. Spinning .

Thought I was going to have to make finishing this novel one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

I did enjoy the book, even at my slow-paced reading of it.  This does not reflect on the book, btw, but rather on some seriously involved writing time garnering all my creative forces. 

The cons:  Poor punctuation, looooong sentences and a bit repetitious detail of an event that almost makes it seem like it’s all happening in slow motion.

The pros:  The depth of consideration into how the event changes the characters almost on an hour by hour basis as the reality of death comes to comprehension, acceptance, and being able to carry on with their own lives.

The minute attention to detail of feelings, of all the mish-mash of emotions that one feels when a life is taken from them, all this Agee covers intimately and on a level with each of the diversity of the characters.  Catherine is only four and yet Agee appears to understand quite well what she would be thinking.  Rufus is shown in a close relationship with his father and yet the sudden loss of it is something he attempts to hold onto in a different way.  He appears to understand that his own life has changed tremendously and not just merely affected by his father not being there.

Agee was not afraid to bring the religious up against the non believers at this most appropriate of times.  He was also aware of the different manners of faith and the often abused privilege of those who wore the Christian collar.  The ending that has Rufus walking with his Uncle Andrew while Andrew tells him of a strange and wonderful experience at the cemetary is in sharp contrast to Father Jackson’s behavior there as well. 

I can well see beyond the fairly mundane features of the telling of this story to why it has become a classic.  It reaches way deep inside a family stricken by the tragic death of a loved husband and father to reach just as deeply inside the reader’s own experience.

Either there’s not a lot of metaphor in this plain-talking novel or I’m missing it, but Agee does have some wonderful subtleties in here that I’m connecting as I am close to finishing this story.

As Mary sits with family after finding out the news of her husband’s death, her mother and father arrive and her father asks to speak with her privately.  They go into a bedroom and close the door.

He came over to her and took her hand and looked at her searchingly.  Why he’s just my height, she realized again.  She saw how much his eyes, in sympathy and pain, were like his sisters, tired, tender and resolute beneath the tired, frail eyelids.  (p. 118)

There is a closeness here, brought about by the tragedy, that brings them on the same level and beyond past estrangement that had occurred as a result of her choice of husband.  Even as Mary knows that she’d gone against her father’s wishes to have married Jay, there is this solid ground on which they meet as equals rather than adversaries.

And later, after the service, Rufus sees his mother once again approach her father:

  And there was Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle Andrew and Aunt Amelia and Aunt Hannah; and Grandma got up quickly and took their mother in her arms and patted her several times emphatically across the shoulders, and Grandpa stood up too; and while Grandma stooped and embraced and kissed each of the children, saying, "Darlings, darlings," in a somewhat loud and ill-controlled voice, they could see their grandfather’s graceful and cynical head as he embraced their mother, and realized that he was not quite as tall as she was; and their Aunt Amelia stood up shyly with her elbows out.  (p. 241)

After all the pain of the days following Jay’s death, Mary seems to have acquired the strength and focus to rise above it and the determination to carry on with life armed by her faith and her children.  Even so, Mary’s height as she grows with experience may not be the only meaning here; her father, filled with pain for the suffering of his daughter, may as easily be shrinking away from a once-firm foothold in life.

Or, I may just be reading all this into it.

One of the most amazing things about Agee’s writing is the detailed simplicity with which he reveals the workings of his characters’ minds.  Here, Rufus has just been told of his father’s death and while his mother and his great aunt Hannah have done their best to make him and his little sister understand, there’s just no way to know how a child comprehends such news.  To make that news fit into his world that he suddenly sees as changed.

Waiting, in silence, during those many seconds before the first of them came really near him, he felt that it was so long to wait, and to be watched so closely and silently, and to watch back, that he wanted to go back into the alley and not be seen by them or by anybody else, and yet at the same time he knew that they were all approaching him with the realization  that something had happened to him that had not happened to any other boy in town, and that now at last they were bound to think well of him;   (p. 204)

