Some years ago I dined at the Harvard Lampoon, the closed society that publishes the eponymous humor magazine. Located in a castle funded in part by William Randolph Hearst, the Lampoon’s chambers harbor myriad relics: a medieval clock, a fourth-century stained-glass window, a conquistador’s armor, a couch from San Simeon, altars of worship to writers such as James Agee. It was because of my relationship with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee and Walker Evans’s collaborative work about Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression, that I’d been invited to socialize at the castle.
There was no electric light. Dozens of candles illuminated the rooms. My host, the Lampoon president, sat in a throne six feet tall and four feet wide at the head of a long table. Dinner was served promptly at ten. Conversation was formal and strange jazz filled the air. I was astonished when, at meal’s end, a man flung his plate to the floor. Suddenly there was a cacophony of crashing plates, spraying shards of porcelain; noodles hung from a coat of arms. Two men jumped atop the table and kicked off the remaining plates. My host assured me this was normal. The china was broken every night.
“Who cleans up the mess?”
“We certainly don’t. We hire help, servants. The Lampoon has more money than most colleges.”
I was further astonished when men wearing ties attacked the piano with feet, fists, and chairs. The splintering of wood rose over the techno beat of the song, “Pump Up the Volume.” The piano was old and a fresh one was being delivered the next day.
Amid this display, Lampoon members besieged me with questions about Agee, hanging on my words. They talked admiringly of Agee’s exploits in the Combat Zone, Boston’s red-light district. The piano was now a heap of waste. Men stood smoking, sated. A woman cavorted in the rubble in a ghostly dance out of sync with the throbbing music. I flung my beer bottle against a wall; it exploded in a shower of glass. I fled and wandered the frozen streets of Cambridge, Agee on my mind.
Agee affects those who read him. For Jimmy Carter, whom I met in Nashville in 1989, the impact of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men seemed to be moral and religious. For Tad Mosel, whom I met at the seventy-fifth Pulitzer Prize anniversary party in 1991, Agee’s presence was supernatural. Mosel’s 1961 Pulitzer-winning play, All the Way Home, was adapted from Agee’s posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family. “I talked with him and asked him to forgive me when I changed things,” Mosel said of communicating with Agee’s spirit. “I talked with him for two years. Did he talk with you?”
Agee talks to me, but not as he did to Mosel or Carter, and certainly not as he does to the Lampoon members, who represent an extreme wing of a de facto Agee cult (Agee wrote for the Lampoon while at Harvard). Agee literally informs And Their Children After Them (1989), the book in which the photographer Michael Williamson and I documented the lives of the survivors and descendants of the three families with whom Agee lived in Alabama. We brought forward their story and the meaning of poverty and its fallout a half-century later.
Agee has informed my other books in a less topical but equally vital way. Joe Elbert, assistant managing editor for photography at The Washington Post (and Michael Williamson’s boss), likes to give speeches excoriating editors, both print and photo, for not taking risks. Elbert doesn’t edit conventionally, as in judging a photo on technical points. He considers how an image makes him feel. For what it takes to get this result, in photos or words, I always look to Agee. His was not cold, buttoned-down, dispassionate reportage. It was about danger, getting hot and sweaty, getting close, close enough to hurt, to feel something, to say something.
This is not a review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is indescribable anyway. One must read it. But be forewarned: it’s uneven. Parts are, frankly, boring. But most of it captivates. The sum of the whole is well worth the journey. Instead, I want to delve into Agee’s journalistic process, a way of working that transcends his book. Agee embodies passion and soul, two qualities that some editors fear because they mistakenly equate them with bias, or having an agenda when covering the human side of social issues. Agee was not about doing journalism. He was about living it. This secret can be applied to book journalism, alternative weeklies, and even daily newspapers, though one must be stealthful with the latter. Agee described himself and Evans as “spies.” If one works for a passion-hating city editor, it’s imperative to think and act like a spy.
Agee was a poet before he was a spy. When he was twenty-five a book of his verse was published by Yale University Press. In 1932 the poet went straight from his Harvard graduation ceremony to Henry Luce’s two-year-old Fortune magazine. Jobs were scarce, and Luce had been impressed by a spoof issue of Time that Agee had edited his senior year. The only reason Agee fit in at all at Fortune was the backdrop of the Great Depression — instead of solely glorifying wealth, Luce knew he had to publish sociological articles about the New Deal.
Agee found himself stuck in the middle level of Luce’s editorial assembly line, churning out his share of “mind-numbing assignments,” according to his biographer, Laurence Bergreen. Yet he sometimes produced profound journalism — on the Tennessee Valley Authority, industrial smoke, the American roadside. He wrote at night in the Chrysler Building, fifty-two floors above Manhattan’s streets, blasting Beethoven on a portable record player, alone.
