The calf ran up the hill as fast as he could and stopped sharp. "Mama!" he cried, all out of breath. "What is
it! What are they doing '! Where are they going!"
Other spring calves came galloping too.
They all were looking up at her and awaiting her explanation, but she looked out over their excited eyes. As
she watched the mysterious and majestic thing they had never seen before, her own eyes became even more
than ordinarily still, and during the considerable moment before she answered, she scarcely heard their urgent
questioning.
Far out along the autumn plain, beneath the sloping light, an immense drove of cattle moved eastward.
They went at a walk, not very fast, but faster than they could imaginably enjoy. Those in front were compelled
by those behind; those at the rear, with few exceptions, did their best to keep up; those who were locked
within the herd could no more help moving than the particles inside a falling rock. Men on horses rode ahead,
and alongside, and behind, or spurred their horses intensely back and forth, keeping the pace steady, an d the
herd in shape; and from man to man a dog sped back and forth-, incessantly as a shuttle, barking, incessantly,
in a hysterical voice. Now and then one of the men shouted fiercely, and this like the shrieking of the dog was
tinily audible above a low and awesome sound which seemed to come not from the multitude of hooves but
from the center of the world, and above the sporadic bawlings and bellowings of the herd.
From the hillside this tumult was so distant that it only made more delicate the prodigious silence in which
the earth and sky were held; and, from the hill, the sight was as modest as its sound. The herd was virtually
hidden in the dust it raised and could be known) in general, only by the horns which pricked this flat sunlit
dust like little briar. In one place a twist of the air revealed the trembling fabric of many backs; but it was only
along the near edge of the mass that individual animals were discernible, small in a driven frieze, walking fast,
stumbling and recovering, tossing their armed heads, or opening their skulls heavenward in one of those cries
which reached the hillside long after the jaws were shut.
From where she watched, the mother could not be sure whether there were any she recognized. She knew
that among them there must be a son of hers; she had not seen him since some previous spring, and she would
not be seeing him again. Then the cries of the young ones impinged on her bemusement: "Where are they
going?"
She looked into their ignorant eyes.
"Away," she said.
"Where?" they cried. "Where? Where?" her own son cried again.
She wondered what to say.
"On a long journey."
"But where to?" they shouted. "Yes, where to?" her son exclaimed; -and she could see that he was losing
his patience with her, as he always did when he felt she was evasive.
"I'm not sure," she said.
Their silence was so cold that she was unable to avoid their eyes for long.
'Well, not really sure. Because, you see," she said in her most reasonable tone, I've never seen it with my
own eyes, and that’s the only way to be sure; isn’t it?”
2
They just kept looking at her. She could see no way out.
"But I've heard about it," she said with shallow cheerfulness, "from those who have seen it, and I don't
suppose there's any good reason to doubt them."
She looked away over them again, and for all their interest in what she was about to tell them, her eyes so
changed that they turned and looked too.
The herd, which had been moving broadside to them, was being turned away, so slowly that like the turning
of stars it could not quite be seen from one moment to the next; yet soon it was moving directly away from
them, and even during the little while she spoke and they all watched after it, it steadily and very noticeably
diminished, and the sounds of it as well
"It happens always about this time of year," she said quietly while they watched. "Nearly all the men and
horses leave, and go into the North and the West."
"Out on the range," her son said, and by his voice she knew what enchantment the idea already held for
him.
"Yes," she said, "out on the range." And trying, impossibly, to imagine the range, they were touched by the
breath of grandeur.
"And then before long," she continued, "everyone has been found, and brought into one place; and then . . .
what you see, happens. All of them.
"Sometimes when the wind is right," she said more quietly, "you can hear them coming long before you can
see them It isn't even like a sound, at first. It's more as if something were moving far under the ground. It
makes you uneasy. You wonder, why what in the world can that be! Then you remember what it is and then
you can really hear it. And then finally, there they all are.
She could see this did not interest them at all. "But where are they going?" one asked, a little impatiently.
"I'm coming to that," she said; and she let them wait. Then she spoke slowly but casually. .
"They are on their way to a railroad."
There, she thought; that's for that look you all gave me,"-hen I said I wasn't sure. She waited for them to ask:
they waited for her to ex- plain.
"A railroad," she told them, "is great hard bars of metal lying side by side, or so they tell me, and they go on
and on over the ground as far as the eye can see. And great wagons run on the metal bars on wheels@ like
wagon wheels but smaller, and these wheels are made of solid metal too. The wagons are much bigger than any
wagon you've ever seen, as big as, big as sheds, they say, and they are pulled along on the iron bars by a
terrible huge dark machine, with a loud scream."
"Big as sheds?" one of the calves said skeptically.
"Big enough, anyway," the mother said. "I told you I've never seen it myself. But those wagons are so big
that several of us can get inside at once. And that's exactly what happens."
Suddenly she became very quiet, for she felt that somehow, she could not imagine just how, she had said
altogether too much.
"Well, what happens?" her son wanted to know. "'What do you mean, happens?"
She always tried hard to be a reasonably modern mother. It was probably better, she felt, to go on, than to
leave them all full of imaginings and mystification. Besides, there was really nothing at all awful about what
happened . . . if only one could know why.
3
"Well, she said, it's nothing much, really. They just—why when they all finally get there, why there are all
the great cars waiting in a long line, and the big dark machine is up ahead . . . smoke comes out of it, they say .
. . and . . . well, then, they just put us into the wagons, just as many as will fit in each wagon, and when
everybody is in, why . . ." She hesitated, for again, though she couldn't be sure why, she was uneasy.
"Why then," her son said, "the train takes them away."
Hearing that word, she felt a flinching of the heart. Where had he picked it up, she wondered, and she gave
him a shy and curious glance. Oh dear, she thought. I should never have even begun to explain. "Yes," she
said, "when everybody is safely in, they slide the doors shut."
They were all silent for a little while. Then one of them asked thoughtfully, "Are they taking them
somewhere they don't want to go?”
"Oh, I don't think so," the mother said. "I imagine it's very nice." "I want to go," she heard her son say with
ardor. "I want to go right now," he cried. "Can I, Mama? Can I? Please?" And looking into his eyes, she was
overwhelmed by sadness.
"Silly thing," she said, "there'll be time enough for that when you're grown up. But what I very much hope,"
she went on, "is that instead of being chosen to go out on the range and to make the long journey, you will
grow up to be very strong and bright so they will decide that you may stay here at home with Mother. And you,
too," she added, speaking to the other little males; but she could not honestly wish this for any but her own,
least of all for the eldest, strongest and most proud, for she knew how few are chosen.
She could see that what she said was not received with enthusiasm.
"But I want to go," her son said.”
"Why?" she asked. "I don't think any of you realize that it's a great honor to be chosen to stay. A great
privilege. Why, it's just the most ordinary ones are taken out onto the range. But only the very pick are chosen
to stay here at home. If you want to go out on the range," she said in hurried and happy inspiration, "all you
have to do is be ordinary and careless and silly. If you want to have even a chance to be chosen to stay, you
have to try to be stronger and bigger and braver and brighter than anyone else, and that takes hard work. Every
day. Do you see?" And she looked happily and hopefully from one to another. "Besides," she added, aware that
they were not won over, "I'm told it's a very rough life out there, and the men are unkind."
