Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

First published: 1941

Type of work: Journalism

The Work

In 1936, poet and writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, who had been working with the US Farm Security Administration, were commissioned by the staff of Fortune magazine to develop an article on cotton tenantry that would include photographs. Fortune wanted a visual and verbal record of the daily lives of white sharecroppers. As the two carried out their assignment, they found it developing into a much larger project. Ultimately, they were forced to return to their jobs much sooner than they wished, and the work they had done was refused publication by those who had commissioned it.

In 1941, Agee and Evans published their work in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Though complete in itself, the book was intended to be the first volume of a multivolume work called Three Tenant Families, but subsequent volumes were never written. The published book consists of sixty-two photographs followed by lengthy text, partly factual, partly imaginative, all extremely detailed. As a narrative of fact, a regional study, a moving moral document, a lyric meditation on life and art, and an exercise in style, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century.

First, as in a play script, Agee lists the members of the three families whose lives animate the book, their ages, and their relationships. Agee lists himself among the “cast” as a spy traveling as a journalist, and he lists Evans as a counterspy traveling as a photographer. William Blake, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ring Lardner, Jesus Christ, and Sigmund Freud are listed as unpaid agitators.

At the time, many critics considered the book a structural failure. It has no apparent pattern of development. Agee begins by explaining that the project is corrupt, obscene, terrifying, and mysterious. He realizes painfully that he is spying into the private misery of the sharecroppers, that their lives will thus be exposed as passing entertainment to the curious and casual reader, and that he is being paid for doing this work. Determined to show the sacredness and dignity of each life down to the smallest detail, he approaches his subjects with boundless love and humility.

Agee records three incidents—“Late Sunday Morning,” “At the Forks,” and “Near a Church”—that are so moving to him that they render him almost inarticulate. He somehow manages to write about these incidents simply and vividly. In the first, a white foreman intrudes into the local black community and forces three African Americans to sing for Agee and Evans. In the second, Agee asks directions of a sick young man, his worn wife, and a mentally disabled older man. In the third, near a church that Evans wishes to enter to take photographs, Agee accidentally frightens a young black couple by running up behind them. In each case, he empathizes so strongly with each individual that he feels sympathy and understanding for the foreman even though he humiliates the black singers; he feels sick with joy and gratitude when the wife at the forks shows sufficient confidence in him to smile slightly; he feels the fear of the young couple and the utter impossibility of ever communicating his intentions clearly to them.

Part 1, “A Country Letter,” which Agee wrote while sitting up late at night, contains some of the most beautiful lyric prose of the entire book. It is unified, developed, and complete in itself. Agee speaks of his tenants specifically, but he places them and their flimsy homes against a backdrop of the earth and the universe so that they and their problems, their joys and sorrows, become representative of all. The theme running through the piece is of aspirations and ideals dulled and lost, worn down by the hard necessities of living.

Parts 1 and 2 are primarily factual. Agee introduces the people and clarifies their complex family relationships. The process of their waking up and getting breakfast is described in detail. Agee explains simply the attempts of the men to find other work during slack times on the farm and the kinds of jobs available to them. The chapter on money is an objective and devastating account of the tenant farmers’ financial situation. The section on shelter is almost one hundred pages. Agee details the setting of one tenant home, the surrounding fields, the spring, the garden, and the outbuildings, including the contour and quality of the soil, the angle of the path, the flavor of the water, the shape and size of the building, the boards and nails holding them together, and the odds and ends found inside them. Systematically, as with a microscope, he examines the house itself, its outside structure and materials as well as the space underneath it, including the dampness, the insects, and the odors. Then, inside, he details the front bedroom, where he sleeps; the rear bedroom, where the family sleeps; the kitchen and storeroom; and the space beneath the roof. For each room, he describes the walls, the floor, the placement of furniture, the furniture itself, and the contents of each drawer, all the way down to bits of dust, the items on the furniture and pinned to the walls, the insects inhabiting the bed, the wasps in the beams of the roof, the textures and odors, and the imagined hopes and feelings of the people whose home it is.

Agee’s description of the house is of a living thing, flimsy and inadequate but alive and, like the people, placed against the curve of the earth and sky. He describes the homes of the other two families also, but chiefly to point out their differences from the first. The final part of this section is devoted to the other forms of life present: the dogs, cats, cows, mules, pigs, snakes, insects, birds, and trees. These lives, too, are described with respect and consideration, with humor, and with an appreciation of the beauty to be found in them.

Part 2 is devoted to sections on clothing, education, and work. Agee lists the items of clothing worn by the men and women on Saturdays, Sundays, and workdays. He describes in particular detail a suit of overalls and the shirt worn with them, including their cut, pockets, stitching, straps, color, and texture when new, when partly worn out, and when completely worn out, differentiating carefully between the three stages. Again, he makes the clothes seem almost alive, an outer skin, part of the person who wears them. The section on education, considered brilliant by some critics, is an angry analysis of the failure of schools and teachers not only in the South but also in other areas to educate the young properly, while society forces on them work with no bearing on their lives and values that are meaningless and harmful. In “Work,” Agee gives a step-by-step description of how to raise cotton, from the preparation of the soil through the sowing, cultivating, and harvesting of the crop. Such work is extremely laborious and is done with primitive, inadequate tools. The entire family participates in the labor and in the anxious waiting for harvest, which will determine the meager incomes of the sharecroppers.

The next part of the book, “Intermission,” is illustrative of the confused structure of the text. It deals with a questionnaire sent to Agee by a noted journal and Agee’s answers to that survey.

Part 3, “Inductions,” goes back in time to the first meetings between Agee and Evans and the three families involved in their work. In particular, the section describes Agee’s first night in the Gudgers’ home, how he came to be there, what they said and ate, and how they all reacted to the prospect of Agee and Evans living with them.

From this point on, the book consists of short pieces: descriptions of a graveyard, of Squinchy Gudger and his mother, of Ellen Woods; a poem, the first line of which gives the book its title; and a section of notes and appendices, chiefly containing notes on American photographer Margaret Bourke-White and a listing of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables.

The concluding piece describes a call, probably of a small fur-bearing animal, possibly a fox, heard one night from the Gudgers’ front porch. The call is answered by another animal, and as the two continue to call back and forth, Agee and his friend speculate on the animals and their locations. Finally, within himself, Agee experiences the joy of hearing the world and nature talk, and he experiences the grief that comes from the inability to communicate.

The faults of the book arise from its very virtues: Agee’s love and compassion for people result not only in vivid, lyric prose but also in verbosity and repetition. When the book first appeared, some critics thought Agee’s prose arrogant, mannered, precious, and nonsensical; others found it confused and adolescent. Obsessed though the author was with his own complex reactions to his subjects and the rest of the world, and his failure to convey all that he felt, he nevertheless gives a picture of himself and of the tenants and their lives in a way that is vivid and overwhelming. At times, the writer’s sensibility would be almost unbearable if it were not of a high moral order. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men breaks through the limits of reality to convey meanings and insights that are rich and strange. Its personal revelations are of great moral significance.

Bibliography

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