Being A Writer: In Perspective

The following information comes from the Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of writer James Agee, (books by this author) born in Knoxville, Kentucky (1909). He was 16 when his father was killed in a car accident, and as an adult he worked for nearly two decades, on and off, on a manuscript that tried to recreate, as he put it, "my childhood and my father, exactly as I can remember and represent them." He never finished it; but after he died it was published as the novel A Death in the Family, and won the Pulitzer Prize (1957). He's also the author of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), generally considered to be a masterpiece. He was an obsessive person, an insatiable talker, addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, and Benzedrine. He died of a heart attack in a New York cab in 1955, with no will, no insurance, and $450 in the bank. 

I had to put this in my journal because James Agee's A Death In The Family is one of the first books that made a big impression on me.  I still have the copy I bought from the Scholastic Book Club back when I was in the 7th grade.  It's a paperback with pages that are now brown and brittle.  I'm not sure how much of the book I understood at age 13, enough that I remembered the haunted feeling it had given me, the realization of the temporariness of life.  The beauty of Agee's prose is something I would discover many years later.  

The common manner of Agee's death reminds me of another situation involving a writer I admire:  Dorothy Allison.  I participated in the Southern Festival of Books in 2002 by doing a presentation of my novel, and Allison was also at the festival that year.  I went to her presentation (I was a lowly first novelist; to me she has "rock star" status), and the presentation was very powerful.  I learned a lot by watching her that day about the power one's voice should have during a reading, about how to act out one's story (I had not thought of a reading as a "performance" before I saw Allison). And then I practically ran to the signing collonade so I wouldn't have to wait in a long line to have her sign my books.  When I got there, my heart fell because a long line already snaked from the table.  But then I realized the line was for Garrison Keillor, and no one was in Dorothy Allison's line.  Indeed, only two of us had books signed by Allison that day.  I couldn't believe it! 

What the death of Agee and the Dorothy Allison signing show me is that "being" a writer has got to be enough. There can't, there shouldn't, be an expectation of reward greater than that.  

From A Death In The Family:

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.  It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on their side of that.  The houses corresponded:  middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the nate nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches.  These were softwooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods.  There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn't doing very well.  ...

But it is of these evenings, I speak.

Supper was at six and wasover by half past.  There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the father and the children came out. ...

It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them:  that of the fathers and families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.  The hoses were attached at spiggots that stood out of the brick foundations of the houses.  The nozzles were variously set but usually so there was a long sweet stream of spray, the forearm and the peeled-back cuff, and the water shishing out a long loose and low-curved cone, and so gentle a sound. ...

...By some chance, here they [my family] all are, all on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night.  May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed.  Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:  and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:  but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.