You have heard of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Depression era book on poverty in the South by James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. The forerunner was an article assigned by Fortune magazine to a young Agee but never published. This past Tuesday it was published as a book.
There are a couple aspacts to Christine Haughney’s NY Times story on the new book that intrigue me. One is the image of a young Agee moved by the plight of the sharecroppers and indignant at the magazine’s apparent exploitation of them.
The other is how the original subjects, and later, their children, were embarrassed and didn’t want names used, but the grandchildren are able to see the beauty in their forebears.
Writes Haughney, “In 1936 Fortune magazine’s editors assigned a relatively unknown and disgruntled staff writer named James Agee to travel to Alabama for the summer and chronicle the lives of sharecroppers. When Agee returned, he was inspired by the subjects he had met and lived with, but frustrated by the limitations of the magazine format. His subjects, he argued, warranted far more than an article.
“What readers have known for decades is that Agee used his reporting material to create his 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a literary description of abject poverty in the South, accompanied by starkly haunting Walker Evans photographs.
“The original magazine article was never published, as Agee squabbled with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization of destitute American families. In the early pages of Famous Men, he wrote that it was obscene for a commercial enterprise to ‘pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.’ What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.
“Melville House [is publishing] Agee’s original, unprinted 30,000-word article in book form, under the title Cotton Tenants: Three Families. The publication gives Agee fans a glimpse of an early draft of what became a seminal work of American literature.
” ‘With the book, we have a much better map of him writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ said John Summers, who edited Cotton Tenants and printed an excerpt from the article in a literary journal he edits, The Baffler. …
“Irvin Fields, whose grandfather Bud Fields was featured in the book, said he didn’t mind that the names were now being published.
“ ‘It makes me appreciate my relatives for bearing up under those circumstances and making me appreciate what I’ve got today.’ ” More.
A photo by Walker Evans, from “Cotton Tenants: Three Families,” via Library of Congress
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Thanks for this, Suzanne’s Mom. It’s something I think of often–the sharing of these images and the stories of these people’s lives arguably helped change things for the better, but yes: at what cost to them? Interesting that Agee took a principled stand against exploitation. Interesting too that what once shamed the family members, they now see as a source of pride. And indeed, to be bearing up under hard circumstances *ought* to be a source of pride, I think.
A friend of my father knew Agee well and told me how passionately he embraced everything — in ways not always good for him. He died young. Makes me think of an Anna Russell routine about a French chanteuse, probably Piaf: “She was smoking too much, she was drinking too much, she was doing ev-ery-thing too much. And when you do anything too much … even if eet ees ni-i-ice … eet ees too much!”
Wow! That’s pretty amazing! And yes, I guess there truly are people who live *very* intensely. Burning that much brighter and briefer.
Good old Anna Russell. My mother played me an old LP of her telling of the Ring Cycle. It was excellent (and thanks to her I learned the plot of the Ring Cycle).
I learned to love Anna Russell from an old record, too. When we went to the Shaw Festival once at Niagara-on-the-Lake, I babysat while my husband saw a Shaw, and he babysat while I went to see Anna Russell. Would love to find her version of the Ring Cycle. Can’t make head or tail of it!