. Spinning .

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.

Just started on this today but it’s amazing how quickly I’m learning to switch worlds.  From the unknown and odd Flatland, or Sandoval’s alluring parallelism, I’m back to a post-war America where family is stable–no mother would dream of leaving her child in the woods here. 

Realizing that this novel by James Agee was published posthumously and also awarded the Pulitzer Prize, I’m caught up in the language that brings me back to the world of poetics.  The prologue, full of imagery, is long but sets the tone of the times and the story.

But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them.  Now only two, and now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle enquiring of your presence in a pitchdark pool of meadow; and now he too is gone; and it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars.  People go by; things go by.  (p. 13)

Agee creates a world of mothers, fathers, children, all placed within a safe neighborhood of well kept houses and hearty meals made by aproned women in sparkling clean kitchens.  It is inviting to the reader and one where we dredge up our own memories to relate.  Oddly, though I remember our large kitchen in the apartment upstairs in my grandfather’s house, and the red tiles on the floor, the rocker in the corner where my dad read us Golden Book stories while we laid our head on his chest; I don’t remember the table.

I just pulled it out to make room for putting back Flatland, but this novel by James Agee certainly appeals as a down-to-earth, exciting reality story, judging by the back cover:

"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." — Saturday Review

I’m afraid I’m burying myself in reading lately, avoiding issues that need be faced and dealt with eventually. 

But then, there’s a couple of hundred books on the shelves that need to be read.