In Which James Agee Found No Single Word For What He Meant

Plans for Work: October 1937

by JAMES AGEE

The following was submitted by James Agee with his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

I am working on, or am interested to try, or expect to return to, such projects as the following. I shall first list them, then briefly specify a little more about most of them.

An Alabama Record.

Letters.

A Story about homosexuality and football.

News Items.

Hung with their own rope.

A dictionary of key words.

Notes for color photography.

A revue.

Shakespeare.

A cabaret.

Newsreel. Theatre.

A new type of stage-screen show.

Anti-communist manifesto.

Three or four love stories.

A new type of sex book.

"Glamor" writing.

A study in the pathology of "laziness."

A new type of horror story.

Stories whose whole intention is the direct communication of the intensity of common experience.

"Musical" uses of "sensation" or "emotion."

Collections and analyses of faces; of news pictures.

Development of new forms of writing via the caption; letters; pieces of overheard conversation.

A new form of "story": the true incident recorded as such and an analysis of it.

A new form of movie short roughly equivalent to the lyric poem.

Conjectures of how to get "art" back on a plane of organic human necessity, parallel to religious art or the art of primitive hunters.

A show about motherhood.

Pieces of writing whose rough parallel is the prophetic writings of the Bible.

Uses of the Dorothy Dix method, the Voice of Experience: for immediacy, intensity, complexity of opinion.

The inanimate and non-human.

A new style and use of the imagination: the exact opposite of the Alabama record.

A true account of a jazz band.

An account and analysis of a cruise: "high"-class people.

Portraiture. Notes. The Triptych.

City Streets. Hotel Rooms. Cities.

A new kind of photographic show.

The slide lecture.

A new kind of music. Noninstrumental sound. Phonograph recording. Radio.

Extension in writing; ramification in suspension; Schubert 2-cello Quintet.

Analyses of Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Auden, other writers.

Analyses of review of Kafka's Trial; various moving pictures.

Two forms of history of the movies.

Reanalyses of the nature and meaning of love.

Analyses of miscommunication; the corruption of idea.

Moving picture notes and scenarios.

An "autobiographical novel."

New forms of "poetry."

A notebook.

In any effort to talk further about these, much is liable to overlap and repeat. Any further coordination would however be rather more false than true indication of the way the work would be undertaken; for these projects are in fluid rather than organized relationship to each other. None of the following can be more than suggestive of work.

Alabama Record.

In the summer of 1936 the photographer Walker Evans and I spent two months in Alabama hunting out and then living with a family of cotton tenants which by general average would most accurately represent all cotton tenancy. This work was in preparation for an article for Fortune. We lived with one and made a detailed study and record of three families, and interviewed and observed landowners, new dealers, county officers, white and negro tenants, etc., etc., in several cities and county seats and villages and throughout 6,000 miles of country.

The record I want to make of this is not journalistic; nor on the other hand is any of it to be invented. It can perhaps most nearly be described as "scientific," but not in a sense acceptable to scientists, only in the sense that it is ultimately skeptical and analytic. It is to be as exhaustive a reproduction and analysis of personal experience, including the phases and problems of memory and recall and revisitation and the problems of writing and communication, as I am capable of, with constant bearing on two points: to tell everything possible as accurately as possible: and to invent nothing. It involves therefore as total a suspicion of "creative" and "artistic" as of "reportorial" attitudes and methods, and it is therefore likely to involve the development of some more or less new forms of writing and of observation.

Of this work I have written about 40,000 words, first draft, and entirely tentative. On this manuscript I was offered an advance and contract, which I finally declined, feeling I could neither wisely nor honestly commit the project to the necessarily set or estimated limits of time and length. With your permission I wish to submit it as a part of my application, in the hope that it will indicate certain things about the general intention of the work, and also some matters suggested under the head of "accomplishments," more clearly than I can. I should add of it a few matters it is not sufficiently developed to indicate.

Any body of experience is sufficiently complex and ramified to require (or at least be able to use) more than one mode of reproduction: it is likely that this one will require many, including some that will extend writing and observing methods. It will likely make use of various traditional forms but it is anti-artistic, anti-scientific, and anti-journalistic. Though every effort will be made to give experience, emotion and thought as directly as possible, and as nearly as may be toward their full detail and complexity (it would have at different times, in other words, many of the qualities of a novel, a report, poetry), the job is perhaps chiefly a skeptical study of the nature of reality and of the false nature of re-creation and of communication. It should be as definitely a book of photographs as a book word, in other words photographs should be used profusely, and never to "illustrate" the prose. One of part of the work, in many senses the crucial part, would be a strict comparison of the photographs and the prose as relative liars and as relative reproducers of the same matters.

Letters.

Letters are in every word and phrase immediate to and revealing of, in precision and complex detail, the sender and receiver and the whole world and context each is of: as distinct in their own way, and as valuable, as would be a faultless record of the dreams of many individuals. The two main facts about any letter are: the immediacy, and the flawlessness, of its revelations. In the true sense that any dream is a faultless work of art, so is any letter; and the defended and conscious letter is as revealing as the undefended. Here then is a racial record, and perhaps the best available document of the power and fright of language and of miscommunication and of the crippled concepts behind these. The variety to be found in letters is almost as unlimited as literate human experience; their monotony is equally valuable.

Therefore, a collection of letters of all kinds.

Almost better than not, the limits of this would be: what you and your friends and their acquaintances can find. For even within this, the complete range of society and of mind can be bracketed; and this limitation more truly indicates the range of the subject than any effort to extend it onto more ordinary planes of "research" possibly could.

Working chiefly thus far with two or three friends, we have got together many hundreds of letters. Many more are on their way.

There are several possible and equally good methods of handling these letters.

1. Beyond deletion of identifiers, no editing and no selection at all. In other words, let chance be the artist, the fulcrum and shaper. This is beyond any immediate possibility of publication, in any such bulk.

2. Very careful selection, the chief guides to be a scientific respect for chance and for representativeness rather than respect for more conventional forms of "reader interest"; and (b) the induction and education of a reading public, for less selected future work.

