Knoxville: Summer 1915

Knoxville: Summer 1915, the prologue to A Death in the Family (Agee) is so beautiful it almost hurts.  It's funny that we think of the lyric essay as something created recently by the Seneca Review, but this prologue is a lyric essay.  I'm recalling, Laura, you were reading a book on criticism written by Agee and two other critics, and you said "we think we've invented all this new criticism but they were doing it then."  I feel the same about this essay.

Agee describes that most magical of things -- a child's long summer twilight in the security of family and neighborhood. He invests a huge portion of the essay in sensory detail, especially in trying to capture the specific sounds: various types of hose sounds, locusts, crickets. "Meantime from low in the dark, just outside the swaying horizons of the hoses, conveying always grass in the damp of dew and its strong green-black smear of smell, the regular yet spaced noises of the crickets, each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted, like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain.

I found it masterful the way he invoked the cricket. His first descriptive phrase is musical, lyrical, delightful to the eye and ear, but I didn't follow his meaning (although obviously I know what a cricket sounds like) -- "each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted" -- I couldn't grasp his notion of a cold silver noise.  Then he clarifies: "like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain."  Oh! Now I hear it!

He also restates everything he said in prose in verse, before closing the essay with a kind of coda-prayer.

My clumsy efforts here are not beginning to touch the magic of this piece, which captured my heart with its lyrical blend of sound and image, of repetition and musical syntax. ("Now is the night one blue dew.")

I'm really enjoying reading the pieces in this Southern Selves book. There is something soothing to my inner ear. Because I'm interested in sound, and in meditative memoir, this piece in particular stands out to me as a model.  I'm going to find the whole book and read it.