The Unquiet One

LETTERS OF JAMES AGEE TO FATHER FLYE (235 pp.)--Brazlller ($5).

When James Agee died of a heart attack in a New York taxicab at the age of 45, he was already something of a legend. The legend partly derived from the very fact that he was so little known and had written so little outside of his critical and journalistic work. His admirers cherished him like a shared secret.

In fact, Agee's best work was published after his death. A Death in the Family is a classic in the American tradition of evoked childhood; it won the Pulitzer Prize and has since been made into a play. He also, although probably he did not know it, left a lifetime of yellowing letters in the hands of the man who buried him, Father James Flye, now on summer parish duty at St. Luke's Chapel in New York's Greenwich Village.

Angel's Talent. Agee met Father Flye at St. Andrew's School near Sewanee, Tenn., where the young Rufus (as Agee was then called) went shortly after the death of his own father. To the teacher-priest, Rufus seemed a sort of wonderful, shy, gifted hillbilly. For once the priestly vocation and the artist's vocation--often hostile in direction--met in understanding. Few sons have written to their natural fathers as James Agee wrote to Father Flye. Such trust, love and the confidence in being understood seldom surmount the walls of consanguinity. The letters are also a vivid portrait of the artist as a young man--for Agee remained a young man to the day of his death, with all a young man's prodigal energies and frustrated intentions. In his introduction, Critic Robert Phelps calls Agee "a born, sovereign prince of the English language." But the letters proved in a sad way, that the language was his sovereign. Agee had an angel's talent, and he wrestled all his life to bring it to earth.

The letters begin with the boy's notes from Phillips Exeter, where young Rufus had gone on a scholarship. He is reading and liking Beau Geste, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, finding Sinclair Lewis "turning rancid'' in Elmer Gantry, moving on to the discovery of the "terrific" Ernest Hemingway (who does, however, earn a boy's stern moral disapproval as "one of the crowd of degenerate Americans who settled . . . in Paris after the war"). Dreiser's English is "bum," and John Dos Passos rouses a boy's puritanism with the "unalleviatedly filthy" Manhattan Transfer.

Beauty in Slop Jars. Such is his rare candor to his elder confidant that he is able to confess the first signs in himself of a troubled spirit, "feeling inexplicably like crying or biting into something or beating it with my fists." Also, while still a schoolboy, he salutes the first intimations of his special vision of life, "feeling the beauty of everything, not excluding slop jars and foetuses--and a feeling of love for everything--and now I've run into Walt Whitman--and it seems as if I've dived into a sort of infinitudeof beautiful stuff . . ."

Soon he is at Harvard, and famous people, including Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, are reading his poetry--he notes their verdict, "that I can do a lot if I don't give up and write advertisements." He is also reading and talking prodigiously, beginning to drink, and looking for "a permanent cure for the irrational side of my unhappiness."

The Wild Beasts. The cure does not come easily. Graduated and living in New York, he wavers between thoughts of suicide and huge, gusty waves of euphoria in which he imagines playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the top of an empty skyscraper "with all New York about 600 feet below you . . . With joy speaking over them: O ye millions, I embrace you . . . I kiss all the world . . . and all mankind shall be as brothers beneath thy tender and wide wings."

The spirit capable of this sort of afflatus has trouble in this world. His most characteristic letter is the one that most eloquently set forth the bitter awareness that his great gifts needed as great a discipline to create the form in which they might be expressed. He was only 24 when he wrote, promising to send a copy of his book of poems. Permit Me Voyage: "I am in most possible kinds of pain . . . and the trouble revolves chiefly round the simple-sounding problem of how to become what I wish I could when I can't. That, however, is fierce and complicated enough to keep me balancing over suicide as you might lean out over the edge of a high building but with no special or constant desire not to fall . . . without guidance, balance, coordination, my ideas and impressions and desires, which are much larger than I can begin to get to paper, are loose in my brains like wild beasts of assorted sizes and ferocities, not devouring each other but in the process tearing the zoo to parts . . . Without scrupulousness I am damned forever."

Bent on Tragedy. Most men would aver that he was overscrupulous, a man often rendered impotent by the severity of his own dedication. For most of his working life, that dedication was placed at the service of journalism and films--to his admirers' regret. Reading the letters to Father Flye, it is easy to see how his great hopes might always be somehow frustrated by something else.

For a man so bent toward tragedy, it is pleasant to note that Agee's last letter was one in which he was able to extract an amiable fantasy from the world of caged, frustrated animals. The letter is in the form of a draft for a film script about circus elephants. They are taught to dance by Choreographer George Balanchine but are shamed by being made huge fools of. "Later that night the wisest of them, extending his trunk, licks up a dying cigar butt, and drops it in fresh straw. All 36 elephants die in the fire. Their huge souls, light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret cemetery back in Africa--and perhaps God speaks, tenderly . . ."

This last letter to his old friend went unmailed. Agee himself had died.

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