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.