“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
-Knoxville: Summer, 1915, opening lines.
A somber, beautifully evocative memoir filled with lyrical imagery, James Agee’s A Death in the Family presents a deeply poetic meditation on the nature of grief and sorrow. A Death in the Family is an autobiographical account of the sudden passing of Agee’s thirty-six-year-old father when Agee was still a young boy. In the novel, Agee goes by the name of “Rufus” (Agee’s middle-name and boyhood nickname) and he invites us to follow along with his childhood memories. Shortly after the turn of the century, in the gently folding foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and along the Powell River Valley of North Knoxville, Tennessee, we are introduced to the Folletts, a lower middle-class family who reside in a large wooden house with a spacious connected yard filled with softwooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, and cottonwoods.
In a delicately woven prologue for Part I entitled “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”, Agee treats us to fond recollections of carefree summer nights –dewy grass, fathers in suspenders, neighbors hosing their lawns, mothers prepping supper, children playing in the street, fireflies hanging suspended in warm evening glow, the sounds of locusts, elderly people casually rocking back and forth on porches, and the sounds of people trotting by on horse-drawn buggies as the stars are wide and alive above. In this milieu, Rufus and his father Jay laughingly suggest a jaunt downtown to a picture show to see a William S. Hart or Charlie Chaplin movie. However, Rufus’s devoutly Catholic mother, Mary, disapproves of comedians like Chaplin, particularly for the way they “hook” skirts of pretty girls for laughs –“that horrid little man!” At any rate, this little adventure shows Jay to be a fun-loving father who enjoys a good time, despite being an occasionally quiet and lonely man, and who secretly drinks in spite of his wife’s protestations (Jay and Rufus stop at a bar on Market Square on the way home). This is mentioned not to cast a pall on Jay’s moral character, on the contrary, he is every bit a tender father and doting husband. Agee vividly recounts a scene in which Rufus grows increasingly afraid of the dark and his father dutifully arrives singing songs to lull the poor boy back to sleep. Early in the morning, Jay is roused by a phone call from his drunken brother, Ralph, who implies that their elderly father “Grampa Follett” has taken a turn for the worse. In order to check-up on his father, Jay makes “one of the most solemn errands of his life” –he eats breakfast, shares a fond embrace with his wife, and then fires up the family Ford before departing for the “home country” (he promises to be home before the children are asleep).
He crosses the ferry into Knoxville proper: “He lighted his pipe and settled down to drive. He always felt different once he was across the river. This was the real, old, deep country, now. Home country. The cabins looked different to him, a little older and poorer and simpler, a little more homelike; the trees and rocks seemed to come differently out of the ground; the air smelled different” (45-46).
However, Jay arrives at his parent’s farm to find that this has all been exaggerated by his alcoholic brother, Ralph, who has simply had too much to drink again; Jay’s father is fine, though Ralph is now sporting a large welt after a night of heavy drinking and wallowing in self-pity. Meanwhile, during the day in town, Rufus goes shopping with his Aunt Hannah who offers to buy him a brand-new cap, one with a “thunderous fleecy check in jade green, canary yellow, black and white, which stuck out inches to either side above his ears and had a great scoop of visor beneath which his face was all but lost” (73). Rufus is elated and eager to show off the cap to his father.
In Part II, our attention turns to Rufus’s mother, Mary. Late in the evening, she receives a cryptic phone call from a man claiming Jay has been in a serious accident. He asks her to send a man out to Powell Station, near Brannick’s Blacksmith shop. In shock, Mary calls her brother Andrew to see what happened, and he is joined by a family friend, Walter Starr, while Aunt Hannah keeps Mary company. Minute after agonizing minute ticks by as Hannah and Mary reflect on Jay’s life, his relationship with Mary’s family, and the complex joys and hardships of marriage. Mary reveals herself to be a devoutly pious woman, desperately clinging to her Catholic prayers for comfort, whereas Aunt Hannah (who once underwent a similar tragedy some thirty years ago) is by now a more seasoned individual, skeptical of religious dogma, full of doubts and a hardened sense of inner strength. Indeed, throughout the novel a fascinating dialectic unfolds between faith and doubt. Some people respond to tragic circumstances with religion and prayer, others with despair, while still others praise the strength to endure great hardship.
