Skinny Dipping with James Agee

Everything I didn't learn about literature from my Southern Lit teacher

(St. Andrew’s Lake, Sewanee, Tennessee, 2016).

Ever since I was sixteen, and attended tiny St. Andrew’s School, nestled in the mountains of Tennessee, one of the same schools James Agee attended (along with Exeter and Harvard), I’ve seen him as a kind of role model, both for good and ill. My role models have always looked nothing like me and have always tempted me with their wicked ways, both linguistically and temperamentally. In grad school (I first wrote “grand” school), when I was a “gradual student,” (to quote John Irving), I identified with my teacher and sometime downstairs neighbor, Barry Hannah. In high school, it was James Agee, in whose eponymous library on the campus of St. Andrew’s you could find me studying under the not-so-watchful eye of the librarian, Mrs. Gooch. Unlike most of my fellow St. Andrewsians, I lived for study hall, and I immersed myself in southern literature full of madness and disgrace. As in the children’s story in which an alligator is raised by ducks and thinks he’s a duck too, I disregarded the fact that my background had little in common with possessed southerners like Hannah and Agee.

I had something in common with Agee, besides going to St. Andrew’s and sitting through Anglican chapel services. Agee and I had both lost our fathers when we were young, his when he was six and mine when I was seven. But that wasn’t what forged my connection with him. By the time I graduated from St. Andrew’s, I had read almost nothing of James Agee’s work. Why would a school that prided itself in forging young Jim’s character overlook his writing? I wondered. The only Agee texts that were pushed on me—I can’t speak for other St. Andrewsians of the time—were the letters of James Agee to Father Flye, a former teacher at St. Andrew’s who lived past one hundred to Agee’s forty-five, dead of a heart attack in Manhattan in the back seat of a cab on his way to see a doctor. Not that Agee’s work was discouraged at St. Andrew’s—I remember seeing Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family on the shelves of the library. I might have even picked it up. I might have even stolen it to read later.

But Agee wasn’t really southern literature as defined by St. Andrew’s at the time. When I took Mr. Norton’s Southern Literature class, we read four Faulkner novels. Couldn’t one of Agee’s books have supplanted a Faulkner novel? After all, one of Agee’s works, The Morning Watch, took place at St. Andrew’s, for heaven’s sake, but Mr. Norton, whose great-grandfather had had two horses shot from under him when he was defending against the Northern Aggressors, didn’t seem to care for any Black writers either. He decidedly preferred the old South to the new, even assigning us a book about “Quadroons and Octaroons,” The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, written by George Washington Cable in 1880. For Mr. Norton, Southern Literature meant White Literature, not that this was ever explicitly stated. It didn’t need stating. I don’t think he particularly considered a Yankee Jew as the ideal student for his class either. Too late now for me to turn in a negative teacher evaluation for Mr. Norton—not that we were ever asked to fill out such things, but The Grandissimes I could have lived without. Agee, on the other hand . . . I’m not sure if it would have helped me or hurt me to read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at the age of sixteen. It probably would have confounded and devastated and frustrated and sometimes bored me as it has since I first discovered it years later.

We’re all ruins in the making, and that’s what I love so much about Agee, that he was a ruin on the page. When he ventured in 1936 with Walker Evans down to Alabama for Henry Luce’s Fortune Magazine, he met three white tenant farm families, forming a kind of ruinous circle of human enterprise and squalor that he found himself in for several weeks, and that he tried, in vain (he thought), to capture these people in his writing on the page. He wrote:

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odor, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust the majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing.

In an introduction to the work of Argentine novelist Macedonio Fernandez, novelist Adam Thirlwell writes that it’s long been a wish of the avant-garde “to make a novel which is in fact a reality: that art only has a value in so far as it stops being art.” I’m not sure that I’d classify Agee as avant-garde, but I believe this is what he was after, this impossible desire to give us not an ordinary book but a body. Walker Evans called Agee’s delirious and doomed attempt to accomplish this, “night writing,” a work that could only be written by a twenty-seven-year-old who takes himself seriously to the point of pomposity. Still, I love all the flaws of this great ruin of a book. In it, I see all our failures to capture what we want to capture, yours and mine. I’ve passed the time when I could conceivably write such a majestic failure. I’m out of “grand” school though still a “gradual student,” which means my failures have become increasingly fatal, like a slow carbon monoxide leak.

Had Mr. Norton made us read James Agee, I’m not sure how I would have reacted, but I would have reacted. The Grandissimes still sits in me, undigestible.

I only truly discovered Agee after high school when I first read his gorgeous evocation of place, “Knoxville, Summer 1915,” followed by A Death in the Family, the copy I stole when Mrs. Gooch wasn’t looking, and The Morning Watch. But first, I acted out The Morning Watch. Although I wasn’t taught Agee’s work, I was taught some good old-fashioned southern self-destructiveness at St. Andrew’s: a little drunkenness, a little weed, a lot of pining for sex, and even more conflict about religion. Jew or not, I had to participate in the high Anglican rituals of the campus along with all the other Agee wannabes. All students were required on the eve of Easter Sunday to participate in “Morning Watch,” a kind of relay prayer in which we were required to pray alone to Jesus in the chapel for fifteen minutes before being relieved by another student. My watch came at 3:00 a.m (an hour before Agee’s slot in his day). This was punishment, I’m sure, for being a Jew from New York City, punishment for getting the award from Mr. Norton for best student in his Southern Literature class (“It pains me to give you this award, Mr. Hemley,” he told me when I went to receive it on the St. Andrew’s stage that May). What was I supposed to say to Jesus? Agee suffered spiritual torment during his own stint with Jesus during Morning Watch. For me, there was only resentment at having been awakened so early for something I didn’t believe in. But there came a reward. One of the girls I had a crush on—none of the girls were crush-exempted, actually—suggested that we do what the main characters in The Morning Watch did in Agee’s book: ride our bikes out to the lake and go skinny-dipping. She didn’t have to ask twice. Half a dozen of us Agee heathens rode our bikes out to the lake and luxuriated in the warmth and freedom of being sixteen and not on the downhill slide. And from that moment, throwing off my clothes, when I hit the water, skinny bones and all, that’s the time I mark as when I first understood something about literature.