Anyway, the tension between the two writers is instructive. I think Agee is the greater artist.

I’ll remember the name. She may tack off in some direction(s) somewhat different from dear Agee’s but, with this writing of hers as an alert, I eagerly await wherever prose next takes her.

And, anyway, why take Agee’s word for it? It’s always dangerous to attack a writer–or anybody, really–through his or her letters, which is what Updike is doing in his short piece. Writers are not especially helpful guides to their own writing, particularly when their criticism is filtered through personal letters, where one is often less thoughtful, careful, and articulate. As William Maxwell would say, “We read other people’s mail at our peril”–especially so when we hang a critique on the reliability of the observations contained therein.

This is a great appreciation of Agee, though I would echo Lauren Davis’s suggestion that alcohol played a decisive role in his failures, literary and personal. And I would say that the two were connected. There is, too, the matter of Agee’s discomfort with women and his own sexuality — questions which, as best I recall, are probed in at least a couple of the biographies that have been published. Paula Rabinowitz, writing about 20 years ago in “Cultural Critique,” explored Agee’s “voyeurism;” more recently, David Denby, in the New Yorker, argued that Agee’s work anticipates “the strategies of self-acknowledgment” which mark the non-fiction of our time and which remind us that “the writer is not some impersonal conveyor of data but a fallible instrument of experience, including his own.”

I, too, read Agee when I was a teenager, and I come back to him year after year, and try to get my students to bite. No success, at all, in the effort.

What I see now in re-reading the work, but was incapable of seeing then, is Agee’s slide into a different sort of intoxication. There are long passages which are not merely messy and amateurish, but downright sodden with booze. That, to me, is the great tragedy of Agee. And perhaps I should thank him for that as well, for with seventeen plus years of sobriety behind me, I didn’t want to repeat his journey into alcoholic hell. Agee’s writing was ruined, it might be argued, by his alcoholism. I only began publishing after I got sober, which was as it should be. What I wrote under the influence of booze was, frankly, useless. And so it goes.

In any event, I still hold “Famous Men” as one of the world’s great books — difficult, sloppy, intense and scalding, it is also unique and unforgettable. It deserves to be in the canon, as does Agee, drunk or sober.