Joel and Catherine (Mary’s parents) await news of the accident at their home –it is clear that Joel has never particularly liked Jay. He believes that his daughter’s many talents, intelligence, and youthful vigor have been wasted on keeping house and raising the children with Jay, pushing her deeper into religious fervor. Later, Andrew returns to Mary’s house with news that Jay has, in fact, been killed in a car accident. He was killed instantly following a concussion, leaving only a small mark on his chin when his car hit a rock and knocked loose its “cotter pin” which held the steering mechanism together. Was he drinking? The novel leaves this question somewhat ambiguous; but what would it tell us about Jay if we were to learn he was, in fact, driving while driving drunk? If he died sober, does it make him a tragic hero? If he died drunk, does it make him a petty fool? These questions are paramount, yet Agee offers no definitive answers –perhaps in an effort to protect the reader from the true image of his father, the same way his mother was shielded from learning the truth of her husband’s death first-hand. Upon hearing the news, Mary’s parents –Joel and Catherine– arrive to comfort their daughter. Joel then asks to speak alone with Mary, hoping to carefully advise her not to retreat into her religion like so many others have done in the past:
“Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got have gumption. You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and they’ve come through it and you will too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice… It’s kind of a test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all… I imagine you’re thinking about your religion… Well, more power to you… I know you’ve got a kind of help I could never have. Only one thing: take the greatest kind of care you don’t just –crawl into it like a hole and hide in it” (140-141).
Joe further claims: “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport” (155), and he states that “none of us know what we’re doing any given moment… A tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing” (159). Riddled with allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, A Death in the Family presents us with a deep meditation on the existential questions in life –questions of faith and meaning in the world. As observed by Agee through characters like Joel or Andrew, life is fickle, unpredictable events happen without satisfying reason. The maddening skies persist overhead in their deafening silence; night passes over the earth with calloused indifference to humans; and the delicate veil existing between life and death is torn without the slightest care from the cosmos. Regardless of how people choose to respond to tragic phenomena in life –either by retreating into comforting pieties or by enduring the sheer bleakness of suffering– the world continues onward, unaffected by human life or death, and the twinkling stars in the infinite heavens continue to shine down upon the living as well as the dead alike.
Jay’s rejection of religion is troubling to Mary, but not to anyone or anything else. Late into the night, Mary and her family drink whiskey reminiscing about Jay, sometimes laughing and sometimes crying –when suddenly, Mary believes she senses a strange otherworldly “presence” in the house which she assumes to be a superstitious premonition of Jay:
“When she came through the door of the children’s room she could feel his presence as strongly throughout the room as if she had opened a furnace door: the presence of his strength, of virility, of helplessness, and of pure calm. She fell down on her knees in the middle of the floor and whispered, ‘Jay. My dear. My dear one. You’re all right now darling. You’re not troubled any more, are you, my darling? Not anymore. Not ever any more, dearest. I can feel how it is with you. I know, my dearest. It’s terrible to go. You don’t want to. Of course you don’t. But you’ve got to. And you know they’re going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right, my darling. God take you. God keep you, my own beloved. God make his light shine upon.’ And even while she whispered his presence became faint, and in a moment of terrible dread she cried out ‘Jay!’ and hurried to her daughter’s crib. ‘Stay with me one minute,’ she whispered, ‘just one minute, my dearest’; and in some force he did return; she felt him with her, watching his child… ‘Be with us all you can,’ she whispered. ‘This is good-bye.’ And again she went to her knees. Good-bye, she said again, within herself; but she was unable to feel much of anything. ‘God help me to realize it,’ she whispered, and clasped her hands before her face: but she would only realize that he was fading, and that it was indeed good-bye, and that she was at that moment unable to be particularly sensitive to the fact. And now he was gone entirely from the room, from the house, and from this world” (174-175).
In spite of her deep desire to withdraw into her Catholic faith, even Mary cannot shake the overwhelming feeling of doubt which comes naturally to all people. She feels at once a sense of “calm” as well as “annihilating emptiness” and a “cold and overwhelming fullness.” Nevertheless, she decides to pray.