"Don't you see," she said again; and she pretended to speak to all of them, but it was only to her son.
But he only looked at her. "Why do you want me to stay home?" he asked flatly; in their silence she knew
the others were asking the same question.
“Because it’s safe here,” she said before she knew better; and realized that she had put it in the most
unfortunate way possible. “Not safe, not just that,” she fumbled, “I mean… because here we know what
happens, and what’s going to happen, and there’s never any doubt about it, never any reason to wonder, to
worry. Don’t you see? It’s just Home,” and she put a simile on the word, “where we all know each other and
are happy and well!”
They were so merely quiet, looking back at her, that she felt they were neither won over nor alienated. Then
she knew of her son that he, anyhow, was most certainly not persuaded, for he asked the question she most
dreaded, “Where do they go on the train?” And hearing him, she knew that she would stop at nothing to bring
that curiosity and eagerness and that tendency toward skepticism within bounds.
“Nobody knows,” she said, and added, in just the tone she knew would most sharply engage them, “Not for
sure, anyway.”
“What do you mean, not for sure,” her son cried. And the oldest, biggest calf repeated the question, his
voice cracking.
4
The mother deliberately kept silence as she gazed out over the plain, and while she was silent they all heard
the last they would ever hear of all those who were going away, one last great cry, as faint almost as a breath,
the infinitesimal jabbing vituperation of the dog; the solemn muttering of the earth.
“Well,” she said, after even this sound was entirely lost, “there was one who came back.” Their instant,
trustful eyes were too much for her. She added, “Or so they say.”
They gathered a little more closely around her, for now she spoke very quietly.
“It was my great-grandmother who told me,” she said. “She was told it by her great-grandmother, who
claimed she saw it with her own eyes, though of course I can’t vouch for that. Because of course I wasn’t even
dreamed of then, and Great-grandmother was so very very old you see, that you couldn’t always be sure she
knew quite what she was saying.”
Now that she begun to remember it more clearly, she was sorry she had committed herself to telling it.
"Yes," she said "the story is, there was one, just one who ever cam back, and he told what happened on the
train, and where the train went and what happened after. He told it all in a rush, they say, the last things first
and every which way, but as it was finally sorted out and gotten into order by those who heard it and those
who they told it to, this is more or less what happened.
"He said that after the men had gotten as many of us as they could into the car he was in, so that their sides
pressed tightly together and nobody could lie down, they slid the doors shut with a startling rattle and a bang,
and then there was a sudden jerk, so strong they might have fallen except that they were packed so closely
together, and the car began to move again. You see, they were just moving up the next car that was joined on
behind, to put more of us into it. He could see it all between the boards of the car, because the boards were
built a little apart from each other, to let in air.”
Car, her son said again to himself. Now he would never forget that word.
"He said that then for the first time in his life, he became very badly frightened, he didn't know why. But he
was sure that there was something dreadfully to be afraid of. The others felt this same great fear. They called
out loudly to those who were being put into the car behind, and the others called back, but it was no use; those
who were getting aboard were between narrow white fences and then were walking up a narrow slope and the
men kept jabbing them as they do when they are in an unkind humor, and there was no way to go but onto the
car. There was no way to get out of the car either: he tried with all his might, and he was the one nearest the
door.
"After the next car behind was full, and the door was shut, the train jerked forward again, and stopped again,
and they put more of us into still another car, and so on, and on, until all the starting and stopping no longer
frightened anybody; it was just something uncomfortable that was never going to stop, and they began instead
to realize how hungry and thirsty they were. But there was no food and no water, so they just had to put up
with this; and about the time they became resigned to going without their suppers (for now it was almost dark),
they heard a sudden and terrible scream which frightened them even more deeply than anything had frightened
them before, and the train began to move again, and they braced their legs once more for the jolt when it would
stop, but this time, instead of stopping, it began to go fast, and then even faster, so fast that the ground nearby
slid past like a flooded creek and the whole country, he claimed, began to move too, turning slowly around a
far mountain as if it were all one great wheel And then there was a strange kind of disturbance inside the car,
he said, or even inside his very bones. He felt as if everything in him was falling, as if he had been filled full of
a heavy liquid that all wanted to flow one way, and all the others were leaning as he was leaning, away from
this queer heaviness that was trying to pull them over, and then just as suddenly this leaning heaviness was
gone and they nearly fell again before they could stop leaning against it. He could never understand what this
5
was, but it too happened so many times that they all got used to it, just as they got used to seeing the country
turn like a slow wheel, and just as they got used to the long cruel screams of the, engine, and the steady iron
noise beneath them which made the cold, darkness so fearsome, and the hunger and the thirst and the continual
standing up, and the moving on and on and on as if they would never stop."
"Didn't they ever stop?" one asked.
"Once in a great while," she replied. "Each time they did," she said, "he thought, Oh, now at last! At last
we can get out and stretch our tired legs and lie down! At last we'll be given food and -water! But they never
let them out. And they never gave them food or water. They never cleaned up under them. They had to stand
in their manure and in the water they made.”
“Why did the train stop?” her son asked; and with somber gratification she saw that he was taking all this
very much to heart.
“He could never understand why,” she said. “Sometimes men would walk up and down alongside the cars,
and the more nervous and the more trustful of us would call out; but they were only looking around, they
never seemed to do anything. Sometimes he could see many houses and bigger buildings together where
people lived. Sometimes it was far out in the country and after they had stood still for a long time they would
hear a little noise which quickly became louder, and then became suddenly a noise so loud it would stop their
breathing, and during this noise something black would go by, very close, and so fast it couldn’t be seen. And
then it was gone as suddenly as it had appeared, and the noise became small, and then in the silence their train
would start up again.
“Once, he tells us, something very strange happened. They were standing still, and cars of a very different
kind began to move slowly past. These cars were not red, but black, with many glass windows like those in a
house; and he says they were as full of human beings as the car he was in was full of our kind. And one of
these people looked into his eyes and smiled, as if he liked him, or as if he knew only too well how hard the
journey was.
“So by his account it happens to them, too,” she said, with a certain pleased vindictiveness. “Only they
were sitting down at their ease, not standing. And the one who smiled was eating.”
She was still, trying to think of something; she couldn’t quite grasp the thought.
“But didn’t they ever let them out?” her son asked.
The oldest calf jeered. “Of course they did. He came back, didn’t he? How would he ever come back if he
didn’t get out?”
“They didn’t let them our,” she said, “for a long, long time.”
“How long?”
"So long, and he was so tired, he could never quite be sure. But he said that it turned from night to day and
from day to night and back again several times over, with the train moving nearly all of this time, and that
when it finally stopped, early one morning, they were all so tired and so discouraged that they hardly even
noticed any longer, let alone felt any hope that anything, would change for them, ever again; and then all of a
sudden men came up and put up a wide walk and unbarred the door and slid it open, and it was the most
wonderful and happy moment of his life when he saw the door open, and walked into the open air with all his
joints trembling, and drank the water and ate the delicious food they had ready for him; it was worth the whole
terrible journey."