Agee shows us not a maudlin grieving little boy, but the more realistic wondering one.  Rufus knows that he is using his father’s death to increase his popularity with the other boys, but he also later tries to justify it by knowing it would please his father if he were well-liked.  He is aware that somehow the change of death makes him "special" and he is trying on that role.  He has already questioned his mother as to whether he and Catherine were now orphans, and is a bit disappointed to find that he is not, knowing that orphans command an even greater admiration of sorts.  Chastised by his mother for thinking this way, Rufus is secretly surprised and happy to come up with his own formula (since he is only half-orphaned, his mother still being alive, and since his little sister Catherine is likewise half-orphaned, then he and Catherine together make a full orphan).  Better yet, the Reverend Jackson’s prayers at the service give him hope:

"O Lord, cherish and protect these innocent, orphaned children," he said with his eyes shut.  Then we are! Rufus thought, and knew that he was very bad.  (p. 235)

As Rufus and Catherine wait for their mother to come out, they reflect on seeing their father in the casket.  Rufus repeats to himself "Dead.  Dead."  Catherine was unhappy to see him so still and waxen, like a doll, rather than what she’d hoped would be merely sleeping.  The two children focus their thoughts on each other, still trying to comprehend what "never again" and "last time" will mean.

As do we all.

It was mentioned as a Note in the beginning of this book that James Agee died suddenly prior to the final draft of this novel.  Some pages that are in the pov of Rufus, the son of Jay and Mary, have been placed in the back of two sections of the story and I’m in the middle of one now.

It’s wonderfully touching and painfully real, especially when we’re allowed into Rufus’ head as some older boys tease him:

It puzzled him very deeply.  If they knew his name all the time, as apparently they did, then why did they keep on asking, as if they had never heard it, or as if they couldn’t remember it?  It was just to tease.  But why did they want to tease?  Why did they get such fun out of it?  Why was it so much fun, to pretend to be so nice and so really interested, to pretend it so well that somebody else believed you in spite of himself, just so that he would show that he was deceived once again, because if you honestly did mean it, this time, he didn’t want to not tell you when you honestly seemed to want so much to know.  (p. 164)

Every day on their way to school the older boys stop and ask Rufus his name, then make fun of it as not appropriate for a white boy.  This brings in the racial relations once again, and in his own family, their attitude is one of almost condescension, so Rufus is already confused on the issue.  He also is anxious to please and looking for friends so he really wants to believe that at least some of the boys are sincere.  They coax him into singing and dancing for them, all the while for their own amusement. 

Kids are always at that point of learning, turning another corner as they learn about the world and its people.  They’re sharp at determining motives and reading intentions.  Unfortunately their judgement is often clouded by their desire to be liked and accepted.  Rufus is suspicious but it takes him a while to accept that some people are just mean.

Beautifully done, but as with much of this novel, it just seems that Agee wrote every impulse, every feeling, every nuance and detail written out so that in this unedited version, it just goes on too long.

Agee has done wonderfully well at setting the mood and tone of these hours spent with Mary and her family after the death of her husband.  It is still predawn, heading towards early morning, and it’s been a very, very long night.  I do wonder how Mary’s two children are sleeping through all this activity.  Even in the hush of shock and loss the adults have touched upon so much emotion, so much philosophy and questioning of life.

Earlier Agee brought in a light touch of humor, a natural break in the stress.  Now he hits head on as the scene becomes weary, uncomfortable.

In this quietness their mother sat, and smiled nervously and politely, and tilted her trumpet in a generalized way towards all of them.  She realized that nobody was speaking and it was at such times, ordinarily, that she felt sure that she could speak without interrupting anyone, but she feared that anything that she might say might brutally or even absurdly disrupt a weaving of though and feeling whose motions within the room she could most faintly apprehend. (p. 149)

This signals a change in the atmosphere that encompasses the characters and their own feelings.  They’ve shared quite a bit in this night’s discussions, very much aware of each other’s thoughts and particular care is taken not to add distress to Mary’s troubles.  But here her mother is starting to return to her own situation; she is deaf and how she behaves in accordance with the situation is important to her.

After a little while it occurred to her that even to hold out her trumpet might seem to required something of them; she held it in her lap.  but lest any of them should feel that this was in any sense a reproach or should in the least feel sorry for her, she kept her little smile, thinking, how foolish, how very foolish to smile.

Even as we are considerate of others, part of our actions always do seem to include their reaction to us; her anxiety is not to hurt, yet not to be considered hurtful.  She softens it all with an inappropriate smile.  Her husband Joel is aware of her discomfort.