By 1935 he was languishing, and his work troubles flowed into his marriage. He wanted to reach heights with his writing but felt he was stumbling. He was disgusted with his bosses — even then editors feared passion — and went so far as to talk with his colleagues about a fantasy of shooting Luce dead.
“Who, what, where, when and why (or how) is the primal cliché and complacency of journalism,” Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Because of how journalism was practiced, it was difficult to get at truth. Could journalism be blamed, he wrote, any more than a cow be blamed “for not being a horse?” Yes. “The difference is, and the reason one can respect or anyhow approve of the cow, that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses, and that none of them could get away with it even with a small part of the public. The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism.”
He went on leave to Florida for six months in a failed attempt to save his marriage. He was adrift, proof that one’s personal life is intertwined with the professional. He returned in 1936 to an assignment from Fortune’s managing editor: travel with Walker Evans to the South for a piece on the nine million cotton sharecroppers, the most hardscrabble poor in the nation.
The stakes were high as Agee and Evans hit the road that June. Agee’s life, personal and professional, became wrapped up in the assignment. He could not fail. The pair cast about and found three families — the Woods, Gudgers, and Ricketts — on Hobe’s Hill, a bleak plateau south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
After a month Agee had a story, but it was a cow masquerading as a horse. He left Evans in a Birmingham hotel and drove off in aimless despair, contemplating a roadside hooker whom he passed up, then a fight at a lunch counter likewise avoided. He ended up back on Hobe’s Hill. A storm hit. George Gudger invited him to stay the night in the family’s shotgun shack. Agee graciously declined, then hated himself for doing so as he drove down the mud-slick road. He had to get closer to the family, and he’d blown his chance. Then, either by accident or on purpose — Agee himself did not know — his car crashed into a ditch. He rolled up his pants and walked back to the Gudgers’, where he lived for three weeks.
This is when Agee discovered the horse.
When he came home from Alabama in September, however, Luce had turned rightward from being a New Deal moderate. Sociological articles were out, and Agee and Evans’s story was rejected. They decided to publish a book; to hell with Luce. Published in 1941 in a country mobilizing for war, the book was a commercial flop. Agee went on to make a name as a movie reviewer for Time and The Nation. He lived hard, drinking and smoking and womanizing, dying of a heart attack in a Manhattan taxi in 1955. He was forty-five. In 1958, A Death in the Family was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In 1960, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued, racking up serious sales.
In 1982 I was given a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Diane Alters, a writer/editor colleague at The Sacramento Bee. Michael Williamson (another Bee colleague) and I were embarking upon our first book, Journey to Nowhere, about the new homeless, and Diane wanted me to read Agee for inspiration.
The first time Agee affected how I approach my work was in Houston in 1983, when Michael and I met Jim and Bonnie Alexander and their two kids. Jim was a job-seeking welder, and the family ended up living in a tent. We set up camp next to them, living out of our car. We shared meals, played pool with Jim, got drunk, talked by campfire. On night six Jim showed us his pistol. Bonnie told about a dinner when there was just one potato. “Boy, I sliced it real thin,” she said. “I’m never going to let that happen again,” Jim said. “First, I’ll go hunting for food. If that doesn’t work, I hit a 7-Eleven. I won’t take money. But I’ll take food. My kids won’t starve.”
We wouldn’t have achieved this degree of intimacy had we not lived with the family. This was relatively simple. Things were stunningly more complicated when Michael and I went to Alabama in 1985 to find the 128 survivors and offspring of the original twenty-two family members from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. None were still sharecropping — machines had ended that — but most were still at the bottom of the socioeconomic order. We unearthed a deeper lesson from Agee as we spent three years on the story.
We didn’t literally move in with any of the descendants, but we emotionally set up house. We were invested to the core of our beings in the lives of those we were documenting. We didn’t set out to do this. It just happened. It mattered not if our work never materialized into a book — for three years publishers rejected us. I had $12,000 of my savings in the project. When things looked most hopeless, Michael spent $1,500 he didn’t have on a trip, for one photo. We had to journey to a conclusion even if the story remained dormant in the notebooks and film negatives stored in our garages. It was personal.
Agee was a strong influence on the “new journalism” of the 1960s, his biographer Bergreen and others have noted. While some laud Agee, others trash him. Many critics of new journalism and some who attempt its practice but fail miss a vital point about Agee’s work. It was not really about “style,” nor how Agee used the first person. Yes, Agee was a stylist, and he wasn’t shy about using an “I.” But these aspects are incidental to his journalism. More important was that Agee emotionally connected with the families. In order to get their stories, he gave of himself. He confronted the wall of “objectivity,” of not getting close to one’s subjects, and smashed through it.
