Agee's war

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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message 1: by Seth (last edited 45 minutes ago) - rated it 5 stars 56 minutes ago
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," is not a novel, an article, or a poem, in the anatomical definition of these words and that's how Agee wanted it along with photographer, Walker Evans, who went down with him from New York to the Appalachian mountains in the depression era thirties to document the living conditions of the hill people for a Time magazine article. I'm not sure if the editors of Time thought the poverty was going to be as bad as it was, or if it caught them, Agee, and Walker totally off guard, but it would be fair to say that James Agee was radically moved by what he saw both emotionally, poetically, and politically, and started writing a polemic to the families he was living with, even though he was only commissioned for an article. I don't remember the story, but I think the editors at Time saw what Agee had written and it went on for hundreds of pages in a kind of stream of consciousness Joycean manner with almost none of the objectivity or usual clarity reserved for magazine articles, and pulled the plug on the assignment. I'm not sure if Agee and Walker stayed on a little bit longer on their own, or if they did their work in the field in the time alloted by Time, but if they did stay on it wasn't for the rest of their lives, but to finish the piece that became a kind of holy mission to Agee on both an artistic front and a journalistic one. For starters, photography was relatively new back then and I think Agee came to the conclusion that the poor mountainfolk he met couldn't have their story told without photographs, because their poverty, beauty, and grace before God, were just too unreal to describe in words. Agee was really struggling with the artistic question of how best to show these people, because the journalist in him was on a mission to bring their plight to light, and show to America that a chunk of the Country was living in squalor, and a political solution was necessary to change the direction of a Country that would allow this to happen.

Agee was also a great artist who went onto be a screenwriter ("African Queen"), a poet, a noteworthy film critic, and a pulitzer prize winning novelist for his most famous work, "A Death In the Family." Like many of the great writers of the era, Agee was under the influence of Joyce and the stream of consciousness writers, and I don't think was much of a journalist at heart, so the question of the mountainpeople in the Appalachians became not only a social one for him inspiring his ideals for a more just world, but an aesthetic one as well, because he really wanted to represent these people without a voice as best he could and had all of the tools of modern art at his disposal. I think Agee felt that photography was much better suited to this task and praised Walker Evans through sections of the work, but more than that went on aesthetic rants that would go on for twenty or thirty pages calling for the end of writing and the beginning of photography; or at other points he'd slip into an almost stream of conscious writing and try to describe nature for thirty pages or so to really make the reader feel the experience he was going through, because at root the assignment made Agee want to wake people up, and he wasn't sure literature had the power to do this anymore. I read somewhere recently that at a certain point he conceived of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," to literally be rock-hewn and craggly to give the impression of the earth that the hill people slept on, and this would make sense since from the very beginning it seemed like the assignment to write it became somehting of an aesthetic challenge against the very idea of words.

The prose is very ornate for the most part and feels like a cross between Faulkner and Joyce, though there are words and a style that could only be Agee, so any comparison is only for the sake of a review and to get people to read "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," but there is no beginning, middle, or end, or certainly not in that order. It is clear that the very scope of the project was always bigger than its parts, and that the writing itself no matter how grand and pure was secondary to the very questions the project was raising: what is art? what is reality? How can art best communinicate reality. It's very odd that a work with as defiant and sensitive a social conscience as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," would become a study in aesthetics but that's part of the complexity of the manuscript that makes it a one of a kind, but maybe this makes sense since it would seem that Walker Evans' photographs are much more remembered than anything Agee's actual writing about the hill people, however lucid and musical, because Agee was arguing for photographs over literature, and for reality at any cost, however obscure or clear. It was almost like Agee was making arguments in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" against his own writing, and I'm sure the editors at Time caught wind of this.

