A FAMOUS MAN.(James Agee)(Critical Essay)

In July of 1936, James Agee, a writer for Fortune and an avid Greenwich Village partygoer, drinker, and talker, found himself in the house of a taciturn Alabama family he called the Gudgers. Henry Luce's business magazine was then in its early, socially concerned phase, and Agee, along with the photographer Walker Evans, had been sent to the South to investigate the situation of tenant cotton farmers--the sort of subject that was common for Fortune during the Depression. As Agee reconstructed the moment afterward, in the report that became not a magazine article but a daunting four-hundred-page prose epic, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (with Evans's extraordinary photographs preceding the text), he was writing late on a summer night, by the light of a coal-oil lamp, in a front bedroom vacated for his use, while the seven members of the Gudger family were asleep in the next room. He was feeling calm--confident of his ability, aided by the "dry, silent, and famished" little flame, to take stock of the life around him. He hadn't always felt that way. From the beginning, he had denigrated the reporting project as a fraud and a betrayal. In the book's first pages, a furious self-inquiry builds up. Agee was not wealthy, but he was privileged, an emissary from a powerful organization and therefore authorized to "pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings." For what purpose did he pry? For money? For glory? In the name of "honest journalism"? After all, he wasn't going to do the tenant farmers any good. A literary man in love with Joyce, Faulkner, and Celine, he had no intention of writing the kind of responsible report, with statistics and graphs, that might have spurred legislative action. Nor was he a Marxist, hoping to inflame protest meetings and rallies. The moral quandary of liberal journalism has never been stated with greater clarity or anguish.

Agee and Evans settled on two more families, whom Agee called the Rickettses and the Woodses, and worked and stayed with them for three weeks. The families owned virtually nothing--at best, a couple of mules and a few farming implements--and they were required to give their landlords half of their crops and a quarter or more of the earnings from their own half. They lived without electricity or running water. Having worked since they were children, they were hardened and shrewd, perhaps, but unlettered and inarticulate. For Agee, however, the point was not that these families suffered from atrocious social conditions. The point was that they existed. In an age concerned largely with the "masses," Agee was impressed by the notion that other human beings idiosyncratically are what they are, in every ornery fibre. Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness--in almost every way, the farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and as capable of pleasure and misery as he. A young couple sitting on a porch and staring at Agee had in their eyes "so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude." Agee, born an Episcopalian, and deeply religious as a child, was no longer an orthodox believer. But he had a consciousness of the sacred in people and in ordinary objects that believers associate with God's immanence. He loved, and took literally, Blake's proclamation "Everything that lives is holy."

It's an idea that, as a practical mat-ter, most of us would find hard to sustain. But it imposed devastating, almost comically savage responsibilities on this inordinately ambitious young man (he was twenty-six at the time). Agee wanted to make a connection with the families, and to be liked by them in return, but he didn't want to swamp the farmers with sympathy--their pride wouldn't endure it. Try as he might, he could not resolve the disparity between the sullenness of his subjects and his own ravenous and unending sensibility. All that he could do was record. In the room where the Gudgers slept, there was:

George's red body, already a little squat with the burden of thirty years, knotted like oakwood, in its clean white cotton ...