'Most possible kinds of pain'

 James Agee’s psyche was injured and never healed. The pain comes through in all his writing, but Agee sometimes thought he communicated most clearly, most understandably, in poetry.

Throughout his life, Agee wrote letters to his teacher, the Rev. James Harold Flye at St. Andrew’s, a school for boys near Sewanee in Tennessee. Agee, then known by his middle name Rufus, was 9 when he met Father Flye. He was 25 when he wrote this from New York:

 

In two or three days, when I can get hold of another copy, I want to send you a copy of my book of poems, not out of any pleasure in them myself but because I expect you would like to see them and have them: If a dying man passed out his hair and his toenails to friends, he would not be thought vain of hair, toenails, or his friendship. Not a dying man, and you are more than a friend, but the reason for all this elaborateness of diffidence is more genuine than it looks: I am in most possible kinds of pain, mental and spiritual that is. In this pain the book and its contents are a relative small item, only noticeable in the general unpleasantness because they are tangible.

 

The pain that Agee wrote about was from wounds of the soul, rather than the body. He was fascinated that something intangible could sometimes be caught in ink on a page.

• Source: Letters of James Agee to Father Flye; New York: Bantam Books, 1963, p. 61. The book was Permit Me Voyage, No. 33 in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, published in 1934.

Word of the Day: lek

 What Merriam-Webster says: an assembly area where animals (such as the prairie chicken) carry on display and courtship behavior.

What I’m thinking about: the bird feeders, where the male cardinals are making claims about territory and their suitability as mates.

• Source: “Lek.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lek. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

A stupefied country

 James Agee’s “1928 Story” is about a writer who stopped writing.

I don’t think there’s anything special about writers. I’ve heard of painters who couldn’t paint and composers who couldn’t compose.

I haven’t heard of bankers who couldn’t bank or developers who couldn’t develop. But if your practice of making things is something you have to put your psyche into, you’re in trouble if yours is injured, wounded or damaged.

Agee’s character, a fellow named Irvine, who was once a writer, mainly a poet, looks back over World War II and the Depression before it. He thinks of all that was crushed during those hard times. It seems to him that only the meanness and insanity survived.

 

Certainly, by now, he felt no hope or trust in anything that anyone might do or say. It was a stupefied country, and evidently a stupefied world and as stupefied as anything else was his sense of universal mistrust and hopeless regret, his dependence on mere taste, his pleasure in the sensuous, his miserable reluctance to live in the world as it was, and to discard the pleasures of recall.

 

I think this is a story for our times. I keep telling friends who are worried about the republic that the first duty is to keep the lights own, not to lose courage, not to be overwhelmed.

If you’re a poet, one who makes poetry, now’s not the time to stop.

• Source: James Agee’s “1928 Story” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 1-19. The quotation is on pp. 2-3. 

A picture of regret

 I admire Carson McCullers’s story “The Sojourner.” I think it paints a convincing picture of what regret is like. I also think that’s not easy to do.

“The Sojourner” is the story of John Ferris, who turns 38 during the story, and who has just buried his father in Georgia. Ferris is returning to Paris by way of New York. He sees his ex-wife, Elizabeth, on the street. It’s been eight years. Perhaps emotional from his father’s death, Ferris calls Elizabeth and has dinner with her and her husband and meets their son, Billy, and the new baby.

Ferris thinks of his own girlfriend and her 6-year-old son and feels inexplicably miserable.

I like this bit of dialog, which begins with Elizabeth saying that Ferris should visit again.

 

“You’re not going to be an expatriate, are you?”

“Expatriate,” Ferris repeated. “I don’t much like the word.”

“What’s a better word?” she asked.

He thought for a moment. “Sojourner might do.”

 

I’m biased because I believe there’s a connection between regret and how we live — and particularly how we go about getting rooted to a place and all the living things and that make up a place. We can be rooted there or just passing through. Or somewhere in between.

Regret is slippery, but I have felt it most when I’ve been a tourist when I should have been an inhabitant.

• Source: Carson McCullers’s “The Sojourner” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 233-24. The quotation is on p. 237. 

Stone Mountain, February

 It’s chilly in the morning as I turn over the garden beds with a spade, clearing out weeds and last year’s stubble. I also rousted a green anole, sleepy but alive, and dug up a DeKay’s brown snake that died underground during the winter. The spade turns up insects and earthworms with every turn.

Another freeze is expected, but it warms up during the day. Red-tail hawks have been soaring when the earth warms up enough to generate thermal currents. Last week, I’d hear them around 11 a.m. This week, they’re usually aloft just after 10. The earth is getting warmer.

Atlanta, 1988

 Few things are uglier than the press corps covering a presidential campaign. I know because I was part of a mob at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 in Atlanta.

At newspapers, the traffic cop is the news editor, who rules the copy desk and thus rules on all disputes involving good English. He or she reads everything. I found the news editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and asked what story he’d like to read that the mob was not likely to cover.

He told me about Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, just down Auburn Avenue from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached. Ebenezer is a smaller church. Big Bethel is enormous. All the political stars and the press corps would be at Ebenezer. For better or worse, Dr. King’s church had become a prestigious place, and, in a way, an exclusive place. Big Bethel would be where people who drove buses and cleaned hotel rooms for a living would be. If I went to church on the Sunday before the convention began, I might learn something.

It was a long service, and I was among those standing so that others could sit. Minister after minister spoke about why people who claim to be religious can’t turn away from questions of justice. They were not concerned with arcane policy. They asked whether it’s OK to have two people doing the same job for different wages. Whether it’s OK, when you are hiring workers or admitting students to college, to exclude people because of race. The ministers asked whether someone who claims to believe in a just God could see all that and not do anything at all.

The ministers did not speak of Democrats and Republicans. In 1988, David Duke, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was seeking the Republican nomination. Instead, the ministers at Big Bethel were looking to the Democratic Party for some kind of sign. How important was it to the party that people be treated unjustly?

Jesse Jackson was seeking the nomination, but it was clear from what the ministers and church members said that people were watching the party, not the candidate. How would the party treat the issues Jackson raised? Would the party give the agenda of equal treatment lip service or would it offer voters a sign that it was serious, perhaps by nominating Jackson for vice president?

I left the church with the impression that one segment of one community had clearly stated its hopes and expectations.

I spent the week looking for evidence that the party’s delegates understood those hopes and expectations and took them seriously.

By the end of the week, I thought the Democratic Party was in trouble.

Domestic dialog

 I said that I could think of few novels that had been turned into successful films.

The Wise Woman said that a person who had, as a boy, promised his parents he’d be good if they didn’t make him go to the movies really shouldn’t venture into film criticism. She mentioned several films, including “The Maltese Falcon.”

Stung, I replied that I was thinking about the kinds of novels she’d taught in literature classes.

She queued up “Far from the Madding Crowd,” the 2015 version. I had to admit I enjoyed it.

Thomas Hardy’s novel was published, in monthly installments, in The Cornhill Magazine in 1874. I wondered whether novels written and published as serials were easier to adapt to film. I said that at least the screenwriter had parts to work with — installments, if not scenes.

The Wise Woman is not sure which is worse: to have a husband who is not interested in film or to have one who is newly interested in film.