A Death In The Family: Restored

Fascinating article about the new edition of James Agee’s Death in the Family – just released. When James Agee died in 1955, he left behind a mostly finished manuscript of A Death in the Family, something he had been working on for a couple of years. It was a novel about losing his father in a car crash at the age of 6 and what a formative event it was. If you haven’t read the book, all I can do is beg you to pick it up. It is an American classic. His writing is so good it hurts. His insights into small moments, little teensy moments of revelation, epiphany … how emotions actually work … He was a psychologist of the highest order. And his prose!! I have a soft spot for Death in the Family for many reasons (I go into it here) – so I was VERY interested to read about this new edition. Basically, it is being touted as the “restored” edition – the TRUE reflection of James Agee’s intentions (kind of like the re-release of Ariel recently, in the order that Sylvia Plath had said she wanted – not the chronological order imposed on it by Ted Hughes after her death) – Now I can’t speak to whether or not the new editor is onto something or just full of it – but it sounds to me like he is a scholar, a dogged investigator, and truly passionate about the work of Agee. That’s pretty damn cool. I will still keep my old dog-eared copy of the book, it is a book I treasure – I’ve had it for years, and it’s all marked up in pencil from the time I played Hannah in a production in Chicago – with particular attention paid to the Hannah sequences. I put little marks next to her internal monologues, or tiny exclamation points which show me I thought that might be important – and not just important but play-able as an actress…. But I think I will pick up a copy of the new edition, which sounds like it has extensive changes, some restored text, some rearranging. I have my opinions about some of it (I happen to like the non-chronological set-up, and also the interspersing lyrical sections which have no plot, and an entirely different voice than the rest of the book) – but hey, they didn’t ask me my opinion and I didn’t spend years poring over James Agee’s personal notes on the manuscript trying to put it together. I’m very interested to see what the new edition is like – and I am especially interested to read some of the new material that they have found and put back in. !!! I know each episode of the book very very well (the vigil, the visit to Grandma, the Charlie Chaplin movie, Mary laughing hysterically in the middle of her tragedy, the whiskey) – so it’ll be very cool, I think, to read more of it.

And this excerpt from the article could be true of the old version as well:

“One by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved.” Why don’t our novelists write in Agee’s tender high style these days? Either something has gone out of the world, or something has gone out of them. His book reads like a prayer, an attempt to breathe life into the dead through mighty exertions of language. Everything is consecrated. Trees move in their sleep, stars tremble like lanterns, and a butterfly — yes, a butterfly — alights on a coffin.

In the end, all that a writer has to pass on is not myth and anecdote, but scene and character, evoked in memorable prose. The beauty of “A Death in the Family” is that the child’s point of view that begins the book eventually widens until readers may feel they are seeing into the very heart of existence — the utter strangeness of being alive in a particular family at a particular time and place. What more could James Agee leave behind?

“readers may feel they are seeing into the very heart of existence” …

That’s it, exactly.

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7 Responses to A Death In The Family: Restored

  1. Bernard says:

    “Why don’t our novelists write in Agee’s high tender style anymore?”

    Partly because that requires a certain patience from both writer and reader and the current trend is more favorable to flash fiction.

  2. red says:

    With questions like that, Bernard, big questions – it’s my preference to “live the questions” – to quote Rilke – than come up with an answer. I appreciate your opinion, but I enjoy pondering the question way more than an answer.

    It reminds me of a recent post a film-blogger did where he said he knew definitively that Tony Soprano was killed in the last episode and he built his case, moment by moment … It was a fascinating read, and very convincing – but Matt Zoller Seitz (of House Next Door and, formerly, the NY Times) made a case for just accepting ambiguity … how he felt that Chase (Sopranos creator) was always about ambiguity … it’s not a puzzle piece to be put together … it could go either way. Now it is fun to argue your case, the discussion was fascinating – with the pros and cons people – but I was with Matt on that one. I like not ACTUALLY knowing.

    It means I get to keep the questions going.

  3. Kelly says:

    I recently read this book. After years of seeing it as a clue in crosswords, I picked it up.

    It KILLED me. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it. I didn’t know he was a screenplay writer, and I was seeing it vividly, like a play being acted out in my head.

    The formality of the family members, their language, the way they would sit together for long stretches without anyone saying anything was much more true to my family and my growing up memories than almost anything I can think of.

    Oh the guilt, the guilt ,the guilt! The questioning of the past! Wanting to rewrite history to make the memories more palatable…these I know about.

    And to that I can imagine my mother saying, “Oh Kelly, stop being so dramatic. You sound like an old Irish washerwoman! Really now.”

    But I know you will understand. The last time I was this moved I was watching an episode of “Cold Case”, that paralleled an episode in my past. I love how they use different actors playing the same characters in different time periods as past and present weaves together, showing we are not only who we are now, but the ghosts of memory and experience, some of which we wish we could forget.

  4. red says:

    Kelly – It is one of the most intense books I’ve ever read – you’re right – it’s almost unbearable!! The way he evokes childhood, too – it’s just so amazing.

    I love the uncle, too – who is so deaf he needs to use an ear-trumpet and people shout the bad news into the trumpet … If I’m not mistaken that’s what brings on Mary’s inappropriate laughing fit in the middle of her tragedy. Something about the deaf uncle … I’ve blocked it out.

  5. Bernard says:

    Sheila, you’re right of course.

    I wasn’t offering an all-encompassing answer. Hell, there aren’t any answers. Note the qualifying entry: Partly because…

    But you have to wonder if Agee were a new writer coming along if he would even get published today. Maybe probably likely, but I’ll lay even money he’d get at least a few editorial inquiries to the effect of, “Could you possibly tighten this up some?”

  6. red says:

    Bernard – absoLUTEly!!! I didn’t mean to sound like I was dismissing ANY opinion – just stating my preference of not landing on one, in general.

    Back to the topic: along the lines of what you said, I get sooo sick of ironic distance – and I really really appreciate the author who can go for the big lyrical gesture. With no shame or wink-wink. It takes confidence and is very out of style these days! I think Michael Chabon approaches it at times – although he’s not really like Agee at all in many ways!

    One of the reasons Death in the Family is so good is because it is a mess! I wonder, though, if Agee himself would wince at the fact that what was, essentially, a draft was released to the public! As wonderful it is – it is interesting to contemplate what changes he’d like to make.

  7. Kelly says:

    While I was reading it I kept thinking about an incidence in my family where my deaf grandmother decided to go on a diatribe about toilet paper during a family funeral. She would not stop and it went on to tragic, mortifying proportions. It would’ve fit right into this book.

    Thanks again for all your books- Its so great to share a passion when you hit on something I am opinionated about. I also really enjoy when our opinions differ.

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