3. Context notes, short and uncolored, would probably be useful.

4. Take certain or all such letters. Let them first stand by themselves. Then an almost word by word analysis of them, as manysided and extensive as the given letter requires. This could be of great clarifying power.

5. Instead of a purely "scientific" analysis, one which likewise allows the open entrance of emotion and belief, to the violent degrees for instance, of rage, rhapsody and poetry.

6. A series or book of invented letters, treated in any or all of the above ways.

These treatments may seem to cancel each other. Not at all necessarily. I would hope to use them all in the course of time, and very likely would try substantial beginning-examples of all in the same first volume.

The value or bearing of such work would come under my own meanings of science, religion, art, teaching, and entertainment.

It should also help to shift and to destroy various habits and certitudes of the "creative" and of the "reading," and so of the daily "functioning" mind.

It could well be published in book form or as all or as part of a certain type of magazine I am interested in, or as a part of a notebook which I shall say more of later.

As a book it should even in its first shot contain as much as a publisher can be persuaded to allow; and its whole demeanor should be colorless and noncommital, like scientific or government publications. It should contain a great deal of facsimile, not only of handwriting but of stationary.

A story about homosexuality and football.

Not central to this story but an inevitable part of it would be a degree of cleansing the air on the subject of homosexuality. Such a cleansing could not in this form hope to be complete. The same clarifying would be attempted on the sport and on the nature of belief: always less by statement than by demonstration. All this however is merely incidental to the story itself.

An account, then, of love between a twelve year old boy and a man of twenty-two, in the Iliadic air of football in a Tennessee mountain peasant school: reaching its crisis during and after a game which is recounted chiefly in terms of the boy's understanding and love; in other words in terms of an age of pure faith. The prose to be lucid, simple naturalistic and physical to the maximum possible. In other words if it succeeds in embodying what it wants to it must necessarily have the essential qualities of folk epic and of heroic music carried in terms of pure "realism." This is being written now. It is to be about the length and roughly the form of the "long short story."

time staff writers, 1945News Items.

Much the same as Letters.

Hang with their own rope.

I have found no single word for what I mean. The material turns up all over the place. The idea is, that the self-deceived and corrupted betray themselves and their world more definitively than invented satire can. Vide Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day; Mrs. Daisy Chanler's Autumn in the Valley; the journal and letters of Gamaliel Bradford; court records, editorial, religious, women's pages; the "literature" concerning and justifying the castration of Eisenstein; etc.

Such could again be collected in a volume, or as a magazine or part of a magazine; or in the notebook. The above is limited to self-betrayals in print. Those in unpublished living must of course be handled in other ways. One minor but powerful way is, the unconsciously naked sentence, given either with or without context. These are abundant for collection.

A dictionary of key words.

More on the significance of language. Add idioms. A study and categorizing of tones of voice, or rhythms and of inflection; of social dialects; would also be useful. Key words are those organic and collective belief - and conception - words upon the centers and sources of which most of social and of single conduct revolves and deceives or undeceives itself and others. Certain such words are Love, God, Honor, Loyalty, Beauty, Law, Justice, Duty, Good, Evil, Truth, Reality, Sacrifice, Self, Pride, Pain, Life, etc. etc. etc. Such would be examined skeptically in every discernible shade of their meaning and use. There might in a first dictionary be an arbitrary fifty or a hundred, with abundant quotations and examples from letters, from printed matter, and from common speech.

Mr. I. A. Richards, whose qualifications are extremely different from my own and in many essentials far more advanced, is, I understand, working on just such a dictionary. Partly because the differences of attack would be so wide, and still more because the chief point is the ambiguity of language. I do not believe these books would be at all in conflict.

Notes for color photography.

Of two kinds: theoretical and specific. For stills; in motion; in coordination with sound and rhythm. Uses of pure color, no image. Metaphoric, oblique, nervous and musical uses of color. Analyses of the "unreality" of "realistic" color photography. Of differences between color in a photograph and in painting. The esthetic is as basically different as photography itself is from painting, and as large a new field is open to color in photography. Examples of all this, and notes for future use, from observation.

A revue.

Much to do with the whole theatrical form. The dramatic stage is slowed and stuffed with naturalism. Audiences still and without effort accept the living equivalent of "poetry" in revue, burlesque and vaudeville. Stylization, abbreviation and intensity are here possible. Destructive examples of "spurious" use: Of Thee I Sing, As Thousands Cheer, etc. Solid examples, upon which still further developments can be made: the didatic plays of Brecht; The Cradle Will Rock; The Dog Beneath the Skin.

Shakespeare.

Commentary; ideas for productino in moving picture and on stage; criticism of contemporary production of his work and of attitudes toward his work produced or read. In movies: use of screen and sound as elliptic commentary or development of the lines. On stage: concentration totally in words and physical relationships. Qualifiedly good example: The Orson Welles Faustus (I have not yet seen his Caesar). On stage also: Savage use of burlesqued melange of traditional idioms of production, conception and reading, intended as simultaneous ridicule, analysis and destruction of culture.

A cabaret.

Cheap drinks, hot jazz by record and occasional performers; "floor show." Examples of acts: monologues I have written; certain numbers from Erika Mann's Peppermill; much in Groucho Marx, Durante, Fields. Broad and extreme uses of ad lib and of parody. No sets, no lighting and only improvised costume. Intense and violent satire, "vulgarity," pure comedy. Strong development of improvisation; use of the audience in this.

Newsreel. Theater.

The theater: 15-25 cents, 42nd street west of Times Square, open all night. Usual arty-theatre repertory much cut down, strongly augmented by several dozen features overlooked by the arty and political, and by several of Harry Langdon's and all of Buster Keaton's comedies. Strong and frequent shifts in "policy," to admit, for instance, a week embodying the entire career of a given director or star or idiom. Revivals, much more frequent than at present, of certain basics: Chaplin, Cagney, Garbo, Disney, Eisenstein. For silent pictures, uses of the old projector, which gives these at their proper speed. Occasional stage numbers and jazz performers. Cheap bar out of sound of screen. Totally anti-arty and anti-period-laugh. Strongly, but secondarily, political. Most of hte audience must be drawn on straight entertainment value, or not at all.

