[I intended to publish this piece on Father's Day, but circumstances well within my control prevented me from doing so. However, since the subject of the piece is a posthumous novel, I may as well publish it like a back-dated check.]
In the first chapter of James Rufus Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, a father and son, Jay and Rufus Follet, have gone out to the movies in North Knoxville, Tennessee. Rufus is 6 years old, and Agee dwells on him throughout the novel. The movie is silent (the year isn’t given, but 1915 is when Agee was 6), a Western with William S. Hart, and it’s preceded by a short film with Charlie Chaplin. Jay and Rufus walk home in the darkened town, stopping at a saloon where Jay drinks two whiskies. On the way back into the street, he hands Rufus a lifesaver and pops one in his own mouth to disguise the smell of the whisky from his wife. They stop at a favorite spot and sit down on a broad stone under a tree. Rufus looks at his father looking up at the leaves and the stars beyond, and Agee writes:
He felt that although his father loved their home and loved all of them, he was more lonely than the contentment of this family love could help; that it even increased his loneliness, or made it hard for him not to be lonely. He felt that sitting out here, he was not lonely; or if he was, that he felt on good terms with the loneliness; that he was a homesick man, and that here on the rock, though he might be more homesick than ever, he was well.
And in a later chapter, that isn’t a numbered chapter (the novel was posthumously assembled from Agee’s manuscripts) Rufus awakes in his crib and is afraid of the dark. He can hear the voices of his mother and father and aunt and uncle in the next room, and Rufus screams for his father, Jay. Jay comes into the dark room and shows him there’s nothing there in the dark that could hurt him. Then he sings little Rufus to sleep.
He looked down. He was almost certain now that the child was asleep. So much more quietly that he could scarcely hear himself, and that the sound stole upon the child's near sleep like a band of shining angels, he went on:
There's a good old sayin, as you all know,
That you can't track a rabbit when there ain't no snow
Sugar Babe.
Here again he waited, his hand listening against the child, for he was so fond of the last verse that he always hated to have to come to it and end it; but it came into his mind and became so desirable to sing that he could resist it no longer:
Oh, tain't agoin to rain on, tain't agoin to snow:
He felt a strange coldness on his spine, and saw the glistening as a great cedar moved and tears came into his eyes:
But the sun's agoin to shine, and the wind's agoin to blow
Sugar Babe.
A great cedar, and the colors of limestone and of clay; the smell of wood smoke and, in the deep orange light of the lamp, the silent logs of the walls, his mother's face, her ridged hand mild on his forehead: Don't you fret, Jay, don't you fret. And before his time, before even he was dreamed of in this world, she must have lain under the hand of her mother or her father and they in their childhood under other hands, away on back through the mountains, away on back through the years, it took you right on back as far as you could ever imagine, right on back to Adam, only no one did it for him; or maybe did God?
How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?
Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and it's almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember.
And God knows he was lucky, so many ways, and God knows he was thankful. Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he ever deserved; only, whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.
How much of Agee’s own recollections went into his loving, sad, and magnificent final work (he had been working on it since 1948) we can only surmise. The simple fact that the death of his father at the age of six must have had an immeasurable impact on him, on every stage of his growth afterward, gives the figure of Jay, the father in his novel, a somewhat legendary status. For a 6-year-old boy, especially one as precocious and impressionable as Rufus, a father is something of a legend anyway. But the father’s stature, as the boy grew up without him, grew even larger. His novel is a noble memorial to a man Agee barely knew. According to an old friend of his from his college days (Dwight Macdonald), “The theme is the confrontation of love, which I take to be life carried to its highest possible reach, and death, as the negation of life and yet a necessary part of it”.
Happy Father’s Day
With everything being held in suspense this year while the world makes up its mind what it’s going to do with the pandemic (simply because waiting for a vaccine will take far too long to simply stay home and wait), baseball season is supposed to start over the 4th of July weekend, sans fans, in empty stadia, with only television cameras looking on. Exactly how it is going to be pulled off remains to be seen. But, as many observers insist, America’s Pastime can help Americans pass the time this summer, distracting them from the weary months of worry and boredom that have gone by and that are to come.
