I've recently realized that most of my favorite artists all kind of ran themselves into an early grave after writing the best literature of the twentieth century. So I thought I would share them with you.
James Agee (unknowingly) pioneered what we now call "postmodern literature" with his 1941 masterpiece on tenant farmers in the South. The pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men weep with Agee's own blood, horror, anger and loving awe at the world around him. I could go into how every line of his 406 page volume is flooded with the worlds of heartbreak that defined Agee's view of the human experience, but this isn't a review because reviews are boring and a bit pointless ("I liked it and you might too!"). But this book is a train through your barely beating heart, a tornado that will rip up the broken barns of icy hatred that lying leaders and the endless pursuit of cheap shit have built on the flat plains of your jaded little twenty-first century psyche.
I am hesitant to reprint any of Agee's words on this admittedly- sometimes-bereft-of-anything-good-or-humane-corner of the virtual world, and the internet is mostly for illicit sexual activity, gambling, and "entertainment news," and printing his words here somehow seems like letting your wide-eyed baby play in a pile of dirty needles at the park, because you just can't bear the though of your baby touching needles just like you can't bear the thought of James Agee's words touching porn or news of governmental sex scandals or celebrity teen pregnancies and the hateful jokes about them that have become an industry and an ideology, an easy refuge in a broken time, because he never took the easy route and he wrote about every spiderweb and and tree and barn and how a cotton dress moved at the end of the day and because the words he wrote about poor tenant farmers during the depression and his life with them and how they were beautiful and how they were damned by the system that they had no control over pretty much killed him, dead 14 years later at age 47 of the bad heart life and alcohol had given him.
But. Because at age thirty he described every door frame of every decrepit house with the love of a new father and with the sorrow of a man who knows his children are dying: this is how he writes:
The sky was withdrawn from us with all her strength. Against some scarcely conceivable imprisoning wall this woman held herself away from us and watched us: wide, high, light with her stars as milk above our heavy dark; and like the bristling and glass breakage on the mouth of stone spring water: broached on grand heaven their metal fires.
And now as by the slipping of a button, the snapping and failures on air of a spider's cable, there broke loose from the room, shaken, a long sigh closed in silence. On some ledge overleaning that gulf which is more profound than the remembrance of imagination they had lain in sleep and at length the sand, that by degrees had crumpled and rifted, had broken from beneath them and they sank. There was now no further extreme, and they were sunken not singularly but companionate among the whole enchanted swarm of the living, into a region prior to the youngest quaverings of creation.
(We lay on the front porch:
Good god. No wonder he was dead so early. He seems to have absorbed every action and emotion he ever came into contact with, and at a certain point he didn't have the space or strength or energy for any more. Photographer and collaborator on Famous Men Walker Evans notes: "Agee's rebellion was unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply principled, infinitely costly, and ultimately priceless."
Like all great artists, Agee rendered the world a richer place by offering an invaluable take on the act of being human, and left behind some devastating love letters to life itself.
* Irony is only the splintered crutch of the heartbroken.
Also: Of course we celebrate Black History Month at Remix Mountain, too!
No comments:
Post a Comment