Tender Realist

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (339 pp.) --James Agee--McDowell, Obolensky ($3.95).

This posthumous novel draws an elegiac picture of an American scene that vanished scarcely a generation ago but already seems as remote as Eden. The story opens in Knoxville. Tenn. as the city dreams through a summer evening filled with the cry of locusts, an evening as calm as the shirtsleeved men watering their lawns in the gentle half-light. A streetcar makes its metallic groan on a curve and disappears trailing sparks like blue fireflies; chanting children play in the circling glow of a lamppost. And when it grows dark, there are more quiet stars in the sky than there will ever be again.

This is the world of Jay and Mary Follet, and of their two small children, Rufus and Catherine. A few streets away live uncles and cousins and grandparents. A few miles out in the country is another solid cluster of relatives, and up in the timeless hills survive even more ancient progenitors. Safe, warm, sweet almost to the point of cloying, this is a world nourished on love, protected by kindness, impervious to small failures or vaulting ambition. It is shattered by the sudden, meaningless death of Jay Follet in an auto accident.

Who Is God? There is an almost antlike scurrying to repair this break in the ordered rhythms of life. Friends and relations bring the offerings of their affection and experience; widowed Mary Follet, though splintering within, turns uncomplaining to her God; her agnostic father rages as man always has against the working of what seems blind chance.

In this symphonic reconstruction of time past, there is a soloist: young Rufus Follet, who plays a lighthearted, vagrant air in counterpoint to the heavier orchestration. Death, to Rufus, is scarcely more complex than the other riddles flung at him each waking day--the nagging puzzle of why he should not speak about the black color of a Negro maid's skin; or why the older boys on their way to school solemnly ask his name and then go into fits of inexplicable laughter; or why a woman will suddenly become so very fat; or who is God. The boy's sense of loss is inextricably mixed with a sense of exhilaration, for "on this day everybody would treat him well, and even look up to him, for something had happened to him today which had not happened to any other boy in school, any other boy in town."

Great Promise. Just as for Jay Follet. death came suddenly in 1955 for Author James Agee, 45. Born in Knoxville, a graduate of Harvard, Agee spent 16 years as a writer on FORTUNE and TIME, and during the last years of his life worked on the scenarios for such movies as The African Queen, The Quiet One, Face to Face (in which he also appeared in a bit part). With each of his few books--Permit Me Voyage (1934), a collection of poems published when Agee was scarcely out of college; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an angry Depression report on sharecroppers in the Deep South; The Morning Watch (TIME, April 23, 1951), his moving first novel--critics had been waiting the fulfillment of Agee's great promise. This book, finished just before his death but not fully edited or polished, is close to that fulfillment.

Certain scenes--the Follets watching a Charlie Chaplin movie, young Rufus visiting his great-great grandmother, a colloquy between the child and darkness--are a near-marriage of prose and poetry.

Agee had a unique way of looking at reality, unblinking and with the lens-precision of the movies he loved, yet gentle--the manner of a tender realist. His description of how the boy and his sister are led to see their father's corpse in the coffin will linger with readers for a long time:

"There it was, against the fireplace, and there seemed to be scarcely anything else in the room except the sunny light on the floor. It was very long and dark; smooth like a boat; with bright handles. Half the top was open. There was a strange, sweet smell, so faint that it could scarcely be realized. Rufus had never known such stillness. Their little sounds, as they approached, vanished upon it like the infinitesimal whisperings of snow, falling on open water. There was his head, his arms; suit; there he was ... He saw him much more clearly than he had ever seen him before; yet his face looked unreal, as if he had just been shaved by a barber."

There are occasional sentences so strung with subsidiary clauses that they clank by like a slow freight in the Louisville & Nashville yards, and some of the family conversations contain too much of the truth of total recall. Yet the book thrusts and pulses with the joy of existence. It is a prayerful celebration of the truth that love can outlast death.

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