6
Now that these scenes came clear before her, there was a faraway shining in her eyes, and her voice, too,
had something in it of the faraway.
"When they had eaten and drunk all they could hold they lifted up their heads and looked around, and
everything they saw made them happy. Even the trains made them cheerful now, for now they were no longer
afraid of them. And though these trains were forever breaking to pieces and joining again with other broken
pieces, with shufflings and clashings and rude cries, they hardly paid them attention any more, they were so
pleased to be in their new home, and so surprised and delighted to find they were among thousands upon
thousands of strangers of their own kind, all lifting up their voices in peacefulness and thanksgiving, and they
were so wonderstruck by all they could see, it was so beautiful and so grand.
"For he has told us that now they lived among fences as white as bone, so many, and so spiderishly
complicated, and shining so pure, that there's no use trying even to hint at the beauty and the splendor of it to
anyone who knows only the pitiful little outfitting of a ranch. Beyond these mazy fences, through the dark and
bright smoke which continually turned along the sunlight, dark buildings stood shoulder to shoulder in a wall
as huge and proud as mountains. All through the air, all the time, there was an iron humming like the
humming of the iron bar after it has been struck to tell the men it is time to cat, and in all the air, all the time,
there was that same strange kind of iron strength which makes the silence before lightning so different from all
other silence.
"Once for a little while the wind shifted and blew over them straight from the great buildings, and it
brought a strange and very powerful smell which confused and disturbed them. He could never quite describe
this smell, but he has told us it was unlike anything he had ever known before. It smelled like old fire, he said,
and old blood and fear and darkness and sorrow and most terrible and brutal force and something else,
something in it that made him want to run away. This sudden uneasiness and this wish to run away swept
through every one of them, he tells us, so that they were all moved at once as restlessly as so many leaves in a
wind, and there was great worry in their voices. But soon the leaders among them conclude@ that it -was
simply the way men must smell when there are a great many of them living together. Those dark buildings
must be crowded very full of men, they decided, probably as many thousands of them indoors, as there were
of us, outdoors; so it was no wonder their smell was so strong and, to our kind, so unpleasant. Besides, it was
so clear now in every other way that men were not as we had always supposed, but were doing everything
they knew how to make us comfortable and happy, that we ought to just put up with their smell, which after
all they couldn't help, any more than we could help our own. Very likely men didn't like the way we smelled,
any mote than we liked theirs. They passed along these ideas to the others and soon everyone felt more calm,
and then the wind changed again, and the fierce smell no longer came to them, and the smell of their own kind
was back again very strong of course, in such a crowd, but ever so homey and comforting, and everyone felt
easy again.
"They were fed and watered so generously, and treated so well and the majesty and the loveliness of this
place where they had all come to rest was so far beyond anything they had ever known or dreamed of, that
many of the simple and ignorant, whose memories were short, began to wonder whether that whole difficult
journey, or even their whole lives up to now, had ever really been. Hadn’t it all been just shadows, they
murmured, just a bad dream?”
“Even the sharp ones, who knew very well it had all really happened, began to figure that everything up to
now had been made so full of pain only so that all they had come to now might seem all the sweeter and the
more glorious. Some of the oldest and deepest were even of a mind that all the puzzle and tribulation of the
7
journey had been sent to us as a kind of harsh trying or proving of our worthiness; and that it was entirely
fitting and proper that we could earn our way through to such rewards as these, only through suffering, and
through being patient under pain which was beyond our understanding; and that now at the last, to those who
had borne all things well, all things were made known; for the mystery of suffering stood revealed in joy. And
now as they looked back over all that was past, all their sorrows and bewilderments seemed so little and so
fleeting that, from the simplest among them even to the most wise, they could feel only the kind of amused
pity we feel toward the very young when, with the first thing that hurts them or they are forbidden, they are
sure there is nothing kind or fair in all creation, and carry on accordingly, raving and grieving as if their hearts
would break.”
She glanced among them with an indulgent smile, hoping the little lesion would sink home. They seemed
interested but somewhat dazed. I’m talking way over their heads, she realized. But by now she herself was too
deeply absorbed in her story to modify it much. Let it be, she thought, a little impatient; it is over my head, for
that matter. “They had hardly before this even wondered that they were alive,” she went on, “and now all of a
sudden they felt they understood why they were. This made them very happy, but they were still only
beginning to enjoy this new wisdom when quite a new and different kind of restiveness ran among them.
Before they quite knew it they were all moving once again, and now they realized that they were being moved,
once more, by men, toward still some other place and purpose they could not know. But during these last
hours they had been so well that now they felt no uneasiness, but all moved forward calm and sure toward
better things still to come; he has told us that he no longer felt as if he were being driven, even as it became
clear that they were going toward the shade of those great buildings but guided.
"He was guided between fences which stood ever more and more narrowly near each other, among
companions who were pressed ever more and more closely against one another; and now as he felt their
warmth against him it was not uncomfortable, and his pleasure in it was not through any need to be close
among others through anxiousness, but was a new kind of strong and gentle delight, at being so very close, so
deeply of his own kind, that it seemed as if the very breath and heartbeat of each one were being exchanged
through all that multitude, and each was another, and others were each, and each was a multitude, and the
multitude was one. And quieted and made mild within this melting, they now entered the cold shadow cast by
the buildings, and now with every step the smell of the buildings grew stronger, and the darkening air the
glittering of the fences was ever more queer.
"And now as they were pressed ever more intimately together he could see ahead of him a narrow gate,
and he was strongly pressed upon from either side and from behind, and went in eagerly, and now he was
between two fences so narrowly set that he brushed either fence with either flank, and walked alone, seeing
just one other ahead of him, and knowing of just one other behind him, and for a moment the strange thought
came to him, that the one ahead was his father, and that the one behind was the son he had never begotten.
"And now the light was so changed that he knew he must have come inside one of the gloomy and
enormous buildings, and the smell was so much stronger that it seemed almost to burn his nostrils, and the
smell and the somber new light blended together and became some other thing again, beyond his describing to
us except to say that the whole air beat with it like one immense heart and it was as if the beating of this heart
were pure violence infinitely manifolded upon violence: so that the uneasy feeling stirred in him again that it
would be wise to turn around and run out of this place just as fast and as far- as ever he could go. This he
heard, as ff he were telling it to himself at the top of his voice, but it came from somewhere so deep and so
8
dark inside him that he could only hear the shouting of it as less than a whisper, as just a hot and chilling
breath, and he scarcely heeded it, there was so much else to attend to.
"For as he walked along in this sudden and complete loneliness, he tells us, this wonderful knowledge of
being one with all his race meant less and less to him, and in its place came something still more wonderful:
he knew what it was to be himself alone, a creature separate and different from any other, who had never been
before, and would never be again. He could feel this in his whole weight as he walked, and in each foot as he
put it down and gave his weight to it and moved above it, and in every muscle as he moved, and it was a pride
which lifted him up and made him feel large, and a pleasure which pierced him through. And as he began with
such wondering delight to be aware of his own exact singleness in this world, he also began to understand (or
so he thought) just why these fences were set so very narrow, and just why he was walking all by himself. It
stole over him, he tells us, like the feeling of a slow cool wind, that he was being guided toward some still
more wonderful reward or revealing, up ahead, which he could not of course imagine, but he was sure it was
being held in store for him alone."
