James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction (Library of America) (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Michael Sragow (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

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. And it would open with Walker Evan's stark, unflinching photographs.

Its first intended publisher naturally wanted cuts; Agee naturally refused. He kept working on the book, never satisfied, even after Houghton Mifflin brought it out to pitiful sales (600 copies the first year). 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 of Famous Men, yet Agee's natural bent is always toward lyrical excess. Take, for instance, his two-page list of what he saw on the wall around the family fireplace of the desperately poor Ricketts family:

"calendars of snowbound and staghunting scenes pressed into bas-relief out of white pulp and glittering with a sand of red and blue and green and gold tinsel, and delicately tinted; other calendars and farm magazine covers or advertisements of dog-love; the blesséd fireside coziness of the poor; indian virgins watching their breasts in pools or paddling up moonlit aisles of foliage; fullblown blondes in luminous frocks leaning back in swings, or taking coca-cola through straws, or beneath evening palmleaves, accepting cigarettes from young men in white monkey-coats, happy young housewives at resplendent stoves in sunloved kitchens, husbands in tuxedos showing guests an oil furnace, old ladies leaning back in rocking chairs, their hands relaxed in their needlework, their faces bemused in lamplight, happy or mischievous or dog-attended or praying little boys and girls, great rosy blue-eyed babies sucking their thumbs to the bone in clouds of pink or blue, closeups of young women bravely and purely facing the gravest problems of life in the shelter of lysol, portraits of cakes, roasts of beef, steaming turkeys, and decorated hams, little cards by duplicate and a series depicting incidents in the life of Jesus with appropriate verses beneath, rich landscapes with rapid tractors in the foreground, kittens snarled in yarn, or wearing glasses, or squinting above pink or blue bows. . . ." And on and on, as Agee without emotion sets down these clichéd images of modern advertising, circa 1937 -- all of them stared at and dreamed over, day after day, by people who stitch their clothes together out of flour sacks.

After he published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to resounding indifference, Agee drifted back to journalism, spending the next nine years turning out book and film reviews, mainly for Time and the Nation. Editors there curtailed his tendency to excess and sentimentality. By common consent, the movie pieces are the best ever written by an American, at least until the advent of Pauline Kael. They possess only one failing: Agee was reviewing from 1943 to 1948, probably the dullest period in Hollywood screen history. But he did manage to welcome the great Italian neo-realist films ("Open City," "Shoeshine"), to defend Charlie Chaplin's derided masterpiece "Monsieur Verdoux," and to celebrate the greatness of the silent era.

Agee wrote that movies, like the photographs of his friend Walker Evans, succeeded by "picturing the way that places and things and people really look and act and inter-act, and making the information eloquent to the eye." That sounds almost theoretical, but Agee was nothing if not primarily impassioned. He loved every aspect of the movies, and he could encapsulate their plots or their stars with wonderful economy: "Gary Cooper, over the years, has so cornered the beloved American romantic virtues of taciturnity, melancholy, tenderness, valor and masculine gauche grace that he has become, for millions, a sort of Abraham Lincoln of American sex." In "The Big Sleep," Humphrey Bogart can "get into a minor twitch of the mouth the force of a slug from an automatic," while Lauren Bacall is "like an adolescent cougar." Such phrases, combined with an almost diary-like tone, make his pieces not only criticism but also appreciations, sometimes love letters or awed confessions. "Recently I saw a moving picture so much worth talking about that I am still unable to review it." (It was Roberto Rossellini's "Open City.")

From writing about the pictures, it was only a step to writing for them. Agee scripted much of "The African Queen" and almost all of that black-and-white masterpiece of Southern Gothic suspense, "The Night of the Hunter." (It provided Charles Laughton his only directing gig and Robert Mitchum his greatest role -- the preacher with the words "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on his knuckles.) Feeling ill from ongoing heart problems, Agee turned down the chance to write the screenplay for "Moby Dick." (John Huston gave the job to Ray Bradbury.) And then, in 1955 while sitting in a New York taxicab, the 45-year-old James Agee died.

He had always driven himself hard, smoking, drinking, womanizing, talking through the night; there had been three rocky marriages, several children, suicidal impulses. He felt everything intensely, drawing on an almost mystical religious sensibility as well as a deep regard for human beings in all their fallen glory. His childhood especially haunted him, and after his death some scraps of autobiographical fiction, largely about the events just before and after his father's funeral, were edited into A Death in the Family (1957); it received a Pulitzer Prize. (The novel opens with a prologue, the haunting paean to "Knoxville: Summer 1915," which Samuel Barber set to music in probably his most beautiful song, especially when sung by Leontyne Price.) In the 50 years since Agee's death, few writers have been so lovingly memorialized as he has, in particular by such friends as Walker Evans, the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and the journalist John Hersey.

These two volumes of the Library of America cap Agee's long progress upward. They contain virtually everything that an ordinary reader might want to read, excepting the marvelous self-portrait of the young artist contained in the Letters to Father Flye (1962). On the other hand, editor Michael Sragow compensates for this omission by adding a hundred pages of hitherto uncollected movie reviews, as well as a choice selection of book pieces. Surely what Agee writes of The Hamlet could just as well be said of the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: "For Dionysian William Faulkner the story is, as usual, a mere set of springboards and parallel bars for the display of one of the most dazzling and inchoate talents in contemporary letters." It is a rule of God's Providence, said Cardinal Newman, that we succeed by failure. Certainly Agee's gifts always led him to exceed the boundaries of whatever form he was working in. Today, however, that same work continues to feel so vital just because it remains so nakedly vulnerable, so provisional, so utterly lacking in that subtle artistic poison of self-confident complacency. Throw in Agee's moody charisma on the page, as well as his dark good looks in photographs, and he honestly does seem something close to the James Dean of American literature.

