America had no more uncompromising writer in the last century than James Agee (1909-55).

It may seem a strange thing to say of a man most famous for squandering a talent that could have made him the great novelist or poet of his time on hundreds of thousands of words of ephemeral journalism for Henry Luce, screenplays for movies, and unending drinking and talk. It is nonetheless true.

What nearly every one among his friends recalled as the root flaw of his character – his inability or refusal to reserve some part of himself and his gifts for work that truly mattered – was that which distinguished him. His magnificent ear for language, his grand sense of national destiny, his unerring eye for motion, and his deeply felt knowledge of guilt, sin, and obligation made every subject worthy.

Asked to write about Brooklyn in 1939 for Fortune, he produced a 10,000-word prose poem, which was rejected upon delivery and only published many years after his death, as “Brooklyn Is” in Esquire in 1968. (The essay is being published as a slim book by Fordham University Press in late October.) It is the finest writing about the borough of which I know. It begins:

Watching them in the trolleys, or along the inexhaustible reduplications of the streets of their small tradings and their sleep, one comes to notice, even in the most urgently poor, a curious quality in the eyes and at the corners of the mouths, relative to what in seen on Manhattan Island: a kind of drugged softness or narcotic relaxation. The same look may be seen in monasteries and in the lawns of sanitariums, and there must have been some similar look among soldiers convalescent of shell shock in institutionalized British gardens where, in a late summer dusk, a young man could mistake heat lightnings and the crumpling of hidden thunder for what he has left in France, and must return to. If there were not Manhattan, there could not be this Brooklyn look; for truly to appreciate what one escapes, it must not only be distant but near at hand. Only: all escapes are relative, and bestow their own peculiar forms of bondage.

The most famous, and greatest, example of Agee’s alchemy is his response to a 1936 assignment to write a piece for Fortune on tenant farmers. Rather than the neatly turned assemblage of color, anecdote, historical background, official statement, and grave, stoic concern over a great social problem of the day that any editor then or now would expect to place on the pages of a slick magazine, Agee wrote 500 pages to stand alongside “Moby-Dick,” which he titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” (The piece has been included in one of two anthologies issued by the Library of America.) Here are passages, dozens of pages long, as beautiful and true as any ever written by an American standing alongside catalogs of nouns, inventories of household items, self-conscious apologetics, paeans to Beethoven, Kafka, and Christ: all in the service of demonstrating not only the impossibility of a journalist ever arriving at truth, but even the moral squalor of any attempt to do so:

It seems to me now that to contrive techniques appropriate to it in the first place, and capable of planting it cleanly in others, in the second, would be a matter of years, and I shall probably try none of it or little, and that very tortured and diluted, at present … A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you could hardly bear to live.

Agee was capable of the most exasperating false humility, and it is almost tempting to write off such phrases as a maudlin exercise in martyrdom. But “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is a polemic against the idea that there is dignity and worth in trying to capture reality in words, whether for aesthetic or political ends.

For decades professors and critics have tried to make it into an easily classifiable item on a timeline that shows the inexorable forward progress of journalism. This is the gravest possible insult to what Agee actually did. His was not an attempt to describe the lives of tenant farmers, nor an experiment in matching photography to words as an equal rather than illustrative element of a book, nor a venture in applying the language of James Joyce and Sir Thomas Browne to miserably circumscribed lives lived in futile anguish. It was not a piece of advocacy journalism. It was not a forerunner of the New Journalism or the nonfiction novel. It was an examination of the limits of the printed word. As he put it in an introduction to a book of Helen Levitt’s photographs: “The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of esthetic reality, but to perceive the esthetic reality within the actual world … Through his age and through his instrument the artist has, thus, a leverage upon the materials of existence.”

Agee had come to believe that it was impossible for a writer to exercise this leverage. It is no wonder that shortly after the utter failure of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” he began to devote himself to film, the great distraction of his life. (In truth, even before he wrote his masterpiece he was trying to work his way into film – in 1937, applying for a Guggenheim, the never shy Agee gave more thought to his plans for a newsreel theater and “a new form of movie short” that anticipates Godard’s late-1960s work than to his idea for an autobiographical novel.)

It is one among the many ironies of Agee’s posthumous career that he is now so highly regarded as a film critic and screenwriter, for the truth is that, with very few exceptions, his writing on and for movies could be erased from human memory without the least damage to his legacy. This is not because it was inconsequential – he was every bit as important a critic as he is held to be, and his scripts are models of the form – but because it is the only part of his oeuvre where he suppressed the overwhelming force of his personality and his all-controlling eye.

Towards the end of his life Agee seemed finally to resolve the contradiction that defined his work. He turned to the composition of lyrical fiction, writing “The Morning Watch” (1951), a lovely, Joycean novella, and “A Death in the Family” (1957), one of the most haunting and re-readable of American novels. The latter was typical of its author in every way, from the fact that it was merely the unfinished first part of a grand, symphonic novel to the way it has been misread as an autobiographical piece about childhood and the early death of a father. It is about the inadequacy of words to express emotion and the way that deadens and hardens us as we age – a theme not so far off from that of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Even in briefly touching on Agee’s achievements here, it has been necessary to neglect much. He was a fine minor poet and a wicked satirist, and his letters to his mentor, Father Flye, in all their self-consciousness and vainglory, are among the most vivid depictions of the mid-century American writer’s conflicts and trials. The previously uncollected book reviews in the present collection show he could have been as fine in literary criticism as he was in film criticism. (On Faulkner, and almost certainly thinking of himself, he wrote that, “in passages incandescent with undeniable genius, there is nevertheless not one sentence without its share of amateurishness, its stain of inexcusable cheapness.”)

Overwhelming all this has been the myth of failure: Agee the drunken Village wastrel, the epic talker and unfaithful husband, the hack who sold himself to Luce and Hollywood and declined a place beside Faulkner, Warren, and O’Connor as one of the great Southern writers. It is simply untrue. There is, first, the argument of sheer volume – the present admirable collections would need a third volume of equal size to take in all that’s worthwhile among what they omit, much of it greatly superior to some of what is included. (The oddly misnamed “Collected Short Prose of James Agee,” which is nothing of the sort, is an essential companion to the Library of America anthologies.)

That his work did not take the shape of a half-shelf of novels or volumes of poetry published at neat intervals and plotting a linear path into maturity does not diminish its substance in the least. Agee knew that whether we wish it or not, writers are read on cinema screens, in unsigned dispatches in middlebrow weeklies, in socialist and anti-Stalinist magazines with tiny circulations, in artbook introductions, and in sociological studies infinitely more – and with infinitely more attention – than they are read as artists. Each form imposes its own barriers to art; and each in its way can serve the writer who wants nothing more than the chance to write well and honestly.

He bridged two worlds: the old America with “the whole memory of the South in its 6,000-mile parade and flowering outlay or the facades of cities, and of the eyes in the streets of towns, and of hotels, and of the trembling hear, and of the wide wild opening of the tragic land, wearing the trapped frail flowers of its garden of faces,” and the new one in which a serious writer can make a good living without ever having a word printed on a page, in which he might write a comic book, a movie, and a celebrity profile instead of a novel and profit not only monetarily but artistically from the choice.

James Agee did not sequester himself in the acceptable forms of art, but brought art to the forms of his day, and transfigured them into something worthy of him. In a time when it was impossible for a writer to be heroic, that’s what he was.

tmarchman@nysun.com