A.
To make myself clear, I will need to set certain propositions to you. Those propositions comprise a philosophical argument. Don’t be alarmed by the term “philosophical” – I don’t mean anything recondite or highly abstract by these propositions. You need not accept the numbered paragraphs below as true or meaningful. I only ask that you give them the benefit of the doubt.
1.
Most people live in a fog of ignorance. This ignorance is fundamental and so profound that people are not even aware of it.
2.
It behooves human beings to understand things as they really are. (This truism is, perhaps, the most questionable in this sequence of propositions – if the truth were important to people, why do most of us live in a state of ignorance?)
3.
At the core of human ignorance is a shocking deficit in our understanding. We are surrounded by things that we perceive to be real, but have no idea how it is that these things exist as real. We don’t understand what it means for something “to be” – or, better stated, we don’t think about how things manifest themselves to us as real.
4.
That is, when we use the word “is”, we don’t know what that word means in any fundamental sense. Probably, the word “is” has many possible meanings. It would be reasonable for us to attempt to work out some of those meanings.
5.
Being conceals itself as beings. When I see a tree, I think of its type, variety, its physical characteristics of size, shape, and color, its history and the seasonal cycles in which it flourishes and endures. I forget to think of the fact fundamental to all these useful things that I might perceive about a tree – that is, that the tree exists, it somehow stands forth as real.
6.
The example of the tree may be extended: a tree has no existence in and for itself. The tree’s existence is always in relationship to something else. Most obviously, the tree exists in a relationship with my consciousness – it stands forth as real to me.
7.
Therefore, to understand how a tree or a stone exists , we must understand my relationship to these things.
8.
For this reason, we should commence our study of how things exist by directing our attention to the one thing that is indisputably known to us –that is human nature and consciousness. To understand the being of a tree or a stone, we should begin our inquiry with something that we can study intimately – how is it that humans exist?
9.
There are different ways to access human existence. One approach is to consider tools. Human beings equip themselves for existence by making and using tools. Like the “is-ness” of things in general, tools are often ignored in an understanding of human existence – they are usually too humble and familiar to be studied. Thus, the relationship of tools to human beings is often overlooked. But if we think about tools, and look at them closely, we will discover intricacies of design, history, wear, and application that will tell us much about the hands (and minds) that use those tools.
10.
Human beings are not equipped to live exposed to the elements. Rather, people make dwellings. The relationship of people to the dwellings in which they live is another aspect of human existence that is often overlooked. But if we think carefully about our dwellings, how they are located and made, the patterns of use and wear evident in them, their repair, destruction and construction, we will learn many useful things about how people exist.
11.
Observing thoughtfully tools and dwellings will provide us with facts about human existence – that is, how humans “are”.
12.
When we approach an understanding of how things “are”, we stand in the presence of the truth.
13.
The truth is radiant.
Beyond these propositions, things become murky.
B.
In 1936, a young man, just graduated from Harvard, was given a journalism assignment by the magazine for which he worked. (When he was 27, James Agee worked for Fortune magazine.) It was the height of the Great Depression and Agee was told to travel to Alabama and spend eight weeks researching the lives of tenant farmers. Walker Evans, a photographer who had attended Philips Academy in Exeter, Massachusetts, traveled with Agee – his role was to photograph that poor farmers who were to be the subjects of the Fortune article. Evans had experience taking pictures of this kind. When he worked with Agee, he was on-leave from the FSA’s Resettlement Authority, an agency of the federal government for whom he had made documentary photographs.
Agee and Evans, who stuck out like ‘sore thumbs’ in impoverished rural Alabama, were accused of being “spies” for the Communist party. (This explains why Agee calls himself with Evans “a spy” and the epigraph to their resulting book drawn from Karl Marx’ Communist Manifesto.) Evans and Agee lived with the most prosperous of the three sharecropper families that are described in their work. They were allowed to sleep on the porch of the family’s small house. The two reporters interacted intimately with the farmers and their families. In 2005, family members recalled Agee and Evans snooping through chest-of-drawers and closets, looking under beds, and even crawling under the pine plank floor, open in places to the dirt under the house – the structure was set on ungainly cairns of fieldstone above the ground. Agee admits to falling in love with a young woman, a teenager living in one of the households with her married sister. He describes his own grief when she is sent away to marry someone in a distant town far from her kin - a place that would be like another planet to her.
Agee was undisciplined. His short life is filled with stories of projects that he attempted and, then, subverted. He was an alcoholic and self-destructive. The article for Fortune magazine grew into a manuscript exceeding 400 printed pages. The text is written, at least in part, in extravagant language that derives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and, of course, Faulkner’s more purple prose. (In fairness, it should be observed that about two-thirds of the text are written in simple American demotic, plain, declarative sentences that are lucidly descriptive.) The editors at Fortune, confronted with a huge rambling manuscript, much of it in the first-person, rejected the article and it was not published in the periodical. Similarly, Walker Evans’ photographs that make up a somber and astonishing overture to the book were also not printed in Fortune.
