It has been seventy years since James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and yet their work speaks across the decades, powerful, moving, poignant, gripping, exhausting, blazingly brilliant. I taught this book again last week for the first time in a long while in a graduate seminar. And I was struck by how much historians have to learn from Agee still. It may be at first glance that Agee’s obsession with being a “spy” is the stuff of drama, comical in its overreach or pathetic in its self-absorption. Certainly, some of my students saw it this way.
But Agee, “a spy traveling as a journalist,” brings us into the world of cotton tenancy in such vivid detail and with such excruciating emotion and with such fidelity and honor and care and love, that we have to pay attention. We have to sit still and listen, to every sentence, every colon, every comma, every gesture. What can we learn as historians from Agee now? Certainly, we can aspire to the hyper-awareness of power and the drama of power relations in his opening scenes “Late Sunday Morning,” “At the Forks,” and “Near a Church.” He was “sick in the knowledge that they felt they were here at our demand, mine and Walker’s, and that I could communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in a perversion of self-torture, I played my part through. I gave their leader fifty cents, trying at the same time through my eyes, to communicate much more.” (31) Agee tells us about his “impulse” to “throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet” until he realizes that such a demonstration of love or allegiance or forgiveness or repentance would only terrify the black couple he was asking directions.
The book is in its way a hypertext–arranged in ways for the reader to move across and within it, shifting time, event, impression, and voice. But at the center of all of it is Agee’s struggle to tell about the past. “It seems likely at this stage,” he writes about in the middle of the book, “that the truest way to treat a piece of the past is as such: as if it were no longer the present.” Instead of “chronological progression,” Agee decides that the “‘truest’ thing about the experience” is “rather as it turns up in recall, in no such order, casting its lights and associations forward and backward upon the then past and the then future, across that expanse of experience.” (244)
More than anything, Agee was deeply aware of his own presence in the lives of his subjects, and he was ashamed of his complicity in their exploitation. It is a humbling lesson for any historian. We traffic in stories, in lives, and in histories, and we carry out our work often unaware of the potential for misperception, misjudgment, and mistake. Agee considered the camera “a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil-eye.” (362) When he meets Annie Mae Gudger for the first time, Agee is painfully aware of her: “you, Annie Mae, whose name I do not yet know, and whom I have never yet seen, and who I gather, are George’s wife (though there has been no foolishness of ‘introductions,’ nor any word spoken, of any such kind): it is you I was first aware of from when I first came into this room, before you were yet a shadow out of the darkness, and you I have had on my mind while we have sat here, and so much cared toward.” (398)
Seventy years later we still need Agee: his precision, his language, his poetic rendering, his documentary methods, his passionate care for his subjects, and his soul searching introspection. We need his honesty. And we need his humility.
Source: all quotes from James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, with an introduction to the new edition by John Hersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988)