If you were to ask people to name the very first Peanuts TV special to air, most of them would correctly answer A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was first broadcast in December 1965. But if asked to name the second Peanuts special, most of them would wrongly identify it as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which first aired in October 1966. Both of these specials have become perennial favorites with American viewers, and have been aired continually since their premiers.
The second Charlie Brown special, which first aired 54 years ago today on June 8, 1966, was Charlie Brown’s All Stars! in which Charlie Brown is the manager of a neighborhood baseball team consisting of five boys, three girls and a dog who can’t throw (Snoopy). As the new baseball season begins, the players show up hoping that Charlie Brown doesn’t, blaming all of their defeats to every opposing team on him. But, as we are shown, the team’s misfortunes aren’t entirely the manager’s fault. They lose their first game 123 to 0 and all of the players threaten to quit the team. Charlie Brown, always wanting to be the hero and not the “goat,” has to find some way of getting the players to come and play. Linus tells Charlie Brown that the owner of the town hardware store, Mr. Hennessy, wants to provide his team with uniforms and get them into a baseball league. Charlie Brown tells his players the news and they agree to play in the next scheduled game.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hennessy phones Charlie Brown and tells him the league won’t accept a team with girls and a dog on it. Charlie Brown knows that his team will quit if he tells them the news, so he waits until after the game to tell them. They lose the game 2 to 1, because Charlie Brown tried to steal home and failed, and, lying on his back, he breaks the news to them: no uniforms and no league. Just as he predicted, everyone quits. Charlie Brown is the goat.
But Linus, always the conciliator, tells his teammates the real reason they didn’t get the uniforms and, together, they decide to make a uniform for Charlie Brown as a gesture of contrition. The trouble is – the only material available is Linus’s blue blanket. They even use Linus to fit the finished product, which has the words “Our Manager” on the front. When they present it to Charlie Brown he is touched, but then he quickly tells them to show up for tomorrow’s game. Luckily, for everyone – and especially Charlie Brown – the game is rained out.(1)
Peanuts is a peculiarly – gloriously – American creation. To understand why, all you need do is try to imagine what Charlie Brown’s All Stars would be like if the children were playing cricket. In his early novel Psmith in the City, P. G. Wodehouse devotes a chapter to a cricket match. Reading it, I hadn’t the vaguest notion of what was happening from one paragraph to the next. Wodehouse was engaging in, to an American reader, the arcane jargon of a beloved national sport that was untranslatable. All the chapter communicated to me was Wodehouse’s love of cricket, and that was all I needed to know.
Charles Schulz does the same for baseball in Charlie Brown’s All Stars, just as he would do for trick-or-treating the following October in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. He was relating to us his intense love of baseball and, metaphorically, of America.
In his beautiful writings on sports, and baseball especially, the Anglo-American novelist Wilfrid Sheed gave us flashing glimpses into his heart – where baseball is a ritualized, venerated religion:
The good and the bad of sports are exquisitely balanced even at the best of times. Victory and defeat induce respectively a joy and despair way beyond the run of normal human experience. When a politician says he hates something viscerally – whether it's John Major on terrorism or Senator Windbag on flag-burning – one doubts his insides are much disturbed: as Dr. Johnson might say, he will eat his dinner tonight.
But a sports fan who has seen a sure victory slip away in the bottom of the ninth, or the work of a whole season obliterated by a referee's call in overtime, is disconsolate beyond the power of description, although Sophocles comes close. This author experienced such grief over the defeat of the Dodgers by the Cardinals in 1942 as an 11-year-old should not be asked to bear. An adult inflicting such pain on a child would be thrown in jail.
Yet I got over it, and was all the better for it, recovering sufficiently to root for the Cardinals over the hated Yankees in the World Series. This cycle of make-believe deaths and rebirths can actually be the healthiest thing about sports, or the most dangerous, depending on how you handle it. At its worst, it can cause riots and death, but at its best the pain of defeat is cleansing and instructive, a very good rehearsal for life.(2)
Schulz’s genius as a cartoonist was his ability to humorously dramatize the tiniest events of childhood and make us feel their impact on a child. But in the midst of their innocence, his children often reflect philosophically on their lives, contributing, of course, to the comic strip’s humor. The last we see of Charlie Brown is him standing on the pitcher’s mound in the driving rain while Linus holds the tails of his manager uniform to his face because it was made from his old blue blanket.