This brand of reporting is akin to “method acting,” in which actors take on the persona of the characters they are portraying. With journalism this means total immersion — method reporting. It started that day Agee showed up at the Gudgers’ door, mudcaked, his car wrecked in a ditch. Earlier that afternoon during the storm, when he took refuge with the family in their shack, he focused on the eyes of ten-year-old Maggie Louise Gudger, “temperatureless, keen, serene and wise and pure gray eyes.” Looking into them, he wrote, was “scary as hell, and even more mysterious than frightening.”
In the coming weeks he watched the family picking cotton. He took Maggie on rides through the county, told her about life in the big city. She was smart, and he saw in the girl hope for breaking out of the cycle of poverty. One night he perched her on the chicken coop, beneath the starry sky. Maggie wondered about her future. Agee later wrote that she might get her wish, and become a nurse or a teacher.
We were left with Maggie’s hopes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I found that she sharecropped until her second husband died in 1958, then became a waitress, raising her four children. Maggie descended into alcoholism and depression. She moved back home. One day in 1971 she stopped in a store to buy a bottle of something while her sister waited in the car. At home later the sister heard a thud. Rushing into the room, the sister saw the empty bottle whose contents had just been swallowed by Maggie. It was rat poison. The family tried to force saltwater down her throat, to make her expel it, but she clenched her teeth.
“I don’t wanna live,” Maggie said. “I wanna die. I’ve took all I can take.”
In And Their Children After Them I wrote, “They buried Maggie Louise at the edge of a hill, two miles up the road from where she had sat on the chicken coop that night and dreamed the stars.”
I needed to see, feel, and smell everything connected to Maggie Louise, including Agee. Michael and I spent two days, sometimes on hands and knees, in a chigger-infested jungle of pine and kudzu seeking vestiges of the Gudger shack. I tracked Agee in New York City, through his daughter, ex-wife, friends; at Harvard, at the Lampoon. I obtained Maggie’s suicide note and found her children, and we got to know some of them with an intensity that cannot be addressed here in any form that would do justice to the story.
There’s no guidebook for this kind of work. It’s about being human first, a journalist second. One has to submit to a story for which one has passion, and allow life to happen. The story does not exactly write itself; it is journalisme verité.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was a bitter disappointment for Agee, “like a dead child,” a friend of Agee’s had told me, not to be discussed. He felt like a failure, and this led to increased drinking and smoking.
Did something happen in the South that darkly affected Agee as his life spiraled to its early end? He never again did a project like that book. Perhaps he’d said all he’d needed through this form of work, abandoning it just as he’d left poetry behind. Or possibly it was the children from two marriages he had to support and the impossibility of earning a living from this kind of journalism. Or maybe it was simply too emotionally costly. He turned in new directions, plunging into Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s African Queen, and biographer Bergreen notes that we see Agee in the brooding and boozing loner played by Humphrey Bogart.
My editor asked me if method journalism had affected me. It’s a question that immediately raises another: How can one boil into a few paragraphs the weight of the work’s emotion, without sounding self-absorbed, or silly? But there are deeper reasons, whose nature is possibly not fully acknowledged to myself, for wanting to avoid the question of effects. I liken it to the cessation of a long-term romantic relationship. One moves on, yet the pains and joys remain below the surface for years and cannot really be discussed. Denial can rule. There’s a danger in method reporting, outside any discussion about journalism. One does not walk away unscathed.
For years I continued to brush against the darkness of Agee’s life — there were other intense experiences beyond the Lampoon dinner — and he became a mirror as I figured some things out, and learned the most important lesson from him. Agee is evidence that one can be too serious, too self-absorbed. It’s vital to step back from this kind of work. It’s one reason that I own an off-the-grid house on the Pacific Coast where I live part of the year and tend to tomato plants and haul firewood.
Does this kind of journalism take a toll on those written about? We can look to Agee and Maggie Louise for some insight.
“Good God, if I have caused you any harm in this,” Agee wrote about Maggie Louise in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “if I have started within you any harmful change . . . forgive me if you can, despise me if you must.”
Maggie Louise didn’t read this until not long before she killed herself, family members told me, for Agee never sent them books and they didn’t learn Let Us Now Praise Famous Men existed until the 1960s. Was it a cruel reminder, after a life hard-lived, of her unrealized dreams? Her aunt and son said she never gave up her affection for Agee; she didn’t seem outwardly upset.
Who really knows about any of this. What is certain is that Agee, the urbane writer from Harvard, a poet and Hollywood celebrity, and Maggie Louise Gudger, sharecropper and waitress, lived weirdly parallel lives. Maggie chose a direct path to her end: Agee’s was less direct but equally willed, by hard drinking and ignoring his doctors. As I wrote in Children, “They were both dreamers and, deep down, tragic people who yearned for something they could not define even as they came to know finally that it had irretrievably escaped them. They died, though far apart in years and miles, at the same age — at forty five — as if defining a limit for the number of years of failed dreams a dreamer can be asked to endure.”
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