James Agee is perhaps best known today for his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that documents tenant farmers during the Great Depression. He also won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family. But before he became celebrated for his writings of film criticism, journalism, and fiction, Agee attended a boys’ school during his formative, adolescent years.
A young teacher, Father James H. Flye, befriended Agee soon after the boy’s arrival and mentored him for the rest of the writer’s short life. In a book published last year on Agee’s time in Tennessee, scholar Paul Brown unearthed some of Father Flye’s long-forgotten articles written early in the last century. Brown includes an excerpt from one article in particular in which Flye’s observations and principles strike me as vital for boys’ educators today:
A young teacher, Father James H. Flye, befriended Agee soon after the boy’s arrival and mentored him for the rest of the writer’s short life. In a book published last year on Agee’s time in Tennessee, scholar Paul Brown unearthed some of Father Flye’s long-forgotten articles written early in the last century. Brown includes an excerpt from one article in particular in which Flye’s observations and principles strike me as vital for boys’ educators today:
We look into the face of a boy,…and notwithstanding faults whose traces may perhaps be there[,] we are won by the infinite charm of youth, speaking to us of something purer and sweeter and higher than the hard, dry, practical, materialistic life which so many adults live. The child has his faults and failings, he is careless, his ethical standards may seem at times disappointing, and yet there is this delicate quality in his face which means innocence and faith, and love…something which seems to say that the faults do not express his real self…. The appeals of the world make themselves heard, the broad way is inviting, the world’s roughness has hurt and perhaps toughened him, low standards are constantly presented to him, and influences towards what is common and vulgar, and probably he has absorbed more or less of all this…. The boy can be touched by the appeal to what is high and pure.
That boys’ schools need to be countercultural remains as important as ever—our teachers, coaches, and staff cannot speak enough to our students of those matters “purer and sweeter and higher” than the materialistic world that often knocks louder. That boys’ schools need to show mercy never ceases to be the case—we, as educators, must always mind that “faults do not express [a boy’s] real self” and that instances in which failings overshadow the good are often the best teaching moments. Perhaps most importantly, we must remember that boys are ultimately drawn to the “high and pure,” or what my own mentor called “the deepest loves [that] are beyond reason, yet they are real and true and good. The heart has its reasons. The heart longs not to tear down and analyze, but to stand in awe, to appreciate, to enter into intimacy, to surrender.” Let us not praise the famous of the world in our classrooms and on the fields and courts but praise the true and good.