I miss baseball.
(1) Vince Guaraldi, whose music graced the Peanuts specials from the '60s into the' 70s, supplied Charlie Brown's All Stars with the beautiful song, "Rain, Rain, Go Away."
(2) Wilfrid Sheed, "Why Sports Matter."
It would be lovely if I could report that Ivan Passer, who died in January at the age of 86 (not, I gather, from Covid-19), was one of the rare exceptions, rather like his childhood friend Milos Forman, among foreign filmmakers who wound up in Hollywood and made films as good as his best work in his home country. This just isn’t the case. The list of accomplished or promising filmmakers who “escaped” to Hollywood and found work there but never managed to equal the films made in their native tongues is depressingly long.
Passer has a place in what is looked back on as the “Czech film miracle” – a brief flowering of splendid films whose vitality has not faded in the intervening half-century. Similar creative stirrings had happened in other Iron Curtain countries in the ‘50s, especially in Poland. But filmmakers in Czechoslovakia (as it was called until December 31, 1992) were the beneficiaries of shifting political forces, what was known as a “thaw,” a loosening of strict censorship in respect to subject matter and its presentation. Such loosening came to an abrupt end in 1968 when the Russian Army entered the country from nearby East Germany. Some intellectuals, writers, artists, and ordinary freedom-loving Czechs managed to escape. Forman and Passer were among them. Others, like Jiri Menzel and Jaromil Jires, stayed.
But it’s 1965. Passer helped Forman with the scripts for his second and third films and directed one short film, A Boring Afternoon, and one feature, Intimate Lighting. It is as fresh and alive as it was when it entered the world 55 years ago. Bohumil Hrabal (whose novels and stories formed the basis of several Czech films, including Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains) co-wrote the script of A Boring Afternoon, which was “about all the things that happen when, ostensibly, nothing is happening.”
Intimate Lighting was exported to appreciative audiences in Europe and the U.S. before being banned for twenty years for after the Russian crackdown in late 1968. It’s finer than any of Forman’s films because Passer invests its lightness with touches of whimsical beauty. Without ceremony, we enter the world of a provincial semi-professional orchestra. Karel plays violin with other musicians in an amateur ensemble (his nickname from school days is Bambas). An old friend, Petr, plays cello in a professional orchestra in Prague and comes to Karel’s town to perform with them in a concert. He brings along his cute young girlfriend, Štěpa (played by Milos Forman’s wife Věra Křesadlová). Karel has a plump wife, Marie, and three small children. His father and mother live with him a house erected brick by brick in the middle of billowing wheat fields. Petr looks at his friend’s domesticity without envy. It’s Štěpa who seems lost – the hardworking village women look at her with curiosity. All of the young people have absconded to the cities.
Everyone in the film presents to us their ripened humanity: the grandfather who brags of amorous conquests, his wife - the woman he kidnapped and carried off to the circus, where she performed stunts on horseback (she shows one to an amazed Štěpa), Marie, happily absorbed in motherhood, a charming old pharmacist with smiling eyes, and even a village idiot who asks Štěpa to go for a walk with him.
Praising Christopher Isherwood’s novel, A Single Man, Anthony Burgess wrote: “To make us fascinated with the everyday non-events of an ordinary life was Joyce's great achievement. But here there are no Joycean tricks to exalt mock-epically the banal.”(1) The style of the film is so naturalistic that it almost makes one overlook what is happening, the moment to moment incidents that make up the beauty of the film’s utterly plotless unfolding, until we find that it’s we who have unfolded, not the people we meet and whose lives we follow for the duration (69 minutes!) of the film. Passer loved his subject so much that he went to the trouble of presenting it to us in all its unadorned verity.
(1) 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 - A Personal Choice by Anthony Burgess (1984).
