By Stuart Mitchner

The day after I wrote an article on Elon Musk referencing his first and foremost “life lesson,” that “empathy is not an asset,” the New York Times came up with a front page that instantly connected with my post-election state of mind. Lead head: “Chop First and Fix Later: How Musk Tames Costs.” The story directly beneath: “Trump Stands by Defense Pick Who Denies Sex Assault Claim.” Directly under that: “Robots Still Lack Human Touch in Warehouses.” And just below came two smaller heads previewing stories in the Business section: “Social Media Veers Right” and “Spirit Files for Bankruptcy.”

While the “spirit” in the story is a low-fare airline, what stands out in the current news cycle is the primary meaning of the word as understood by James Agee, who was born on this day in 1909. In his biography James Agee: A Life (Penguin 1985), Laurence Bergreen underscores Agee’s “eloquent” response to the April 12, 1945 death of President Roosevelt. Writing in The Nation, Agee celebrated Roosevelt as someone whose passing would inspire men with a “metaphysical yet very literal faith” in a “unanimity and massiveness of spirit.” Bergreen adds that Agee “perceived the same massiveness of spirit among Southern blacks.”

Carter on Agee

“His spirit is as strong as ever,” said Jimmy Carter’s grandson when the former president celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1. Carter’s is the first voice you hear in the Ross Spears documentary Agee (1980). Referring to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1940), the word-drunk masterpiece of inspired empathy Agee constructed around Walker Evans’s photographs of Alabama tenant farmers and their families, Carter says, “The life he was writing about was almost exactly the life I knew. We were not as poor but my neighbors were.” Carter’s feeling for the book that “touched my heart” is a quietly thoughtful appreciation of Agee’s “projection on a universal basis of the suffering and destitution of people who were afflicted by poverty.” Carter goes on to speak of Agee’s “sensitivity,” adding that “his personal projection of himself into the scene or the person’s life was unique,” bringing “a new dimension to descriptive literature.”

Spirit and Empathy

Whenever I search out a sample of Agee’s genius, I find myself landing on the same passage, even though there are many others, enough to fill at least ten of these columns. What sets this brief explosion of imagination apart is its dynamic mixture of empathy and spirit, plus music, and a driven, unstoppable, middle-of-the-night passion that goes and goes and soars and soars like a Charlie Parker solo.

The inspiration is a sharecropper’s mirror in one of the homes Agee and photographer Walker Evans visited in 1936: “The mirror is so far corrupted that it is rashed with gray, iridescent in parts, and in all its reflections a deeply sad thin zinc-to-platinum, giving to its framings an almost incalculably ancient, sweet, frail, and piteous beauty, such as may be seen in tintypes of family groups among studio furnishings or heard in nearly exhausted jazz records made by very young, insane, devout men who were soon to destroy themselves, in New Orleans, in the early nineteen twenties.”

An excess of empathy? Spirit on steroids? Too many delirious adjectives? I never felt like parsing it or deconstructing it. Agee played the piano. Maybe he created this cadenza after improvising a ragtime sonata while dreaming of Chopin and Jelly Roll Morton in the wee small hours of the morning in Frenchtown, N.J., where much of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was written.

Swift and Beethoven

Agee was 23 and fresh out of Harvard when he was hired by Fortune magazine. Installed in an office on the 52nd floor of the 77-story Chrysler Building, he found that life at Fortune “had compensations beyond a paycheck.” According to Bergreen’s biography: “After settling into the routine there, he resumed his habit of writing late at night, relishing the prospect of solitude in the gigantic, deserted skyscraper. As it swayed gently in a strong wind, the building itself seemed to come to life.”

