. . . let’s mark a birthday. James Agee was born a hundred years ago today in Knoxville and died forty-five years later in a New York City cab, by which time he had written two novels, a couple of stories, scripts, lots of journalism, poetry, and that thing that still can’t quite be categorized, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, early on in which he writes:

While we were wondering whether to force a window, a young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for, and without altering their pace, they made thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera.

The chaos doesn’t really seem to abate, or the noise to soften, or the dripping mess of stuff I dragged downstairs to organize itself, even in these dark mornings at the table, but it was Agee who best showed me exactly what you could do with words.

Laurence Bergreen’s 1984 biography is pretty good. Robert Fitzgerald’s memoir is intimate and moving. There is apparently a new biography being written by Dwight Garner (I forget where I noticed that), and we could use it. It would be splendid if Blake Bailey did Agee but you can’t have everything you want.

After wondering, when he heard of his death, why they were not better friends, John Cheever wrote in his journal:

I think, niggardly perhaps, that there may have been some imbalance between the relationship of Agee’s work to the people who appreciated it and the relationship of this work to everybody else’s work. I am sad to think that he is dead.

Am not sure this is entirely clear to me, but maybe Cheever is trying to get at that troubling sense that Agee was not as directed a novelist as he might have been, and that the “writer’s writer” aspect Agee’s work gets a bit tangled when you introduce the reading and buying public. Maybe he’s saying that while you might have loved the work, it’s ultimate importance may not have been as deep as, say, Cheever’s own. Cheever, of course, waffled between exaltation and denigration of his talent and self, and reputations waffle too, so let’s not choose. Besides, this was before A Death in the Family was published.

So, fine . . . Happy Birthday, Jim.