Smiling at grief, Joel thought.  He wondered whether his sister and his son and his daughter, if they were thinking of it at all, understood the smile as he was sure he did.  He wished that he could pat her hand.  By God, they’d better, he thought.

Such a nice indication of the love he holds for his wife.  His protective instincts, which we’ve seen earlier in his private talk with Mary, are so showing here of the good husband and father.

Agee may use long sentences and loads of commas (both of which are inborn within me) as he details the minutes and hours after the passing of a man–a son, husband, and father–but he hits real close to home with the tone of family relationships and how they face tragedy. 

Agee, in his tremendous adherence to realism, knows enough to throw in an offset to the dramatic tension in the scene.  In this case, it is Mary’s mother, Catherine, who is hard of hearing and uses an ear ‘trumpet’ to hear Andrew relate the story of Jay’s accident and death.  Obviously, this is eventually going to cause a misunderstanding and the result is that the family cannot help but falling into laughter and this laughter grows as it feeds upon itself just as the worry and fear had just hours earlier.

As the narrator allows us into the heads of the main characters, we note a change after this release of tension.  From Andrew, as he begins again after apologizing to his mother:

"She means it," Joel said.  "She’s not hurt any more." 

"I know she does," Andrew said.  "That’s why I’m Goddamned if I’ll leave her out.  Honestly, Mama," he told her, "just let me tell you.  Then we can all hear.  Don’t you see?’ 

"Well, if you’re sure; of course I’d be most grateful.  Thank you."  She bowed, smiled, and tilted her trumpet.

It required immediate speech.  That trumpet’s like a pelican’s mouth, he thought.  Toss in a fish.  "I’m sorry, Mama," he said.  "I’ve got to try to collect my wits."  (p. 131)

I recall being at the neighbor’s house after we came back from the hospital, sadly confirming the death of her husband.  Something eventually was said that made us all laugh, wiping out some of the horror of phone calls and CPR and doctors and more phone calls.  It’s almost a way of realizing the reality of it all.

With Agee, though this was based on his own recall of his father’s death, the writer in him knows how far to allow the characters to go without a change just as well as he knows how long the reader will stand the somber mood before he too needs a break from it.

Nicely done.   

I seem to be reading this part of the story in careful, hushed tones.  Has the author, James Agee, brought this about?  Does the reader become funereal with the waiting for confirmation of death?  In preparation for the ceremonies that necessarily accompany the event even though they are mere methods of stalling?

I’ve been through many, many deaths of dear ones, in all stages and in all ranges of shock to patient waiting and watching for the last pulse of blood, that last shuddering exhaled breath.  Agee has us witness a part of this drama, and has brought me to tears with this moment between Mary and her father shortly after they’ve heard the news:

He came over to her and took her hand and looked at her searchingly.  Why he’s just my height, she realized again.  She saw how much his eyes, in sympathy and pain, were like his sisters, tired, tender and resolute beneath the tired, frail eyelids.  He could not speak first.

You’re a good man, she said to herself, and her lips moved.  A good, good man.  My father.  In an instant she experienced afresh the whole of their friendship and estrangement.  Her eyes filled with tears and her mouth began to tremble.  "Papa," she said.  He took her close to him and she cried quietly. (p. 118)

So it ended up taking about twenty-three pages to find out that Jay is dead, but there is a building up of emotion–if not tension–Agee does well.  It still seems to be slow, but then again, that may just be because I’m reading this in small quick doses spaced farther apart than my normal reading style.  (Good reason/excuse: I’ve been writing a lot.) There is a pacing of language and information that seems to match the agony of waiting to hear about a loved one in an accident.  There is a politeness and caution in the conversations, as if afraid to be optimistic, yet reluctant to accept the worst before it is confirmed.

There’s also some clear and concise simile that hits home once Mary’s brother Andrew returns with the bad news:

While he broke ice and brought glasses and a pitcher of water, none of them spoke; Mary sat in a distorted kind of helplessness at once meek and curiously sullen, waiting.  Months later, seeing a horse which had fallen in the street, Andrew was to remember her; and he was to remember it wasn’t drunkenness, either.  It was just the flat of the hand of Death. (p. 115)

"It was just the flat of the hand of Death."  Yeah.

While it looked like i hadn’t been reading at all, I did manage a page or two at a time on this and the fact that I’ve been taken with a hypertext project I’m working on is not totally to blame. 

The plot is soooooo slooooow.