In Part III, the final section of the book, young Rufus awakens in a jolt, excited to show his father the new cap. Alas, he and his younger sister Catherine are solemnly informed of the horrible truth, that their father has died —“Daddy didn’t come home. He isn’t going to come home ever anymore.” Despite being restless, Rufus stays home from school. Wandering into an alley, he spins a yarn to a group of schoolboys about his father’s death, and then promptly returns home to apologize to his father’s empty chair –speaking into the void, characters in A Death in the Family are desperate to communicate with an unresponsive world. Later, the children are dressed in their Sunday best and an austere cleric named Father Jackson arrives, promptly lecturing and scolding the children. Then Follett family friend, Walter Starr, arrives with a friendly demeanor. He speaks kindly to the children, telling them of a musical device he has purchased called a gramophone. He also tells them that their father was a truly great man, one of the “finest men that ever lived.” Unlike the coldness of Father Jackson, the children are drawn to the warm nature of Walter Starr –the stiff and archaic world of the church is portrayed as strangely foreign and even inhuman. The Follett family views the body of Jay in an open-casket ceremony before the children are taken away, but Andrew later recalls for Rufus a beautiful moment during the funeral. As the casket was being lowered into the ground, a butterfly landed on it, a scene which was almost too perfect, it even may have been enough for Andrew to question his religious skepticism, but then Father Jackson stubbornly refused to read the full burial rights for Jay since he was never baptized —“‘Some church,’ he snarled. ‘And they call themselves Christians. Bury a man who’s a hundred times the man hell ever be… The rules of the church forbid it. He’s not a member of our little club’” (308). The novel ends as Rufus privately wonders if Andrew’s hatred of religion extends to both Mary and Hannah, but he keeps his silence.
Reading A Death in the Family yielded a deep and bountiful harvest for me –it is a novel I likely would not have otherwise encountered had I not embarked on this strange pilgrimage through the Pulitzer Prize-winners. In some ways, it reminded me of the existential themes presented in an earlier Pulitzer Prize-winner, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, since both novels present one inexplicably tragic moment followed by a string of unique narratives demonstrating how people respond to an unresponsive world. In both cases, the two novels highlight the strength of humans who endure great pains, troubled by the unfathomable silence and solitude of the world, and they leave readers with a sense of reverence for those who have suffered. I was particularly struck by the opening section of A Death in the Family entitled “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”(while nobody truly knows where James Agee would have placed this section of the book, the Penguin edition features it at the outset and this mirrors the version that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958). It serves as a wonderful prologue to the novel; I was so enamored, I had to gleefully read it aloud to my wife and three-year-old son. However, this section “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” was actually a prose piece that was first published in 1938 in The Partisan Review, an abbreviated small-circulation magazine with a certain anti-Stalinist socialist bent (the magazine was actually secretly funded by the CIA throughout the 1950s and 1960s).
Agee apparently worked on A Death in the Family off and on between 1948-1955. Following his untimely death in 1955, it was posthumously published by his family in 1957. Originally, Agee’s work was edited by Agee’s publisher and literary executor David McDowell. In 2007, Dr. Michael Lofaro published a restored edition of the novel after combing through Agee’s original manuscripts (I read the Penguin edition which was edited by Steve Earle). In Lofaro’s version, the book apparently opens with a previously unpublished nightmare of Rufus dragging the decomposing body of John the Baptist and his severed head through the streets of Knoxville. Which version is closest to the author’s original intent? Like a major theme in the novel, answers only prove elusive.
Notable Quotations:
“He felt that although his father loved their home and loved all of them, he was more lonely than the contentment of this family love could help; that it even increased his loneliness, or made it hard for him not to be lonely” (18).
“These realizations moved clearly through the senses, the memory, the feelings, the mere feeling of the place they paused at, about a quarter mile from home, on a rock under a stray tree that had grown in the city, their feet on undomesticated clay, facing north through the night over the Southern Railway tracks and over North Knoxville, towards the deeply folded small mountains and the Powell River Valley, and above them, the trembling lanterns of the universe, seeming so near, so intimate, that when air stirred the leaves their hair, it seemed to be the breathing, the whispering of the stars” (19).
“Deep in the night they experienced the sensation, in their sleep, of being prodded at, as if by some persistent insect. Their souls turned and flicked out impatient hands, but the tormenter would not be driven off. They both awoke at the same instant. In the dark and empty hall, by itself, the telephone was shrilling fiercely, forlorn as an abandoned baby and even more peremptory to be quieted” (22 -on the sound of the telephone call from Ralph).