The manuscript with photos was finally published in 1941 as the book Let us now praise famous men: Three Tenant Families. The book’s peculiar format, its densely written reveries, clusters of literary allusions and daunting High Modernist prose-style defeated most readers. (These features will defeat many readers today as well even though the book is accounted a classic and, often, assigned to college students.) Only six-hundred copies of the book were sold; the rest of the first edition was “remaindered.” By that time, the world was at war and no one was inclined to study rural poverty.
Walker Evans became famous as a photographer – much of his renown rests on the eerie, strangely inert, photographs published in Let us now praise famous men. But he made hundreds of other classic pictures, many of them in urban settings. Evans said that taking photographs was “like hunting – you shoot to kill.” The best pictures, he argues, are those that are “mysterious and evocative – but realistic as well.” A famous picture in the prelude to Let us now praise famous men shows a child’s body sprawled on a wooden deck; the child’s face and shoulders are covered with some kind of garment and the infant lies on a flattened sack bare legs outstretched. In the context of images showing debilitating poverty, the person viewing (attempting to “read”) this photograph shudders: Are we seeing the corpse of a baby? In fact, the picture depicts an infant stretched out on a bed called a “pallet” (the squashed sack), napping with face covered against biting flies and mosquitoes. Evans ended his life teaching photography at Yale and died in New Haven in 1975.
Agee was enamored with photographic representation of the world. Some of his dithyrambs in Let us now praise famous men laud photography as producing a “factual” image of reality. Consistent with this belief, Agee worked as a film critic, one of America’s greatest – two volumes of his pathbreaking film criticism have been collected and now are ensconced in official Library of America volumes. He went to Hollywood and wrote filmscripts, most notably a draft The African Queen and the original screenplay for The Night of the Hunter (directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum) – Night of the Hunter is shot, for the most part, in a starkly factual style that looks like Walker Evans. Agee was working on a novel A Death in the Family when he died of a heart attack in a Manhattan taxi cab in 1955. Much of his life was thwarted by alcoholism – he was only 46 when he perished.
The three tenant farm-families chronicled in Agee and Evans’ book have “endured” to use Faulkner’s word. Children alive when the two journalists from the magazine lived in their midst recall the experience with bitterness. The book made their kin look ignorant and helpless. Flattering pictures of family members were rejected for images that emphasized their poverty and shabby clothing. These comments from people who vaguely remembered Evans and Agee are understandable – but, in fact, the two men seem to have thought that the men, women and children that they portrayed were beautiful and that the pictures ennobled them. After all, the book was intended to document an “unimagined existence” as Agee says and the pictures are not intended to be “illustrative.” The intent of the book is stated by its title – Agee, in his hubris, aims to make the people that he chronicles “famous” and to “praise” their resilience and desperate courage. Evans’ photographs have a chiseled monumental aspect – the images certainly do not degrade their subject. Indeed, they dignify them.
Surviving family members remark bitterly that Evans and Agee “didn’t even send them a copy of the book.”
C.
The poverty that Agee describes (and that Evans depicts) is shocking. The most prosperous of the three families (Agee calls them the Gudgers – not their real name) owns two mules and sharecrops about eight or ten acres on which cotton is grown. The least prosperous family has no mule and leases three acres. The third family has one mule and a similarly small tract of rather arid, unproductive land on which to raise cotton. The poorest family was once the most well-off – they had two mules, but both died, a cow (she also died), and a house that had once been occupied by a lower middle-class farmer. But the death of their livestock and illness in the family has destroyed them and they are desperately poor – impoverished to the extent that starvation is a real hazard to them.
Since the Gudgers have two mules, they are half-share sharecroppers. This means that in a good year they can clear a tiny profit – perhaps, eight to ten dollars after living expenses. The other two families either break even or acquire more and more debt to the landlord of the property that they sharecrop. These two families are on one-third and one-quarter shares respectively. The landlord extends credit for seed and some necessary equipment so that the cotton can be raised. In the winter months, when starvation threatens, the landlords sometimes extend credit for staple foods. The people eat a kind of fry-bread made with salt, lard and flour. The flour must be carefully sifted to strain out vermin. The only meat available is poor-quality bacon.