On a Friday night in August 1932, Agee wrote to Father Flye, an Episcopalian priest, his oldest and dearest friend. He’d been rereading Gulliver’s Travels. After trying to express “the love and dumb reverence” he felt for Swift, he said, “I don’t think many people have ever lived with as little compromise to the cruelties in human nature, with such acute pain at the sight of them, and such profound love for what the human race could or might be. [Agee’s emphasis]”

Moving from Swift to Beethoven, Agee mentioned playing his phonograph late at night at top volume: “An empty skyscraper is just about an ideal place for it. Something attracts me very much about playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony there — with all New York about 600 feet below you” and with the Ode to Joy “taking in the whole earth, and with everyone on earth supposedly singing it.”

Typically, Agee balances his rhapsody with some topical realism, referring to “all this depression over the world” and of two feelings the city inspires, “one the feeling of that music — of a love and pity and joy that nearly floors you,” and the other “of Swift’s sort, when you see the people you love, any mob of them in this block I live in — with a tincture of sickness and cruelty and selfishness in the faces of most of them, sometimes an apparently total and universal blindness to kindliness and good and beauty.”

Agee Talking

James Agee was “a youthful-looking” 27 when he and Walker Evans headed south for the Fortune magazine assignment that resulted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As Evans puts it in his foreword to the 1960 edition, Agee’s voice “was pronouncedly quiet and low-pitched,” giving “the impression of diffidence, but never of weakness.” Physically, he was “quite powerful, in the deceptive way of uninsistent large men. In movement, he was rather graceless. His hands were large, long, bony, light, and uncared for. His gestures were one of the memorable things about him. He seemed to model, fight, and stroke his phrases as he talked. The talk, in the end, was his great distinguishing feature. He talked his prose, Agee prose. It was hardly a twentieth century style; it had Elizabethan colors. Yet it had extraordinarily knowledgeable contemporary content. It rolled just as it reads, but he made it sound natural — something just there in the air like any other part of the world.”

Agee on Film

Another part of Agee’s world, one that often challenged his “gift for empathy,” was the film criticism he wrote between 1942 and 1948, for The Nation and Time, which has been collected in The Library of America’s Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism. When Agee is sufficiently motivated, each review becomes a working pilgrimage during which he lives, feels, endures, grapples with, and prosecutes his subject memorably enough that W.H. Auden called Agee’s column in The Nation “the most remarkable regular event in American journalism.” When empathy takes a back seat to the Swiftian pain Agee feels “at the sight of the cruelties in human nature” and his love for what could or might be in the Hollywood product, the result can be hilariously savage.

Untimely Death

James Agee died of a heart attack on May 16, 1955, in a cab en route to a doctor’s appointment. Ravaged by decades of heavy smoking and drinking, he was only 45. The event that sent him in that direction was the death of his father in a single-vehicle accident in 1915 when Agee was 6. He recounts the story in his Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family (1957). Although he died before he could finish it, the novel is at once richly lyrical and unflinchingly true to life. Most admirable of all is Agee’s spirited empathy, that word again, not only for the father, the family dealing with sudden death, but for the boy that lived in and learned from it.

The Other Swift

Last October, when I reviewed Taylor Swift: In Her Own Words (Agate 2019), I quoted her opening statement, which was set apart on a single page: “I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this.” She was referring to the album 1989, titled after her birth year, and I was thinking that her illustrious namesake, Jonathan Swift, might have written those words, such was their cranky, in-your-face command of the moment.

In “On the Porch: 2,” a chapter of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men written late on a Frenchtown summer night, James Agee suggests that “severe and otherwise insolvable human and spiritual problems are solved in every performance of, or for that matter in the silent existence of, say, Beethoven’s quartet, Opus 131.” Or perhaps Taylor Swift’s song “The Outside,” composed when she was 12: “I didn’t know what I would find / When I went looking for a reason.”

Tennessee Roots

Swift grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where she began her career as a country-western singer. Worth a look online is a March 27 post headed “Taylor Swift’s family tree shines with love, heartbreak and the triumph of the human spirit.” Agee grew up 180 miles east in Knoxville, the setting of A Death in the Family, reprinted in 2009 with an introduction by Steve Earle, who calls the novel “powerful and beautiful and very nearly perfect … in the humble, uneducated opinion of a hillbilly singer with delusions of grandeur.”