Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee
Walker Evans

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it; and the question, Why we make this book, and set it at large, and by what right, and for what purpose, and to what good end, or none:

that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of still others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.

All over Alabama, the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider's net is heavy. The roads lie there, with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast. The plow handles are wet, and the rails and frogplates and the weeds between the ties: and not even the hurryings and hoarse sorrows of a distant train, on other roads, is heard. The little towns, the county seats, house by house white-painted and elaborately sawn among their heavy and dark-lighted leaves, in the spaced protections of their mineral light they stand so prim, so voided, so undefended upon starlight, that it is inconceivable to despise or to scorn a white man, an owner of land; even in Birmingham, mile on mile, save for the sudden frightful streaming, almost instantly diminished and silent of a closed black car, and save stone lonesome sinister heelbeats, that show never a face and enter, soon, a frame door flush with the pavement, and ascend the immediate lightless staircase, mile on mile, stone, stone, smooth charted streams of stone, the streets under their lifted lamps lie void before eternity.

This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself.

The furniture in general and the eating implements are all at or very near the bottom of their scale: broken, insecure, uncomfortable, ill-smelling, all that a man without money must constantly accept, when he can get it, and be glad of, or make do. Since I have talked of 'esthetics' the least I can do is to add a note on it in their terms: they live in a steady shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities, piecing these together into whatever semblance of comfortable living they can, and the whole of it is a stark nakedness of makeshifts and the lack of means: yet they are also, of course, profoundly anesthetized.

For that reason and for others, I would do just as badly to simplify or eliminate myself from this picture as to simplify or invent character, places or atmospheres. A chain of truths did actually weave itself and run through: it is their texture that I want to represent, not betray, nor pretty up into art. The one deeply exciting thing to me about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living, at this instant. He is not some artist's or journalist's or propagandist's invention: he is a human being: and to what degree I am able it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate him into some invented literary imitation of a human being.

There are times of year when all these three are overlapped and collaborated, all in the field in the demand, chiefly, of cotton; but more largely, the woman is the servant of the day, and of immediate life, and the man is the servant of the year, and of the basis and boundaries of life, and is their ruler; and the children are the servants of their parents: and the center of all their existence, the central work, that by which they have their land, their shelter, their living, that which they must work for no reward more than this, because they do not own themselves, and without hope or interest, that which they cannot eat and get no money of but which is at the center of their duty and greatest expense of strength and spirit, the cultivation and harvesting of cotton: and all this effort takes place between a sterile earth and an uncontrollable sky in whose propitiation is centered their chief reverence and fear, and the deepest earnestness of their prayers, who read in these machinations of their heaven all signs of a fate which the hardest work cannot much help, and, not otherwise than as the most ancient peoples of the earth, make their plantations in the unpitying pieties of the moon.

My father, my grandfather, my poor damned tragic, not unusually tragic, bitched family and all these millions of each individual people that only want to live in kindness and decency, you never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and ----ing yourself everlastingly and only the hard bastards come through, I'm not born and can't be that hard apparently and God ---- Genius and Works of Art anyway and who the hell am I, who in Jesus' name am I. This is a beautiful country. You can take that and good art and love together and stick them up your ---. And if you think da dialectic is going to ring any conceivably worthwhile changes, you can stick that and yourself up after. Just an individualizing intellectual. Bad case of infantilism. And ---- you, too.

For half my blood is just this; and half my right of speech; and bland chance alone is my life so softened and sophisticated in the years of my defenselessness, and I am robbed of a royalty I can not only never claim, but never properly much desire or regret.

It is not likely for her; it is not likely for any of you, my beloved, whose poor lives I have already so betrayed and should you see these things so astounded, so destroyed, I dread to dare that I shall ever look into your dear eyes again: and soon, quite soon now, in two years, in five, in forty, it will all be over, and one by one we shall all be drawn into the planet beside one another; let us know, let us know there is cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun, and in slow agonies and all deceptions clearing; and in the teeth of all hope of cure which shall pretend its denial and hope of good use to men, let us most quietly and in most reverent fierceness say, not by its captive but by its utmost meanings:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us: and lead us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom: and the power: and the glory: for ever and ever: amen.

When there was an earthquake in Haiti early this year, television coverage was speedy and morally righteous. I heard many announces, television personalities, and correspondents asking where such and such aid was and why wasn't the aid being delivered faster and don't you see all these problems and how deplorable is all this and yet sublime for the human struggle and will to triumph. Particularly of note, I remember seeing a small boy, who looked to be naked, hugging his knees and looking around as people walked by him, looking entirely scared and worried and not knowing what to do. This image is in my memory because I saw it every commercial break, every time they displayed the network's logo and "Breaking News" graphics. It was always the same shot and the boy always looked just as naked, just as bewildered, just as scared, just as lost in the middle of a million busy people all bigger than he was.

What happened to the boy?

There are too many stories for every story to be told, and surely the television crews had their hands full and there really is only so much air time. And maybe someone did help him. Of course this shot probably drew quite a few viewers in--it was very compelling--so you can say that the boy made the network quite a lot of money. I doubt he received any compensation for that. But then again maybe those people who watched were compelled to donate and so maybe this naked knee-hugging boy is responsible for large sums of money that would otherwise have been slightly less large. Still, I don't know what happened to this boy.

Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about three families: he gloried in their very factualness, their livingness, and yet with the printing of his words, the telling of their story, what happened to them? Vollmann and Steinbeck the same. All these authors who write of what is real, they leave uprooted the lives they've told. You see, like a camera catching and moving into fame for anonymous brevity the face of some child bystander, victim, representative, all the famous men's relatings of their relations with those who are not famous are sneakingly vile. Not only are they unfair, but they happen also to be incredibly painful, fraudulent, and you could even say that they use people. Because they steal the emotion, the pain, the happiness, the is, the life and personality of these who are defenseless in the realm of fame, and they (the famous) use them (they who are not) as so much reason to make money and speeches, and even sometimes to draw morals. Often they do not ask permission. Many times they even do it covertly so that no unfamous has even a hope of representing their self as the famous will represent him or herself through the story of the unfamous.

And now the famous men are still famous and some even have made their fame off those who are not, like fortunes made off the unfortunate, we find that the unfamous vanished and we do not know the fullness of their story; they have become nothing more than pages to the fullness of the famous man's story. And is he even thankful? Are we? Who remembers them after the prop they were made into? Who can?