Only the Gudgers have a reasonable source of water – fifty yards from their cabin, a spring gushes fresh cool water over limestone ledge. The other two families pull what they call “fever-water” out of swampy pits. The water makes them sick. One family shares the filthy well with a “negro farmer’s family” – the Blacks come at night because if they try to draw water during the day, the White tenant farmers will throw big rocks at them. There are no outhouses or privies. All three of the families use woodlots for their toilets. Their houses are crates set on piles of field stone, uninsulated with walls made from the poorest, most low-grade pine. These structures are, more or less, open to the elements. The family fallen on hard-times lives in a farm-house but the place is dilapidated and most of its rooms are full of vermin and uninhabitable. Everyone is afflicted with lice and fleas.
The children and women have one or two home-spun garments that they wear to town. During week-days, at home, the women wear fertilizer sacks stitched together with safety pins and used shoe-laces. The local farmstores sell fertilizer that has been packaged in burlap printed in calico. The reason that the fertilizer sacks are made this way is that it is understood that the fabric will be repurposed to make garments for the women and children. The men have two pairs of shoes – a work pair and shoes that can be worn to town. Because everyone is accustomed to going about barefoot, the men slice open the tops of their shoes to aerate their feet. The “negroes” are said to particularly skillful in creating artistic patterns in the leather of slashed shoes. No one wears socks. The poorest of the families can’t afford store-bought hats (which might costs a dime) – so they weave headdresses from corn-stalks.
Working animals and pets are casually mistreated. Mules labor with their hides excoriated with bleeding sores. This is not that different from the humans – one of the men has a skin-cancer spreading across his shoulders that makes it painful for him to wear overalls (the standard work clothing for laborers). His wife puts wet rags on the raw sores.
The education available to these sharecroppers is “unconscious murder” – although Agee, a product of expensive Prep Schools and Harvard, attenuates this argument by asserting that all American education is pretty much tantamount to soul-murder. In any event, the children that Agee describes have to slave in the fields to support their families and they miss as much as one-half of the days of instruction offered. Agee notes that several of the girls are “bright” and “enjoy school” but he sees no way for them to escape the burden of their poverty. They will end up as tenant wives, constantly pregnant, and working themselves half to death in the cotton fields. Agee writes an eloquent twenty-page dissertation on the horrors of farming cotton. Picking is done between “can and can’t” – the axiom means you work as long as you can, pinching the wool from the thorny, rock-hard bolls and, when you “can’t” – that is, your forearms and fingers are too sore and numb to close on the cotton, then, you “can’t” continue. The work is agonizing, mindless, destructive to the joints and spine, and, ultimately, yields close to nothing in sustenance to its victims.
No one bathes. Everything stinks of sweat. Man and animals are eaten up by lice and other carnivorous insects. It’s either hellishly hot or brutally cold and the houses don’t afford much protection from the elements –when it rains, the storm comes inside to drown the floors in water and mud.
D.
The 14th photograph in the Evans’ gallery that serves as the book’s preface shows work boots. The footwear is posed on flat, scoured-looking dirt. The boots look solid with bulbous, reinforced toe boxes. They are partly laced with the tongues or gussets awry. Above the place where the boots are laced, there are hook eyelets but the laces are not drawn around them.
The boots are stolid, durable-looking and serious. They are an example of a tool for living defining a certain relationship between a man and his environment. Indeed, the picture of the boots is a kind of portrait of the man who wears this footware. In 1886, Van Gogh painted work boots almost exactly like those shown in Let us now praise famous men – the most notable example of this theme is at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. This picture is sometimes regarded as a kind of portrait of Van Gogh himself. (Van Gogh sometimes portrayed people in terms of objects – there is a famous picture of Van Gogh’s chair, a humble wood frame with a wicker bottom, made to contrast with the much grander throne-like chair that Gauguin occupied at Arles: the Van Gogh chair is labeled “Vincent” and the Gauguin’s chair is labeled “Paul”.) Martin Heidegger wrote a famous essay called “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1950. The German philosopher’s analysis singles out Van Gogh’s painting of boots as an example of the work that art performs. Heidegger says that the boots are “human equipment”, that is, an example of the kind of tool that allows men to dwell in the world. Therefore, contemplation of the boots as painted by Van Gogh draws us into a system of relationships – what is the relationship between the boots and the man that wore them, between the boots and the animal that supplied the leather for this footware? what do the boots tell us of their use, of their utility in the world of work, of how men are required to labor? All of these aspects of existence are made available to us for thought by the image of the boots. (And by the actual boots if we could be persuaded to attend to them – but this is unlikely; rather the boots must be abstracted from the world by art before we are inclined to actually see them.) Heidegger says that the painting of the boots provides us with the opportunity to understand through phenomenological analysis.
Of course, Walker Evans didn’t know anything about Heidegger when he make the picture of the work boots in 1936. But there is no doubt that the method of analysis presented by Let us now praise famous men is very precisely phenomenological. Agee with Walker studies the dwellings of the Alabama sharecroppers families, inventories their gear or “equipment”, and describes their clothing in order to phenomenologically study how these people exist.
