Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Read online

  Table of Contents

  Photos

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Preface

  Epigraphs

  Persons and Places

  Design of the Book

  Verses

  Preamble

  All Over Alabama

  (On the Porch: 1

  July 1936

  Late Sunday Morning

  At the Forks

  Near a Church

  Part One: A Country Letter

  Colon

  Part Two: Some Findings and Comments

  Money

  Shelter

  (On the Porch : 2

  Clothing

  Education

  Work

  Intermission: Conversation in the Lobby

  Part Three: Inductions

  Shady Grove Alabama

  Two Images

  Title Statement

  Notes and Appendices

  (On the Porch: 3

  About the Authors

  Footnotes

  To those of whom the record is made.

  In gratefulness and in love.

  J. A.

  W. E.

  First Mariner Books edition 2001

  Copyright © 1939, 1940 by James Agee

  Copyright © 1941 by James Agee and Walker Evans

  Copyright renewed © 1969 by Mia Fritsch Agee and Walker Evans

  Copyright © 1960 by Walker Evans

  Copyright renewed © 1988 by John T. Hill, executor of the estate of Walker Evans

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Agee, James, 1909–1955.

  Let us now praise famous men : three tenant families / James Agee, Walker Evans

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

  ISBN 0-395-95771-0

  ISBN 0-618-12749-6 (pbk.)

  1. Alabama—Rural conditions. 2. Agee, James, 1909–1955—Journeys—Alabama. 3. Alabama—Description. 4. Farm tenancy—Alabama—History. I. Evans, Walker, 1903–1975. II. Title.

  HN79.A4A535 1988 88–18110

  976.1 – de 19 CIP

  eISBN 978-0-547-52639-3

  v1.0613

  Photographs reproduced through the courtesy of the Library of Congress and the Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

  Selected photographs copyright © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Passages from this book appeared in Common Sense, New Directions, and The Atlantic Monthly.

  FOREWORD

  James Agee in 1936

  by Walker Evans

  At the time, Agee was a youthful-looking twenty-seven. I think he felt he was elaborately masked, but what you saw right away—alas for conspiracy—was a faint rubbing of Harvard and Exeter, a hint of family gentility, and a trace of romantic idealism. He could be taken for a likable American young man, an above-average product of the Great Democracy from any part of the country. He didn’t look much like a poet, an intellectual, an artist, or a Christian, each of which he was. Nor was there outward sign of his paralyzing, self-lacerating anger. His voice was pronouncedly quiet and low-pitched, though not of “cultivated” tone. It gave the impression of diffidence, but never of weakness. His accent was more or less unplaceable and it was somewhat variable. For instance, in Alabama it veered towards country-southern, and I may say he got away with this to the farm families and to himself.

  His clothes were deliberately cheap, not only because he was poor but because he wanted to be able to forget them. He would work a suit into fitting him perfectly by the simple method of not taking it off much. In due time the cloth would mold itself to his frame. Cleaning and pressing would have undone this beautiful process. I exaggerate, but it did seem sometimes that wind, rain, work, and mockery were his tailors. On another score, he felt that wearing good, expensive clothes involved him in some sort of claim to superiority of the social kind. Here he occasionally confused his purpose, and fell over into a knowingly comical inverted dandyism. He got more delight out of factory-seconds sneakers and a sleazy cap than a straight dandy does from waxed calf Peal shoes and a brushed Lock & Co. bowler.

  Physically Agee was quite powerful, in the deceptive way of uninsistent large men. In movement he was rather graceless. His hands were large, long, bony, light, and uncared for. His gestures were one of the memorable things about him. He seemed to model, fight, and stroke his phrases as he talked. The talk, in the end, was his great distinguishing feature. He talked his prose, Agee prose. It was hardly a twentieth-century style; it had Elizabethan colors. Yet it had extraordinarily knowledgeable contemporary content. It rolled just as it reads; but he made it sound natural—something just there in the air like any other part of the world. How he did this no one knows. You would have blinked, gaped, and very likely run from this same talk delivered without his mysterious ability. It wasn’t a matter of show, and it wasn’t necessarily bottle-inspired. Sheer energy of imagination was what lay behind it This he matched with physical energy. Many a man or woman has fallen exhausted to sleep at four in the morning bang in the middle of a remarkable Agee performance, and later learned that the man had continued it somewhere else until six. Like many born writers who are floating in the illusory amplitude of their youth, Agee did a great deal of writing in the air. Often you had the impulse to gag him and tie a pen to his hand. That wasn’t necessary; he was an exception among talking writers. He wrote—devotedly and incessantly.

