Agee's Special View
Robertson, Priscilla
Agee's Special View Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. Houghton Mifflin. 471 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson Tn the summer of 1937, Louise Boyle, a...
...taste in memory the same food...
...Perhaps the difference in spirit can be pinpointed by comparing two young married women, Agee's "Emma" and a daughter of my hostess who had the beautiful appellation of "Snowbank...
...The system which seemed to Agee eternal-until-the-Revolution-came ("like a rescuing army," for he was a Communist "by conviction and sympathy" though not a party member) did actually break down...
...had given the husband the first steady cash he had ever earned ($21 a week), he was free to buy at chain stores instead of the landlord's "robbersary...
...This could not have been just the difference between Alabama and Arkansas...
...Many things favored them in those New Deal days...
...Our friends called on local politicians who wanted votes and on labor schools...
...recount the same cycle of cotton chopping and picking and the moneyless lay-off between seasons...
...the Southern Tenant Farmers Union gave them a way of raising wages and a sense of excitement and sociability...
...Since his subjects were too unself-conscious to know the meaning of their own lives, Agee made himself their organ of perception, so to speak, even though he felt such intrusive perception a "sin...
...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson Tn the summer of 1937, Louise Boyle, a photographer, and I spent some weeks living in the home of an Arkansas cotton sharecropper...
...I can remember the smells he describes...
...He loved these people, but did not believe that his love would do much but hurt them, and he had no sense of reciprocity...
...When the local sheriff threatened a union meeting, my hostess telephoned the governor and got him to send some state troopers to protect it...
...indeed, he says that having money, or a Harvard education, can lead to its own form of crucifixion (one of his favorite words...
...The truth is, James Agee couldn't imagine anyone's being either happy or self-propelled...
...When Snowbank had trouble with her husband, her whole family moved to Texas, leaving him behind—and when they went back, it was on the basis of mutual though spirited bargaining...
...Assuming a proprietary right in other people's passivity leads to a kind of arrogance, however...
...Since the W.P.A...
...relive the daily wakening from bed...
...It followed that he trusted no one else—reformers, New Dealers, school teachers, or politicians—to give help...
...Although our hosts were so poor that they lacked running water, screens, adequate dishes, and had been ordered to grow cotton right up to their door, leaving them no space for a garden or a cow, they were full of hope and busy working for a better life...
...partly, because of machinery and industrial change...
...Emma's jealous husband had sent for her to come out to Mississippi, and she cried for days but was shipped off anyway like a sacrificial victim...
...Agee's physical details are acutely familiar...
...Thus, in spite of close observation and moving descriptive prose, Agee's essay is not much more to be trusted as a source book for life in the Thirties than King Lear for early Britain...
...This happened partly because some Americans were unwilling to have the system continued after they saw how bad it was...
...and largely because the Americans whose lives were at stake stood up to help themselves...
...These experiences were recalled by reading the new edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, who visited a cotton tenant family in Alabama in 1936 and made a literary and photographic record of the encounter...
...He was a tragic poet who had to see and magnify and beautify into art the suffering in any life...
...What interests me particularly about Agee's powerful description is the totally opposite feeling he got from ours...
...As his hosts lay asleep and he sat in the next room writing by a coal oil lamp, he says he "lay down inside each one of them" and could tell the dreams which they would not remember...
Vol. 25 • January 1961 • No. 1