This thesis is made clear in one of the book’s several epigraphs. At the very outset, Agee quotes King Lear raging on the blasted heath. He cites Lear: “Take physic, pomp / And expose yourself to what these wretches bear...” In a preliminary allusion, Agee also references Gloucester in King Lear, blinded, as Edgar leads him to the cliff. The Depression is a sort of a sea of misfortune banked by precipitous cliffs that most educated Americans could not really see in 1936 – the nation is tottering on the brink, perhaps, of a Communist revolution. Agee’s insistence is that we see these tenant farm families and understand this phenomenon. The storm on the heath, the jets of falling water and the icy winds, opens Lear’s eyes to see what man really is: “unaccommodated man (is) nothing more than a poor forked bare animal such as thou art.” Agee’s intent is strip away from human existence it’s pomp and surplus – by studying the equipment and dwellings of these tenant farmers, the writer shows us the “poor forked bare animal” itself. The credo of phenomenology is to study existence by “going back to the things themselves” (this is what Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl said). Let us now praise famous men is an effort to present human nature as the thing itself – the “poor bare forked animal” that is our essence.
E.
Unfortunately, the prose in which phenomenology asserts its findings is often unpleasantly dense. This is because the object or equipment can not be described merely in scientific or analytic terms. To adopt a purely objective approach to reality is to assert a scientific stance that is insufficient to our experience of reality. Accordingly, the writer who essays phenomenological analysis must provide not only an account of the equipment or dwelling described, but, also, assess these things in relationship to his own being in the world. We are not wholly measuring instruments or photographic eyes –rather, we stand in relationship with the reality that we are attempting to record. Therefore, a part of that reality is our own response to what we see.
Agee understands that a purely objective account of his tenant farmers would reduce them to specimens. Therefore, he must also record his own response (or relationship) to what he is seeing. Agee was 27 when he wrote the book (mostly from notes in New Jersey) and there is an enormous quotient of what can only be called “bullshit” in his prose. This is a characteristic of phenomological writing – the dense veneer of self-absorption intrinsic to this mode of analysis often obscures its findings:
“The language of ‘reality’ (in the sense of ‘reality’ we are trying to speak of here) may be the most beautiful and powerful but certainly it must in any case be about the heaviest of all languages...
Human beings, with the assistance of mules, worked this (land) so that they might live. The sphere of power of a single human family and a mule is small; and within the limits of each of these small spheres the essential human frailty, the ultimately mortal wound which is living and the indignant strength not to perish, had erected against its hostile surroundings this scab, this shelter for the family and its animals: so that the fields, the houses, the towns, the cities, expressed themselves upon the grieved membrane of the earth in the symmetry of a disease, the literal symmetry of the literal disease of which they were literally so essential a part...
The prime generic inescapable stage of this disease is being. A special complication is life. A malignant variant of this complication is consciousness. The most complex and malignant form of it known to us is human consciousness. Even in its simplest form this sore raises its scab: the scab and the sore are one. Taking shape and complexity precisely in proportion to the shape and complexity of the disease; identical with it, in fact; this identical wound and scab fills out not merely all substance and all process and all contrivance of substance but the most intangible reaches of thought, deduction and imagination: the exactitude of its expression may be seen in the skull that scabs a brain, in the deity the race has erected to shield it from the horror of the heavens, in the pressed tin wall of a small restaurant where some of the Greek disease persists through the persistence of the Renaissance disease: in everything within and, probably, everything outside human conception; and in every combination and mutation of these things: and in a certain important sense let it be remembered that in these terms, in terms, that is to say, of the manifestations of being, taken as such, which are always strict and perfect, nothing can be held untrue. A falsehood is entirely true to those derangements which produced it and which made it impossible that it should emerge in truth; and an examination of it may reveal more of the ‘true truth’ than any more direct attempt upon the ‘true truth’.”
I have quoted these paragraphs as representative of about one-third of Agee’s book. There is much that is inept, vague and unclear, as well as simply false about this sort of writing – although Agee’s ludicrous defense is that “a falsehood” is a derangement from which the truth may somehow be implied. (If I were to tell you that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was an origin story for the Marvel Comic character Spiderman, I wonder if Agee would persist from Hell or Heaven or wherever he is now in the assertion that “nothing can be held untrue.” Obviously, all sorts of statements are untrue as simply inapposite to their subject or objectively false. To make the claim that “nothing is untrue” is to disclose a high degree of anxiety about the accuracy of the book that you have written – Agee seems to be making excuses in advance for errors in his reporting.)
