Books: In Love & Anger

LET Us NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN (471 pp.)—James Agee, Walker Evans —Houghton Mifflin ($6.50).

This remarkable work came close to never seeing print, let alone the literary respectability of a new edition two decades after its first appearance. Originally rejected as an article for FORTUNE, it was expanded into a book, was again turned down, then was finally lured out of a drawer in Greenwich Village by another publisher, who brought it out in 1941. Many reviewers were harsh on Author James Agee. Less than half of the book’s 2,500 copies were sold, and the rest were slowly remaindered. But gradually Famous Men came to life in a sort of readers’ underground. It is now reissued in a fine and welcome new edition.

Famous Men tells of a month spent in the pine cabin of an Alabama sharecropper during the summer of 1936. The book begins with 64 starkly beautiful photographs by Walker Evans, probing into the timeless peasant homes and sun-squinting faces of the Deep South, then ravaged by the Depression. Despite centuries of Anglo-Saxon inbreeding, the faces seem Latin: these same lean, starveling families could have emerged as easily from the caves of the Mezzogiorno or the baked hills of Mexico.

Call of the Blood. In this new edition, Photographer Evans supplies a graceful memoir of James Agee, later movie critic for TIME and the Nation, who died suddenly in 1955, when only 45, before the publication of his finely wrought Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, A Death in the Family. In 1936, says Evans, black-haired, husky Jim Agee seemed younger than his 27 years and still retained “a faint rubbing of Harvard and Exeter.” Though likable and above average as an individual, he “didn’t look much like a poet, an intellectual, an artist, or a Christian, each of which he was.” Agee’s own view was darker. He saw himself and Evans as “two angry, futile and bottomless intelligences in the service of an anger and of a love and of an undiscernible truth.”

In a backwoods, off-the-map hamlet that he calls Hobe’s Hill, Agee and Evans lived with a tenant farmer named George Gudger, made frequent side visits to the ramshackle farms of Fred Ricketts and Bud Woods. Tennessee-born Jim Agee felt the call of blood as well as the vast bond of compassion, since his father’s people had come down from the hills back of Knoxville. But Agee also felt that he was an alien and a spy, prying into the lives of an “undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” He tried to find at least partial absolution in sleeping in beds that swarmed with fleas, lice and bedbugs, gasping through the offal stench, and ignoring his nausea to “eat for a few weeks what a million people spend their lives eating.”

Agony & Rapture. Today Agee’s anger still sweeps with gale force. He rails against prospective buyers of his books because they will presumably read in comfort, hates equally the New Deal and Marxist simplicities; the one because it thinks that simply increasing production will improve the lot of the dispossessed, the other because it finds easy solutions in the class war. At bottom, Agee is most agonized by himself, for he is emotionally drawn to the tenant way of life while intellectually condemning it. The personal love he felt covered every commonplace occurrence, so that when taking a late night meal with George Gudger and his small-boned wife, Annie Mae, it seemed to Agee that “we held quietness, gentleness and care toward one another like three mild lanterns held each at the met heads of strangers in darkness.”

The book is not always easy to follow, for this is the work of a man talented, poetic, idealistic, imitative and vastly young. The prose is interspersed with poetry, with long swooning riveries in which Agee follows every freshet, creek and stream into the mighty Mississippi. He was aware of his faults and lamented that young writers “roll around in description like honeymooners on a bed,”

Together with the Joycean yelps, the fury, and the love of the poor and deprived, Agee steadily retains the artist’s supreme gift: he can bring even a reluctant reader into the heart of his own experience, make him taste the greasy mnemonic food, smell both the odor of human sweat and the scent of sun-ripened pine, and see just how “a little wind laid itself in a wall against the glistening leaves of a high forest” with “a long, sweet granular noise of rustling water.”