Just then the one ahead of him fell down with a great sigh, and was so quickly taken out of the way that
he did not even have to shift the order of his hooves as he walked on. The sudden fall and the sound of that
sigh dismayed him, though, and something within him told him that it would be wise to look up: and there he
saw Him.
"A little bridge ran crosswise above the fences. He stood on this bridge with His feet as wide apart as He
could set them. He wore spattered trousers but from the belt up He was naked and as wet as rain. Both arms
were raised high above His head and in both hands He held an enormous Hammer. With a grunt which was
hardly like the voice of a human being, and with all His strength, He brought his Hammer down into the
forehead of our friend: who, in a blinding blazing, heard from his own mouth the beginning of a gasping sigh;
then there was only darkness."
Oh, this is enough! It's enough! she cried out within herself, seeing their terrible young eyes. How could
she have been so foolish as to tell so much!
"What happened then?" she heard, in the voice of the oldest calf, and she was horrified. This shining in
their eyes: was it only excitement? no pity? no fear?
"What happened?" two others asked.
Very well, she said to herself. I've gone so far; now 1'1-; go the rest of the way. She decided not to soften it,
either. She'd teach them a lesson they wouldn't forget in a hurry.
"Very well," she was surprised to hear herself say aloud.
"How long he lay in this darkness he couldn't know, but when he began to come out of it, all he knew was
the most unspeakable dreadful pain. He was upside down and very slowly swinging and turning, for he was
hanging by the tendons of h is heels from great frightful hooks, and he has told us that the feeling was as if his
hide were being torn from him inch by inch, in one piece. And then as he became more clearly aware he found
that this was exactly what was happening. Knives would sliver and slice along both flanks, between the hide
and the living flesh; then there was a moment of most precious relief; then red hands seized his hide and there
was a jerking of the hide and a tearing of tissue which it was almost as terrible to hear as to feel turning his
whole body and the poor head at the bottom of it; and then the knives again.
“It was so far beyond anything he had ever know unnatural and amazing that he hung there through
several more such slicing and jerkings and tearings before he was fully able to take it all in: then with a
9
scream, and a supreme straining of all his strength, he tore himself from the hooks and collapsed sprawling to
the floor and, scrambling right to his feet, charged the men with the knives. For just a moment they were so
astonished and so terrified they could not move. Then they moved faster than he had ever known men could—
and so did all the other men who chanced to be in his way. He ran down a glowing floor of blood and down
endless corridors which were hung with bleeding carcasses of our kind and with bleeding fragments of
carcasses, among blood-clothed men who carried bleeding weapons and out of that vast room into the open,
and over and through one fence after another, shoving aside many an astounded stranger and shouting out
warnings as he ran, and away up the railroad toward the West.
"How he ever managed to get away, and how he ever found his way home, we can only try to guess. It's
told that he scarcely knew, himself, by the time he came to this part of his story. He was impatient with those
who interrupted him to ask about that, he had so much more important things to tell them, and by then he was
so exhausted and so far gone that he could say nothing very clear about the little he did know. But we can
realize that he must have had really tremendous strength, otherwise he couldn't have outlived the Hammer;
and that strength such as his—which we simply don't see these days, it's of the olden time—is capable of
things our own strongest and bravest would sicken to dream of. But there was something even stronger than
his strength. There was his righteous fury, which nothing could stand up against, which brought him out of
that fearful place. And there was his high and burning and heroic purpose, to keep him safe along the way, and
to guide him home, and to keep the breath of life in him until he could warn us. He did manage to tell us that
he just followed the railroad, but how he chose one among the many which branched out from that place, he
couldn't say. He told us, too, that from time to time he recognized shapes of mountains and other landmarks,
from his journey by train, all reappearing backward and with a changed look and hard to see, too (for he was
shrewd enough to travel mostly at night), but still recognizable. But that isn't enough to account for it. For he
has told us, too, that he simply knew the way; that he didn't hesitate one moment in choosing the right line of
railroad, or even think of it as choosing; and that the landmarks didn't really guide him, but just made him the
more sure of what he was already sure of; and that whenever he did encounter human beings—and during the
later stages of his journey, when he began to doubt he would live to tell us, he traveled day and night— they
never so much as moved to make him trouble, but stopped dead in their tracks, and their jaws fell open.
"And surely we can't wonder that their jaws fell open. I'm sure yours would, if you had seen him as he
arrived, and I'm very glad I wasn't there to see it, either, even though it is said to be the greatest and most
momentous day of all the days that ever were or shall be. For we have the testimony of eyewitnesses, how he
looked, and it is only too vivid, even to hear of. He came up out of the East as much staggering as galloping
(for by now he was so worn out by pain and exertion and loss of blood that he could hardly stay upright), and
his heels were so piteously torn by the hooks that his hooves doubled under more often than not, and in his
broken forehead the mark of the Hammer was like the socket for a third eye.
"He came to the meadow where the great trees made shade over the water. 'Bring them all together!' he
cried out, as soon as he could find breath. 'All!' Then he drank; and then he began to speak to those, who were
already there: for as soon as he saw himself in the water it was as clear to him as it was to those who watched
him that there was no time left to send for the others. His hide was all gone from his head and his neck and his
forelegs and his chest and most of one side and a part of the other side. It was flung backward from his naked
muscles by the wind of his running and now it lay around him in the dust like a ragged garment. They say
there is no imagining how terrible and in some way how grand the eyeball is when the skin has been taken
10
entirely from around it: his eyes, which were bare in this way, also burned with pain, and with the final
energies of his life, and with his desperate concern to warn us while he could; and he rolled his eyes wildly
while he talked, or looked piercingly from one to an- other of the listeners, interrupting himself to cry out,
'Believe me, Oh, believe me!' For it had evidently never occurred to him that he might not be believed, and
must make this last great effort, in addition to all he had gone through for us, to make himself believed; so that
he groaned with sorrow and with rage and railed at them without tact or mercy for their slowness to believe.
He had scarcely what you could call a voice left, but with this relic of a voice he shouted and bellowed and
bullied us and insulted us, in the agony of his concern. While he talked he bled from the mouth, and the
mingled blood and saliva hung from his chin like the beard of a goat.
“Some say that with his naked face, and his savage eyes, and his beard and the hide lying off his bare
shoulders like shabby clothing, he looked almost human. But others feel this is an irreverence even to think;
and others, that it is a poor compliment to pay the one who told us, at such cost to himself, the true ultimate
purpose of Man. Some did not believe he had ever come from our ranch in the first place, and of course he
was so different from us in appearance and even in his voice, and so changed from what he might ever have
looked or sounded like before, that nobody could recognize him for sure, though some were sure they did.
Others suspected that he had been sent among us with his story for some mischievous and cruel purpose, and
the fact that they could not imagine what this purpose might be, Made them, naturally, all the more suspicious.