Normally I don’t mind this, being a bit changed from the need for speed and constant action from a novel and into more of a mood, a setting, a grasp of something important going on that I don’t want to miss.  But Agee takes 16 pages to go from a phone call to Mary telling her of a terrible accident involving her husband, Jay, and we still don’t know if he’s dead or alive.

What Agee has focused on beautifully is the tension that fairly crackles in the waiting.

"I think what’s very much more likely is, that he was already dead when the man just phoned, and that he couldn’t bear to tell me, and I don’t blame him, I’m grateful that he didn’t.  It ought to come from a man in the family, somebody–close to Jay, and to me.  I think Andrew was pretty sure–what was up–when he went out, and had every intention not to leave us in mid-air this way.  He meant to phone.  But all the time he was hoping against hope, as we all were, and when–when he saw Jay–it was more than he could do to phone, and he knew it was more than I could stand to hear over a phone, even from him, and so he didn’t, and I’m infinitely grateful he didn’t.  He must have known that as time kept–wearing on in this terrible way, we’d draw our own conclusions and have time to–time.  And that’s best.  He wanted to be with me when I heard.  And that’s right.  So do it.  Straight from his lips.  I thin what he did–what he’s doing , it’s…"  (p. 107)

What Agee has done is relate what is a very common phenomenon when someone is injured in an accident and the family at home waiting for news.  The minutes drag into hours and speculation is tentatively offered as conversation runs dry.  Imagination argues with hope, and symbols are made out of time gone by.    It’s a glimpse into a painful and tense scenario and follows the thoughts of the characters as they conflict hope with despair, belief with faltering faith in God, finally coming to a place of readiness.

Still, it’s going on a bit too long, even for me.

At the end of what evidently appears to be Part 1, we have a chapter again from third person pov, focusing on the child, Rufus.  The scenario is when his mother is pregnant with his brother and we see through his eyes how they handle telling him.  They don’t.  I’m not sure what age he is at this point, but he’s old enough to understand his mother is putting on weight and that everyone acts differently around her.

Everyone seemed either to look at his mothe with ill-concealed curiosity or to be taking special pains not to look anywhere except, rather fixedly and cheerfully, into her eyes.  For now she was swollen up like a vase, and there was a peculiar lethargic lightness in her face and in her voice.  He had  distinct feeling that he should not ask what was happening to her. (p. 83)

Agee give us a view of the situation at the child’s point of view, but not in the language of a child, but indeed with the limitations of experience of one, i.e., "swollen up like a vase," is a likely what a child (of that era anyway) might liken her to in shape.

Interesting aspect of this is that we see so clearly the character of the child’s parents as they interact, and simply by what they are doing in his mother’s insistence not to tell him what’s going on.  He is instead sent away to his grandmother’s just prior to delivery.

Juxtapositioned with this is the boy’s curiosity about Victoria, a colored woman who has been hired back to act as nanny.  His openness and lack of fear to ask her about the color of her skin–having been warned by his mother to say nothing–shows a deeper relationship, one of trust that he does not share with his own mother. 

There is a section of the novel that goes back into an early time in Rufus’ childhood that Agee has incorporated into the story at a point where we are wondering what Jay has walked into at his own father’s house, this being the main story line, the dramatic arc.

Done in italics, the first part recalls an incident (still third person, but a rather intimate view of a scared child) wherein in the middle of a party, Jay must go upstairs to calm Rufus’ distress and fear of the dark.  We are treated to an insightful interplay between father and son:

"Bad dream?" 
He shook his head, no.
"Then what’s the trouble?"
He looked at his father.
"Feared, a—fraid of the dark?"
He nodded.  He felt tears on his eyes.
"Noooooooo," his father said, pronouncing it like ‘do’.  Big boys don’t get skeered of a little dark.  Big boys don’t cry.  Where’s the dark that skeered you?  Is it over here?"  With his head he indicated the darkest corner.  The child nodded.  He strode over, struck a match on the seat of his pants.
Nothing there.
"Nothing there that oughtn’t to be."  (p. 71)

There’s more here too; there’s a questioning of belief and of God and of parenthood.  Much is made in metaphor and much is used to establish the bonds of parent and child.  In a further discourse, Rufus interacts with his mother, and there we see a different form of relationship.

