let us now praise famous men, part two
Friday 29 June 2007 | someone left a cookie
The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
—James Agee
In the unlikeliest of places—on Amazon.com’s page for the Library of America’s Agee reissue—I find a succinct and decidely conservative response called “Let Us Now Reexamine Famous Men,” in which amateur reviewer Charles Weinstein disagrees with other reviewers’ lavish praise of Agee:
Agee was an outrageous bleeding-heart, a man whose life and work were compromised by posturing, mawkishness and complacency in anguish. The gush of his prose—the hemorrhaging of that bleeding heart—is deeply and cloyingly purple. His endless rhapsodies betray a stubborn adolescence that will delight those who see an artist as a perpetual kid and repel those who don’t.
Immense suffusions of tenderness are not the most helpful or respectful way of responding to fellow human beings, and they betray an obsession with one’s own feelings instead of their ostensible object. In this regard, one notes that Agee’s tenderness did not prevent him from engaging in serial adulteries and enforced threesomes, devoting his life to personal fulfillment rather than self-denying altruism, and indulging himself to death by the age of 45. Of course Agee felt guilty about all this (his writing fairly reeks of a rotting conscience), but he saw his guilt as a reassuring index of purity, like the parishioner who sees confession and absolution as a license to go on sinning.
Moreover, Agee’s tenderness was reserved for the disadvantaged. The obverse of this solicitude was an affected brutality of reference to just about everyone else (except family and friends, his favorite artists and his latest lover). This tough-talking pose, which has not worn well, assumed a moral superiority that the record does not bear out.
Art and morality are not the same thing, but Agee thought they were, and this confusion permeates his work. Again and again he makes moral claims upon us which he thinks that his aesthetic project will validate. It does nothing of the kind: it merely aestheticizes.
Agee did possess extraordinary powers of lyric observation, and a sharp mind when he wanted to use it; but aching sensitivity, metastasizing into ecstatic intoxication, tended to distort his vision, soften his rigor and sentimentalize his voice. He has his devoted followers, or rather his cultists, but one doubts that his place in the canon is as secure or exalted as they might wish, or as this Library of America volume would suggest.
Rather ad hominem, in parts; but as the Brujo points out that’s considered completely fair play among cultural conservatives.
I’m grateful to Weinstein for giving such a terse, trenchant version of the anti-Agee stance, making it much easier to respond to what I gather is a fairly frequent criticism (albeit one usually not so concisely phrased), not only of Famous Men but of its politically progressive descendants, among whom some of must number ourselves. I’m sure Agee would have been proud to stand accused of “bleeding-heart…mawkishness.” When is prose purple and when is it just the color of blood? Isn’t it true that you can only make that kind of criticism when the artist lays herself open for it? That only such vulnerability, such an invitation, makes possible the attack?
Where I really disagree with Weinstein is in the statement, “He saw his guilt as a reassuring index of purity.” I don’t read anything of the sort, though I think Agee almost wishes that were the case, and courts it desperately, as if it could be so. I find in the writing a continual and uncomfortable (excruciating) awareness of his inadequacy in the face of his assigned task (first magazine-assigned, then self-assigned). He feels the insurmountability of the divide between him and his “subjects.” Merely calling them that makes it impossible to achieve what he wanted, which was intimacy with them. Again and again the book features episodes where Agee and Evans merely want not to frighten their new acquaintances—they have rapidly given up any hope of really befriending them. The gaps are too wide; Agee’s shirts are too white and too machine-sewn, his background too patrician, his speech too educated, his skin too clean, his eyes insufficiently brutal for a man. He is honest about his revulsion and his separation from the life he briefly enters. The food sickens him, the bedbugs devour him, and the lack of reflection, conversation and depth leaves him vertiginous. At one point he and Evans flee to town for a few days in a hotel just to eat off a plate, sleep, read newspapers and recover their identities. Agee is honest about drinking and wishing he could find a prostitute. He repeatedly refers to himself as “a complex person,” and his new acquaintances as “simple.” There’s nothing “tender” or “rhapsodic” about that locution. It’s brutally straightforward. Agee was struggling for language, struggling not to label them—them!— as “primitive” or “bestial” or “savage,” or himself as “sophisticated” or in any way superior; but at the same time his shocked Phillips-Exeter-Harvard face was being slammed up against the fundamental and very real differences in human consciousness when one has been reared while continually exposed to cosmopolitan rarefaction, and the other exposed to nothing further than the Montgomery county line. There’s no way to “aestheticize” being elitist, and Agee doesn’t try.
