James Agee: a life.

JAMES THURBER'S "Something to Say," a story from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, is a wicked spoof of that quintessentially American literary Genre, the memoir of genius unrealized. Elliot Vereker, the "genius" of Thurber's tale, is an alcoholic writer whose knack for self-dramatization is surpassed only by his inability to get anything written:

He never believed in doing anything or in having anything done, either for the benefit of mankind or for individuals. He would have written, but for his philosophical indolence, very great novels indeed. . . . Proust, I later discovered, he had never read, but he made him seem more clear to me, and less important, than anybody else never has. . . . He was enamored of breaking phonograph records and phonographs; he like to tear sheets and pillow cases in two; he would unscrew the door knobs from your doors so that if you were in you couldn't get out and if you were out you couldn't get in.

"His was the true artistic fire," Thurber's awe-struck narrator says of Vereker, "the rare gesture of genius"; the fact that Vereker's entire output consisted "twenty or thirty pages, most of them bearing the round stain of liquor glasses" is promptly dismissed as trivial. Needless to say, Vereker's premature death, the result of a blow to the head by "some heavy instrument, probably a bottle," is treated as a literary catastrophe of the first order.

Everybody, I suspect, has known at least one Elliot Vereker. But the handsdown winner of the Elliot Vereker Memorial Award, Literary Division, has got to be James Agee, the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the subject of a gruesome new biography by Laurence Bergreen. Several of Agee's friends (Dwight Macdonald, F. W. Dupee, Robert Fitzgerald) have left vivid memoirs that unanimously insist on two things: Agee's genius and his apparently inexhaustible appetite for self-destructive behavior. The genius has to be taken largely on faith, though (to quote Wilfrid Sheed) "Agee was so much the American idea of a writer . . . that we still keep sniffing around his literary remains for the one work that would clinch it, the missing sonnet"; with the appearance of Mr. Bergreen's book, Agee's legendary feats of dissipation become a grisly and explicit matter of public record at last.

Endowed by nature with all the standard ingredients of a Vereker-in-the-making--childhood traumas, adolescent sexual confusion, a bad case of imperfectly lapsed Anglo-Catholicism, alcoholism, three hopeless attempts at marriage, writer's block--Agee nevertheless managed to work in a few startlingly original twists of his own. And, to top it all off, Agee managed to finesse a legend-enhancing stroke of professional self-abuse rivaled only by Bix Beiderbecke's decision to sign up with Paul Whiteman: He became, at the height of his erratic, lurching career, film critic for Time magazine.

Agee, to absolutely nobody's surprise, died young. The surprises were all posthumous ones: the 1957 publication of A Death in the Family, an autobiographical novel, left unfinished at Agee's death, which netted his estate a Pulitzer Prize: the 1958 publication of Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments, a brilliant collection of Agee's reviews and articles for Time, Life, and The Nation, which established him for all time as the man to beat in the field of film criticism; the 1960 production of All the Way Home, Tad Mosel's dramatic adaptation of a Death in the Family, which knocked down yet another Pulitzer and was turned into a movie; and the 1962 publication of Letters to Father Flyne, a volume of God-haunted correspondence that gave things about his book prove intrusive. His decision to cite A Death in the Family verbatim, as if it were a "straight" autobiographical memoir rather than a poeticized retelling of Agee's childhood, lends a suspiciously artsy tone to the opening chapters; Mr. Bergreen's own rather undistinguished prose contrasts poorly with Agee's luscious wallowings. Still, James Agee: A Life brings out hundreds of telling details that other Agee scholars have tended to miss or to gloss over--Agee's close friendship with Whittaker Chambers is very much a case in point--and it will be a long time before anybody needs to go back over the ground that Laurence Bergreen has tilled so scrupulously.

The James Agee who emerges from the pages of this excellent book is exactly what you would have expected: a troubled, oddly attractive man who never quite managed to make something solid out of his minor but genuine talent. Agee, of course, would have hated so balanced an appraisal of his worth; an ardent disciple of Joyce and Thomas Wolfe, he was frankly obsessed with the need for creating king-sized masterpieces. ("I don't know of anything more ghastly," he once told a friend, "than the prospect of being a definitely minor writer.") But his best work is liable to survive, if only because it is (in Lionel Trilling's phrase) "full of marvelous writing which gives a kind of hot pleasure that words can do so much."