No apology needed ...

... John Updike's "James Agee, Talker" | The New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If Agee is to be remembered, it should be for his few, uneven, hard-won successes. The author of the best pages ofLet Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family owes no apology to posterity. As to “the quarter of a million unsigned words,” surely a culture is enhanced, rather than disgraced, when men of talent and passion undertake anonymous and secondary tasks. Excellence in the great things is built upon excellence in the small; Agee’s undoing was not his professionalism but his blind, despairing belief in an ideal amateurism.