Walker Evans's portrait of Bud Fields and his family in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
The troubling economic news of the past few months has set me off reading books from the straitened 1930s. One that I have returned to recently is the documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans.
Agee must rank as one of the unluckiest writers in American literature. He spent three years writing the book, which documents the lives of sharecroppers in the southern US, and it's a masterpiece. Evans's photography is clear-sighted and humane; Agee's writing is frank, stylish, opinionated and, by most accounts, honest. His description of the lives of the rural poor in one of the greatest economic disasters in modern history should have made him a household name - but Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published in 1939, the same year as John Steinbeck's great dustbowl novel The Grapes of Wrath. It had no chance.
The book went out of print in 1948, having sold just over 1,000 copies. Agee also published poems, novels, and wrote screenplays, including the script for John Huston's The African Queen and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, but he died a broken man in 1955, aged just 45. It was after this that his writing career really began to take off.
In 1958 Agee's posthumous novel A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer prize. A collection of his film criticism and screenplays was published to great acclaim. In 1960 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued and this time it was a hit. The new edition became a rallying book of the civil rights movement, especially around university campuses, and sold 60,000 copies.
What appeals most about the book is its anger. Agee had a compelling story to tell but he was aware of the risk that the story, rather than the real human suffering, would take centre stage. "Above all else," he says "in God's name don't think of it as Art.
"Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again ..."
The reality of what Agee and Evans recorded during their time among the sharecroppers is shocking. In 1936, many of them lived in former slave accommodation dating back 80 years or more. They had limited food and clothing, no sanitation and no education at a time when many Americans were buying cars and furnishing their new houses from glossy catalogues. Evans's photographs, which perfectly complement the detailed, descriptive prose, show a horse-drawn cart, a chair with no seat, a lined, exhausted face, and pale, dirty children, interposed with an image of a prosperous small town, its main street lined with shiny new cars and overhung with powerlines and telephone cables. The farmers seem to belong to a much earlier time.
Compared with this, Steinbeck and his redemption fantasies seem almost obscene. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is an altogether tougher, less compromising book. While Steinbeck understood the need for an appealing story, Agee ploughed on with his unflinching eye and almost Melvillean fixation on detail. Ultimately they were both right, of course, but while Steinbeck remains the most famous of the two men, it is Agee whose book now seems the more modern and the more urgent.
