99 Stories of God

77. Elephants Never Forget God

Five days before his death on May 16, 1958, the writer and film critic James Agee wrote a letter to his beloved longtime correspondent the Reverend James Harold Flye. The letter, never mailed, speaks of a film Agee wished to make concerning elephants.

He was haunted by the cruel death of a circus elephant in Tennessee in 1916. The elephant had gone berserk and killed three men. It was decided that she should be hung, and thousands of people turned out for the execution. She was strung to a railroad derrick and, after several hours, died.

This would be the basis for the film, but he also envisioned the choreographer George Balanchine training a troupe of elephants in a corps de ballet who perform their duties to the music of Stravinsky while a crowd roars with laughter. So humiliated are the elephants that they later set themselves ablaze, whereupon “their huge souls, light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret cemetery back in Africa.”

Agee never explained how he would go about making such a film.