James Agee

Walker Evans

Agee's colleague at Time in the 1940s, John Hersey, writes a major evaluation of Agee's work and the Agee legend in a new introduction to this literary classic. 64 pages of photos.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Bryan Alexander

I really should have read this years ago. But my university literature work focused on British, not American lit.

What an astonishing, rich, crazily ambitious book!

Quick summary: Let Us Now consists of photographs (Walker Evans) and text (James Agee) describing the lives of very poor southern sharecroppers during the 1930s. There's an interesting publication history you can find, starting with Wikipedia.

Some reactions:
The photographs are amazing. 

Agee's writing is wildly daring. For one, he puts himself forward as the mediating layer of the book to an autobiographical, confessional level. His point of view character is frequently embarrassed, screws up frequently, obsesses about sex, accidentally terrifies people, loses a car... he's a splendid point of view, making visible the problematic stance of being an ethnographer, or anthropologist. 

And yet Agee doesn't lose sight of his subjects. He focuses on the farming families to epic levels of attention to detail. There are passages and chapters on clothing, individual persons, the five minutes before a sawmill shift starts, dishes, individual rooms in a small house, a spring. The photos are spare in number, but the text overwhelms with texture.

The prose also dares by mixing lyricism with ethnography, not to mention meditations on phenomenology and politics. Sentences sprawl across paragraphs, an individual paragraph runs over multiple pages, phrases yoked by semicolons, colons, commas, dashes, and sheer force of poetic will. I found myself reading out loud from the book to my wife because the prose was so delicious, and the passages it took so compelling. The style resonates with so much 20th-century American prose, from dos Passos to Kerouac to Bradbury and Harlan Ellison. I'd love to use it as the anchor for a syllabus.

Politics: this book feels like a document from a parallel world, where poor people's lives not only mattered, but were worthy of respect verging on worship. It's the anti-Trump, anti-Kardashian. Read that amazing last bit about a sleeping and very poor child whose... goodness? potential? "shall at length outshine the sun".

The book is a challenge to read. It is long, and that prose makes you work at times. Agee's obsession over details can feel to a modern reader like some sections should have been DVD extras. And the sheer sadness of the subjects' lives depresses. But keep going. It's so worth it.

PS: there's a nice sketch of how to frame a personal recollection or story on 243.
 
  

   In media res;
 
   "'as it happened'": the straight narative at the prow as from the first to last day it cut unknown water."
 
   making it about "recall and memory from the present"
 
   foregrounding "problems of recording"

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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