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Description

A passionate literary innovator, eloquent in language and uncompromising in his social observation and his pursuit of emotional truth, James Agee (1909- 1955) excelled as novelist, critic, journalist, and screenwriter. In his brief, often turbulent life, he left enduring evidence of his unwavering intensity, observant eye, and sometimes savage wit.

This volume collects his fiction along with his extraordinary experiment in what might be called prophetic journalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that began as an assignment from Fortune magazine to report on the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, and that expanded into a vast and unique mix of reporting, poetic meditation, and anguished self-revelation that Agee described as "an effort in human actuality." A 64-page photo insert reproduces Evans's now iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition.

A Death in the Family, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that he worked on for over a decade and that was published posthumously in 1957, re-creates in stunningly evocative prose Agee's childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the upheaval his family experienced after his father's death in a car accident when Agee was six years old. A whole world, with its sensory vividness and social constraints, comes to life in this child's-eye view of a few catastrophic days. It is presented here for the first time in a text with corrections based on Agee's manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

This volume also includes The Morning Watch (1951), an autobiographical novella that reflects Agee's deep involvement with religious questions, and three short stories including the remarkable allegory "A Mother's Tale."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 818 pages
• Publisher: Library of America; 1st Thus. edition (September 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931082812
• ISBN-13: 978-1931082815
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #147,849 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Overlooked-Writer, September 26, 2005

By	Ken Schellenberg (Arlington, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Let me be clear... I've not read the present volume though I've read the individual books collected in it years ago. "A Death in the Family" remains vivid in my memory, depite almost 30 years since I last read it, and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is an absolute classic.

Though I have not yet received the LOA edition, I was compelled to add a review if only to counter the first reviewer here who is intent on seeing only ideology rather than the writing. If the work is looked at without the rose-colored glasses of (conservative) political correctness, you'll find there is an amazing writer and thinker behind the words.

Just read the works for yourself, not through an ideological smokescreen.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich Reading Experience, February 2, 2006

By	Theresa Williams "Zen" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Lately, I find myself returning to literature written before I was born (1956). When I saw the review of LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN in THE NEW YORKER, I became instantly convinced that I should purchase it. I'd known Agee's work since I was 13, when I first read DEATH IN THE FAMILY. I belonged to the Scholastic Book Club and every month my mother gave me change out of her the bottom of her purse so I could buy the books I had faithfully marked on my order form. I was haunted by this book as a teen, and I remain haunted still. I will always believe that few American writers ever achieved anything comparable to the beginning of DEATH IN THE FAMILY, a short italicized introduction which begins: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." Agee's sensory details throughout DEATH amaze. Another stunning passage reads: "Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell;" I could go on, because every page of this book is a treasure. But I would like to turn my attention to LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, which I had never read until now.

I will preface my remarks by saying that I am a writer currently very interested in the distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing. Agee addresses this issue by saying: "In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger." It's perhaps this interest of mine in the craft of writing itself that has made FAMOUS MEN so fascinating to me.

Another thing: In the beginning pages, Agee writes with absolute humility towards his own writing and his subject matter. This was stunning to me, because I've also read Agee's movie reviews, and in those writings Agee is witty, merciless, honest, and very confident in his own opinion. In short, they are some of the best movie reviews I have ever read. However, FAMOUS MEN is another kind of writing altogether. As Agee admits, his efforts to capture his subject matter through words were a failure. Words are inefficient, inadequate in matters so huge. He wrote: "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement."

That FAMOUS MEN is not more popular does not surprise me, nor was Agee surprised, I think, when the book got bad reviews and suffered poor sales. FAMOUS MEN, I think, is not the sort of book that would ever gain wide acceptance. It is a flawed masterpiece that takes a lot of work to absorb, but well worth the effort.

I don't know the extent to which Agee may have been devastated, nonetheless, at the way America turned its back on his masterpiece. I do know that Agee seemed to suggest in the early pages of FAMOUS MEN that the worst thing that can happen to any artist is mass acceptance. Perhaps mass acceptance is something the writer both wants and fears; I don't know. But Agee does say in FAMOUS MEN that he felt that as soon as, say, Beethoven's music is used as a form of relaxation or as a background to the mundane activities human beings inevitably become so wrapped up in, then the music has lost its vitality. That is why Agee suggests:

"Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down onto floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it."

The same might be said for FAMOUS MEN. You can't read it as you would some other books, even DEATH IN THE FAMILY, which has a nice and clean chronological structure. You have to really pay attention when you read FAMOUS MEN. If you concentrate, you will hear FAMOUS MEN in your whole body. And if it hurts you, you will be glad.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic, March 26, 2006

By	Raymond K. Casteel (Ventura, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This recently reissued collecton of Agee's work includes the brilliant, touching photos of Walker Evans with James Agee, photos made during the Depression Era of the 'thirties. Agee's writings are true Americana, his prose flows and the reader is made a part of the families about which he writes. This compilation belongs in the library of anyone concerned with human feelings in times of hurtin', hunger, and need. If you lived through the time,as I did, you will know it again through Agee's superb reflections on it.