Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Some of you who used to visit my AOL Journal (before AOL tacked Ads on our journals and many of us left), may remember that I did an entry on James Agee. In that entry, I wrote of how I'd loved his novel, A Death In The Family from my first reading of it when I was 13. I'm writing about Agee again because I've just finished reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which can be bought in a gorgeous Library of America edition. This edition also includes A Death In The Family and other Agee writings.

The blurb on the back of the book says: "In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee invented a new genre to convey his stark vision of the lives of Alabama tenant farmers." We are all used to blurbs being exaggerations; however this claim "new genre" is not an exaggeration. I have never see anything like Famous Men before.

I implore you, do not, do not be swayed by the negative reviews of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. If you are looking for a book that is deeply engrossing, challenging, different, and enlightening, then this is a book you should read. It's not for the squeamish, nor for those who don't like to pry up the rotting boards and peer into the darkness.

In Famous Men, Agee addresses the difference between fiction and non-fiction 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. This is at once a book about the tenant farmers and a book about the difficulty of writing about them.

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 in Famous Men: "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. If you concentrate, you will hear Famous Men in your whole body. And if it hurts you, you will be glad.