Some believed he was actually a man, trying—and none too successfully, they said—to disguise himself as
one of us; and again the fact that they could not imagine why a man would do this, made them all the more
uneasy. There were quite a few who doubted that anyone who could get in such bad condition as he was in
was fit even to give reliable information, let alone advice, to those in good health. And some whispered while
he spoke, that he had turned lunatic; and many came to believe this. It wasn't only that his story was so
fantastic; there was good reason to wonder, many felt, whether anybody in his right mind would go to such
trouble for others. But even those who did not believe him listened intently, out of curiosity to hear so wild a
tale, and out of the respect it is only proper to show any creature who is in the last agony.
"What he told was what I have just told you. But his purpose was away beyond just the telling. When they
asked questions, no matter how curious or suspicious or idle or foolish, he leaned, toward the last, to answer
them with all the patience he could and in all the detail he could remember. He even invited them to examine
his wounded heels and the pulsing wound in his head as closely as they pleased. He even begged them to, for
he knew that before everything else, he must be believed. For unless we could believe him, wherever could
we find any reason, or enough courage, to do the hard and dreadful things he told us we must do!
"It was only these things, he cared about. Only for these, he came back."
Now clearly remembering what these things were, she felt her whole being quail. She looked at the young
ones quickly and as quickly looked away.
"While he talked," she went on, "and our ancestors listened, men came quietly among us; one of them shot
him. Whether he was shot in kindness or to silence him is an endlessly disputed question which will probably
never be settled. Whether, even, he died of the shot, or through his own great pain and weariness (for his
eyes, they say, were glazing for some time before the men came), we will never be sure. Some suppose even
that he may have died of his sorrow and his concern for us. Others feel that he had quite enough to die of
11
without that. All these things are tangled and lost in the disputes of those who love to theorize and argue.
There is no arguing about his dying words, though; they were very clearly remembered:
“Tell them! Believe!”
After a while her son asked. “What did he tell them to do?”
She avoided his eyes. “There’s a great deal of disagreement about that, too, she said after a moment. “You
see, he was so very tired.
They were silent.
“So tired,” she said, “some think that toward the end, he really must have been out of his mind.”
“Why?” asked her son.
“Because he was so tired out and so badly hurt.”
They looked at her mistrustfully.
“And because of what he told us to do.”
“What did he tell us to do?” her son asked again.
Her throat felt dry. “Just…things you can hardly bear even to think of. That’s all.”
They waited. “Well, what?” her son asked in a cold accusatory voice.
"'Each one is hin2self,' " she said shyly. " 'Not of the herd. Himself alone.' That's one."
"What else?"
" 'Obey nobody. Depend on none.'
"What else?"
She found that she was moved. " 'Break down the fences,"' she said less shyly. "Tell everybody,
everywhere.”
"Where?"
"Everywhere. You see, he thought there must be ever so many more of us than we had ever known."
They were silent.
"What else?" her son asked. "'For if even a few do not hear me, or disbelieve me, we are all betrayed.”
"Betrayed?"
“He meant doing as men want us to. Not for ourselves, or the good of each other.”
They were puzzled.
“Because, you see, he felt that was no other way.” Again her voice altered: “’ All who are put on the range
are put onto trains. All who are put onto trains meet the Man With The Hammer. All who stay home are kept
there to breed others to go onto the range, an so betray themselves and their kind and their children forever.
“’We are brought into this life only to be victims; and there is no other way for us unless we save
ourselves.’”
Still they were puzzled, she saw; and no wonder, poor things. But now the ancient lines rang in her memory,
terrible and brave. They made her somehow proud. She began to want to say them.
“’Never be taken,’” she said. “’Never be driven. Let those who can, kill Man. Let those who cannot, avoid
him.’”
She looked around at them.
12
“What else?” her son asked, and in his voice there was a rising valor.
She looked straight into his eyes. “’Kill the yearlings,’” she said very gently. “’Kill the caves.’”
She saw the valor leave his eyes.
“Kill us?”
She nodded, “’So long as Man holds dominion over us,’” she said. And in dread and amazement she heard
herself add, “’ Bear no young.’”
With this they all looked at her at once in such a way that she loved her child, and all these others, as never
before; and there dilated within her such a sorrowful and marveling grandeur that for a moment she was nothing
except her own inward whisper. “Why, I am one alone. And of the herd too. Both at once. All one.”
He son’s voice brought her back: “Did they do what he told them to do?”
The oldest one scoffed, "Would we be here, if they had?"
"They say some did, the mother replied. "Some tried. Not all."
"What did the men do to them?" another asked.
"I don't know," she said. "It was such a very long time ago."
"Do you believe it?" asked the oldest calf.
"There are some who believe it," she said.
"Do you?"
"I'm told that far back in the wildest corners of the range there are some of us, mostly very, very old ones,
who have never been taken. It's said that they meet every so often to talk and just to think together about the
heroism and the terror of two sublime Beings, The One Who Came Back, and The Man With The Hammer.
Even here at home, some of the old ones, and some of us who are just
old fashioned, believe it, or parts of it anyway. I know there are some who say that a hollow at the center of the
forehead—a sort of shadow of the Hammer's blow—is a sign of very special ability. And I remember how
Great-grandmother used to sing an old, pious song, let's see now, yes, 'Be not like dumb-driven cattle, be a hero
in the strife.' But there aren't many. Not any more."
"Do you believe it?" the oldest calf insisted; and now she was touched to realize that every one of them,
from 'the oldest to the youngest, needed very badly to be sure about that.
"Of course not, silly," she said; and all at once she was overcome by a most curious shyness, for it
occurred to her that in the course of time, this young thing might be bred to her. "It's just an old, old legend."
With a tender little laugh she added, lightly, "We use it to frighten children, with."
By now the light was long on the plain and the herd was only a fume of gold near the horizon. Behind it,
dung steamed, and dust sank gently to the shattered ground. She looked far away for a moment, wondering.
Something - it was like a forgotten word on the tip of the tongue. She felt the sudden chill of the late afternoon
and she wondered what she had been wondering about. "Come, children," she said briskly, “it’s high time for
supper.” And she turned away; they followed.
The trouble was, her son was thinking, you could never trust her. If she said a thing was so, she was
probably just trying to get her way with you. If she said a thing wasn’t so, it probably was so. But you never
could be sure. Not without seeing for yourself. I’m going to go, he told himself; I don’t care what she wants.
And if it isn’t so, why then I’ll find out what is so. And if what she told was true, why then I’ll know ahead of
time and the one I will charge is The Man With The Hammer. I’ll put Him and His Hammer out of the way
forever, and that will make me an even better hero than The One Who Came Back.
13
So, when his mother glanced at him in concern, not quite daring to ask her question, he gave her his most
docile smile, and snuggled his head against her, and she was comforted.
The littlest and youngest of them was doing double skips in his efforts to keep up with her. Now that he
wouldn’t be interrupting her, and none of the big ones would hear and make fun of him, he shyly whispered his
question, so warmly moistly ticklish that she felt as if he were licking her ear.
"What is it, darling?" she asked, bending down.
"What's a train?"
A Famous Man
The collected works of James
Agee.