The Newsreeel: Once a month for a week. Clips from newsreels, arranged for strongest possible satire, significance and comedy, with generally elliptic commentary and sound.

New type of stage-screen show.

Using anti-realistic technique of revue and combining and alternating with screen, plus idioms also of radio; proceeding by free association and by naturalistic symbol and by series of nervous emotional and logical impacts rather than by plot or characters; in an organization parallel to that of music and certain Russian and surrealist movies. More direct uses of the audience than I know of so far. Made not for an intellectual but for a mixture of the two other types of audience: the bourgeois, and the large and simple. Such a show should not last more than 40-60 minutes and should have the continuous intensity as well as the dimensions of a large piece of music. I have begun one such, springboarding from the Only Yesterday idiom, and have another projected, on mothers.

Anti-communist manifesto.

Merely a working title. Assumption and statement in the first place of belief in ideas and basic procedures of communism. On into specific demonstrations of its misconceptions, corruptions, misuses, the damage done and inevitable under these circumstances, using probably the method of comment on quotations from contemporary communist writing and action.

Three or four love stories.

Stories in which the concentration would be entirely on the processes of sexual love. If these are "works of art," that will be only incidental.

A new type of sex book.

Beginning with quotations from contemporary and former types, an analysis of their usefulness, shortcomings, and power to damage, and a statement of the limitations of the present book. Then as complete as possible a record and analysis of personal experience from early childhood on, and of everything seen heard learned or suspected on the subject; analyses and extensions of the significance and power of sex and of sexual self-deception; with all available examples.

"Glamor" writing.

Here, as above on love, the concentration on recording and communicating pure glamor and delight.

Pathology of "laziness."

Essentially fiction, but probably much analysis. Its connections with fear, ignorance, sex, misinterpretation and economics. A story of cumulative horror.

A new type of "horror" story.

Not the above, but the horror that can come of objects and of their relationships and of tones of voice, etc, etc. Non-supernatural, non-exaggerative.

Stories whose whole intention is the communication of the intensity of common experience.

Concentration on what the senses receive and the memory and context does with it, and such incidents, done full length, as a family supper, a marital bedfight, an auto trip.

Musical uses of sensation or emotion.

As for instance: A, a man knows B, a girl, and C, a man, each very well. They meet. A is anxious that they like each other. B and C are variously deflected and concerned. All is delicately yet strongly distorted. Their relationship is more complex yet as rigid as that or mirrors set in a triangle, faces inward and interreflecting. These interreflections, as the mirrors shift, are analogous to the structures of contrapuntal music.

Most uses would be more subtle and less describable. Statements of moral and physical sprained equations. This would be one form of poetry.

dinner with the chaplins

Collections and analyses of faces; of news pictures.

Chiefly the faces would be found in news pictures.

The forms of analysis would be useful, one with, one without, any previous knowledge of whose the face and what the context is. The nearest word for such a study is anthropological, but it involves much the anthropologist does not take into account. The faces alone, with no comment, are another form of value. The pictures of more than face involve much more, which has to do with the esthetics and basic "philosophies" of poetry, music and moving pictures.

One idea here is this: no picture needs or should have a caption. But words may be used detachably, and may be used as sound and image are used with and against each other. And the picture may be used as a springboard, a theme for free variation and development; as with letters and with pieces of overheard conversations.

A new form of movie short.

A form, 2 to 10 minutes long, capable of many forms within itself. By time-condensation, each image (like each words in poetry) must have more than common intensity and related tension. This project is in many ways directly parallel to written "musical" uses of "sensation" and "emotion."

walker evans

Conjectures on how to get "art" back on the plane of organic human necessity.

I can write nothing about this, short of writing a great deal. But this again is intensely anti-"artistic," as of art in any of its contemporary meanings. Every use of the moving picture, the radio, the stage, the imagination, and the techniques of the psychoanalyst, the lecturer, the showman and entertainer, the preacher, the teacher, the agitator and the prophet, used directly upon the audience itself, not just set before them: and used on, and against, matters essential to their existence. Such would be the above-mentioned show about motherhood: a massive yet detailed statement of contemporary motherhood and all ideas which direct and impose it.

"Prophetic" writing.

Here too, the directest, most incisive and specific, and angriest possible form of direct address, semi-scientific, semi-religious; set in terms of the greatest available human intensity.

Dorothy Dix: the Voice of Experience

Typical human situations, whether invented or actual, are set up: then, of each, strong counterpoints of straight and false analysis and advice. So, again, as in a letter, each case inevitably expands and entangles itself with a whole moral and social system; the general can best be attacked through the specific. No time wasted with story, character development, etc.; you are deep in the middle from the start, with more immediacy and intensity than in a piece of fiction: inside living rather than describing it.

The inanimate and non-human.

By word, sound, moving picture. Simply, efforts to state systems and forms of existence as nearly in their own, not in human terms, as may be possible: towards extensions of human self-consciousness, and still more, for the sake of what is there.

A "new" style of use of the imagination.

In the Alabama record the effort is to suspect the mind of invention and to invent nothing. But another form of relative truth is any person's imagination of what he knows little or nothing of and has never seen. In these terms, Buenos Aires itself is neither more nor less actual than my, or your, careful imagination of it told as pure imaginative fact. The same of the States of Washington and West Virginia, and of his histories of The Civil War, the United States, and Hot Jazz. Such are projects I want to undertake in this way.

A true account of a jazz band.

The use of the Alabama technique on personal knowledge of a band.

An account and analysis of a cruise: "high"-class people.

Related to the Alabama technique, a technique was developed part way in Havana Cruise, mentioned among things I have had published, I should like to apply this to behavior of a wealthier class of people on, say, a Mediterranean cruise.

Portraits, Notes, The Triptych.