  Night was his time. In Alabama he worked I don’t know how late. Some parts of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men read as though they were written on the spot at night. Later, in a small house in Frenchtown, New Jersey, the work, I think, was largely night-written. Literally the result shows this; some of the sections read best at night, far in the night The first passage of A Country Letter [>] is particularly night-permeated.

  Agee worked in what looked like a rush and a rage. In Alabama he was possessed with the business, jamming it all into the days and the nights. He must not have slept. He was driven to see all he could of the families’ day, starting, of course, at dawn. In one way, conditions there were ideal. He could live inside the subject, with no distractions. Backcountry poor life wasn’t really far from him, actually. He had some of it in his blood, through relatives in Tennessee. Anyway, he was in flight from New York magazine editorial offices, from Greenwich Village social-intellectual evenings, and especially from the whole world of high-minded, well-bred, money-hued culture, whether authoritarian or libertarian. In Alabama he sweated and scratched with submerged glee. The families understood what he was down there to do. He’d explained it, in such a way that they were interested in his work. He wasn’t playing. That is why in the end he left out certain completed passages that were entertaining, in an acid way. One of these was a long, gradually hilarious aside on the subject of hens. It was a virtuoso piece heightened with allegory and bemused with the pathetic fallacy.

  He won almost everybody in those families—perhaps too much—even though some of the individuals were hardbitten, sore, and shrewd. Probably it was his diffidence that took him into them. That non-assurance was, I think, a hostage to his very Anglican childhood training. His Christianity—if an outsider may try to speak of it—was a punctured and residual remnant, but it was still
a naked, root emotion. It was an ex-Church, or non-Church, matter, and it was hardly in evidence. All you saw of it was an ingrained courtesy, an uncourtly courtesy that emanated from him towards everyone, perhaps excepting the smugly rich, the pretentiously genteel, and the police. After a while, in a round-about way, you discovered that, to him, human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls.

  The days with the families came abruptly to an end. Their real content and meaning has all been shown. The writing they induced is, among other things, the reflection of one resolute, private rebellion. Agee’s rebellion was unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply principled, infinitely costly, and ultimately priceless.

  New York, 1960

  Preface

  (Serious readers are advised to proceed to the book-proper after finishing the first section of the Preface. A later return will do no harm.)

  During July and August 1936 Walker Evans and I were traveling in the middle south of this nation, and were engaged in what, even from the first, has seemed to me rather a curious piece of work. It was our business to prepare, for a New York magazine,* an article on cotton tenantry in the United States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers. We had first to find and to live with such a family; and that was the object of our traveling.

  We found no one family through which the whole of tenantry in that country could be justly represented, but decided that through three we had come to know, our job might with qualified adequacy be done. With the most nearly representative of the three we lived a little less than four weeks, seeing them and the others intimately and constantly. At the end of August, long before we were willing to, we returned into the north and got our work ready.

  For reasons which will not be a part of this volume the article was not published. At the end of a year it was, however, released to us; and in the spring of 1938 an agreement was reached with a New York publisher for an expansion of the same material in book form. At the end of another year and a half, for reasons which, again, will receive later attention, the completed manuscript was rejected, or withdrawn. In the spring of 1940 it was accepted by those who now publish it, on condition that certain words be deleted which are illegal in Massachusetts.

  The authors found it possible to make this concession and, since it rather enhanced a deception, to permit prominence to the immediate, instead of the generic, title.

  This volume is designed in two intentions: as the beginning of a larger piece of work; and to stand of itself, independent of any such further work as may be done.

  The title of this volume is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

  The tide of the work as a whole, this volume included, is Three Tenant Families.

  The nominal subject is North American cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families.

  Actually, the effort is to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense. More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.

  The immediate instruments are two: the motionless camera, and the printed word. The governing instrument—which is also one of the centers of the subject—is individual, anti-authoritative human consciousness.

  Ultimately, it is intended that this record and analysis be exhaustive, with no detail, however trivial it may seem, left untouched, no relevancy avoided, which lies within the power of remembrance to maintain, of the intelligence to perceive, and of the spirit to persist in.

  Of this ultimate intention the present volume is merely portent and fragment, experiment, dissonant prologue. Since it is intended, among other things, as a swindle, an insult, and a corrective, the reader will be wise to bear the nominal subject, and his expectation of its proper treatment, steadily in mind. For that is the subject with which the authors are dealing, throughout. If complications arise, that is because they are trying to deal with it not as journalists, sociologists, politicians, entertainers, humanitarians, priests, or artists, but seriously.