Adolescence? Absolutely. Oh my yes he was young; pretty and hungry and clueless. I doubt he could have written with such innocent invention, and such ambition, had he not been. Staying up all night writing in pencil, trying to tell the truth about something as hellishly conflicted and murky and convoluted as poverty in the reconstructed American South! No one much over thirty would even attempt such insanity. But sentimental? No. He didn’t have the sense to be. You have to believe in something, maintain it to be a certainty, in order to romanticize it. Agee took the assignment and then entered the South with such youthful naivete that he had no dogma to defend. He hadn’t had time to develop an image to sentimentalize. When we look at Evans’ photographs, we bring our sentiment to them. There’s actually nothing there but faces and hands, clothes and buildings, lines and planes, shades of silver and white and gray. Weinstein is, I think, taking something from today’s liberalism which bothers him (and probably rightly so) and working backward with it. I don’t think you actually can find these things in Agee’s text, which has a kind of purity in its purple bloodiness. Or as a wiser man said, The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
The same Amazon page also includes a fine review from the Washington Post Book World, a review I’ve not been able to find elsewhere, nor can I discover who wrote it. But it’s très bien fait, and I think serves both to acknowledge Agee’s literary excesses while also maintaining their singular value in American letters:
Like many of the world’s most interesting books, James Agee’s youthful masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has a lot wrong with it. Upon its initial publication in 1941, critics savaged this account of “Three Tenant Families” as self-indulgent, tedious, overblown. Originally, Fortune magazine had commissioned Agee and photographer Walker Evans to report on the conditions of cotton farmers in Depression-era Alabama, but they killed the resulting article as unusable. Who could blame them? Certainly Agee’s heated, self-exculpatory prose would have been more at home in The Masses than in Henry Luce’s Fortune.
But Agee couldn’t forget the Ricketts, Woods and Gudger families. So he rewrote and further amplified his material, mixing in autobiography, reflections on art and society, lists and catalogues, bits of conversation, newspaper clippings, prayers, litanies, the imagined thoughts of real people. He produced pages and pages of near-epic description of old shoes, denim overalls and homemade clothing, sang about the haunting beauty of Louise Gudger’s eyes, confessed his own sense of guilt and shame before the hopelessness of the lives around him, pointed out the even greater degradations visited upon the Negro, raged against American society and third-rate educations and the condescensions of Northern intellectuals (not excluding himself) and the myriad inadequacies of art. In the end, he aimed to transform his one-time magazine feature into the prose equivalent of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: He too would celebrate human fraternity, but instead of joy his great and anguished ode would honor the wretched of the earth….
Its problems begin with the book’s structure. Agee circles around his subject like a restless dog, unable to settle. He keeps talking about what he’s going to talk about, and the pages roll by, until the reader eventually arrives at the book’s very last sentence. And there our author announces that he is finally turning to the story “which I shall now try to give you.” But, of course, the book is over, and we have already—in a collagist, temporally skewed way—had the story. On top of this odd, almost Faulknerian approach, one must also draw on deep wells of patience to endure the lengthy analyses of cotton-picking and share-cropping or the nail-by-nail description of a tenant house. And yet from the morass of these very same paragraphs rise up sentences of breathtaking beauty, especially when read aloud. For, as critic Robert Phelps said long ago, Agee is a “born, sovereign prince of the English language.”
His similes even now take one by surprise. The inside of a trunk is “unexpectedly bright as if it were a box of tamed sunlight.” The smell of cooked corn is likened to the odor of “the yellow excrement of a baby,” and a row of chairs is said to “sit in exact regiment of uneven heights with the charming sobriety of children pretending to be officers or judges.” More elaborately, Agee tells us that a mirror is so tarnished that it gives to its “framings an almost incalculably ancient, sweet, frail, and piteous beauty, such as may be seen in tintypes of family groups among studio furnishings or heard in nearly exhausted jazz records made by very young, insane, devout men who were soon to destroy themselves, in New Orleans, in the early nineteen twenties.” That unexpected adjective “devout” and the musical cadence of the syntax are characteristic of young Agee. There are similar restrained miniature poems on every page…yet Agee’s natural bent is always toward lyrical excess.
Not excluding himself. Exactly.
