The Ego & I

THE LATER EGO (625 pp.) James Agate -- Crown ($4).

In the spring of 1947, London Drama Critic James Agate found himself in a familiar condition: up to his neck in work, up to his ears in debt. The British revenue office sent him a "curt communication saying that unless I find -L-940 within a week everything in my flat except the bed I lie on will be taken away."

Agate shrugged and made note of it in Ego--the compendious, perennial diary which would enable him, he hoped, "to take my place beside Pepys." "Something has always turned up," he told Ego, "and something will turn up now." Four days later, a heart attack swept 69-year-old Diarist Agate to that bourne from which no income tax returns.

"The English," he once wrote, "instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it." Sure of his own talent, James Evershed Agate (rhymes with plague it) saw no reason to be shy about it; the English took him on his own bumptious terms. Though no Pepys, he was as much a national institution as the Archbishop of Canterbury's gaiters.

Up from Calico. Eldest son of a Manchester calico merchant, he dutifully sold the "disgusting, smelly stuff" till he was past 40. After business hours, as drama reviewer for the Manchester Guardian, he soaked up theatrical lore, fashioned a springy, cock-of-the-walk style all his own. With a little prompting from J.A. (as he often called himself), London capitulated, gave him enough critical portfolios for an unofficial ministry-of-arts. Some of his posts: drama critic of the Sunday Times, film critic of the Tatter, book reviewer for the Daily Express, theater commentator for BBC. For a time, he held all four jobs at once.

Busy as a beaver, he estimated his peak output at 350,000 words a year, occasionally resolved to ease off. "My New Year resolution," he swore to Ego at the beginning of 1945: "To do the work of two men instead of three." By then, that 13-year labor of self-love had grown to seven volumes (final total: nine). Into it, Agate had poured his "insane desire" for immortality, and a volley of educated banter ranging from Bernhardt to boogie-woogie, censorship to Sartre.

Ibsen & Spam. Like the rest of the series, The Later Ego (Egos 8 & 9) is larded with letters from friends and fans, old reviews, quotations from favorite authors. But these are only walk-on bits. The leading "character" is still James Agate, and the role he plays with the most zest is Victorian-conservative-at-bay. From modern art to modern man, he was convinced that the 20th Century was a dubious conspiracy against good sense, good taste, and good James Agate. Wearing the chips on his shoulders like epaulets, he waged a steady duel with his time. "To be perfectly frank, I haven't the slightest desire to read any novel later than Henry James, see any play later than Ibsen, hear a note of music after Richard Strauss, or look at any canvas after Renoir ... I hold that when Labor rules the world all elegance will vanish and good manners will be a thing of the past . . . The masses? . . . I should compel them to vote, of course, because of the salutary effect of voting. But I should destroy the votes, not count them."

What keeps The Later Ego from being stuffy is not its ideas but the "I" behind them. Fetchingly individual, Agate once launched a personal economy drive by paring his dinner to two slices of Spam-- plus his favorite vintage champagne. Sunbathing on a Riviera beach, he refused to doff his London bowler, sputtered sulky non sequiturs: "I will not wear sandals, even if the alternative is sun-stroke."

Animated, but rarely intimate, the diaries suffer most from his sturdy British conviction that a gentleman does not disclose his private life. "Hamlet," he notes, "could accuse himself of such things that it were better his mother had not borne him. But he did not tell Ophelia what those things were ... What is good enough for Hamlet is good enough for me."

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