He did not know what "she’s worth the saving" meant, and it was one of the things he always took care not to ask, because although it sounded so gentle, he was also sure that somewhere inside it there was something terrible to be afraid of exactly because it sounded so gently, and he would become very much afraid instead of only a little afraid if he asked  and learned what it meant.  (p. 78)

There are different dynamics between Rufus and his mother, surprisingly there appears to be a matter of trust and of learning what can be clothed and hidden within words.  What’s great about this is that the experience of adulthood is filtered through the eyes of a child and how he sees his world:

He smelled like dry grass, leather and tobacco, and sometimes a different smell, full of great energy and a fierce kind of fun, but also a feeling that things might go wrong.  He knew what that was because he had heard them arguing.  Whiskey.  (p. 80)

What an intense evaluation of a man, put into the simplest forms of cognizance by a little boy.

It is as well a lesson to be learned by the writer.

While the story is a very close look at a family, Agee uses the omniscient third person to separate the characters and reveal their inner conflicts as well as their own viewpoints of their interactions.

As  mentioned, I suspected some underlying tension between Jay and Mary as Agee displayed their hour together just before Jay leaves to visit his dying father.  Once Agee has them separated, we are privy to their reflections.  While Jay drives toward home, we see not by specific references to Mary that there is a problem, but rather by the joy he takes in being alone and driving away from her and his home. Agee then takes us back to Mary, unable to go back to sleep after Jay’s leaving, and her turmoil over her feelings towards his father, his family, and Jay himself.  Mary evidently has a very strong grounding in her religious beliefs, and a good portion of her conversation is in asking God for forgiveness for her uncharitable feelings.  A morning scene with her children where Rufus insists on answers about God reinforces what Mary herself has let us see.

Prior to Jay’s arrival at his family home, we are once again given a glimpse of the family dynamics, and it is obvious that his brother, Ralph, is an alcoholic desperately wanting to be the son his mother and father expect, and yet feeling himself substandard, seeks solace in booze. 

There is a definite focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each of the main characters, the plot being carried by their interaction and in how they each stand up to the problems that come up.

There may be some overwriting here, some overemphasis on certain points that tend to get the least bit tedious, but overall, the tension is maintained throughout.

Even while the relationship of Jay and Mary is presented as a loving and happy marriage, there is subtlety in their dialogue before Jay leaves to see his sick father, and prior to that, in the easy relationship between father (Jay) and son (Rufus) that is in contrast.  While there is some awkwardness present in the spaces between conversation with Jay and Mary, between Jay and Rufus, the silence speaks for itself–there is no need to speak.

I think of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and Rabbit’s obvious dislike of his wife, the silence there too speaking up in screams of loneliness and unhappiness. 

Dialogue then, and the lack of it, is a writer’s tool that Agee uses well.

Talk about your similes and imagery:

(…) and along both banks the trees which crowded the water like drinking cattle began to take on distinctness one from another. (p. 41)

Agee appears to reveal his story slowly, lovingly using each word to fit within and enhance his characters and their relationship to each other. There’s a whole chapter that covers an evening that has six year-old Rufus going to see a Charlie Chaplin movie with his father, Jay, and the long walk home.

(…)Rufus felt his father’s hand settle, without groping or clumsiness, on the top of his bare head; it took his forehead and smoothed it, and pushed the hair backward from his forehead, and held the back of his head while Rufus pressed his head backward against the firm hand, and, in reply to that pressure, clasped over his right ear and cheek, over the whole side of the head, and drew Rufus’ head quietly and strongly against the sharp cloth that covered his father’s body, through which Rufus could feel the breathing ribs;  (p. 24)

The two speak little, yet through gesture and proximity, we see that the boy adores his father, the father loves his son.  Later that night, the father is awakened by a phone call that brings news of his own father being ill.

He sighed, and thought of his father as he could first remember him: beak-nosed, handsome, with a great, proud scowl of black mustache.  He had known from away back that his father was sort of useless without ever meaning to be; the amount of burden he left to Jay’s mother used to drive him to fury, even when he was a boy.  And yet he couldn’t get around it: he was so naturally gay and so deeply kind-hearted that you couldn’t help loving him.  (p. 30)

There’s a chain of generations established here, but it’s more. It is a clear-sided box of layers of time that are all seen simultaneously, bonded together by the relationship of father and son, father and son.