James Agee
Father James Flye was James Agee’s lifelong friends and mentor. “In writing to Father Flye, Agee is addressing not only a priest but the embodiment of his boyhood aspirations.”
September 20, 1950, Hillsdale
Dear Father,
So Fall is beginning. Always the time of year I like best. I had imagined I’d stay up here and work alone till cold weather but it looks as if I won’t. They are apt, I imagine, to want some work on the movie script, on which I’d go out there; whether they do or not, Huston has invited me to go on a trip with him when he finished his movie, in about 3 weeks, and if possible I want to get out somewhat sooner than that and see him work on it. In some ways it all fits together very well. I’m exhausted after writing and still more after typing the script, feeI I could do very well with a breather before I get back to writing. So all I really regret and miss is the great good and pleasure of being mostly alone up here during these most beautiful months of the year. If I do go to the coast, and whether I do or not, I will expect to see you: for whether or not I go to California, I’m almost sure I will somehow go to Texas for a short while and see Irvine Upham, so that I do very much look forward to, the more so since I got to see you so little this summer. My feeling about living up here has changed; I realize it by how much I always hate to leave it for more than a day or two; to begin leaving over a whole season is already deeply sad and homesick. I just now look at an old letter of yours, from last Fall, and see the stamp, signalizing the final national encampment of the G.A.R. I have nothing to say about it but it moves me “historically” as nothing else has which I can remember. I imagine by the Centennial years, there won’t be a one alive who was in it, barring some almost unthinkable freak—before whom, if I could find him, I’d feel like dropping on my knees. God bless them all, of both sides. It’s the only war that doesn’t just purely make me sick to my stomach.
I’m so tired from the last few weeks work I haven’t a brain in my head. No reading except the customary late-night trash: no music; few movies, and none worth mentioning. Mia had to take Teresa to town yesterday, to start “school” this morning. Another reason I feel the year, and all of existence so far as I’m concerned, is taking a deep turn under. She’s been a lovely and happy child so far; and I’ve felt, however foolishly, always within my sight and reach. I know that from now on it will be just as before, the usual indiscernible things: but I all I can feel is, God help her now. I begin to get a faint sense of what heartbreak there must be in it even at the best, to see a child keep growing up.
Partisan Review has made a pamphlet of that “Symposium” on religion. They sent me two copies and if you like I’ll send you one; but I hardly imagine you’ll want it? I evidently move, as I imagine many people do, in a rough not very predictable cycle, between feeling relatively uninvolved religiously and very much involved: though I’m not sure the “religiously” is the right word for it: but anyhow a strong sense of being open, aware, concerned, in the ways which are rooted usually in religion, or in the more serious kinds of poetry or music, or just in the sense of existence—i.e. a relatively very full and emotionally rich sense of it, as compared with the opposite side of the cycle. I’m evidently swinging into it again now. At times or moments I feel virtually sure that nothing short of coming back to a formal religion (probably the one I was brought up in) will be nearly enough for me: at others, just as sure I never will. But at all times I feel sure that my own shapeless personal religious sense, whatever that may be, is deepening and increasing: even the swings away are less far way from it: keep some kind of relation with it. I wish I were with you and could talk about this, but even if I were I doubt there would actually be much to say about it: and though in a sense I like to speak of it (to you, and, so far as I know, only to one other person, Mia), why in more of a sense it is perhaps still better not to–such as one is apt to say little about being in love. Essentially a very private matter and should be, and any expression of it is probably best indirect, if at all. Or “direct” in a highly formalized way. (I think for instance much of Beethoven’s music.)
That was last night, now it is Thursday. I’ll stop this and make some use of the masking-tape I got, to paint edges of doors, screens, and windows, before winter. I hope Mrs. Flye continues to be well. My love to her always, and to you.
Jim
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FURTHER READING
(For those with a New Yorker subscription, or means of contravening paywall) click here for a nice piece on Father Flye.