Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
James Agee & Walker Evans
Penguin Classics 512pp
Writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans received assignment in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the lives of sharecroppers in the US south. Three years into President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” – a sequence of economic planning aimed at alleviating unemployment in America – and Agee and Walker were billeted with three families in the south, and told to write their stories and take a few photographs. Over this eight week assignment Agee began to envisage a deeper story, a larger series of writings, and began the first of a planned trilogy, entitled Three Tenant Families, of which Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the first and only volume.
The book sold poorly upon its publication in 1941 – estimates say about 600 copies – and it was not until a 1960 reissue, following Agee’s untimely death, that its genius was recognized. In many ways Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book before its time – it anticipates the change in journalistic writing that would occur in the 1960s with Norman Mailer.
James Agee, a notorious hell raiser in Greenwich Village, a man enamored with city life, with the fast life, seemed a strange choice for such an assignment, but in July 1936 he found himself, with Walker Evans in the “house” of a taciturn Alabama family, whom he called the Gudgers. These were simple people, living in a house open to the elements, with no running water or electricity, families that received land off the landowners in exchange for their work in bringing in the cotton crop each year. It was a tough work, work that paid poorly, and left those indebted to such a lifestyle with nothing. The families Agee meets are dressed in clothing made out of flour sacks and passed down the generations. They often go barefoot because they cannot afford shoes. The portrait Agee paints of these people is not a maudlin one, it is not a judgmental tone he adopts, or one of sympathy – Agee simply tells it as it is, sometimes in great detail. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men stands as one of the most well documented of studies, the perfect resource if one ever wished to recreate such a life, for everything is here, from the decoration of their homes, to the style of the clothes, to the dust on the step.
Only to achieve all of this, Agee does not always use prose. In a book that uses poetry, prose and photographs to build up its resonant image, the portrait of these families becomes more wholly complete than in anything else I have ever read. The families come alive. They breathe through Agee & Walker’s work, they live still. We are in this land with them.
“Here I must say, a little anyhow: what I can hardly hope to bear out in the record: that a house of simple people which stands empty and silent in the vast Southern country morning sunlight, and everything which on this morning in eternal space it by chance contains, all thus left open and defenseless to a reverent and cold-laboring spy, shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacing of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence: that this beauty is made between hurt by invincible nature and the plainest cruelties and needs of human existence in this uncured time, and is inextricable among these, and as impossible without them as a saint born in paradise.”
Okay, so at times he is overly-wordy, overly enthusiastic – and any section like this taken without the context of what has come before it might not work – but Agee’s work is a hymn to this life, its parts, in becoming a whole, become magnificent.
This is not to say that it is a book without flaws, because it does have some. There is a moment early on in his book where he describes an incident: he and Walker Evans were photographing a church and a black couple walk past. Agee goes after them to ask about the church and the couple panic, obviously fearing attack, and Agee understands at last the tensions that ripple throughout the south. It is a vivid moment in a book full of them, but instead of continuing in this vain he begins to detail, in great length, the minutiae of the homes – 30 pages on clothing, 40 on education (or lack of it), and though all of this is necessary, during it one wishes to feel people in this narrative, for it becomes almost a museum piece, the life drained out of it. However, come alive it does, during part three of the book known as “inductions” – when Agee describes meeting the families for the first time and his first road trip alone into the south. The writing here is experimental at times, and Agee’s work comes soaring to life: The beginning:
“Down in front of the courthouse Walker had picked up talk with you, Fred, Fred Ricketts (it was easy enough to do, you talk so much; you are so insecure, before the eyes of any human being); and thee you were, when I came out of the courthouse, the two of you sitting at the base of that pedestal wherefrom a brave stone soldier, frowning, blows the silence of a stone bugle searching into the North; and we sat and talked; or rather, you did the talking, and the loudest laughing at your own hyperboles, stripping to the roots of the lips your shattered teeth, and your vermilion gums; and watching me with fear from behind the glittering of laughter in your eyes, a fear that was saying, ‘o lord god please for once, just for once, don’t let this man laugh at me up his sleeve, or do me any meanness or harm’ (I think you never got over this; I suppose you never will); while Walker under the smoke screen of our talking made a dozen pictures of you using the angle finder (you never caught on; I notice how much slower white people are to catch on than negroes, who understand the meaning of a camera, a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil eye): and then two men came up and stood shyly, a little away; they were you, George, and you, Mr. Woods, Bud; you both stood there a little off side, shy, and taciturn, George, watching us out of your yellow eyes, and you, Woods, quietly modeling the quid between your molars and your cheek; and this was the first we saw of you:”
I could quote the whole chapter. Just from that we know Fred and Bud and George, we know this time, this town, this life. It is a piece of writing full of stunning work, of great images: the tight menace of a diner in an unfamiliar town for an unfamiliar man; the sun, cutting through the sky, and the heat; and a nighttime in one of these cabins, being bit at by bedbugs and peeing into the open night.
One of the great sadness’s of Agee’s work is that he knows he cannot help these families. He is simply and observer; the recorder of their life, a man who will know them and leave them, but that they will “outshine the sun”. Let Us Now Praise Men remains a masterpiece of American letters, and one of the greatest works of non-fiction, and throughout it these simple people remain alive and glorious.
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