Customer Reviews

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Many people argue about Agee's complex text. The entire body of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is written in a kind of highly emotional euphoria in which Agee combines his own thoughts and perceptions with exhaustive description of the world around him. His intense feeling causes the writing to be, by conventional grammatical standards, virtually unreadable. Once the reader gets past his chapter-long sentences and widely varying themes, however, the book emerges as one of the greatest written accomplishments of the 20th century.

While the nominal subject of the documentary is an in-depth exploration of three tenant farming families during the Great Depression, the real project (and Agee himself admits this in his remarkably confessional prose) is the documentation of his own experience living with those farmers for several weeks--sleeping in their vermin-infested beds, eating their home-cooked food, and interacting with them on a human level. In addition, Agee self-consciously writes the text and explores the act of writing, both during his stay with the farmers and several years later, when he completed the vast majority of the book.

The final product is a patchwork book pieced together from Biblical prayer, Evans's photographs, Agee's flawless descriptions (which, in several cases, may be more accurate than Evans's probably manipulated prints) and meditations on writing, poverty, art, and day-to-day human experience. Two things make this work remarkable: Agee's honesty (he never claims to be objective or non-judgemental) and his innate talent for description. I approached this book with an open mind, and found it to be one of the most thoughtful and rewarding works I have ever read.

This book is an amazing work of art. At times it's baffling, and at times almost impertinent--like when the author decides to describe every object in an entire home, and yet in all these things and in all the conflicting emotions it evokes, it creates a mood and a feeling and a setting that will seep into your skin and fog your brain for months.
The writing is beautiful, the story it tells--of poor, sharecropping, depression-era families--is heartbreaking, and the experience of reading about it all is like a baptism by fire. This book just might re-wire your brain.
I think this is a much better read than Agee's "A Death in the Family," and that one won the Pulitzer Prize. Read this, for sure.
I read it on a bus trip across Guatemala, and the way Agee's descriptions of the old southern poverty fit the poor little towns full of Guatemalan coffee pickers was uncanny.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and let us start with James Agee.

UPDATE: It's years later, and this book has never stopped haunting me. I think of it almost daily. If I were to review it today, I would definitely give it Five Stars.

In one of the most edifying ways, James Agee illustrates the life of the Southern tenant sharecropper in the Great Depression. Agee's writings coupled with the eloquent photography of one notable Walker Evans, distinguishes the book in a elite category unparalleled by few if any whatsoever. The circumstances the sharecropper endured during the Depression not only working the land but also at home with family was rigorous and was additionally exposed very thoroughly in Agee's writings. The book is a must read for anyone interested in the History of the Great Depression era/New Dealism. One other book of notable mention for those interested is Larry Nelson's- KING COTTON'S ADVOCATE.

James Agee's book on the sharecroppers of the American south during the great depression is a book not to be taken lightly. I read this book for a college english class and I can honestly say that most people in the course including myself are confused by Agee's intent and purpose. Agee's highly lyrical and philosophical tone allows a deep analysis into the question of human existence in the depression south. Yet, the very scope and difficulty of his subject is expressed in his confused, perhaps confusing writing. There are lonely moments of insight stacked alongside pages of seemingly irrelevant and baseless speculation. I say seemingly because each time I re-read the passage I find that Agee's words have quite a bit more meaning than I had originally found. This book is not a novel, not journalism but a puzzle which Agee could not piece together. Only with time and care can the reader hope to understand the frustratingly complex yet real message of Agee's work.

Living only 3 miles from the site where this book was born, I can easily still see the horrors of what Agee and Evans witnessed. Rual Hale County, Alabama is still a place slow to develope, but with still as much pride and hope as was seen in the Depression years. The book is, at times, unequelled because of the direct accurancy describing the people, smells, conditions, and lifestyles of the three families. It is simply a work of art. The families are still around, and PBS even shot a piece on the book; however, the reminders of what was can still pierce the souls of all who live in our area. We have come a long way, but there are "miles to go." It is a work of art. Powerful! It needs to be followed up- yet I doubt that there could ever be such a quality work to follow that of Agee's.