Here Agee derogates the homes of his hosts, the tenant farmers, as mere scabs, that is, the symptoms of a disease like scabies that signifies poverty. He argues that conscious life is suffering: this echoes the more pessimistic German philosophers such as Schopenhauer and the early Nietzsche in his writings on Greek tragedy – the later Nietzsche, of course, was ebullient in his very despair. In a puerile sense, Agee claims that this suffering that afflicts all people (the pain of being conscious of an indifferent world) is like scabies or some other skin infection. Then, for some reason, he claims that the sores produced by the disease are “symmetrical” – I have no idea why he makes this claim, although, perhaps, it has something to do with the rigorous symmetry that he has observed (and admired) in the cabins of his sharecropper subjects. But disease, which is disequilibrium, that is life out of balance, isn’t symmetrical and the moment that he argues that the sores of the sharecropper homes show “the symmetry of a disease”, I can’t follow what Agee is claiming. In the next sentence, he uses “literally” or “literal” three times only to demonstrate that he doesn’t know what the word means. Agee’s arguments on sores and scabs are certainly not literal in any way but resolutely figurative, even symbolic.
Agee, then, proceeds to make arguments that an “identical wound and scab” reaches everywhere into all “substance” – then, he makes the remarkable claim that the thinking in our brains, our wounded consciousness, has somehow produced our skulls, which, like the peasant cabins, protect the inflamed site of our imagination. Religion is now a “scab” to protect us from “the horror of (empty) heavens” in which no deity exists to succor us. The Greeks knew this (again a reference to Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek tragedy) and the Renaissance, which rediscovered the Greeks and their literature have transmitted this contagion to us. (Although I’m unclear what this has to do with the “pressed tin walls of a small restaurant” – except that, maybe, in the Deep South, such small restaurants were operated by Greek immigrants: heirs to Aeschylus and Sophocles?) Agee has the audacity to proclaim that these thoughts apply not only to what we can perceive but also “probably in anything outside human conception” – an idiotic notion of there ever was one. (What is “outside of human conception” and how does it apply to Agee’s arguments?) He, then, notes that the sick consciousness of self-awareness engenders “derangements” – that is, untruth except that there is no untruth because every so-called “derangement” is a distorted or half-truth, something that is palpably wrong. My exegesis of Agee’s half-baked ideas here is much clearer than his prose.
My point is that one-third of Agee’s book is turgid with this sort of unreadable nonsense. It is important to note, however, that Agee is making an argument about “being” and, this subject, in general incommensurate with logical or reasoned analysis, triggers some of the gibberish comprising a part of his book.
E.
Agee’s book is limited by its brutal and persistent materialism. If his subjects have any kind of culture exceeding that of their animals, we aren’t told about it. Agee isn’t interested in these people’s religion. In fact, he is sloppy and dismissive on that subject: at one point, he notes a sign posted over a hearth, hand-lettered to say: “PLEASE BE QUITE every body is welcome”. This curious sign appears in one of Walker Evans’ photographs and Agee describes it and tells us that he will later explain the “religious services” in which the sign played a role. But he seems to forget that he has assigned this task to himself and never writes another line about this emblem of a folk religion that he apparently disdains. (In one of the book’s many postludes, Agee mentions that the renowned and glamorous Margaret Bourke-White – she was one of Hemingway’s girlfriends – has also taken pictures in the Deep South on the same subjects. In fact, Agee quotes an article saying that she has documented the services at the so-called “white Holiness churches”, something she finds appalling: just an excuse to “shout and scream and roll on the floor.” Agee’s remarks on Margaret Bourke-White’s competing photographs are catty and hard to interpret. He seems to be accusing her of sensationalizing the tenant-farmers’ poverty. The only mention in the book about the religion that these people practice, something that was surely an important aspect of their lives, is his side-glance at photographs by “Miss Bourke-White” and the unfulfilled promise that Agee will explain the strange sign posted on the hearth.) My suspicion is that Agee’s Communist inclinations make him hostile to religion as a “false consciousness” – when he inspects, a cheap family Bible, he accuses the volume of being printed on “slimy” paper and having the “cold smell of human excrement.”
Similarly, Agee doesn’t tell us anything about his character’s view of their world, their politics, or their sexual customs. He doesn’t mention their music or their folk crafts. Indeed, he suggests that these people are ahistorical, like cattle, and that they have no religion to speak of, no superstitions worth recording, and no stories or mythology of any substance. (Many of these people would have produced “moonshine” as an avocation – Agee doesn’t mention this either.) Most puzzlingly, Agee doesn’t explain the rage and horror that the poor Whites feel with respect to their Black neighbors. It’s clear that the White sharecroppers despise the “Negroes” but, also, are terrified of them. When Agee gets stuck on a remote country road at night, mired in mud, he goes back to George Gudger’s cabin to spend the night – Gudger hears him outside and is terrified: “I thought you were a nigger”, Gudger says. Why are these people so fearful of their Black neighbors, living only a few hundred yards away, and, seemingly, culturally similar in many ways? To understand this fear and hatred, Agee would need to explain the “mentality” of these tenant farmers. But, for all intents and purposes, as a good Marxist, Agee regards their consciousness and imagination as “false” and “inauthentic”, a superstructure (epiphenomena) that conceals their deplorable economic status or, worse, reconciles them to it – and, so, for all practical purposes, the human subjects of his book have no more culture than their mules.
