South Beheld: The Influence of James Agee on James Dickey, The

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Maxwell, Angie

JAMES AGEE (1909-1955), Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and author of the classic Southern documentary text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), had a substantial influence on James Dickey (1923-1997), Southern poet and bestselling author of Deliverance (1970). In an unpublished and undated poem entitled "In Memory of James Agée," Dickey claimed on the occasion of Agee's death: "Genius gone, and fewer left / To remember it." Though the two men never met, Agée made an enduring impression on Dickey's creative imagination, as can be seen in a close reading of several of Dickey's early poems, and in the numerous coffee-table books that Dickey published in the years following the success of Deliverance, the novel and the film. This influence-specifically the unique moral conscience that pervades Agee's work, which Dickey referred to as Agee's "complete participation" with his subject-explains Dickey's inconsistent representation of the poor white South, a subject that figured prominently in his work. Agee's depiction of the poor white South developed in response to the Popular Front political movement of the 1930s and 194Os, as well as to the burgeoning Southern Literary Renaissance of the same period. This depiction registered with Dickey personally and aesthetically, establishing a cultural memory of the poor white South with which he grappled throughout his career.

During World War II Dickey was stationed on Okinawa where he read voraciously. After a monsoon in early October of 1945-Dickey was still stationed abroad even after the Japanese surrendered-he found a tattered piece of Agee's prose that had blown over from the military library at their Island Command post (Hart 112).' It was there, after completing numerous combat missions with the 418th Night Fighters, that Dickey chose poetry as his life's work. In an interview with Paul O'Neill of Life magazine, he explained the dramatic scenario that led to his decision:

There were books scattered all over the place-and I read whatever I could get my hands on. Novels. Prose. But I sensed immediately that writers like Faulkner or Wolfe had a different orientation with language ... I responded to this quality. I kept looking for writers who had this thing. Melville. James Agée. I felt that writers like this were sort of failed poets who were trying to use prose for higher things; if those fellows were aspiring for something higher, I thought that was the direction to go. (qtd. in Calhoun and Hill 3)

Agee's highly moral literary ambition struck Dickey early in his development as a writer. And so it was across the ocean, and away from the South of his birth and upbringing, that Dickey began to read Agée and, consequently, to understand the complexity of his regional identity.

The final chapter of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-if the book presents any recognizable sections-is entitled "(On the Porch 3."2 This nine-page essay closes the book, following the section "Notes and Appendices," and takes its place long after it seems that everything has been said. It completes the work in several ways: as a profound and simple description of the end of a blistering and ordinary day; as a eulogy for a Southern sharecropper; as an apology for the perceived shortcomings of his own art; and lastly, and most importantly for my purposes, as a charge to "a more gifted human being" to record all of this in a poem (470) .James Dickey, twenty years later, accepted that charge. Moreover, a comparison of "(On the Porch 3" with three of Dickey's early poems, shows how this shared moral conscience, developed early on by Agée, was ultimately adopted by Dickey. Its presence influences the way in which both men approach the poor white South in their works.

Dickey clearly relied on passages from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to structure his own work. There is an obvious similarity in style and subject matter between "(On the Porch 3" and three of Dickey's most famous poems: "Listening to Foxhounds" (1960), "A Dog Sleeping on My Feet" (1962), and "A Screened Porch in the Country" (1962).:i In "(On the Porch 3," Agée described sitting on the weathered boards of a front porch and watching the night fall slowly across the land. A cry in the night announces the presence of two foxes. Agée begins paradoxically by describing the silence that breaks the mesmerizing music of the animals: "this new sound came out of silence, and left an even more powerful silence behind it, so that with each return it, and the ensuing silence, gave each other more and more value, like the exchanges of two mirrors laid face to face" (463). Immediately, Agée, photographer Walker Evans, ' and the men whom they have been studying intently, glance at each other. Without speaking, they strain to identify the animal cries, to determine their meaning in the darkness: "we now engaged in mutual listening and in analysis of what we heard, so strongly, that in all the body and in the whole range of the mind and memory, each of us became all one hollowed and listening ear" (463). The act of listening and analysis, of uniting "all the body and ... the whole range of the mind and memory"-this is Agee's moral conscience, particularly his commitment to first-hand individual experience ("complete participation," as Dickey called it), surfacing clearly.