By David Denby
In July of 1936, James Agee, a
writer for Fortune and an avid Greenwich Village partygoer, drinker, and
talker, found himself in the house of a taciturn Alabama family he called the
Gudgers. Henry Luce’s business magazine was then in its early, socially
concerned phase, and Agee, along with the photographer Walker Evans, had been
sent to the South to investigate the situation of tenant cotton farmers—the
sort of subject that was common for Fortune during the Depression. As Agee
reconstructed the moment afterward, in the report that became not a magazine
article but a daunting four-hundred-page prose epic, “Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men” (with Evans’s extraordinary photographs preceding the text), he was
writing late on a summer night, by the light of a coal-oil lamp, in a front
bedroom vacated for his use, while the seven members of the Gudger family were
asleep in the next room. He was feeling calm—confident of his ability, aided by
the “dry, silent, and famished” little flame, to take stock of the life around
him. He hadn’t always felt that way. From the beginning, he had denigrated the
reporting project as a fraud and a betrayal. In the book’s first pages, a
furious self-inquiry builds up. Agee was not wealthy, but he was privileged, an
emissary from a powerful organization and therefore authorized to “pry
intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of
human beings.” For what purpose did he pry? For money? For glory? In the name
of “honest journalism”? After all, he wasn’t going to do the tenant farmers any
good. A literary man in love with Joyce, Faulkner, and Céline, he had no
intention of writing the kind of responsible report, with statistics and
graphs, that might have spurred legislative action. Nor was he a Marxist,
hoping to inflame protest meetings and rallies. The moral quandary of liberal
journalism has never been stated with greater clarity or anguish.
Agee and Evans settled on two
more families, whom Agee called the Rickettses and the Woodses, and worked and
stayed with them for three weeks. The families owned virtually nothing—at best,
a couple of mules and a few farming implements—and they were required to give
their landlords half of their crops and a quarter or more of the earnings from
their own half. They lived without electricity or running water. Having worked
since they were children, they were hardened and shrewd, perhaps, but
unlettered and inarticulate. For Agee, however, the point was not that these
families suffered from atrocious social conditions. The point was that they
existed. In an age concerned largely with the “masses,” Agee was impressed by
the notion that other human beings idiosyncratically are what they are, in
every ornery fibre. Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness—in almost every way, the
farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and
as capable of pleasure and misery as he. A young couple sitting on a porch and
staring at Agee had in their eyes “so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred,
and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves,
and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of
beatitude.” Agee, born an Episcopalian, and deeply religious as a child, was no
longer an orthodox believer. But he had a consciousness of the sacred in people
and in ordinary objects that believers associate with God’s immanence. He
loved, and took literally, Blake’s proclamation “Everything that lives is
holy.”
It’s an idea that, as a practical
mat-ter, most of us would find hard to sustain. But it imposed devastating,
almost comically savage responsibilities on this inordinately ambitious young
man (he was twenty-six at the time). Agee wanted to make a connection with the
families, and to be liked by them in return, but he didn’t want to swamp the
farmers with sympathy—their pride wouldn’t endure it. Try as he might, he could
not resolve the disparity between the sullenness of his subjects and his own
ravenous and unending sensibility. All that he could do was record. In the room
where the Gudgers slept, there was: **{: .break one} ** George’s red body,
already a little squat with the burden of thirty years, knotted like oakwood,
in its clean white cotton summer union suit that it sleeps in; and his wife’s
beside him, Annie Mae’s, slender, and sharpened through with bone that ten
years past must have had such beauty, and is now veined at the breast, and the
skin of the breast translucent, delicately shriveled, and blue . . . and the
tough little body of Junior, hardskinned and gritty, the feet crusted with
sores; and the milky and strengthless littler body of Burt whose veins are so
bright in his temples. **
**{: .break one} ** The house is
rudimentary as a child’s drawing, and of a bareness, cleanness, and sobriety
which only Doric architecture, so far as I know, can hope to approach: this
exact symmetry is sprung silently and subtly, here and there, one corner of the
house a little off vertical, a course of weather-boarding failing the
horizontal between parallels, a window frame not quite square, by lack of skill
and by weight and weakness of timber and time; and these slight failures, their
tensions sprung against centers and opposals of such rigid and earnest
exactitude, set up intensities of relationship far more powerful than full
symmetry, or studied dissymmetry, or use of relief or ornament, can ever be. **
Then, burrowing under the house,
he finds, among many other things, “the white tin eyelet of a summer shoe; and
thinly scattered, the desiccated and the still soft excrement of hens.”
The families were certainly
seen—the re-creation of their furniture, their clothes, food, work, and speech,
their smells, their scraps and broken belongings, their momentary joy when they
start picking the cotton (until the pain sets in), their outlying woods and
springs goes on for pages. In this prose, with its tangled and then flowing
lyricism, its indefatigable enumerations and Biblical amplifications, one can
hear the influence of Whitman’s exultant catalogues and Joyce’s vibrant
harmonies of daily life. In journalism, however, there is no earlier version of
it that I’m aware of, and no later equivalent, either—not until you get to
Mailer’s polyphonic re-creation of the hippie-activist battalions in the 1967
“Armies of the Night.” In the Library of America’s recent two-volume selection
of Agee’s writing ($35 and $40), edited by Michael Sragow, the film critic of the
Baltimore Sun, “Famous Men” stands out as Agee’s major achievement, towering
over the justly beloved film criticism and the fine, posthumously published
novel “A Death in the Family.” Yet “Famous Men” is no easier to read now than
it was sixty-five years ago. (It was finally published in 1941, and sold six
hundred copies.) At first glance, certainly, it smacks of such period artifacts
as documentary hymns to rural electrification and W.P.A. canvases of
hammer-swinging workers—the oatmeal-bland left sentimentality that has now
fallen into the category of historical kitsch. Confusingly organized,
ill-mannered, at times grandiloquent and stargazingly wide-eyed, it’s one of
those books which many people read parts of when they were in school but never
got around to finishing. Its burdened ethical tone makes readers feel vaguely
guilty, a terrible fate for any piece of writing. Yet “Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men” is a book of wonders—an untamable American classic in the same line as
“Leaves of Grass” and “Moby-Dick,” a book whose failures of measure and common
sense are necessary to its peculiar kind of success.
“Agee is a genius—our only
genius.” So spoke “a woman writer of decided opinions,” F. W. Dupee, the
Columbia English professor and critic, recalled in an appreciation of Agee
written in 1957, two years after the writer’s death. The opinionated lady was
almost certainly Mary McCarthy, no easy dispenser of laurels. But tributes to
Agee’s talents had been commonplace since he was a boy. Born into a
middle-class family in Knoxville in 1909, he was an erratic student but a much
appreciated poet and fiction writer at St. Andrew’s school, near Sewanee, at
Phillips Exeter Academy, and then at Harvard, where he edited the literary
magazine, T__he Advocate. Agee’s stepfather paid his tuition and sent him a
check now and then, but at Harvard, then still a place for the wealthy and the
wellborn, he was one of the poorer boys. Agee was grateful when his friend Dwight
Macdonald, a writer at Fortune, got him a job there, in 1932, and he quickly
joined the literary-journalistic life of New York, living modestly in walkup
apartments in the Village and in Brooklyn, and in small houses in New Jersey,
for most of the rest of his life. At Time Inc., he became famous for his
writing, his drinking, his good and bad temper, and for such bits of heroic
foolishness as listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in his office at peak
volume, with his ear pressed against the phonograph’s speaker. He became a book
reviewer at Time in 1939, and then, in late 1941, moved over to the movie
section; the following year, he took the film critic’s job at The Nation as
well. He wrote for both magazines until 1948, and then worked as a screenwriter—for
John Huston on “The African Queen” (1951) and for Charles Laughton on “The
Night of the Hunter” (1955), although Laughton heavily revised that screenplay.
