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
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