Praising James Agee

Over at Open Letters, Liza Birnbaum offers an appreciation of James Agee and in particular of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which, despite its anti-art bias, is perhaps the most artistically ambitious chronicle ever written by an American writer.Unfortunately, Liza's piece does not address the topic of how influential Agee was as a stylist. How clearly and completely many passages in the Agee book anticipated by about 20 years Jack Kerouac's more celebrated style is, by itself, worthy of at least a lengthy essay. The old influence-anxiety may have led Kerouac to conceal or "forget" Agee's impact.

The Evolution of Padget Powell

One of America's most interesting writers, Padget Powell, has brought out a new book, "You & I." But so far it has been released only in England, where his most enthusiastic readers are to be found. Is the title a nod to another innovative American writer, Nicholson Baker, whose first venture into the chronicle form was entitled "U and I: A True Story" and concerned his unhealthy fixation on his writing idol, John Updike? Powell's new work apparently is a run-on dialogue between two old codgers, and though called a novel it is described as by no means a conventional one. Of course, that probably means that it is labeled a novel only for convenience. Certainly, Powell's previous work, "The Interrogative Mood," was more chronicle than novel, consisting entirely of questions that were creative enough but in which it was hard to detect any out-and-out fiction-making. A good interview with Powell, in which he explains how he evolved from a "cuddly" realist into the sort of writer he is, can be found at the Guardian.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Wood and What We Talk About When We Talk About Essays

Reissuing a piece of magazine journalism in book form and calling it an essay adds literary cachet to it, making it seem indeed worthy of a place between book covers. I've noted this happening in the case of Joan Didion and now it's happening with John Jeremiah Sullivan and his book,"Pulphead."

I admit that I have not read Sullivan's book yet, but I suspect that although it is sub-titled "Essays," most of the magazine stories collected in it did not appear under that rubric in GQ and wherever else they were published. The pieces most often mentioned by reviewers do sound like they are indeed magazine stories -- i.e. narratives based on reportage.

An essay is, by definition, not a story, not a narrative. And if Sullivan's pieces do contain strong essayistic elements in them,and you do not wish to call them simply magazine stories, then you would have to call them chronicles. When a narrative turns essayistic, or an essay turns narrative, what you are reallly talking about is a chronicle.

Still, "essays" were what Sullivan or his publisher chose to call his pieces, and in I way I find this encouraging. It could mean that publishers have begun to realize that essays are not sales poison. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom in publishing was that essays rated beneath even short stories among genres to be avoided.

Perhaps publishers have cottoned onto the fact that essays do indeed have literary cachet, so much so as to lead even an eminent literary critic like James Wood of the New Yorker to review Sullivan's magazine pieces as though they were indeed examples of the literary essay. (Of course, in getting the God-obsessed Wood's attention, it must have helped that one of Sullivan's stories was about a Christian rock concert.) Which works out to be unintentionally funny at times, because Wood seems unaware that many of the story-telling strategies that he remarks in Sullivan, including what he calls "the postmodernity" of showing us a story's workings, have long been hackneyed ploys in magazine writing (though I'm sure Sullivan is talented enough to have freshened them up a bit.)

Still, I would like to believe that Wood is correct when he writes in this review: "The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction." Of course, when he talks about the contemporary essay he is really talking about the contemporary chronicle.

Pulphead: Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

James Agee and the Modern Chronicle

James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is to the modern chronicle what James Joyce's "Ulysses" is to the modern novel.