F.
A long passage in the book describes how Agee came to spend the first night at the Gudger house. Earlier, we have seen him in engaged in philosophical pillow-talk with Walker Evans who is also living with the Gudger family – the two men sleep on the porch. (Agee is evasive about how much time he spent actually living in the Gudger household – I would guess that it was only a couple weeks at most.) This part of the book is callow and patronizing, but, also, often gorgeously written and seems climactic. In effect, Agee despairs about portraying the tenant farmers under his microscope in themselves, a task he is ill-equipped to perform by his bourgeois background and Harvard education, and, instead, reverts to a detailed description of his own reactions and relationships with these people. This approach is characteristically phenomenological – nothing is isolated in reality; all things exist in relation to other things including their observer: if I’m incapable of penetrating to the truth about these sharecroppers, that is their way of “being”, I can, at least write about myself. This method arises from the truism that if I can’t effectively grasp the metaphysical question of “Being”, I can, at least, study the one being with which I am intimate – that is myself.
Toward the end of the book, Agee shows himself at his absolute worst and, then, at his best. The worst is a section called “Intermission: Conversation in the Lobby”. Here, Agee submits responses to seven questions about the state of literature and writing propounded by Dwight McDonald in May of 1939 at Partisan Review. Agee, who was then 30, responds to the questions with explicit derision – he equates them to a meeting of “the Junior League of Nations at Wellesley”. It is true that the questions are rather prosaic and staid – but that’s in the nature of a questionnaire and McDonald’s modest inquiry really doesn’t warrant the indignation that Agee heaps upon it. Of course, he denounces the entire literary establishment as a hoax and a fraud – in his outrage, he seems to take the position that because every writer isn’t Melville or Shakespeare, then the craft of writing, in general, is corrupt. This is an adolescent posture and one that it is embarrassing to observe in thirty-year old man. Furthermore, when Agee is faced with the question of how a writer should engage with the imminent “mortal storm” of the war against Fascism, he is completely baffled. This question surely was a legitimate once in the Spring of 1939 with the world inexorably edging toward the brink of cataclysmic and total war. But Agee who has earlier helpfully told us that he feels an “allegiance or part-allegiance” (note the equivocation) toward “catholicism and communism” – of course, he should be forced to explain how he can hold these two systems in some kind of equivalence – gives no fewer than five inconsistent answers to the question about the imminent war. Clearly, this displays a great deal of unresolved ambivalence toward this issue. (And, Agee, with his commitment to showing us the contents of the one mind that he knows, his own, doesn’t hesitate to display complete confusion on this issue.) Most likely, Agee says that he will enlist in the war effort in the “most dangerous, least glamorous part”, choosing to serve in the area that is “least relevant” to his own education, talents and aspirations. Why? one must ask. But this response doesn’t satisfy our hero and so he also suggests that he will just opt out of the whole thing – the term used in my generation was “to drop out”. How this can be accomplished in the face of total war is unexplained. Agee, then, perceives that readers might be confused by these responses and so he footnotes them. “Non-resistence to evil is the only possible means of conquering evil”, Agee writes, a sentiment that is so baffling that he has to take it back in the next paragraph of the response: he admits his answers are “shameful” but says that “I see no immediate prospect of having time to attempt (to respond) properly.” In other words, although I have written five-hundred words on this subject, that answer should be ignored as inadequate and I don’t have time to really address this subject.