He composed the narration for documentary films and wrote for CBS’s “Omnibus,”
the class-act TV show of the early fifties. He was working on many projects,
literary and cinematic, when he died, in 1955, of a heart attack, in a New York
City taxi. He was forty-five years old.
In the decades after his death,
appreciations like Dupee’s became a flourishing literary genre. Macdonald wrote
a harshly loving portrait in this magazine, in 1957; the poet and translator
Robert Fitzgerald, a colleague and friend of Agee’s at Time, wrote a complex
but entirely loving one in 1969. Walker Evans, in an edition of “Famous Men”
issued in 1960, and, much later, Alfred Kazin, in his memoir “New York Jew,”
composed emotionally resonant sketches, and there were many others. All these
portraits might be called elegies for a fallen Adonis. They speak of physical
beauty and lavish gifts—of Agee’s large hands shaping the air as he talked, of
his ardor and generosity, of the inexhaustible vivacity of his mind. And they
mourn the waste of those gifts, the books conceived of and then dissipated in
bouts of drinking and conversation that lasted until dawn. Macdonald complains
of “the worst set of work habits in the Village,” a judgment that was
corroborated by Laurence Bergreen in his biography of Agee, which came out in
1984. Macdonald sums up: “I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly
gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major
work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it.” A later sympathetic critic—Clive
James, writing in 1972—lamented “the absence of that sequence of novels which might
have recollected his life—a sequence for the writing of which he had
qualifications rivalling Proust’s.”
In both the loving and the hostile
portraits, Agee has all too easily been amalgamated into the fable of the Young
Man Who Had It All and Threw It Away. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is
Thomas Wolfe, there is, concurrently with Agee, the carousing and fornicating
Welshman Dylan Thomas—men who drank too much and died too young. But who knows
if these writers could have accomplished any more than what they did
accomplish? Or if their bad habits didn’t, in some way, ease their torments and
make the early good work possible? Why not concentrate on what the writer did
rather than on what he failed to do? Reading Bergreen, with his account of
Agee’s alternating states of euphoria and despair, one can see the outlines of
what a later age would call a manic-depressive temperament, medicated in a way
then considered appropriate for a man of Agee’s background—with cigarettes,
alcohol, and sex. Since Agee successfully dramatized euphoria and despair in
his best work, in the form of idealizing hope and lacerating anger, one could
say that his genius was inseparable from his neuroses, and let it go at that.
In any case, the ground of Agee’s
supposed martyrdom now looks like the springboard of his originality and
accomplishment. He would very likely never have gone to Alabama if Fortune
hadn’t sent him there, and what he wrote, in the event, turned into a de-facto
rejection of the kind of sober social reporting that the magazine’s
writers—Agee among them (Sragow includes a few examples)—were then doing. Time
Inc. provided a similar inadvertent lift for the film-review work. As an
anonymous movie critic at Time (articles in the magazine were then unsigned),
Agee did a terrific job summarizing plots and themes, grade-sheeting
performances, highlighting directorial touches. He had an easy way with actors
and actresses, and wrote sprightly, fact-filled profiles of Ingrid Bergman and
Gregory Peck. He worked with enormous skill, displaying flashes of mischief and
eloquence that took the columns out of the ordinary.
What those of us who know Agee’s
criticism almost by heart read over and over, however, is the reviews that
appeared in The Nation. Some of them are no more than a few sentences or a
phrase. (A movie called “You Were Meant for Me” was reviewed with the words
“That’s what you think.”) In many other pieces, Agee, having done the basics in
Time, would offer just a line or two of plot or setting, and then take off,
using his space to evoke the movie physically. (In “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a
mother and four daughters, “all in festal, cake-frosting white, stroll across
their lawn in spring sunlight, so properly photographed that the dresses all
but become halations.”) He would describe a movie as a revelation of the
American soul, or comment on some issue of dramatic form, or vex himself over
the problem of giving reality its due—his old obsession from “Famous Men,” now
transferred, paradoxically, to a photographic medium attracted to illusion. In
his six years on the job, he was roused by the moral daring of Chaplin’s
“Monsieur Verdoux,” by Jean Vigo’s poetic masterpieces, by Carl Dreyer’s
gravity, and by Laurence Olivier’s soaring rhetoric and flights of arrows in
“Henry V.” But he saved some of his most detailed concern and praise for such
humble realist forms as newsreels and war documentaries (“With the Marines at
Tarawa,” John Huston’s “Battle of San Pietro,” and so on). He believed that the
mere photographic record of something, skillfully shot, selected, and arranged,
could be tantamount to the greatest art. The Nation film criticism was a
continuation of the scrupulous and highly moralized attentiveness of “Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men.”
Having acquitted himself with
adroit professionalism at Time, Agee was free to unleash his most impassioned
eloquence and scorn in the Nation pieces. In Time, reviewing “Bathing Beauty,”
one of the ineffable water-tank musicals that Esther Williams made at M-G-M,
Agee ends with the mild observation that Williams, “wet and peeled . . .
suggests a porpoise amused by its own sex appeal.” In The Nation, however, he
concludes his review: **{: .break one} ** I could not resist the wish that
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had topped its aquatic climax—a huge pool full of girls,
fountains, and spouts of flame—by suddenly draining the tank and ending the
show with the entire company writhing like goldfish on a rug. But M-G-M
resisted it. **
At The Nation, Agee invented the
moral rhetoric of film reviewing. At risk was the “grandest prospect for a
major popular art since Shakespeare’s time.” The stage on which this prospect
was tested was an industry in which a few “dangerous” individuals with
“murderous creative passion” struggled against mediocrity and routine, and
often lost. Agee created the myth that almost every critic since his day has
drawn on—that the audience, collectively, was pure, and that Hollywood, except
for a few people, was timid or corrupt. His friend and rival the critic Manny
Farber later complained that Agee, “borrowing words from God, decided whether
the latest Hollywood sexpot, in ‘Blanche of the Evergreens,’ was truthful,
human, selfless, decent, noble, pure, honorable, really good, or simply
deceitful, a cheat, unclean, and without love or dignity,” and Pauline Kael,
while acknowledging Agee’s powers as a critic, complained of his “excessive
virtue,” which, she said, “may have been his worst critical vice.” But Agee’s
virtue was shot through with dissidence, foul temper, and comedy. (He ended a
grimly knowing review of Billy Wilder’s alcoholism drama, “The Lost Weekend,”
with the following words: “I undershtand that liquor interesh: innerish:
intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.”) Farber and Kael
missed something in Agee that was foreign to their own temperaments—the
intricate and unending play of piety and blasphemy, the twin needs of an essentially
religious man to revere and to let loose. One can only blink in wonder at the
profanity that Agee got away with, artfully, as in his review of the
excruciating “Carnegie Hall,” in which, he noted, the conductor Leopold
Stokowski, “shot from the floor . . . seems to be undergoing for the public
benefit an experience, while conducting a portion of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth
Symphony, which men of coarser clay wish exclusively on women, or perhaps on
albums of prefabricated trade-union songs.”
