Johan Bergenas' blog at The Hill has a strong, plain-speaking plea for the End Wildlife Trafficking Act.
This may be the last good opportunity before it’s (even more than now) too late.
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A couple of personal notes, and then we’ll come to James Agee . . .
One Sunday afternoon, walking with friends, we came upon an unlocked back door at a boarded-up mansion on the grounds of a federal bird sanctuary. We slipped in and explored, ending up in a very dark basement, where vague heaps and weird shapes gradually resolved into skins, some furry, some scaly. There was a pile of leopard cubs or ocelots, dozens of them, maybe a hundred in all, and one dried-up, dusty, twisted crocodile hide that must have been close to a world record in length. The mansion had briefly served as office space for a federal wildlife agency, and the cellar had apparently served as a mass grave for contraband confiscated from New York City docks and airports.
Lord knows how many more piles of skins have accumulated in how many more cellars since then. But even more skins must have found their way to human backs and fireside floors. That was over twenty-five years ago.
Around the same time, a friend told me of visiting the home of a real estate developer (one of Greater NYC’s many mini-trumps) whose ambition was to acquire trophy heads from every surviving species of antelope, from every place on earth. The most endangered species were trickiest to hunt down, but his walls were filling up nicely. (Between his home and the bay was a private tennis court constructed over protected wetlands. To prevent grass growing up through the surface, he’d laid a carpet of full herbicide bags on the bulldozed muddy subsoil.) Like World War Two, this is a struggle against an a metastasizing amoral arrogant attitude, as much as it’s a problem of tracking down and defeating enemy forces in the field.
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Fade to 1955.
The great American author James Agee, 44, is in hospital, writing letters. “He coherently and masterfully sketches several script ideas” as John Updike recounted in the New Republic.
Dwight MacDonald tells us:
In his last letter to Father Flye, written a day or two before he died, Agree sketches out a fantasy about elephants—how they have been degraded by man from the most intelligent and noblest of beast to figures of fun. He felt he was dying and this was his last most extraordinary insight...
Excerpts below. The link goes to the unforgettable full text of what Agee wrote.
I heard it read aloud at a campfire one night in the spring of 1964, and only now have been able to find the words in print. In retrospect, I think Agee’s words probably changed my life. He tells us, above all, that it’s okay to care… that withdrawing into cool, detached bemusement is not cool at all, but just depraved, numb indifference.)
from full text of "
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye” . . .
Nothing much to report. I feel, in general, as if I were
dying: a terrible slowing down, in all ways...
. . . a movie idea I’ve recently had...
At the beginning, elephants converge from all
over Africa, towards a disembodied voice, the voice of God...
". . . now, a new age begins. Soon, now, you will
be taken to be looked upon, to be regarded as strange and
as wonderful and — forgive me, my dear ones — as funny. . . I ask
only this: be your own good selves, always faithfully, always
in knowledge of my love and regard, and through so being,
you may convert those heathen, those barbarians, where all
else has failed."
During this admonition, and blessing, the oldest ele-
phant sadly leaves the assembly, and walks away to the
great, secret, elephant cemetery, and dies there.
Soon after, men come among the elephants, and cap-
ture them for circuses.
We move, then, from fiction to fact.
This is what happened; a matter of record; when ele-
phants were brought among civilized men:
1824: The iirst American circus elephant.
She was bought by a man whose headquarters was at
Somers, N. Y. She was called Old Bet She was exhibited
locally. In a small town in Western Connecticut, religious
people decided that she was the re-incarnation of Behe-
moth, and shot her dead . . .
1916: Tennesse: Mary.
In a small Tennessee town — out of what charming prov-
ocations you can imagine — Mary went berserk, and killed
three men. The general populace decided, accordingly, that
she should be hanged. They strung her up to a railroad
derrick . . .
1934: Grand Finale. . .
. . . All 36 elephants die in the fire. Their huge souls,
light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret ceme-
tery back in Africa —
And perhaps God speaks, tenderly, again . . .
Almost nobody I've described it to likes this idea, except me. It has its
weaknesses, but I like it. I hope you do.
I must stop for now. My love to you —
Jim*
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* This last letter was never posted. In an Air Mail envelope, stamped
and addressed, it was placed as outgoing mail on the mantel in the living
room of his house, where I later found it.
. . . Toward sunset in Wichita, Monday, May 16, 1955,
there was a telephone call for me from New York . . . "Jim died this
afternoon."
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UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012
with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation
archive.org/...
LETTERS OF JAMES AGEE TO FATHER FLYE
GEORGE BRAZILLER
NEW YORK
1962
Copyright © James Harold Flye and The James Agee Trust, 1962
All rights in this book are reserved.
For information, address the publisher,
George Braziller, Inc., 215 Park Avenue South, New York City 3.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-16270
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WWF elephant info