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.
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