Only photographic portraiture is meant. Notes and analyses, with examples, of the large number of faces any individual has. The need for a dozen to fifty photographs, supplementing five or three or one central, common denominator, for a portrait of any person. Notes on composition, pose and lighting "esthetics" and "psycho" analysis of contemporary and recent idioms.

The triptych: Research begins to indicate (in case anyhow of criminals and steep neurotics) that the left and right halves of the face contain respectively the unconscious and the conscious. So: the establishment is possible of custom, habit, wherin one would have triptychs of one's friends, relatives, etc: the left half reversed and made a whole face; the natural full face; the right-face.

Collections of these, with or without case histories, in a book.

Also: of each person, two basic portraits, one clinical, the other totally satisfying the sitter; to be collected and published.

Also: "anthropological" use of the family album. Of any individual, his biography in terms of pictures of him and of all persons and places involved in his life. A collection of such biographies of anonymous people, with or without case-history notes and analysis.

City streets. Hotel rooms. Cities.

And many other categories. Again, the wish is to consider such in their own terms, not as decoration or atmosphere for fiction. And, or: in their own terms through terms of personal experience. And, or; in terms of personal, multipersonal, collective, memory or imagination.

A new kind of photographic show.

In which photographs are organized and juxtaposed into an organic meaning and whole: a sort of static movie. Scenario for such a show furnished if desired.

The slide lecture.

A lecture can now be recorded and sent around with the slides. The idea is that this can be given vitality as an "art" form, as a destroyer, disturber and instructor.

A new kind of "music."

There is as wide a field of pure sound as of pure image, and sound can be photographed. The range, between straight document and the farthest reaches of distortion, juxtaposition, metaphor, associatives, the specific male abstract, is quite as unlimited. Unlimited rhythmic and emotional possibilities. Many possibilities of combination with image, instrumental music, the spoken and printed word. For phonograph records, radio, television, movies, reading machines. Thus: a new field of "music" in relation to music about as photography is in relation to painting. Some Japanese music suggests its possibilities.

Extension in writing; ramification in suspension, Schubert 2-cello Quintet.

Experiments, mostly in form of the lifted and maximum suspended periodic sentence. Ramification (and development) through developments, repeats, semi-repeats, of evolving thought, of emotion, of associatives and dissonants. The quintet: here and sometimes elsewhere Schubert appears to be composing out of a state of consciousness different from any I have seen elsewhere in art. Of these extension experiments some are related to this, some to late quartets and piano music of Beethoven. The attempt is to suggest or approximate a continuum.

Two forms of history of the movies.

One, a sort of bibliography to which others would add: an exhaustive inventory of performers, performances, moments, images, sequences, anything which has for any reason ever given me pleasure or appeared otherwise valuable.

The other, an extension of this into complete personal history: recall rather than inventory.

Reanalyses of the nature and meaning of love.

Chiefly these would be tentative, questioning and destructive of crystallized ideas and attitudes, indicative of their power to cause pain. Not only of sexual but of other forms of love including the collective and religious. The love stories, the sex book, and part of the dictionary and letters, all come under this head.

Analyses of miscommunication; the corruption of ideas.

Again, to quite an extent, the dictionary, the letters, personal experience, dictaphone records of literal experience, comparison of source writing with writing of disciples and disciplinarians. In one strong sense ideas rule all conduct and experience. Analyses of the concentricities of misunderstanding, misconditioning, psychological and social lag, etc, through which every first-rate idea and most discoveries of fact, move and become degraded and misused against their own ends.

Moving picture notes and scenarios.

Much can be done, good in itself and possibly useful to others, even without a camera and money, in words. I am at least as interested in moving pictures as in writing.

An "autobiographical novel."

This would combine many of the forms and ideas and experiments mentioned above. Only relatively small portions would be fiction (though the techniques of fiction might be much used); and these would be subjected to nonfictional analysis. This work would contain photographs and records as well as words.

Poetry.

This I am unable to indicate much about; but it involves all the more complex and intense extensions suggested by any of the above, and, chiefly, personal recall and imagination. It is in the long run perhaps more important than anything I have mentioned; but includes much of it.

Notebook.

One way of speaking, a catchall for all conceivable forms of experience which can in any way, scientifically, imaginatively, or otherwise, be recorded and analyzed. More than one person could contribute to such a work, and it would be handed ahead to others. It would not at any time be finishable. It would in course of time reach encyclopedic size, or more. It would be published looseleaf, so that readers might make their own inserts and rearrangements as they thought most relevant. Such a record could perhaps best be published by the State or by a scientific foundation.

I would wish, under a grant, to go ahead with work such as this. Most likely the concentration would be on the Alabama record and secondarily on moving pictures, sound-music, and various collections of letters and pictures, and various experiments in poetry. Quite a bit of this work would be done in collaboration with Mr. Walker Evans who is responsible for some and collaboratively responsible for others of the ideas or projects mentioned.

James Agee died in 1955.

"Goldeneye" - Frank Ocean (mp3)

"There Will Be Tears" - Frank Ocean (mp3)

"Swim Good "- Frank Ocean (mp3)

In Which We Piece Together The Last Months of James Joyce

If he was alive, James Joyce would have been 129 yesterday.

Silence, Exile & Death

by WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

Last week a little group of people got together in Manhattan in an atmosphere of unaccustomed awe. They were friends of James Joyce — editor Eugene Jolas (transition) and his wife; poet Padraic Colum and his wife; Robert Nathan Kastor, brother of Joyce's daughter-in-law; others. Fortnight before, a terse cable had announced that the author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake was dead in Zurich. Joyce's friends were forming a committee to aid his widow, daughter and son.

To many a baffled reader of Finnegans Wake, the death of Joyce meant merely that the "cult of unintelligibility" had lost its chief prophet. To his admirers, it meant the loss of the greatest figure in European letters since Marcel Proust. To his friends Joyce's death seemed like some simple lapse in nature, grandly tragic and fitting. Joyce's writings had been the most massive, inclusive, eloquent statement of Europe's intellectual and moral chaos, a chaos now audible and visible in the falling walls of Europe's cities. And Joyce had died in the midst of this downfall — perhaps because of it. There was something about his death that suggested the great Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, dying at the close of the Roman world to the echo of Vandal swords against the city gates.