It's a very hard book to describe, actually, because in many ways it is a failure and yet there is so much beauty in the failure, that it's almost like watching a revolutionary movement almost achieve its objective before being stopped, but watching the effort was so exciting, that you almost feel like they won, and in some deep political way they may have. There are very few books I can think of that have as deep a political agenda as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," both for F.D.R. era social change, and for a new kind of art to express it, and in a way the manuscript becomes a sort of template, or scrimmage, for these ideas to meet and take form, but the scrimmage becomes so big, that it actually takes over the manuscript, or the task at hand. There are lots of beautiful descriptions of the mountain people, but a story never starts and Agee didn't want a story, yet the writing quality is anything but journalistic, and on such a high caliber you feel that you're reading an experimental novel at times inspired by cubism. Maybe it was an attempt to do journalism from an artistic cubist perspective, with as many angles and points of view as possible, an ambitious idea, and it may have succeeded on this level, except that Agee was so free he took it on himself to define his ambitons, and in this way it becomes a book of criticism. It would be fair to say that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was never intended to be anything but a search for a new way of communicating, and Agee was tyring to supersede the written word for a new kind of expression by using the written word, though incorporating photographs that are among some of the first to be taken from reality and considered art.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," haunts me in a very personal way because it was my mentor's favorite book and he used it as a sort of template for how he wanted his book on his best friend to be that I was helping him edit, an experience that became the foundation for my novella, "If So Carried By The Wind. Become The Wind" (the Biblical ring to the title was also inspired by Agee and Walker's book, so that it's a shadow that hangs over me in more ways than one). In the novella, I write that 'Max wanted to go the 'Famous Men' route and throw everything into the manuscript but the kitchen sink - tapes, photos, songs, doodles on bar napkins, etc., and that's how I saw it at the time, and indeed that was an aesthetic discussion of ours. But on another level, Max never wanted the book to end, and though I never saw it this way before "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," became one of the most famous literary failures of all time, because it actually started to challenge its very form, and went in so many directions at once it was hard to follow as if by design, but a failure nevertheless, just a very proud and dignified one that sprouted many future successes including the 'new journalism' of the Sixties that would take shape about thirty years later. Max's book was very much the same way because the book itself was almost a failure by design in the name of art because the only goal was to get his best friend right and Max didn't want to feel beholden to art to do this, because the goal was to remember a great man, nothing more or less, and art was only a way to get there, but there were others, and this was a sticky conceit for a work of fiction. Max never finished "X" and in a way Agee didn't finish "Famous Men," either, because the very conceit of both manuscripts made them unfinishable like great heroes going off to fight valiantly in a war they can't win but has to be fought for future generations to go on.

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s, who went down with him from New York to the Appalachian mountains in the depression era thirties to document the living conditions of the hill people for a Time magazine article. I'm not sure if the editors of Time thought the poverty was going to be as bad as it was, or if it caught them, Agee, and Walker totally off guard, but it would be fair to say that James Agee was radically moved by what he saw both emotionally, poetically, and politically, and started writing a polemic to the families he was living with, even though he was only commissioned for an article. I don't remember the story, but I think the editors at Time saw what Agee had written and it went on for hundreds of pages in a kind of stream of consciousness Joycean manner with almost none of the objectivity or usual clarity reserved for magazine articles, and pulled the plug on the assignment. I'm not sure if Agee and Walker stayed on a little bit longer on their own, or if they did their work in the field in the time alloted by Time, but if they did stay on it wasn't for the rest of their lives, but to finish the piece that became a kind of holy mission to Agee on both an artistic front and a journalistic one. For starters, photography was relatively new back then and I think Agee came to the conclusion that the poor mountainfolk he met couldn't have their story told without photographs, because their poverty, beauty, and grace before God, were just too unreal to describe in words. Agee was really struggling with the artistic question of how best to show these people, because the journalist in him was on a mission to bring their plight to light, and show to America that a chunk of the Country was living in squalor, and a political solution was necessary to change the direction of a Country that would allow this to happen.

Agee was also a great artist who went onto be a screenwriter ("African Queen"), a poet, a noteworthy film critic, and a pulitzer prize winning novelist for his most famous work, "A Death In the Family." Like many of the great writers of the era, Agee was under the influence of Joyce and the stream of consciousness writers, and I don't think was much of a journalist at heart, so the question of the mountainpeople in the Appalachians became not only a social one for him inspiring his ideals for a more just world, but an aesthetic one as well, because he really wanted to represent these people without a voice as best he could and had all of the tools of modern art at his disposal. I think Agee felt that photography was much better suited to this task and praised Walker Evans through sections of the work, but more than that went on aesthetic rants that would go on for twenty or thirty pages calling for the end of writing and the beginning of photography; or at other points he'd slip into an almost stream of conscious writing and try to describe nature for thirty pages or so to really make the reader feel the experience he was going through, because at root the assignment made Agee want to wake people up, and he wasn't sure literature had the power to do this anymore. I read somewhere recently that at a certain point he conceived of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," to literally be rock-hewn and craggly to give the impression of the earth that the hill people slept on, and this would make sense since from the very beginning it seemed like the assignment to write it became somehting of an aesthetic challenge against the very idea of words.