  The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the impotence of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

  The text was written with reading aloud in mind. That cannot be recommended; but it is suggested that the reader attend with his ear to what he takes off the page: for variations of tone, pace, shape, and dynamics are here particularly unavailable to the eye alone, and with their loss, a good deal of meaning escapes.

  It was intended also that the text be read continuously, as music is listened to or a film watched, with brief pauses only where they are self-evident.

  Of any attempt on the part of the publishers, or others, to disguise or in any other way to ingratiate this volume, the authors must express their regret, their intense disapproval, and, as observers awaiting new contributions to their subject, their complaisance.

  This is a book only by necessity. More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell. Those who wish actively to participate in the subject, in whatever degree of understanding, friendship, or hostility, are invited to address the authors in care of the publishers. In material that is used, privately or publicly, names will be withheld on request.

  Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

  Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

  From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en

  Too little care of this! Take physick, pomp;

  Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

  That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,

  And show the heavens more just.

  Workers of the world, unite and fight. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win.*

  1. The Great Ball on Which We Live

  The world is our home. It is also the home of many, many other children, some of whom live in far-away lands. They are our world brothers and sisters....

  2. Food, Shelter, and Clothing

  What must any part of the world have in order to be a good home for man? What does every person need in order to live in comfort? Let us imagine that we are far out in the fields. The air is bitter cold and the wind is blowing. Snow is falling, and by and by it will turn into sleet and rain. We are almost naked. We have had nothing to eat and are suffering from hunger as well as cold. Suddenly the Queen of the Fairies floats down and offers us three wishes.

  What shall we choose?

  ‘I shall wish for food, because I am hungry,’ says Peter.

  ‘I shall choose clothes to keep out the cold,’ says John.

  ‘And I shall ask for a house to shelter me from the wind, the snow, and the rain,’ says little Nell with a shiver.

  Now everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter. The lives of most men on the earth are spent in getting these things. In our travels we shall wish to learn what our world brothers and sisters eat, and where their food comes from. We shall wish to see the houses they dwell in and how they are built We shall wish also to know what clothing they use to protect themselves from the heat and the cold.*

  Persons and Places

  FRED GARVRIN RICKETTS: a two-mule tenant farmer, aged fifty-four.

  SADIE (WOODS) RICKETTS: his wife, aged forty-nine.

  MARGARET: aged twenty.

  PARALEE: aged nineteen.

  JOHN GARVRIN: aged twelve.

  RICHARD: aged eleven.

  FLORA MERRY LEE: aged ten.

&n
bsp; KATY: aged nine.

  CLAIR BELL: aged four.

  THOMAS GALLATIN WOODS (BUD): a one-mule tenant farmer, aged fifty-nine.

  IVY WOODS: his second wife; middle twenties.

  MISS-MOLLY: her mother; early fifties.

  GALLATIN: Woods’ son by first marriage; a half-cropper, middle thirties.

  EMMA: a daughter of the first marriage; aged eighteen; married.

  PEARL: Ivy’s daughter by common-law marriage to a man prior to Woods; aged eight

  THOMAS: son of Woods and second wife; aged three.

  ELLEN: child of second marriage; aged twenty months.

  GEORGE GUDGER: a one-mule half-cropper, aged thirty-one.

  ANNIE MAE (WOODS) GUDGER: his wife, aged twenty-seven.

  MAGGIE LOUISE: aged ten.

  GEORGE JUNIOR: aged eight.

  BURT WESTLY: aged four.

  VALLEY FEW (SQUINCHY): aged twenty months.

  CHESTER BOLES: Gudger’s landlord.

  T. HUDSON MARGRAVES: landlord to Woods and Ricketts.

  MICHAEL MARGRAVES: landlord to Woods and Ricketts.

  HARMON: a landowner and New Deal executive.

  ESTELLE: a middle-class young woman.

  JAMES AGEE: a spy, traveling as a journalist.

  WALKER EVANS: a counter-spy, traveling as a photographer.

  WILLIAM BLAKE: unpaid agitator.

  LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE: unpaid agitator.

  RING LARDNER: unpaid agitator.

  JESUS CHRIST: unpaid agitator.

  SIGMUND FREUD: unpaid agitator.

  LONNIE JOHNSON: unpaid agitator.

  IRVINE UPHAM: unpaid agitator.

  OTHERS: unpaid agitator.