“But with that, the child was torn into two creatures, of whom one cried out for his father” (79).
“A great cedar, and the colors of limestone and of clay; the smell of wood smoke and, in the deep orange light of the lamp, the silent logs of the walls, his mother’s face, her ridged hand mild on his forehead: Don’t you fret, Jay, don’t you fret. And before his time, before even he was dreamed of in the word, she must have lain under the hand of her mother and or her father and they in their childhood under other hands, away on back through the mountains, away on back through the years, it took you right on back as far as you could ever imagine, right on back to Adam, only no one did it for him; or maybe did God?
“How far we all come. How far we all come from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home; it’s good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what’s it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what’s it all for?” (87, the reflections of Jay after comforting Rufus while he is afraid of the dark).
“His mother sang to him too. Her voice was soft and shining gray like her dear gray eyes” (89).
“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 overheard them arguing. Whiskey” (92).
“While she was speaking, she was with her voice, her eyes and with each word opening in Hannah those all but forgotten hours almost thirty years past, during which the cross of living had first nakedly borne in upon her being, and she had made the first beginnings of learning how to endure and accept it. Your turn now, poor child, she thought; she felt as if a prodigious page were being silently turned, and the breath of its turning touched her heart with cold and tender awe. Her soul is beginning to come of age, she thought; and within those moments she herself became much older, much nearer her own death, and was content to be. Her heart lifted up in a kind of pride in Mary, in every sorrow she could remember, her own or that of others (and the remembrances rushed upon her); in all existence and endurance” (119-120 -Aunt Hannah’s reflections upon Mary as they await to hear what happened to Jay in the accident).
“God is not here,” she thinks to herself. “What can I know of the proper time for her, she said to herself. God forgive me. Yet she could not ride herself: something mistaken, unbearably piteous, infinitely malign was at large within that faithfulness; she was helpless to forfend it or even know its nature. Suddenly there opened within her a chasm of infinite depth and from it flowed the paralyzing breath of eternal darkness. I believe nothing. Nothing whatever” (121-122, Hannah’s reflections on religion).
“Sometimes life seems more –cruel—than can be borne” (131).
“That’s what theyre for, epitaphs, Joel suddenly realized. So you can feel you’ve got some control over death, you own it, you choose a name for it” (158, Joel reflecting on the nature of epitaphs).
“One by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved” (194).
“When grief and shock surpass endurance there occur phases of exhaustion, of anesthesia in which relatively little is left and one has the illusion of recognizing, and understanding, a good deal” (278).
On the 1958 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1958 Fiction Jury consisted of the following two members:
- Robert Gorham Davis (1908-1978) was a prolific literary critic and professor of English at Columbia University (a young Norman Mailer was counted among his students as was Sylvia Plath, according to Davis, when he taught at Smith College). He wrote extensively about John Dos Passos, C.P. Snow and James Farrell; and he also wrote regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the Partisan Review, Commentary, and the American Scholar magazine, along with celebrated short stories in The New Yorker (one of which won an O. Henry Award). He came from a distinguished Massachusetts family and while he was drawn to communist left-wing politics in his youth, Davis eventually tempered his inclinations and became a liberal Democrat. In 1953, he was forced to testify before the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. Beloved by students, he retired from teaching in 1976, two years before his death.
- John K. Hutchens (1905-1995) was an author, book critic (at both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times Book Review), and long-time judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He was born in Chicago and grew up in Montana –later penning a memoir of his youth– before becoming a leading editor of modern literary anthologies.
A Death in the Family was the first posthumously published book to win a Pulitzer Prize. Upon announcing the award in 1958, The New York Times noted that the Pulitzer jury passed up James Gould Cozzens’s bestselling novel A Love Possessed, as did the National Book Award which granted its prize to John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle that same year instead. Personally, after reading James Gould Cozzens’s drab Guard of Honor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1949, I cannot imagine attempting to summit another one of his books. In the jury report, Hutchens and Davis agreed that “this has been a good year for the American novel.” Other books considered included: John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, James Gould Cozzens’s A Love Possessed, Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, William Faulkner’s The Town, Hollis Summers’ The Weather February, Warren Eyster’s The Goblin of Eros, and Andrew Lytle’s The Velvet Horn.