The prose is very ornate for the most part and feels like a cross between Faulkner and Joyce, though there are words and a style that could only be Agee, so any comparison is only for the sake of a review and to get people to read "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," but there is no beginning, middle, or end, or certainly not in that order. It is clear that the very scope of the project was always bigger than its parts, and that the writing itself no matter how grand and pure was secondary to the very questions the project was raising: what is art? what is reality? How can art best communinicate reality. It's very odd that a work with as defiant and sensitive a social conscience as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," would become a study in aesthetics but that's part of the complexity of the manuscript that makes it a one of a kind, but maybe this makes sense since it would seem that Walker Evans' photographs are much more remembered than anything Agee's actual writing about the hill people, however lucid and musical, because Agee was arguing for photographs over literature, and for reality at any cost, however obscure or clear. It was almost like Agee was making arguments in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" against his own writing, and I'm sure the editors at Time caught wind of this.

It's a very hard book to describe, actually, because in many ways it is a failure and yet there is so much beauty in the failure, that it's almost like watching a revolutionary movement almost achieve its objective before being stopped, but watching the effort was so exciting, that you almost feel like they won, and in some deep political way they may have. There are very few books I can think of that have as deep a political agenda as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," both for F.D.R. era social change, and for a new kind of art to express it, and in a way the manuscript becomes a sort of template, or scrimmage, for these ideas to meet and take form, but the scrimmage becomes so big, that it actually takes over the manuscript, or the task at hand. There are lots of beautiful descriptions of the mountain people, but a story never starts and Agee didn't want a story, yet the writing quality is anything but journalistic, and on such a high caliber you feel that you're reading an experimental novel at times inspired by cubism. Maybe it was an attempt to do journalism from an artistic cubist perspective, with as many angles and points of view as possible, an ambitious idea, and it may have succeeded on this level, except that Agee was so free he took it on himself to define his ambitons, and in this way it becomes a book of criticism. It would be fair to say that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was never intended to be anything but a search for a new way of communicating, and Agee was tyring to supersede the written word for a new kind of expression by using the written word, though incorporating photographs that are among some of the first to be taken from reality and considered art.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," haunts me in a very personal way because it was my mentor's favorite book and he used it as a sort of template for how he wanted his book on his best friend to be that I was helping him edit, an experience that became the foundation for my novella, "If So Carried By The Wind. Become The Wind" (the Biblical ring to the title was also inspired by Agee and Walker's book, so that it's a shadow that hangs over me in more ways than one). In the novella, I write that 'Max wanted to go the 'Famous Men' route and throw everything into the manuscript but the kitchen sink - tapes, photos, songs, doodles on bar napkins, etc., and that's how I saw it at the time, and indeed that was an aesthetic discussion of ours. But on another level, Max never wanted the book to end, and though I never saw it this way before "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," became one of the most famous literary failures of all time, because it actually started to challenge its very form, and went in so many directions at once it was hard to follow as if by design, but a failure nevertheless, just a very proud and dignified one that sprouted many future successes including the 'new journalism' of the Sixties that would take shape about thirty years later. Max's book was very much the same way because the book itself was almost a failure by design in the name of art because the only goal was to get his best friend right and Max didn't want to feel beholden to art to do this, because the goal was to remember a great man, nothing more or less, and art was only a way to get there, but there were others, and this was a sticky conceit for a work of fiction. Max never finished "X" and in a way Agee didn't finish "Famous Men," either, because the very conceit of both manuscripts made them unfinishable like great heroes going off to fight valiantly in a war they can't win but has to be fought for future generations to go on.

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m/book/show/243360.Let_Us_Now_Praise_Famous_Men" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars






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