Agee follows this section with the climax to the book, a chapter comprised of several parts called “Inductions”. This is an extended prose poem that represents Agee’s best work and, in fact, a continuous, novelistic narrative mingled with reverie and confessional material that is embarrassingly self-revelatory. Agee describes the period before he and Walker Evans took up residence in the Gudger home. It’s a Sunday and there’s nothing to do (everything’s closed in the old Deep South) and Agee is at loose ends. He’s met Walker Evans at the county Courthouse, dropped him off somewhere, and, then, drives listlessly though the small towns and the country. Agee has come to believe that art has nothing to do with human life and the entire enterprise involving the article about the sharecroppers is fatally flawed. Heidegger, in his examination of the nature of human being, notes that most of life is spent in a condition of boredom – his philosophy is the first to convincingly represent and analyze what it feels like to be utterly bored, bored, that is, to the state psychic inanition. Other philosophers, particularly those of religion, focus on moments of transcendence – ecstasy, spiritual excitement, instants of revelation, that is, the high points of human consciousness. Heidegger convincingly asserts that focusing on these rapturous climaxes misrepresents the way that people experience their lives: most of the time, we are in-between, waiting around for something to happen, indifferent and bored. Agee instinctively accepts the proposition that our lives are defined by what doesn’t occur in them – we are defined by the romances that don’t happen, the adventures we are too cowardly to experience, the relationships that we have avoided, the meaningful commitments (for example Agee’s stance toward the oncoming world war) that we evade. Life is dull and infected with dread, the fear of death, that haunts us all. Agee’s ennui verges on an anguish that is suicidal. Nothing means anything to him. The long Sunday afternoon is a darkness in the soul. Agee meets with George Woods, a “one-mule tenant farmer”, and asks if he can move into his household to report on their lives. Woods, who is 59, has a wife in her mid-twenties reputed to be promiscuous. Agee, who is totally tone-deaf with respect to sexual matters, says that she is a “serenely hot and simple nymph”. He and Woods agree that if, Evans and Agee were to occupy a room in their shack, trouble would occur between the young men and his wife, Ivy – Agee says that he and Woods agreed upon this “in a thoroughly amused and almost affectionate manner”. (I wonder how “Bud” Woods would have recounted this discussion from his perspective.) Woods takes Agee over to see the Gudger family and they discuss the possibility of the two men lodging with them.
A few weeks pass, leading to the reader’s suspicion that Agee and Evans didn’t spend much time actually living with Gudger. Agee is bored again and finds himself in Birmingham, a Babylon compared to the tiny hamlets where the sharecroppers do business. Agee drives around aimlessly acknowledging that he “badly wanted, not to see needed, a piece of tail” and scouts around for a woman willing to indulge him. He sees a couple of girls, but decides that he is not willing to move toward seducing women that he chivalrously calls “piece(s) of head cheese.” After considering suicide for awhile, he plots to get into a fight with local hoodlums – at least, a good beating would break the boredom. He fantasizes about the girl of his dreams and feels “this dread imposed by Sunday”; in an imaginary sexual encounter with this fantasy-girl, Agee senses the presence of death all around. He finds himself, as if in a dream, on the Madrid Road. (There is a subtext about the Spanish Civil War in some parts of the book and I wonder about this place-name.) Agee decides to drive off the road, there being “a good chance I would kill myself. Gudger lives out in that area and Agee goes to see him. A big thunderstorm is approaching and the family takes shelter during the tempest. Gudger’s wife is terrified of wind, thunder and lightning and she crouches on the bed “all squinched up” in fear. The storm passes and, although parts of the house are flooded, the air is briefly cool, reminding Agee of the spring house on his grandfather’s farm near Knoxville, Tennessee. He has odd fantasies of rescuing the Gudgers from their misery, poverty that he equates to the Civil War concentration camp at Andersonville, and hears, in his mind, the Civil War song “Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching” – somehow, the Union soldiers will appear and save these people from their desperate poverty. Agee, then, tries to drive back to the Madrid road over the bottomless mud on the clay lanes around their cabin. The operation of the car, gliding over a sea of yielding and slick clay, seems to signify to Agee the caution and difficulty of his literaryu enterprise, the skill with which he will need to guide his writing to avoid a crash. Here, he fails and the car skids into the ditch. Agee walks back to Gudger’s place in the twilight – the family has already retired. Gudger comes out of the house terrified that Agee is “a nigger”, but, when he sees him, the sharecropper invites the journalist into his house, feeds him on biscuits, eggs, and rancid bacon, and, then, lets him sleep in the bed where the children usually spend the night. The bed is crawling with vermin, both bedbugs and lice, and Agee is tormented by these creatures all night long, unable to sleep, but, somehow, in his delirium, ecstatic. This anecdote as to Agee’s first night on the Gudger place is interpolated with reveries involving Walker Evans and Agee sleeping on the porch of the shack, a vast and animate night pressing in upon them and the stars vivid overhead. These sections of the book are beautifully written, although some might think the rhetoric is a bit over-the-top. Agee’s response to his subjects, his assertions as to how much the tenant-farmers liked him, are a bit too florid – and, we know in retrospect, that the sharecroppers didn’t like the two men and, in fact, felt that they were being exploited by them. But, this is the sexually intense and powerful climax to the book – Agee’s mode of interaction with his subject is essentially carnal: he wants to know the tenant-farmers by having intercourse with them, penetrating to their essence, and, then, somehow rescuing them. And he is realistic enough to recognize that these inclinations are all fantasy. There is an unbridgeable gap between Agee and his subjects.