The mixture of piety and
blasphemy is what makes Agee’s fiction so moving, for here is a Christian
author of self-punishing temperament who, at the same time, was awed by
creation and could not allow a single aspect of sensuous experience to go
unadmired—which meant, necessarily, loving what was raw and degraded as much as
what was seemly and fine. In “The Morning Watch,” an autobiographical novella
of 1951, a twelve-year-old boarding-school boy, asleep in the early morning of
Good Friday, dreams that he is Jesus about to be betrayed by his disciples. He
awakes, and hears not Peter and Judas but sleepy boys cursing all around him.
He goes to chapel and there, on his knees, relives the previous months of
religious crisis, during which he tormented himself over masturbation, only to
realize that, at that moment, his back and thighs hurting as he kneels, he is
committing the sin of imitating Jesus’ suffering. He leaves chapel with his
friends and, as they go skinny-dipping at dawn, steals a look at their genitals;
then, at the side of the pond, he kills a snake that may be poisonous and feeds
it to the school’s hogs. The mood swings back and forth between guilty devotion
to Jesus and excited apprehension of the physical world. As the school enters
Easter weekend, and Christ’s resurrection approaches, the boy eases into his
sexual future.
In Agee’s autobiographical novel
“A Death in the Family,” which he was working on when he died, and which was
published in 1957, he goes back further into his youth, to when he was six, in
Knoxville, and his young father was killed in a freak automobile accident. The
tense alternation of reverence and self-assertion is similar to the rhythm of
“The Morning Watch.” The family, which has heard the news of the death, gathers
and talks into the night with the strange exhilaration that accompanies
catastrophe. A debate forms between the religious, who see the death as having
a mysterious purpose that God will not divulge, and the skeptics, who think
that it happened by chance, and is without meaning. The boy, Rufus (Agee’s
childhood name), is finally told of the accident, and, to our surprise, feels
very little except a sense of his own new importance. “My daddy got killed,” he
tells strangers and schoolmates on the street. Later, shown the corpse in a
funeral parlor, he “looked towards his father’s face and, seeing the
blue-dented chin thrust upward, and the way the flesh was sunken behind the
bones of the jaw, first recognized in its specific weight the word, dead.” For
long stretches, as Agee evokes first the comforts of childhood and then its
loneliness and bewilderment, the novel reaches a pitch of tenderness that comes
within hailing distance of what Joyce achieved in the early pages of “A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
Agee’s lyrical gift set him off
from other writers of liberal or radical conviction of the day. At almost
exactly the same time that he and Walker Evans were in Alabama, George Orwell
was exploring living conditions in coal-mining towns in the North of England,
and it’s instructive to compare Orwell’s remarkable report, “The Road to Wigan
Pier,” with “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Orwell boarded for a while in a
little house that took in miners:
**{: .break one} ** The place was
beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile
food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into
some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like
blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances. **
In “Famous Men,” Agee is not a
political writer but a poetic and metaphysical writer, who wanted to honor
reality, and also to abolish it. There is a trap built into his kind of intense
receptivity. That a person or a thing is itself and nothing else, and is
therefore worthy of notice and celebration, may be the beginning of morality,
but it’s also the beginning of tragedy. As Agee sits on the porch or alone in a
room in one of the houses, he tries to take in, all at once, everything that
the family is, everything that exists in the house—for instance, Mrs.
Ricketts’s dress, which is shaped “like a straight-sided bell, with a little
hole at the top for the head to stick through, the cloth slit from the neck to
below the breasts and held together if I remember rightly with a small snarl of
shoelace.” He stares at a pair of coarsely sewn and nailed work boots, or at a
tattered doll, or at the worn-through oil cloth on an old table, and is amazed
at how much life went into the making and use of that table, amazed by how much
life is going on in similar households, unnoticed, unrecorded. The mood is one
of Wordsworthian awe and submission, though Agee extended his sympathies to
objects—even mass-produced, industrial products—as well as to nature. At the
same time, however, he is stunned by how limited the families are. Being so
vividly and absolutely themselves, they are unable to be so many other things,
and some of the angriest, most eloquent pages of the book are devoted to the
deformations wrought on the children by early work and poor schooling. They
have been cheated out of the most elementary ways of teaching themselves—and
therefore cheated out of pleasure. When they grow up, and become similar to
that disdainful couple Agee encountered on a porch, the fierceness of their
pride will be created as much by ignorance as by anger. The rhapsodist of
things as they are is necessarily caught in a position of infinite regret. That
is why the book, for all its celebratory tone, never falls into bathos. No one
could confuse the tenant farmers’ days with a complete mastering of life.
Agee could do nothing to help the
farmers, but at least by making a candid account of his relations with them he
could refuse to join their betrayers. After a great many nervous and defiant
disclaimers and proclamations, he gets down to business. Copious sections on
the farmers’ shelter, work, clothing, and education are interrupted, however,
by accounts of his shy attempts to make friends and by speculation on the
nature of observation and subjectivity, which anticipates many of the
theoretical inquiries of the nineteen-eighties. That wasn’t the only way Agee
leaped forward to the future of writing; after about three hundred pages, he
breaks into feverish personal narrative. He hits the road in a car, and
experiences the terrible heat of a small Southern town in the summer. He
wanders around lusting after a whore, almost gets into a fight with some
snickering boys at a lunch counter, and, in general, goes from caring about
everything to caring about nothing. In these passages, he anticipates the
strategies of selfacknowledgment that became commonplace thirty years later in
the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Mailer: the writer is not some impersonal
conveyor of data but a fallible instrument of experience, including his own.
Settling down again at the Gudgers’, he takes off his clothes and attempts to
sleep:
**{: .break one} ** The pillow
was hard, thin, and noisy, and smelled as of acid and new blood; the pillowcase
seemed to crawl at my cheek. I touched it with my lips; it felt a little as if
it would thaw like spun candy. There was an odor something like that of old
moist stacks of newspaper. I tried to imagine intercourse in this bed; I
managed to imagine it fairly well. I began to feel sharp little piercings and
crawlings all along the surface of my body. I was not surprised; I had heard
that pine is full of them anyhow. **
He walks out of the house naked,
stares at the sky, goes back in, covers himself hand and foot against the
bedbugs, and tries again. He can’t sleep, but knows a rare moment of
happiness—the happiness of justification. “My senses were taking in nothing but
a deep-night, unmeditatable consciousness of a world which was newly touched
and beautiful to me, and I must admit that even in the vermin there was a
certain amount of pleasure: and that, exhausted though I now was, it was the
eagerness of my senses quite as fully as the bugs and the itching which made it
impossible for me to sleep.” And there, in his uneasy bed, the Gudgers, as they
rose for another day of backbreaking labor, found him—their recording angel,
ready to observe and write again. ♦
Published in the print edition of
the January 9, 2006, issue.
David Denby has been a staff
writer and a film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.Read more »