After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
At first it struck me how sad it was that his mother and father (who would die the next year) his aunt and uncle, who he lived with and who he'd presented with such loving tenderness would never really know James Agee. It could have been the feeling of any gay man at that time when it was impossible to talk about such a deep and important part of ourselves, especially to our families and Agee was born more than forty years before I was and my parents were New England liberals. But you couldn't talk about it here in the 1950s and early 60s either. At least that's how it struck me at first. I would guess that would have also resonated for Samuel Barber who was also a gay man of Agee's generation. The sense of alienation from our own families was one of the worst and most damaging aspects of having being gay unmentionable. You don't get past the damage that does to you.
But then I saw something deeper than that, Agee, writing when he was an adult said, that those who treated him "as one familiar and well-beloved in that home" would not ever be able to tell him who he was. James Agee seems to have some unmet need of being told who he was. Part of that would be the validation of who he was, the kind of validation of parents and family who feel free to easily and uninhibitedly acknowledge the maturation and sexuality of a straight child. That was something that almost never was available to a gay child. While I can imagine a straight person looking back on their loving family talking of his place in his family thinking of himself as having been, "one familiar and well-beloved in that home," in such a term of removal, it would almost certainly be far more common among gay people of my and earlier generations. I'd guess that even gay children today have that experience in most cases. Agee's whole piece, of which Barber's text only uses the last few paragraphs, is all about the observation of, is a description of the people of his area of Knoxville in the evening, after the business day is over and their real lives, in their homes and with their families are happening. Especially, what he saw while he was, "successfully disguised to myself as a child."
It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.
The description of watering lawns is the longest part of it, it must have been his father, as well as other men in the neighborhood he was describing, the part Barber set comes after the hoses are put away. As I said, his father would die the next year, he was clearly thinking of him throughout the piece, making it plain how much he loved him. But Agee doesn't seem to think they really see him and they seem as incomprehensible to him as animals.
But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them. Now only two, and now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle enquiring of your presence in a pitch dark pool of meadow; and now he too is gone.
If he was remembering his father, that mutual incomprehension, the feeling that his understanding of him was so far of the mark, it is devastatingly sad. But that leads to a larger question of how much those as close as that to us can know us and what that means. As a writer, that knowing would probably be intimately tied to the ability to articulate it. Throughout the piece Agee seems to be straining against the words, against the impressions and images to put more into words than can be done. Agee famously wrote Knoxville pretty much impromptu, not revising what he wrote in about an hour or ninety minutes, producing a masterpiece of short literature. Reading it, listening to the text as set by Barber, it's hard to imagine revision would get Agee closer to what he was trying to say but couldn't. I find the music helps clarify it, this could be about as good an example of how music can do things for words that words themselves can't do. Though in the end, true to the text, Barber wasn't able to go to the very reality of it, the reality that Agee had to live, that he had to live and remember.
Perhaps it's his need to understand that keeps him from that final act of realization. Looking back on that scene with the knowledge of what was to come, of his father's death, of his own maturation as a gay man and the life he would lead, looking back on the yet to come separation that would almost inevitably include as he came to sexual maturity, of the inevitable alienation from people who meant such a profoundly deep much to him.
How much of that alienation from our experience of love is caused by our need to make it respectable through grammar, diction, spelling and punctuation enters into it. Those things he was talking around can't be put into words and our educations, our culture tells us only to trust those things we can put into words. Even the demonstrated love of our families, established in years of proof, not in a declaration that could be false or mistaken or misunderstood but in years of real proof, of the doing of it. We are always depending on declarations of what we feel, what we think what we believe and know when it's the act, what's done that is the real substance and proof of that truth.
Here's a wonderful recording of a live performance by Eleanor Steber, who commissioned the setting of Knoxville from Barber and Edwin Biltcliffe playing piano. It says it better than I have.
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