Who is James Agee?
James Agee, pronounced “Aye-jee” (1909-1955) was born in Knoxville, TN. When he was six years old, Agee’s father died in an automobile accident (the inspiration for A Death in the Family), and as a result, Agee was sent off to boarding school where he developed a lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest and history teacher named Father James Harold Flye. They traveled together and conversed about a wide array of subjects including film and literature. After Agee’s death, Father Flye published Agee’s letters –the corpus is said to offer a unique glimpse into the artist’s mind.
After bouncing between several more boarding schools, Agee was accepted to Harvard University where he attended courses taught by poets like Robert Hillyer (a Pulitzer Prize-winner for poetry in 1934) and classes on literary criticism by the likes of I. A. Richards. At Harvard, he also met Robert Fitzgerald, a future literary critic –the two would eventually work together at Time Magazine.
Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Agee relocated to New York City and became a writer for Time, Fortune, and The Nation. He married Olivia Saunders (aka “Via”), but they divorced in 1938, and later that same year he married Alma Mailman. They had one son together, but by 1941 they were divorced as Alma had fled to Mexico with their son to live with the communist writer and politician Bodo Uhse. Agee moved to Greenwich Village and married for the third and final time to Mia Fritsch. They had three children together.
A leading film critic, Agee became a leading proponent of Charlie Chaplin (particularly his controversial 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux) as well as Laurence Olivier and D.W. Griffith. He helped generate a revival of interest in the great silent film comedians like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. His writings on cinema were collected and published as a 1958 book entitled Agee on Film, a book which remains influential to this day. In the 1940s, W.H. Auden called Agee’s movie column in The Nation “the most remarkable regular event in journalism today.”
Agee wrote a widely celebrated book entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which conveys the lives of southern tenant farmers during the Great Depression. It was hailed as a classic by many far and wide, including President Jimmy Carter. He was also a respected screenwriter having contributed to the writing of The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). He also wrote an untitled screenplay for a Charlie Chaplin film in 1947-1948 in which the Tramp survives a nuclear holocaust. It was posthumously published as “The Tramp’s New World” in 2005.
A heavy drinker and smoker for much of his life, James Agee suffered his first heart attack in 1951 in Santa Barbara, CA. He died several years later of another heart attack in 1955 while inside a New York City taxicab en route to a doctor’s appointment.
While only moderately respected in his day, the esteem of James Agee’s writings has only increased since his death. His unkempt looks and taste for iconoclasm led to him being elegized by the critic Dwight Macdonald as a literary James Dean. In 1958 CBS purchased the film rights to A Death in the Family, and in 1961, it was made into a successful stage play entitled “All the Way Home” by Tad Mosel. Various books have been published about Agee and his relationship with Charlie Chaplin, and as recently as 2018, a complete biography of Agee’s life was released entitled Rufus: James Agee in Tennessee by Paul F. Brown.
Film Adaptation:
- None.
Further Reading:
- Permit Me Voyage (1936) by James Agee, his only published volume of poetry
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941) by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans
- The Morning Watch (1951), a short autobiographical novel by James Agee
Literary Context in 1957-1958:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1957): was awarded the French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”
- National Book Award (1958): The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestselling novel was By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens (who previously won the Pulitzer for Guard of Honor). Other bestselling books included Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
- T. S. Eliot married his secretary Valerie Fletcher, 30 years his junior, in a private church ceremony in London. His first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, had died in 1947.
- Copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, printed in England, were seized by United States Customs Service officials in San Francisco on grounds of obscenity.
- Italo Calvino’s letter of resignation from the Italian Communist Party was published.
- The first American Beat Generation –poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky– stayed at the “Beat Hotel” (Hotel Rachou) in Paris.
- Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington was published.
- Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love was published (along with his nonfiction work The Diamond Smugglers).
- Aldous Huxley’s Collected Short Stories was published.
- Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published.
- The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
James Agee’s A Death in the Family is a beautifully crafted, powerfully haunting autobiography and it ranks among my favorite Pulitzer Prize-winners thus far. The only other novel I would have considered in the running for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 would have been Jack Kerouac’s classic magnum opus, On The Road.
Agee, James. A Death in the Family. Penguin Books, New York, NY, 2009 (originally published in 1957).