Bit by bit, Joyce's friends in Manhattan pieced together a picture of his last months. It was a picture of monstrous ironies. Joyce, the young man who fled from Ireland to live by "silence, exile and cunning," died a destitute refugee from Paris. The mind that thought history "a nightmare to which I hope never to awaken," was caught in the fall of France. The man who resented even minor Government interference with his affairs, was caught in the wartime red tape of three Governments. The mind that created the Miltonic rhetoric, the subtle architecture, the poly-portmanteau language of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, found its last peace in talking to an eight-year-old child.

lucia joyce by berenice abbott

The Joyces (wife Nora, son Giorgio) lived in Paris. His daughter Lucia, who suffered from a nervous disorder, was in a sanatorium near St. Nazaire. A devoted father, Joyce worried much about Lucia, spent a good part of the income left him by Admirer Harriet Weaver on Lucia's doctor and sanatorium bills. When war broke out, he hurried to St. Nazaire to see her.

Giorgio's son Stephen was at Mrs. Jolas' school at St. Gérand-le-Puy, some eleven miles north of Vichy. The Joyces were invited there for Christmas 1939, had a big party. Even then Joyce was suffering a good deal of pain. For ten or twelve years he had had a mysterious intestinal ailment, which did not trouble him as long as life went smoothly, caused him agony when life did not. During the last year, friends claim, Joyce "ate practically nothing."

After Christmas the Joyces rushed back to Paris. Mrs. Joyce hated the Paris alertes, but Joyce could not stand the tranquillity of village life. They returned to St. Gérand-le-Puy for Joyce's birthday (Feb. 2), remained until the end of March. Joyce took long walks, read Goethe's conversations with Eckermann, occasionally went to a movie. He also read all the newspapers, though he would discuss politics only with close friends. Shortly before the time the Nazis moved to Norway, the Joyces moved to Vichy.

On June 11 Mrs. Jolas phoned Joyce that she had found a two-room flat in St. Gérand-le-Puy, urged him to move there for safety. Joyce refused. He added: "Have you heard anything about that book* that I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?" Mrs. Jolas said she hadn't. "Well," said Joyce, "it wouldn't hurt to drop a postal card into the box." The Nazis crossed the Marne.

Two days later, Mrs. Jolas phoned Joyce again to say that the Gare de Lyon in Paris was closed. Joyce said that couldn't possibly be true because his friend, Irish Poet Samuel Beckett, had just come from Paris. He added: "Have you heard anything about that book that I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?" Next day Paris fell. Day after that Mrs. Jolas ran into Giorgio Joyce on the street in St. Gérand-le-Puy, with all the Joyce luggage, looking for a place to stay. So, by then, were hundreds of others.

Zurich in 1938

At 8 the following morning the James Joyces, forced out of Vichy when the army took over, arrived at St. Gérand-lePuy. Joyce was indignant; he was not in the habit of going out before 11. Said Mrs. Joyce of the general situation: "Did you ever hear of such nonsense?" Two hours later friends found Joyce happily listening to the radio. The Joyces were not even disturbed when the Nazis occupied the village for six days. Joyce was a British subject, but they did not arrest him. Friends urged him to go to the Irish Minister in Vichy and change his citizenship. Joyce refused: "It would not be honorable."

A fellow refugee was Paul Léon who had worked with Joyce for ten years. Every afternoon at 4 sharp, Joyce and Léon reread Finnegans Wake. Joyce would sit with his long thin legs wrapped inextricably around each other while he held the book close to his eyes, studied it through a thick lens. Léon read aloud. They would then make corrections. When Mrs. Jolas reached the U. S. last fall, she took 30 pages of typographical corrections for a possible second edition of Finnegans Wake. As she was saying good-by for the last time, Joyce paused, said: "Have you heard anything about that book I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?"

Joyce made frantic efforts to get an exit visa so that he could take his family to Switzerland, scene of his World War I exile, birthplace of Ulysses. Thanks to influential friends (especially in the U. S. embassy), he finally procured a visa from Vichy. But the Swiss Government was fussier. At one point it refused to admit Joyce on the claim that he was a Jew. Then it demanded a $7,000 bond. The mayor of Zurich got the sum reduced to $3,500, which some Swiss friends got together. But on the day the Swiss entrance visa arrived, the French exit visa expired.

James, Nora, Giorgio and Lucia in Paris, 1924

When Vichy finally granted a second visa, there was no gasoline for the drive from St. Gérand-le-Puy to Vichy. Defying police regulations, Giorgio Joyce bicycled to Vichy, begged every embassy and consulate for gasoline. Finally a bank clerk gave his last gallon of gas, which was enough to take the Joyces to the train.

In Zurich the Joyces put up at a small pension. They had almost no money. None of Joyce's cables to London for money was answered (even air mail from London to Zurich now takes a month). Moreover, the Germans had canceled the permission (obtained through the Irish Minister at Vichy) to remove Lucia from occupied France. Friends say that the thought of his daughter's spending Christmas in a bombed area intensified Joyce's intestinal pains.

ezra pound visiting joyce's grave

He brooded over what he considered the poor reception of Finnegans Wake. More & more his bitter day dreams took on the prolonged, chaotic misery of the night dreams in his last great book. (A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?) And as the voices of the awakening children humanize the nightmare in Finnegans Wake, the voice of his eight-year-old Grandson Stephen became Joyce's chief solace. All day he would sit telling the boy (the child we all love to place our hope in forever) stories from Greek and Roman mythology, the Norse sagas, Shakespeare. But when only a small sum of money arrived from the U. S., scarcely enough to pay a part of their debts, Joyce collapsed from worry.

An X-ray showed a malignant ulcer on his duodenum. Joyce at first refused an operation because it would be too expensive. After the operation, he had to have two blood transfusions. He tossed around, worrying about Lucia. Then he had a last brief talk alone with his wife. During the night he began to lose consciousness. (My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. . . . Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!) Unlike the Finnegans, Joyce never woke up.

