In Praise of Famous Men
There a couple of new biographies of James Agee out and about. John Leonard’s essay in the Sunday NYT focused on Agee’s damaged life and long term working relationship with periodicals owned by Henry Luce. Leonard includes some sordid details about failed marriages, days as a Hollywood hack, shots at the man’s poetry and status as inveterate smoker.
Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was released in 1941. I read it early in life, late teens, and thought it was an impressive piece of work. I was so very wrong, according to Leonard, who seems to enjoy reminding us how dissolute a life Agee scraped out while smoking and drinking up a storm. With the exception of his film critiques, Leonard keeps Agee propped up against the ropes in order to beat the man senseless with a series of jabs. Did I mention that Agee smoked?
I think it’s possible for readers to appreciate the works of dissolute people without mimicking their private behavior, without abandoning their value system for a Hollywood Babylon lost weekend that stretches into years. Leonard hones in on Agee’s review of Lost Weekend, a film released in the late Forties that is as brutal a look at alcholism as the more modern Leaving Las Vegas. Leonard sneers at Agee’s take on the film, his ability to analyze an alcholic’s ferocious appetite for destruction. Leonard seems to think that Agee should have seen enough in black and white for a Holywood moment of crystalline epiphany, cast the bottle aside and ridden into the sunset, twelve stepping his way to freedom.
If Leonard wanted to mourn the waste of Agee’s life, his lost potential, his squandered talent, that would have cast the essay in a different light. Leonard’s essay adds to the body of work devoted to drinking and writing, the litany of fallen idols a mile long. Agee died in 1955 at the age of 45, having lived longer than Dylan Thomas, Jack London, or F.Scott Fitzgerald, to name a few. Thomas did a lot of his drinking in New York, at the White Horse on Hudson Street, a place that is still open for business the last time I looked. Pete Hamill wrote eloquently on the subject of his own battle with booze in A Drinking Life.
Leonard’s essay is written from the current perspective; one that suggests that armed with warnings from the Surgeon General, artists and writers of today can look down their noses at the ignorant denizens of a by-gone age. The writer’s job is to see “the boys of summer in their ruin.” Men like Agee, Thomas, and Hamill did that, suffering the consequences of insights both hard earned and frightening.