This unknown critic captures the text’s ambiguity in that first sentence: “Like many of the world’s most interesting books…Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has a lot wrong with it.” Wrong. Thus Spake Zarathustra has everything wrong with it (and was just the beginning of Nietzsche’s entire career of wrongness). Plato and Aristotle are both outrageously wrong. So is most of William Blake, a good deal of Chaucer and the complete works of Dostoyevsky. Wrong? So many of my favorite books couldn’t be wronger. I mean, how lyrically excessive and fixated on catalogues and descriptions and analyses and alternately boring and thrilling is the Bible? The structure’s a mess! The only thing you can say about the Bible is that, as with Shakespeare, at least the oeuvre is so gargantuan that there’s something in there for everyone.
I think tangentially of Brodsky making us write papers by hand; he claimed he could always tell a word-processed paper by the identical lengths of its paragraphs, the conformity of its sentences. When you write by hand, he claimed, you naturally write paragraphs that are two pages long, others that are a single sentence. Then I think of web and print design guru Roger Black talking about the need for layout to be more “lumpy.” Why should all newspapers have the same amounts of text and photographs on the same pages in the same damn proportions? he argued. Why not have a full-page photo spread, followed by dense unbroken pages of essay? Why should all websites be (as the Unnarrator itself is) a bunch of same-length paragraphs with a photo stapled to the upper right hand corner? It imitates the company newsletter, Black would say; and the company newsletter is boring.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is lumpy. Page after run-on page of unbroken breathless text is followed by a single sentence fragment. All Walker Evans’ photographs are stuck together in a wad at the beginning and you’re on page 300 before you even can flip back to them with the foggiest notion of what you’re looking at. There’s an ephemeral “Part 1″ listed in the table of contents which never appears, or anyway I couldn’t find it. Intriguing trains of thought go nowhere. Agee promises he’ll return to certain topics only to leave them hanging forever. It is almost, as actor/director Steve Coogan remarks of Sterne in his lyrically disjointed film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, “postmodern before there was any modern to be post about.”
Unsurprisingly, I maintain that lumpy may be wrong, but it is also good. Note I said good, not right. Right is something different. Lots of things are right that will put you to sleep. Lots of things are right, in fact, that tend to terminate in fascism or the firing squad. And I notice that works of literature which are right eventually cease to be regarded as literature and are instead reclassified where they belong, as treatises or historical documents or curiosities of their time. Literature being news that stays news, it isn’t required either to start out right or to remain that way. Fortune may not publish it, but in five hundred years no one will be reading Fortune other than doctoral scholars researching the twentieth-century American economic fallacies which led to our civilization’s demise.
Obsessed with his own feelings? Has human knowledge not finally admitted that all objective accounts—even objective accounts—especially objective accounts—are utterly and benightedly self-involved? Agee’s just displays the premature ability to ‘fess up.
Maybe Weinstein actually made the mistake of reading this book as sociology, as nonfiction, when the merest Faulknerian idiot could tell you it’s obviously a poem.
Please: Let our art be foully messy, technically inept, disastrously unstructured, purple and blue, beyond the pale and outside the fence, facts unchecked and sentence fragments dangling, so long as it is not tedious.
“For what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
And I rather suspect that what the critic may find “technically inept” may simply mean, precisely versed in some technique with which the critic is not yet familiar, because the artist has only very recently devised it.
Perhaps Sontag says it best—I seem to wind up quoting this passage every few years, for some worthy cause or another, returning to its wrongness again and again as a dog to its vomit, or, as James Dickey says, “as a man to his mother”:
Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. […] Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.
And now I suspect we are finally done wittering on about James Agee. Not that he ever needed us to explicate or defend him. Dear God, what irrelevancy is it not possible to bang on about, when I have a book deadline on Monday? Probably this is how absurd and wrong things get written in the first place.
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RELATED POSTS:
let us now praise famous men, part one
let us now praise famous men, part three
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I don’t think James Agee would want us to analyze or write so much about his book, but to read it, and read all the rest, and understand how stilted our thinking becomes as we are told too much in the wrong ways, by persons who want power or control, not always politically or commercially, but in otherwys, sometimes insane, somtimes confused, sometimes without purpose. These persons speak through public realtions firms, and think tanks, and agencies of government. We are told the facts, nto all the facts, but only the facts whihc will lead us to the conclusions others want us to have. If you can escape that trap, you can read “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”