Four sections of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men take place “On the Porch”. Three of these sections are so titled and are rhapsodies involving Evans and Agee whispering together under the wet night sky of the Alabama summer. The fourth section is the extended narrative of how Agee came to live with the Gudger family and his baptism by vermin during his first night sleeping in their home. These prose poems represent a form of “ecstatic realism”. It is interesting that the scene of a person sleeping or resting on a porch in the summer darkness is integral to Agee’s imagination. The person on the porch communes with the night, its starry vistas, and creatures. In Night of the Hunter (1955), an old woman (played by Lilian Gish) sits on the porch, cradling a shot gun, and watching the darkness for the devil, an intruder that she intends to fill with buck-shot. This is a fantasy of rescue – the old woman is sheltering a little boy and girl who have come down the river on a raft, fleeing a psychotic murderer. After a duet with the murderous preacher - they sing “Leaning on the everlasting arms” together, the old lady shoots at the devil, drives him into her barn, and, then, calls the State Troopers saying there’s some kind “varmint hiding” there. (The endangered children, John and Pearl, rescued in this way, are said “abide and endure.”) The vigil on the porch is repeated in Agee’s most famous work, the prose poem “Knoxville, Summer of 1915" in which the writer recalls his childhood, the heat of the summer that drove his family to sleep on the porch, the ice-cream man, the starry heavens, and a sense of deep, rapturous contentment. The American composer, Samuel Barber set parts of the prose poem to music and the song is now a staple of the classical concert repertoire. Agee wrote this account of a summer night on the porch in 1938, a little after writing Let us now praise famous men and the scenes of that kind in the earlier book seem to me to be sketches for the more compact and successful prose poem set to music a decade later by Barber. The porch is a liminal space, a threshold that is neither inside nor outside – it’s Agee’s symbol for man’s dwelling on the earth, the place where nature and the culture of human artifacts intersect. The fragile house, called a “scab”, opens the interior of consciousness into what is exterior to us – it’s the outlet from brain into world. The night-time summer vigil on a porch seems integral to Agee – both the site of his deepest fears (as dramatized in the film script) and greatest joy.
G.
The title to Agee and Evans’ book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men refers to The Wisdom of Sirach at 44:1. The book is canonical in the Catholic tradition and, therefore, known to Agee who was raised in that faith. (Protestants regard The Wisdom of Sirach as part of the Apocrypha.) The “famous men” to which reference is made are a number of Old Testament figures thought to presage the arrival of the Messiah.
The part of the text crucial to Agee and Evans reads:
And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance and their children are within the covenant. Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes. Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.
H.
Sirach speaks of the “glory” of those who perished “as though they had never been”. Agee’s assertion is that to stand in a great and abiding truth is to experience radiant beauty. The truth, even if painful, is always beautiful. When things are revealed to us and stand forth in their glory, our response is to experience “beauty”. This is a persistent theme in the book.
Here are some of things that Agee experiences as beautiful: the overalls that the men wear, particularly in their worn and ravaged form, the pine walls and floors of the shacks that gleam with a supernatural luster, the design of the cabins themselves with their carefully observed symmetries and almost doric simplicity, the resplendent landscape after the thunderstorm has passed, the “honest” and “beautiful” use of the English language when the sharecroppers’ speak, their talk “more beautiful and valuable than sonnet form.”
Agee says:
They live on land and in houses and under skies and seasons, which all happen to seem to me to be beautiful beyond almost everything else I know, and they themselves, and the clothes they wear, and their motions, and their speech, are beautiful in the same intense and final commonness and purity...there is a purity in this existence in and as “beauty” which is inevitably lost in consciousness , and this is a serious loss.
That is, beauty arises in sheer existence. As soon as we are conscious of beauty it is lost. This is tantamount to Heidegger asserting that “the being of beings is lost in their presence” – that is, we see the thing, but not that it is. Once the truth is seen, it is irreversible. Agee cites Beethoven on several occasions: “He who truly hears my music can never know sorrow again.”
Agee tells us that Annie Marie Gudger on the day of her marriage “was such poem as no human being shall touch.” The faces of the children and young women are luminous with glory. Agee tells us repeatedly that he is “in love with” ten year old Louise Gudger because of her radiance. The cornstalk hats that the Woods’ family members wear are beautiful beyond measure, golden halos plaited about their brows. Agee praises the “beautiful transition to sleep” when he spends his first night with the Gudger family. The bare room is as “shapely” and beautiful as a bone. Agee even praises the vermin for inflaming his flesh and keeping him alert to the numinous radiance around him. He ends the book with a quotation from William Blake: Everything that is is holy. Even a woman’s garment patched together from old fertilizer bags participates in this divine radiance
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