Paternal Nightmare: Division and Masculinity in the Restored Edition of A Death in the Family

Abstract

On the surface, A Death in the Family appears to be James Agee's dreamy meditation on his childhood and its defining event: the sudden death of his father in an automobile crash when Agee was only six years old. Early in its imagining, Agee believed the book would not be work written for any aesthetic value but rather for its intrinsic personal value, especially because through it he had hoped not only to complete picture of his absent and heroic father but finally to piece together the interior image of himself and project it for his reader. Originally published posthumously by Agee's editor and long-time friend David McDowell in 1957, A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. In 2007, fifty years after its initial publication, the University of Tennessee Press offered readers a restoration of Agee's original text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro. The progression of this newly restored edition of A Death in the Family moves from Agee's first recollections of life with his father to his father's death in an automobile accident and the ensuing inner turmoil Agee experiences at the funeral and beyond. As book that ostensibly examines Agee's inner world as child, it also reveals the adult author's emotional life during the period in which he composed it. (1) In fragmentary essay about his intention for what Agee terms his autobiographical he writes that its composition was not just rendering of childhood memories or memorial to my but rather an effort to regain significant part of his life that suddenly seemed lost to him: Now as awareness of how much of life is lost, and how little is left, becomes even more piercing, I feel also and ever the more urgently, the desire to restore, and to make little less impermanent, such of my lost life as I can, beginning with the beginning and coming as far forward as need be. This is the simplest, most primitive of the desires which can move writer. I hope I shall come to other things in time; in time to write them. Before I do, if I am ever to do so, I must sufficiently satisfy this first, most childlike need. (Collected 142) A Death in the Family will be, as Agee describes it, book for himself first, work that not only restores the experience of his childhood but is itself an expression of child-like selfishness. Through the novel, he hopes to memorialize his father, but the book, as he later says in the fragment, is chiefly remembrance of my childhood. As such, it is all ego, (2) and Agee understands the selfishness of its composition, even as he justifies his need to work through himself. For all these reasons, critics have often argued that A Death in the Family is satisfying last work for Agee. Though he did not know it, his final novel would become the defining work of his career, and because of McDowell's arrangement of the text, Death was easily the most popular and accessible text in Agee's oeuvre. However, the structure and progression of the edition of A Death in the Family available for over fifty years does not seem to emphasize satisfactorily central part of Agee's artistic vision: the emphasis on the wounded body, the paranoia over making art out of the personal, the fragmentation of the body, the imagined violence as atonement, and the re-imagining of his father's body. Few critics really have questioned the authenticity of the first version of Agee's novel. The posthumous book manuscript was given to Agee's friend and collaborator David McDowell, who created cogent and readable version of Agee's sprawling novel even though Agee had provided no complete blueprint for how he wanted his book to be laid out. (3) After the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, few critics actively questioned its literary merits, and the Pulitzer gave the McDowell version credibility that continued for close to fifty years. However, serious questions over how Agee conceived his book, including central ideas of progression and placement of key scenes, deserved an answer, or, at the very least, comprehensive review. …