“When a modern comedian gets hit on the head, for example, the most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license, and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a land of poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it-look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palms downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.”—James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life, September 5, 1949
Where do you begin to consider the contributions of James Agee, born on this date 100 years ago? It’s impossible to consider him reaching old age, just as it is inconceivable to think of John F. Kennedy—who likewise died at age 46, after a life of increasingly heightened risks—to have done so.
I first encountered Agee in his sensitive and moving semi-autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957. For those who find Thomas Wolfe a baggy monster of a novelist, this work—another novel about life in the South, with a traumatic death at its center—is an appealing alternative. (Agee’s death, just before an appointment with a doctor about his heart troubles, occurred on the anniversary of the demise of the father he commemorated unforgettably in that book.)
Agee was also a masterful journalist (Let Us Know Praise Famous Men), poet, screenwriter, and letter-writer (Letters to Father Flye). But as a lover of cinema, I also deeply value his film criticism for Time and The Nation. The quote above comes from perhaps his most influential essay, which revived interest in silent clowns Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. Has there ever been a better description of the near-balletic grace required to succeed in this form?
Essayist Phillip Lopate, with characteristic verve, offers a fascinating but by no means uncritical assessment of this compelling writer and personality here.
Where do you begin to consider the contributions of James Agee, born on this date 100 years ago? It’s impossible to consider him reaching old age, just as it is inconceivable to think of John F. Kennedy—who likewise died at age 46, after a life of increasingly heightened risks—to have done so.
I first encountered Agee in his sensitive and moving semi-autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957. For those who find Thomas Wolfe a baggy monster of a novelist, this work—another novel about life in the South, with a traumatic death at its center—is an appealing alternative. (Agee’s death, just before an appointment with a doctor about his heart troubles, occurred on the anniversary of the demise of the father he commemorated unforgettably in that book.)
Agee was also a masterful journalist (Let Us Know Praise Famous Men), poet, screenwriter, and letter-writer (Letters to Father Flye). But as a lover of cinema, I also deeply value his film criticism for Time and The Nation. The quote above comes from perhaps his most influential essay, which revived interest in silent clowns Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. Has there ever been a better description of the near-balletic grace required to succeed in this form?
Essayist Phillip Lopate, with characteristic verve, offers a fascinating but by no means uncritical assessment of this compelling writer and personality here.
A Death in the Family is a gorgeous book. I've never read Agee's film commentary. Thanks for the introduction.
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