Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

published	1989 by Mariner Books
binding	Paperback
isbn	0395488974 (isbn13: 9780395488973)
pages	471
description	Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the prop...more [close] Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words. Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved. Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park
date added	05-07-07 edit book

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Anders added it (review of isbn 0395957710)

03/26/08

bookshelves: recentlyfinished

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Anders by: Sam

First published in 1941, James Agee's study of three Southern sharecropping families during the Great Depression sold a paltry six hundred copies. In the last few decades, however, the book has enjoyed increased interest and to date has been reprinted in a handful of updated editions. The book is packaged with about 30-40 black and white photographs taken by Walker Evans of the families described in the book meant to serve as a companion to the text, and in fact the book gives Evans co-authoring...more First published in 1941, James Agee's study of three Southern sharecropping families during the Great Depression sold a paltry six hundred copies. In the last few decades, however, the book has enjoyed increased interest and to date has been reprinted in a handful of updated editions. The book is packaged with about 30-40 black and white photographs taken by Walker Evans of the families described in the book meant to serve as a companion to the text, and in fact the book gives Evans co-authoring credit. The book came out of a trip taken by Evans and Agee in 1936, when they traveled to the South in an old car full of photographic equipment to live for a few weeks with sharecroppers, to be able to understand their day-to-day realities. They set out to get the full experience of the people they were studying, to fully immerse themselves in their reality. They slept wherever there was room -- a bedbug-infested lumpy old cot, an old car seat ripped out of a car and moved onto a porch; and they ate what their subjects ate, however gross or tasteless. Their shock at these conditions comes through, rippled with admiration and respect. Agee infuses this respect and admiration into his writing of the book, and seeks to do these people justice by writing about their situation as honestly and accurately as possible.

The book straddles many different genres, and the end product can be described as a poetic take on ethnography. Oscillating between highly-detailed personal narrative and impressionistic prose-poem, this book is beguiling and hard-to-follow, to say the least. Agee struggles (to put it mildly) with questions of privilege, truth, empathy, social justice. However, the way he writes this struggle is so overwrought, so labored, that it quickly stumbles into a painful, inaccessible verbosity. Boiled down his thesis would be something like: "these people are so beautiful that it hurts me and literary convention can't possibly contain this pain."

Poetry readers may enjoy Agee's knack for rich description: his prose is proto-Beat in its frenzied rush, its mixture of the fantastic and the ordinary, the colorful swirls of compelling personal narrative, his heartbreaking sensitivity to the plight of the people he's studying. Like his contemporary e.e. cummings, Agee also has a knack for reclaiming the rules of syntax and structuring. But a successful prose-poem does not make a successful ethnography, and ultimately, as such, the book is a failure.

Seeking to truly understand and render for his audience the experience and character of these three families, Agee is faced with the ethnographer's dilemma of trying to see and present the subject free of the preconceptions and biases of the observer. By and large his approach is too concerned with documenting the physicality of the families, including a chapter where he seeks to describe every object in every room of one of the families' small house. When he does look deeper into the character of his subjects, he does it with highly depersonalized, overly sexualized physical observation. But even then he remains distant from them. He extrapolates their thoughts and concerns as they barely make eye contact with him, at most making stilted efforts at politeness. The difference between them and Agee is so great, yet rather than try to seriously broach this divide, Agee explodes into pages of pastoral descriptions of their farms and clothing. Yet beneath all this intricate detail, it is obvious that his retreat to his (considerable) writing skills is due to his acute frustration at not being able to do more.

In this way, Agee neglects ethnography's bread and butter: interpersonal relationships, religious beliefs, community dynamics, shared histories, among others. He mainly shows the people he's studying in terms of their possessions. Discussion about the people themselves is glaringly shallow, and often highly, frustratingly filtered through his idiosyncratic personal lens.

P.S. I don't think I'm going to put a number on this one, just because strangely anything between 1 and 5 seems accurate to me....less

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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

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