A Death in the Family [Paperback]

 

 

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How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves....You can never go home again." - Quote from A Death in the Family

Rufus James Agee was born in a little house in the Fort Sanders Neighborhood in Knoxville, Tennessee. His November 17, 1909 birth was little noticed outside of his family. He was baptized at St. John's Episcopal Church, and grew up in a stable and loving family. However, the day his postal-worker father died in an auto accident marked the end of his carefree existence. This accident scarred the family forever, but produced a genius.

In 1916 at the age of seven, soon after his father's death, James was sent away to boarding school in the Appalachians. At Saint Andrews Seminary, he was introduced to classical literature, music, and the benefits of determined study. It is also where he felt most isolated and rejected by his family. His hard academic work paid off when he received a scholarship to Exeter Academy. From there, James made his way to Harvard University.

After graduation in 1932, James began working as journalist for Fortune Magazine. During his time in New York, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage. In 1936 James and a friend, famed photographer Walker Evans, returned to the south to document the lives of Southern farmers during the depression. The result became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published in 1941. Yet, James still felt abandoned.

James continued to live an emotionally barren life. By the 1940s, he had began writing for The New Masses, a procommunist magazine. He was working on destroying his third marriage, and his incessant drinking and smoking was destroying his heart. In contrast, he also began writing one of the most respected tomes of his life - A Death in the Family.

The acute changes which resulted from the death of James' father are the meat and bones of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Unfortunately, James never lived long enough to see his book so well-received. He died of a heart attack on his way to a doctor's appointment on May 16, 1955 - the fortieth anniversary of his own father's death.

A Death in the Family is hauntingly autobiographical.

"The head, the hand, dwelt in completion, immutable, indestructible: Motionless. They moved upon existence quietly as stones which withdraw through water for which there is no floor . . . . The hand was so composed that it seemed at once casual and majestic. It stood exactly above the center of his body. The fingers looked unusually clean and dry, as if they had been scrubbed with great care . . . . The eyes were casually and quietly closed, the eyelids were like silk on the balls, and when Rufus glanced quickly from the eyes to the mouth it seemed as if his father were almost about to smile. Yet the mouth carried no suggestion either of smiling or of gravity; only strength, silence, manhood, and indifferent contentment."

Rufus James Agee died after years of heavy drinking and a hard driven, unorthodox life. In his forty short years, he was a poet, novelist, journalist, film critic, and social activist. Yet he was constantly trying to rid himself of his childhood wounds, and in doing so, he created some of the nation's best literature.

Buy it, read it, meditate on it, be moved

My older Avon edition, with the far more appropriate cover of the empty easy chair, had only one "blurb" on the back, from the now defunct "Saturday Review," which stopped publication in 1986. It said: "There's nothing quite like the excitement of coming upon a book and suddenly having it explode at you and fill you with wonder. Such a book is `A Death in the Family'." The quintessential blurb. I've remembered it for the 43 years since my first reading, and upon the second reading, find it equally appropriate and descriptive.

James Agee starts the book with an equally memorable sentence, as well as introductory passage: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." From the title to the section, you know that the year is 1915, a date that can evoke nostalgia. The men, and yes it was mainly men, came home from work, ate dinner at 6:00 pm, and with no TV, at 6:30 would go outside to water the lawn, and the evenings were enjoyed on the front porch. Agee has a brilliantly precise depiction of the ritual of watering the lawn, from the noise in the hose, to the bell-shaped film of water that the spray can assume. I've rarely been able to use a hose since without recalling this descriptive passage.

The novel spans the two or three days which surround the death of Jay Follet in a car accident, and the subsequent impact his death had on his wife, their two small children, as well as the rest of the family. Yes, it was a simpler time, with cars in their infancy, and we learn that it was one cotter pin that fell out of the steering mechanism which resulted in the crash.

Much of the book is told from the point of view of the Follet's son, Rufus. Rarely does an adult writer have the ability to tell a story through the eyes of a child without mudding the waters with adult sensibilities and knowledge. In Agee's case though, I thought he hit ever note true. It certainly brought back a flood of memories from my own childhood, and how I had rarely thought about certain aspects since. The scene in which the older children make a performance out of making fun of 5-year old Rufus, who is only seeking their recognition and approval, is heart-breaking. Ah, the cruelty of children.

There were numerous other vignettes of equal intensity and insight, and these included a depiction of the alcoholism of Jay's younger brother Ralph; the conflicts in the marriage of Jay and Mary over alcohol and religion; a shopping trip with an aunt, with the importance of making your own style selections; the heartache of extreme age over 100; and a description of the night, from a child's bedroom. Agee's writing evokes deep emotion, again and again.

Many of us have, or may have to explain what death is to a young child. Forget all the "How to..." books on this one. Agee has written the sine qua non account. Agee also had a dim view of the "men of the cloth," and wrote a scathing portrait of the obtuse, pompous Father Jackson, who alienated both Rufus, and his sister Catherine, with numerous faux pas. Again, how much was projection of adult sentiments onto children? On the first reading, I obviously did not know, but on the second, something similar happened to my own children, when they were 6 and 7. They saw through the bad attitude of the "preacher man," and said they never wanted to go back; and they haven't. But it is Mary's brother, Andrew who delivers the most scathing critique, because Father Jackson would not perform all the rites since Jay had never been baptized: "Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs of the Cross, and all that disgusting hocus-pocus, and you come to one simple, single act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He is not a member of our little club. I tell you, Rufus, its enough to make a man puke up his soul."

42 years ago I recommended this book to a well-read friend and mentor from East Tennessee, and he came back with the verdict that this was just a "simple story, OK, but of not much significance." It has bothered me, in a low key way, lo' these many years. Was I originally right, or was his assessment correct? Surely I was right the first time... and the second reading has only confirmed, and even strengthened that assessment. I consider it one of the top 10 American novels ever written. A 6-star read.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on February 10, 2010)

James Agee died in 1955, leaving A Death in the Family, barely finished, as his sole full-length novel. Agee was known for his poetry and non-fiction work, alongside movie reviews and screenplays. This was hailed as his masterpiece, and it obtained the Pulitzer Prize. But one wonders to what extent Agee's trajectory influenced the novel's reception.

A Death in the Family is one of these slow pieces where the action is in the impressions formed by the characters from a single event, in this case the death of a family member. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1915, the novel does include a few moving scenes in between soft canvases of Southern life. But it is also filled with much dull and monotonous dialogue. It skids slowly in between high points. Indeed, the best chapters concern the children's reaction to their father's death, their incomplete understanding of what has happened, and their struggle with adult grief and embarrassment. But these chapters are a small part of the novel. The rest deals with the numerous and sometimes interchangeable members of the storyline's extensive family. The effect is uneven and, I found, not as stirring as the hype promises.

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