; I do it because it is my effort at soul-making, which is as much a restorative endeavor as a prospective one. Agee wrote for his soul. Years ago he grasped my ironically young-old mind when he wrote:
Now as awareness of how much life is lost, and ho
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