What is this thing?!?!? - As John Hersey says in the introduction (page xxviii), "There had never been, and there will never be, anything quite like this book."-On the back cover, a dashing Agee is pictured with a glass of what one presumes to be a shot of the strong stuff in his hand. Appropriately, because the writing resembles nothing so much as an (at times) divinely inspired inebriety. He bounces from one form of writing to the next (poetry, descriptive prose, vituperative essay) without so much as a feint of a segue. There is really no narrative form to speak of. It seems clear (to me at least) that Agee didn't know himself what he was doing at times, and the striking pictures of Evans never seem to connect in the way they should with Agee's prose. It's rather like the characters in James Dickey's Deliverence stumbled out into a swath of impoverished farmland to write a book and take some pictures rather than into a soon-to-be dammed up river to take an ill-advised canoe trip. (One is not surprised, somehow, to learn that Agee was one of Dickey's great literary heroes.) ....And yet, for all the muddle, or perhaps because of it, the book has a disconcerting charm that will not let one be. I don't know where to pinpoint it or how to analyze it. But it's there, like some mischievous elf standing before your eyes who will not leave no matter how many times you open and shut your eyes and shake your head...There is a paragraph in the "On The Porch" section toward the end of the book, describing a girl in the dawning of her sexuality: "A phase so unassailably beyond any meaning of tenderness and of trust, so like the opening of the first living upon the shining of the young earth in its first morning..." In the book's finest moments, in Agee's best sections of writing, we feel this painfully fleeting innocence and bliss wafting over the lives of the simple and hard-bitten tenant farmers, a presence almost physical amidst the cruel hardships they endure. Perhaps this is part of the book's mysterious hold on generations of readers.

Let us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its poetry and prose, reminds me of an epic, like the Hindu Mahabharata or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The lyrical narrative reveals just as much, if not more about Agee, than his subjects. His writing style excludes his subjects as readers.

His prose, which tends to be lofty and cerebral, is also beautiful and brilliant. But, I often wondered, who he was
writing for? The New Yorker audience? The distance in his observations often left me feeling cold. I imagine these hardworking sharecroppers exhibiting some joy, some evidence of warmth, of hope. But I had difficulty finding it in Agee's voice.

The length of Agee's sentences and paragraphs were long, each containing an entire scene, and I labored through them, hoping sleep would not steal me from a passage I might not finish. It was as though Agee too, was afraid sleep would come and steal him from his mission, and so kept hacking away at each sentence, adding commas and colons and semi-colons, lingering his thoughts across the page.

Whatever level of consciousness Agee existed, I could not hang with him for any more than a couple of sentences, as I would fall off the page and have to find my way back into the scene. Where was I? You get the picture...

Agee also uses parenthesis and colons, often not giving his parenthesis a mate: (This struck me as rather unusual and often, cold and detached--more like a voyeur. Did he fabricate his own method of communication using punctuation or was this being done elsewhere at the time? I felt left out of his thoughts when he did this, like when two people are communicating via sign language and you can't make out a word they're saying. Was he doing this in a way to urge us to "think," to stretch beyond the ordinary conventions and try something on that is foreign and unfamiliar, like his subjects and their hardship?

Agee wrote the text and Evans took the photos for this Works Progress Administration project on sharecropping in the South during the Great Depression. Agee's Faulkneresque ramblings are perfectly complemented by Evans' stark photography. To put it simply, the written word integrated with the visual image has never been more striking.

Starts out with a long discourse that is not easy to read, but soon becomes a detailed and moving description of three tenant famer families. Depressing, but valuable. Photos are very moving.

Can't quite give it 5 stars because Agee's self-indulgence does get to me (Evans, though is flawless). The indulgence I speak of is not so much the Agee's overdescription of his own mental states, though this can be intrusive and less than profound, but the too frequent willingness to let language and imagination take flight from reality, when reality, ultimately, is what is so compelling here. Imagination and trustworthiness unnecessarily depart ways, as Agee at times prefers the poetic to the truth. Nonetheless, the decision not to hem in those very flights of empathetic understanding that may depart from specific reality surely allowed him to give the essential breath and life to the portraiture. The perhaps more accurate, but much less illuminating, 1989 followup by Maharidge & Williamson (discussed below) is a useful contrast - all facts, rather little life. And one after all knows, reading Agee, that he probably hasn't quite got everything right; despite the book's inescapable flaws, it (and the marvelous photos) achieves the much deeper task of bringing these people to life and making outsiders understand their dignity in the face of poverty, even where that dignity is expressed in perverse ways (though sometimes seeing dignity when further investigation or more honest reporting, as Maharidge found with the Rickets, would have acknowledged more distressing truths).

But just adding a review to point the curious to a 1989 followup, And Their Children After Them, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, which traces what became of the Gudgers, Woodses, Rickets, and their descendants (they keep the pseudonyms, though the names are elsewhere widely known - Burroughs, Fields, and Tingle (or Tengle)). The newer book certainly does not have the poetry of the original, and it is out of print, but it's worth checking out of your local library if you're left haunted wondering whatever became of the people Agee made you care so deeply about (and how much he got right).