Whittaker Chambers' obituary of James Joyce appeared without a byline in Time.

james and nora on their wedding day in 1931

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In Which This Supreme Art Was A Sunset

The Glory of Venice

by WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

One day during the Renaissance — that cultural convulsion by which the modern world was born from the Middle Ages — the rulers of Venice met to debate an offer of murder. For a consideration the Archbishop of Trebizond had volunteered to poison Marsiglio da Carrara, the ruler of Padua. The minutes of the meeting survive. For the Republic of Venice, the first modern state and the most stable and efficient government in Europe between the fall of Rome and the rise of Britain, left the most massive and detailed secret files in history.

"Inasmuch," say the official minutes, "as the said archbishop offers to poison Marsiglio da Carrara by means of Francesco Pierlamberti of Lucca, and wishes to travel in person with the said Francesco that he may assure himself of the actual execution of the deed; but for this purpose he requires a poison, which he charges himself to have made by a capable poison master if the money be supplied him. Be it resolved that for making the poison, for necessary expenses, and for buying a horse for the said archbishop — for his own is dead — the sum of 50 ducats out of our treasury be given to the archbishop and his companion. Francesco Pierlamberti. Ayes 10; noes 5, doubtful 1."

Modern readers to whom the weapons of Renaissance politics are unfamiliar may be shocked to learn that for more than 500 years Venice employed an official poisoner; that at various times Venice attempted to poison the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Hungary, two despots of Milan, the Sultan of Turkey, Charles VIII of France, Pope Pius IV and the Czar of Russia.

They may be further surprised to know that Venice invented bacterial warfare. In 1649 she sent a physician with a flask containing buboes to spread bubonic plague among the Turkish army in Crete. "Veneossissima ac resurgens vipera," a French ambassador once called her, "a very venomous and indestructible viper."

In part this passion for poison as an instrument of policy was a custom of the times (insanity from poisoning was so common that the Renaissance had a name for it — erberia). In part it was due to the republic's peculiar position — a cluster of sea islands at the head of the Adriatic, through the ages threatened by Franks, Lombards, the Papacy, Milan, Genoa (Venice's great naval rival), France, Spain, Hungary, the Byzantine empire and the furious lunges of the Ottoman Turks. In part it was a heritage of that gorgeous East for whose commerce and culture Venice, during the centuries of her greatness, was the golden gate to Europe.

For Venice was almost as much an Eastern as a Western city. The aura of Asia was over her as the fragrance of spice is said to envelop the Spice Islands, spreading far out to the sea. It gleamed in the brilliant tessellation of her piazzas and the Byzantine mosaics of her church walls. It glowed in gold, jewels and marble from that cathedral — St. Mark's, ornate like a Byzantine crown — in which the unmatable styles of Gothic and Byzantine meet, and as in a baffling marriage, blend.

Eastern violence and despotism were implicit in her government, a close oligarchy of patrician merchants run by the Council of Ten, whose motto was "Secretezza et Iterum Secretezza" ("Secrecy, and Then More Secrecy"). The council's life-and-death decisions were usually without appeal and beyond review. Its nocturnal police were the sinister Signori di Notte (Lords of the Night). Its agents, the dread Sbirri, commonly made arrests by muffling their victims' heads in their cloaks before whisking them into prison. The Orient was incarnate, too, in the doges, the dukes of the Venetian Republic, whose dignity was imperial but who more and more tended to be resplendent figureheads and presiding ornaments of the state's sumptuous pageantry.

In the 15th and 16th Centuries the long latent esthetic genius of Venice ignited from the Italian Renaissance an Oriental sunburst of color and an Oriental voluptuousness, fleshly and fluent. These combined with a vigor born of seafaring and a sense of space and tumultuous motion born of wind and waves. This whirled Venetian painting to heights rarely attained in the history of art.

The sumptuousness of the forms which was so much a part of the glory of Venice had flowered from 12 mud banks. Venice was born in the agonies of Rome's death. (It died, 14 centuries later, the oldest state on earth, in the birth pangs of modern Europe at the hands of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte.) Her founders were displaced persons, Roman fugitives from the Huns. About 450 they fled, in the shipwreck of their world, to the marshy Venetian islands and joined the handful of original settlers, simple fisherman, saltmakers and perhaps a few patricians who hoped to ride out the collapse of civilization near what, in quieter times, had been their seaside villas.

On clear days the refugees could see across the Lagoon the source from which the land of their refuge had come — the blue line of the Alps. The 12 mud banks have been washed down through the ages from these mountains by the rivers of north Italy's fertile plain.

The key to Venice's greatness was her destitution. Everything had to be brought to the islands - vegetables, fruit, grain, cloth, wood (and later stone) for building. While the rest of Europe shattered into a thousand quarreling feudal castles, concerned chiefly with fighting and farming, Venice looked seaward and lived by the only means she had — trade.

Unlike the mass of medieval men, the Venetians were never tied to the soil. Venice knew no serfs. She scarcely knew the Middle Ages, remaining throughout those battlemented times Europe's one great city which never built a wall. So her people, despite the paternalistic despotism of their government, felt the freedom of seafarers who can never be regimented because they are always on the move. They kept for 1,000 years the independence of mind of those who daily mix with men of other nations and creeds. They kept, in form at least, the government of a republic. Other Italian city-states came under the power of individual despots and fell, after the Renaissance, in the rising surge of European nationalism. But Venice kept the flexibility of a government in which many of the people retained the right, if not the real power, to govern themselves.

At first the Venetians traded with the mainland in light, shallow boats which, with the addition of the slender beak and stern post, graceful as the curve of lifting waves, would one day become gondolas. But the open sea was the buoyant highway. Beyond its tossing horizon lay the rich bazaars of Antioch and Alexandria and the golden domes of Constantinople, opulent capital of the Byzantine Empire, of which Venice at first was a nominal dependency.

In time her galleys, powered by wind or banks of rowing slaves and grouped in convoys for protection, drove down the Dalmatian coast, into the mouth of the Nile, through the Bosphorus and her merchants planted a trading post in the Crimea.

