Richard's Ordeal

THE MORNING WATCH (120 pp.)--James Agee--Houghton M/ffl/n ($2.25).

For twelve-year-old Richard, wakening in the dormitory of his Anglo-Catholic church school in the Tennessee hills, the day had begun with a soul-shaming failure. He had vowed to stay awake all night to share somehow Christ's agony, but before midnight he had fallen asleep. Now, as Father Whitman went from cot to cot waking the boys chosen for the next Good Friday watch, it was nearly 4 a.m., and Richard was suffused with the knowledge of his Lord's ordeal.

"O God, he silently prayed, in solemn and festal exaltation: make me to know Thy suffering this day. O make me to know Thy dear Son's suffering this day."

Tincture of Pride. In The Morning Watch, Writer James Agee has come close to a small triumph; he has pierced the protective shell of a boy's personality and exposed the religious exaltation of the boy without once falling into bathos. During the watch in the chapel, Richard's deepest thoughts and feelings are disturbed by weak flesh and childish imaginings: he is kneeling, and his knees and back hurt, disturbing the purity of his devotions; he remembers his silly effort at self-mortification through eating worms; he imagines himself upon the cross and hearing the school's best athlete whisper, "Jesus that kid's got guts." And dismayed because every other thought seems tinctured with pride, he fervently prays: "O God forgive me! forgive me if you can stand to!"

After the watch, Richard and two others play hooky and head for a swim. The shift from the atmosphere of the chapel to the outdoor freshness of a spring morning is achieved in descriptive language of unusual beauty: "Everywhere among the retreating trees strayed sober clouds of evergreen and mild clouds of blossom and the dreaming laurels, and everywhere, as deep into the stunned woods as they could see, layer above unwavering layer, the young leaves led like open shale; while, against their walking, apostolically, the trees turned." The swim itself and the boyish killing of a snake afterwards are described in flashing language. But it is just here that Author Agee falters, clothing the action with symbols for which he furnishes no clear keys. As Richard and the others march back to school to face their punishment for playing hooky, Agee's final meaning lags somewhere behind, among the Freudian trees.

Images of Death. Yet throughout The Morning Watch, Author Agee has achieved many things with a fine economy of language: an adolescent's mysticism, sliced through with normal childishness; a shy boy's painful awareness of his own inadequacy among blustering, sometimes grossly obscene classmates; the confused images of the Lord's death and the death of Richard's own father.

All of this is handled with great sympathy and written as few living U.S. writers can write. In his first book of fiction, Author Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) has written prose that arouses the emotional responses of first-rate poetry.

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