Brick

Copy­right 2006 Ben S. Pollock

Sur­pass­ing expec­ta­tions by accept­ing limits

Wednes­day 4 Jan­u­ary 2006. Last issue, The New Yorker praised James Agee. Actu­ally, it was New Yorker movie critic David Denby. (If I don’t always agree with Denby, he’s about the only cur­rent writer who every once in a while drops in a sen­tence or a para­graph that could have been Robert Benchley’s.) The argu­ment going into the remem­brance was that Agee’s con­tem­po­rary crit­ics and those who con­sid­ered him after he died saw him as a wasted or squan­dered or under­used tal­ent. Until Denby of course slayed those straw men. (If there were no straw men, who would we write essays about?)

His point was that Agee’s lim­its made him great. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men after all was an assign­ment from For­tune. The mag­a­zine would have had no idea he would have come back with over­long, exper­i­men­tal, bor­der­line jour­nal­is­tic yet haunt­ing prose that would barely fit in book for­mat, much less a peri­od­i­cal. (It was reas­sur­ing to learn I was far from the only one who found it basi­cally unread­able.) Denby praised Agee’s film reviews (which may be the hook for that movie critic). What capital-W Writer writes bits like reviews?

So, Agee may have had only that non­fic­tion book, and a cou­ple of nov­els or shorter fic­tion, and those lit­tle mag­a­zine pieces in him. He did not live life well (alco­holic in a word). He also had to earn a liv­ing, and that cut short avail­able time. Or did it? Denby argues Agee gave all he had and did not in truth squan­der his tal­ent and skill, nor did life cut short his productivity.

Con­tin­u­ing Denby’s logic, beyond The New Yorker piece, is what fas­ci­nates. We who cre­ate, do what we do. Could Fitzger­ald have pro­duced more, or should he have, if he wasn’t such a sloppy drunk, if he wasn’t mar­ried to Zelda (yet she was his inspi­ra­tion, in lofty but often prac­ti­cal ways, a nice way of say­ing mat­ri­mo­nial pla­gia­rism). Dorothy Parker wanted to write nov­els, failed at them, but she was a first-rate short-poem and short-prose artist. How dare any­one say she should have done more, but peo­ple do. On the other side of the coin of the realm, Edna Fer­ber in some quar­ters is all-but-damned for her pro­duc­tiv­ity and con­sis­tency. Say Fer­ber today and the response is, “Giant, right? Show­boat? They were nov­els first?”

“You’re wast­ing your tal­ents cook­ing Here when you could be a chef There.” It’s a ploy blud­geoned by loved ones more than strangers, out­side of crit­ics, that is. Guilt-assigning, Me-too-ism, Stay-down-here-with-us, whatever.

Denby’s right. Writ­ers and other artists play out the best they can with the hands they’re dealt. Any com­ment oth­er­wise really is mere second-guessing. You weren’t there. –30–