She has been called "a joint stock company for the exploitation of the East." For 500 years Venice lived for little else. Trade was the pulse of policy and trade tempered for Venice the crusading enthusiasms of medieval Europe. Moslems and Christians alike were her customers. Trade made Venice prefer peace to war, which was itself but a reflex of trade and which she waged fiercely when she had to. Trade defined her foreign policy, which consisted in supporting her weakest neighbor until he became strong enough to threaten her, at which she abandoned him.

Discovery was a thrust of trade, which drove her merchants to some of the most famous explorations in history. It drove the three most famous of the merchants — Marco Polo and his father and uncle — to open up to the incredulous Middle Ages the wonders of Kublai Khan's China, India and unheard of Cipango (Japan). When, in the age of discovery, Columbus stumbled upon a new world, his portentous miscalculation was largely based on the dog-eared copy of Marco Polo's travels, which he kept always by him.

Her empire came to Venice not like Britain's in what has been called "moments of absentmindedness" but as a calculated commercial risk. She acquired Istria for wood for her ships. She acquired Dalmatia to control the coastal pirates. She acquired Aegean islands, the Morea and Crete in the shipwreck of Byzantium, which she helped the crusaders to conquer in order to reinforce her monopoly of Eastern trade. To secure her food supply she eventually acquired possessions on the Italian mainland, extending from Lake Como on the west to the mouth of the Po on the south.

All these territorial treasures, widely separated by the sea, were threaded together by her shuttling ships, which she standardized (for Venice knew about standardization before Henry Ford) so that her trading galleys were quickly convertible to ships of war. Her galleys were built in the Arsenal, which was the dynamo of Venetian sea power.

Dante, seeing in a vision the lake of burning pitch in Hell, could think of only one comparison:

Quale nell Arzana de' Veneziani

Bolle l'inverno la tenace pece...

As in the Arsenal at Venice,

in winter they boil the sticky pitch...

During the Renaissance, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Arsenal was the world's biggest industrial plant, manufacturing everything from nails to cannons, turning out complete ships on its assembly line. "As one enters the gate," wrote a Spanish visitor in 1436, "there is a great street on either hand with the sea in the middle, and on one side are windows opening out of the houses of the Arsenal, and the same on the other side. And out came a galley towed by a boat, and from the windows they handed out to them, from one the cordage, from another the bread, from another the arms, and from another the ballistas and mortars, and so from all sides everything that was required. And when the galley had reached the end of the street, all the men required were on board, together with the complement of oars, and she was fully equipped from end to end. in this manner there came out 10 galleys fully armed, between the hours of 3 and 9."

In 1570, during the war with the Turks, the Arsenal turned out 100 fully outfitted galleys in 100 days. Four years later, when King Henry III of France dropped in, he was shown a galley with only the keel and ribs in position. Then he sat down to a two-hour feast. When he got up the galley, now completely constructed, equipped, armed and manned, was launched in his presence.

If this dynamo hummed with the shipbuilding that floated Venetian power, the city hummed with the life that depended on the ships. The Rialto, the main bridge over the Grand Canal, was the hub of commercial Venice. The surrounding wharves, streets and piazzas teemed with the most cosmopolitan population in the world — Turks, Byzantine Greeks, Cretans, French, Spanish, English, Russians, Germans, even a delegation of Japanese. The docks were piled high with Venetian export goods — salt and salt fish, wooden utensils, wrought iron, damask and cloth of gold for which the city was famous, woolen goods, gold and silver filigree work and the wonderful Venetian glass from the little island of Murano, the most beautiful glass that Europe has ever produced.

Carpaccio's Healing of a Madman, 1494

The galleys, moored in the heart of the city, unloaded the spoils of Europe, Asia and Africa — silks, satins, cotton goods, furs, spices and sandalwood from as far away as Timor, and marble looted from the temples of Greece or Syria for the churches of Venice.

This tide of wealth rose on the docks of Renaissance Venice and flooded the lives of Venetians with an unparalleled prosperity. It was visible in the characteristic Venetian manner — the air of authority, luxury and indolent well-being in the city's gorgeous trappings and, above all, in the magnificent panoply of the official festivities.

One of these festivities occurred whenever a new doge was installed. on that occasion the craft guilds, each in a different costume, marched past the doge, two by two, in ostentatious parade. The furriers were dressed in ermine. The clothes of the 10 master sailors were decorated with vermilion stars. The master weavers of gold cloth were dressed in cloth of gold and garlands of pearls, and the master glassmakers in fur-trimmed scarlet. The goldsmiths wore garlands and necklaces of gold and silver, pearls, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, topazes, jacinths, rubies. The clothmakers carried trumpets, cups of silver and jars of wine, and the comb and lantern makers carried lanterns filled with live birds.

But the most impressive festival of the Venetian year was the wedding of Venice and the sea, La Sposalizio, held on Ascension Day — originally to commemorate the victory of Doge Pietro Orseolo II over the Dalmatians in the year 1000. The doge would appear on his official barge, the Bucentaur, rowed by young merchant princes. Thousands of gondolas and other craft would follow in his wake to the Lido, the sandy spit at the edge of the Venetian Lagoon.

The Bishop of Castello rowed out to meet the doge and offered him peeled chestnuts, red wine and a bunch of red roses in a silver vase. After prayers the bishop blessed a gold ring. The doge then rose from his seat, threw the ring into the Adriatic and cried, "Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii Serenissimae Republicae Venetae" (We wed thee, Sea, in sign of the true and perpetual domination of the Most Serene Venetian Republic). After Mass the doge held a great reception and official feast. The Piazza San Marco became the scene of a great fair, where the reveling went on uninterruptedly for eight days.

From all over Europe men came to see the city whose merchants in power and luxury were the peers of Europe's monarchs. Dante, on the long inferno of his exile from Florence, wandered beside her canals. Petrarch, humanist, sonneteer, sometimes called "the first modern man," visited Venice and in grateful memory bequeathed her his incomparable collection of ancient manuscripts and books, for which Venice built the world's first public library.

