Text That Has Been

One thread of my China story begins with a Presbyterian missionary family living in Penglai, Shandong, the place that periodically experiences mirages off the coast.  It is the place from which Qin Shi Huang sent sailors off to look for the elixir of life, so that he might be the first to cheat death.  Out there at the head of the mighty Shandong Peninsula, in 1898 Henry Robinson Luce was born. I was a Luce Scholar when I first came in China in 1993 and his vision to accelerate understanding between the U.S. and China is an anchor stitching in my life’s practical fabric. 

If I introduce myself to a large room full of people, as I did this week, trying to explain who I am and why I’m here, I almost necessarily weave Luce into the tale. And all I’ve usually time for is to mention that the founder of Time magazine was raised near Wei Fang, two hundred kilometers west of Penglai, the same city my step son was raised in, eighty years later.  And I mention that he was devastated by the loss of the Guomindang and spent the next nineteen years of his life ruing the American ‘loss’ of China.  Indeed the Foundation’s Scholar program did much work in Asia but little in China until the early nineties, when I was able to come for my first time. 

This week I spent some time with Henry Luce from another unexpected thread.  After finishing the contemporary sociological text “White Trash” I picked up something referenced in that text that has been on my shelf for years but which I’ve never began:  “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men” by James Agee and Walker Evans.  From the inscription inside I can see that my mother gave me this book for my birthday.  Was it twenty years ago?  Was in longer than that?  Perhaps she remembers.  It was always something that I ought to have read but never got around to as I suppose I wasn’t quite sure what it was. 

There are a number of introductions to the first of which, by John Hersey is a convincing hagiography.  Quickly it is established that Agee was brilliant, sensitive, instinctively cool, alcoholic and achingly out of touch with his job at Luce’s Fortune magazine.  And as I read about his dealings with Luce, and remembered the other exchanges I’d read about between the magnate and another of his great writers, Theodore White, I considered how fortunate I was to have been buoyed by the great man’s vision, his legacy, in a way that would not have been possible, or perhaps palatable, when he was alive. 

The following quote is pulled from an early journalistic piece of Agee’s at Fortune and follow’s with Hersey’s introduction text:

“The Tennessee River system begins on the worn magnificent crest of the southern Appalachians, among the earth’s older mountains, and the Tennessee River shapes its valley into the form a boomerang, bowing to its sweep through seven states.  Near Knoxville the streams still fresh from the mountains are linked and thence the master stream spreads the valley most richly southward, swims past Chattanooga, though the flood-gates of Wilson Dam, to slide becalmed along the crop-cleansed fields of Shiloh, to march due north across the high diminished plains of Tennessee and through Kentucky spreading marshes toward the valley’s end where, finally at the toes of the Paducah, in one wide glassy golden swarm the water stoops forward and continuously dies into the Ohio. 

Luce called Agee in and told him that the TVA story was one of the finest pieces Fortune had ever run and that it was time for Agee to learn how to write about business. Word went round that he’d volunteered to send Agee to Harvard Business School, but Agee, by then had had enough of Harvard.  Later Luce heard disturbing reports that Agee didn’t follow very closely, the generally understood, Time Inc. dress code.  All too true.  . . . Luce apparently sent Agee a note to “watch it.” 

More on Agee later.  Luce was right.  He writes beautifully.