Benevenuto Cellini, swinging between murder and masterpieces of silverwork, was her guest. Pietro Aretino, "the scourge of kings" and prototype of today's columnist, penned from Venice the wittily scandalous personal attacks for which the great men of the Renaissance paid him to desist. In Venice he was safe from the daggers of outraged victims and the rack of the Inquisition, since Venice never permitted the Church a free hand on her soil. Manuel Chrysoloras and the other Eastern scholars who taught Italy to read Homer in the original entered the West through the water gate of Venice.

Few of them lingered long, for Venice was not, like Florence, a conflagration of the mind. But they brought to the splendid, worldly, commercial city of the sea the turmoil of the mind which we call the Renaissance. For like nearly everything else, the Renaissance too was imported into Venice.

Every great civilization is no more than the effort of the men who briefly compose it to arrest and perpetuate in art, in literature, in politics, in religion, their vision of the meaning of life. To medieval man the meaning of life had been salvation. He looked about him, and the logic of his judgment seemed to him irrefutable: the world being what it was, happiness here was difficult and transitory. not all but much of the energies of his mind were directed to achieving life beyond this world.

Renaissance man also looked about him and his cry of exultation was epitomized by the greatest of Renaissance poets, Shakespeare, in lines that might have been uttered at the Creation: "...This goodly frame, the earth...this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire! What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like angel! In apprehension how like a god!..."

This revolutionary shift in viewpoint came slowly. There are roots of the Renaissance in the Middle Ages. Medieval traces lingered into the Renaissance. But by the 14th century the Middle Ages had grown tired. They were exhausted by their prodigious effort to create a new civilization from the debris left by fallen Rome, exhausted by the effort of the medieval mind to capture God in abstract definitions, exhausted by their piety. Men did not forsake the Church, but they sought a new authority for their yearnings and thought that they had found it in the half-effaced or forgotten literary, architectural and sculptural remains of Greece and Rome. In their longing they prospected as eagerly for these classical treasures as men now prospect for oil.

The Italian earth was full of buried statues. The monasteries were filled with buried works of classical greatness — Plato, Homer, Lucretius, Horace, Cicero, Tacitus, Apuleius — evidences of a lost world of light, reason and luxury. The ancient seed stirred in the ancient Italian soil and, like the harvest of the dragon's teeth, there burst forth, at this contact with the Hellenic and Roman past, Renaissance man.

Violence and individualism were the mode of the Renaissance. Often invididualism took the form of a criminal passion for political power. Borgias, Medici, Carraras, Visconti and Sforzas quite literally waded through blood to make themselves masters of some city and its countryside, no bigger than an American county. But there was also violence in the consuming passion with which literary men and scholars threw themselves into the study of classical Latin and Greek or devoured the ancient authors, seeking to produce a new classical literature of Ciceronian elegance and a philosophy that would blend Christianity and Plato. There was violence in the effort of individual men to pack multiple careers into one lifetime. Lorenzo de' Medici was a statesman, financier, poet, musician, Hellenist, playboy. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a scholar, a poet and a politician who finally became a pope. Leonardo da Vinci was a painter of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, a military engineer, a scientist and aeronautical experimenter.

Renaissance man aspired to be "l'uomo universale" (the universal man). "Men," said Leon Alberti with the voice of modernity, "can do all things if they will." This optimism led to monstrous excesses and magnificent achievements. It also led to an unusual human equality. In the Renaissance world of uncommon men a talented peasant was rated the superior of a dull duke and was treated as such.

This violent enfranchisement of the mind and prowess of the individual man was the meaning of the Renaissance. As creative imagination, it found a supreme expression in painting. In this art the greatness of the Renaissance and the greatness of Venice flowed together.

The imagination of Venice was practical and fully occupied by the arts of governing men, seafaring and sumptuous living. To the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance she added little. But there is a genius of place, and Venice was caught by a visual music of the sea and air. The water sucked at the mooring posts, lapping the stone stairs of the docks. Over the city, air quivered like liquid glass and blazes with lights reverberated by the sea or softened into mist which deposited salt crystals on the tinted facades of the palazzi. Sometimes the sky was tumultuous with such storms as ships sustain on the open sea. Always, in immense contrasting silence, the clouds sailed, like fleets, out to the Adriatic.

This color saturated Venice from the sky and water. And while the city went about her daily, worldly tasks of buying and selling, it entered, like the beauty born of murmuring sound, into her stony face as each palazzo, bridge and ship rode above its shadow in the still canals. This dreamy presence beside the water shimmered into incomparable life in the art of seven great painters: Gentil and Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

There is an art of irreducible simplicities: tragic, as man reviews his fate in the light of the qualities of nobility, justice and compassion that are his claim to greatness; ironic, as with courage, the quality that makes it possible for him to persist at all, he reviews the absurdity of his dilemma. This is the art of Giotto and Michelangelo. But there is another art — an art of the grace of opulence, of the fully ripened character of the full-blown flesh, of the fruit sun-seasoned to bursting, of life without the implications of fate. Of this art, adult and autumnal, the Venetians were the masters.

This supreme art was a sunset. By the 17th century the conquest of Byzantium by the Turks had shut off Venetian trade with the East. With the opening of the new sea route to Asia and the New World, Venice lived more and more on small change and past greatness. She did not go down at once. Anchored on her islands, she swung with the currents of history in which she no longer played a decisive role. For two more centuries she listed, settling as a doomed ship settles until, when Napoleon arrived and Wordsworth wrote his obituary sonnet, she sank.

"Men are we," Wordsworth wrote, that is to say, the only living creatures which conserve in memory the cultures that have made us what we are. The shade of Venice's greatness has merged with history's deeper shadows. The panoply, the lavish life, the teeming trade, lie with her galleys fathoms deep in time. But the memory of the Sea-born City haunts us still, like the luminous streak left by an oar at night or Dante's tremolo del mar — the tremulous play of light and waves at sea.

Whittaker Chambers died in 1961.

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