James Agee As Observer and Observed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Meg Wilkinson

February 25, 2002

James Agee as Observer and Observed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In his introduction to The New Radicalism in America, Christopher Lasch described an emerging “class” of intellectuals that belonged neither to the middle class whose values it wanted to reject nor the “other outcasts” of society with whom it tried to identify (Lasch, xv). Both distancing themselves from the middle class and grouping themselves with less privileged members of society were to some extent empty gestures on the part of intellectuals. Many of them were not comfortable with a role that would have them comment on society without really involving themselves in it, but they were also self-conscious about addressing society’s problems by coming into full contact with the oppressed. The anxiety intellectuals felt about their role as observers is represented in James Agee and Walter Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Agee’s repeated engagement of the theme of observation. On one hand, the work has a pronounced voyeuristic quality to it, with Agee and Evans setting out to record, with often obsessive detail, the tenants’ lives. On the other hand, Agee’s narrative is also substantially a record of his own experience of observing these lives. The personal flavor of the book reveals Agee not only as the watcher but the watched: by the tenants, the readers of the book, and of course himself. To express his uncertainty about playing the role of observer (and by extension, intellectuals playing that role), Agee “turned the camera” on himself, allowing outside criticism of his role in the project.

Agee was careful to highlight the problems with setting out to capture the tenants’ lives in words. He wrote, “Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger…If I could do it, I’d do no writing here…A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point” (9-10). Essentially, he grappled with the age-old artistic issue of the impossibility of accurately capturing reality, exacerbated by the fact he was taking real people, not imagined ones, as his subjects. Though he had set out to capture the tenants’ lives, he would by definition fail. A problem of observation in general, then, whether practiced by artist, intellectual, or otherwise, is the distance between what is seen and what is recorded. If intellectuals were to confine themselves only to commenting on what they observe, their effectiveness would always be handicapped by the fact they couldn’t accurately represent their subject.

However, as Agee went on to suggest, perhaps it was best for the effectiveness of the book that the reality of the tenant families’ lives could not be fully represented. Addressing the reader, he wrote, “I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live” (11). He did not believe the reader capable of enduring the emotions that might be aroused by fully seeing the plight of the tenants, but he could not water down the shock of their lives too much without risking the book being ignored. He was contemptuous of his audience, whom he bitterly imagined as “all those who have a soft place in their hearts for the laughter and tears inherent in poverty viewed at a distance,” yet he had to cater to it if he wanted his book to have any social effect (11). Although a paragraph earlier, he maintained he was unable to write anything that “could make any difference whatever,” he clearly did anticipate that some good would come of his book (11). Otherwise the undertaking would be pointless except for his own edification, and he would not be tempted to publish it. However much he may have shuddered at the self-satisfied middle-class Americans who were going to read his book, he also tacitly recognized, by aiming the work at them, that they had the power to change the social conditions he described. He had to act not only as an observer, but also as a filter on what the reader saw so as to have the maximum effect.

A specific instance in which Agee’s consciousness of not wanting to alienate the reader shows up is his description of Emma. Arguably, the passages about her are some of the more moving ones in the book. Her vitality emerges even though it is curtailed by her bleak circumstances, and one is left saddened by the potential she will never reach. Yet Agee could not talk about her forever; he had to let go of her as a subject so as not to overwhelm the reader. It did not serve the project’s interests to dwell on Emma. This can be seen when he summed up the several pages of description with “and that is Emma” (61). Such a reductive statement expressed not only Agee’s frustration with the impossibility of portraying a life in full, but a need to wrap up the section on Emma for the reader. On reaching that line, the reader could breathe a sigh of relief that he or she would have a break from the sadness of Emma’s life—and was more likely to keep reading.

Agee left his fitness as an observer open to criticism by pointing out the incompleteness of his portrait while also implying this incompleteness would aid him in gaining an audience. He seems more convinced of the effectiveness of a camera as an observer and recorder than himself. It is tempting to think of the camera, because it is a piece of equipment and thus free from emotions and motivations, as impartial. As long as it was “handled cleanly and literally in its own terms, as an ice-cold, some ways limited, some ways more capable, eye, it [was]…incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth” (206). However, as Agee recognized in this quote, the camera is only capable of this impartiality if its operator doesn’t manipulate it to his or her own ends. For, as he suggested with the inclusion of the article on Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer who was also examining the lives of poor Southerners, the camera could be misused. Agee disapproved of her willingness to take pictures of people without their permission or understanding, such as the black preacher (399). The photographs of the tenants taken by Walker Evans, in contrast, were usually posed. Thus, he implied that for a photograph of a person to be “truthful,” he or she must be consciously involved in its making. Evans’s photographs were more accurate because he has their subjects’ permission.

However, while asking the tenants for permission to photograph them showed respect for their personal dignity, it is questionable whether their consciousness of the photographs being taken added to the impartiality of the images. The tenants could not help but have their own agenda in getting their pictures taken. At some level, they had to be conscious of wanting to appear in the best light possible. Agee saw great beauty in their poverty and the simplicity of their possessions, but he did not have to live with the hardships they experienced forever. So, while he may have preferred for himself and Evans to capture the tenants in a way that made their squalor poignant, it is hard to believe the tenants themselves could find anything to celebrate in their circumstances. Thus, the tenants’ interests and Agee and Evans’s were at odds in this respect: would Agee’s definition of “truth” really be shown in his work if the tenants could consciously change what he and Evans saw?

This is not to say that Agee catered to the tenants being able to shape how they were seen. Much of the information in the book gives the impression of him as essentially a voyeur, who collected information without his subjects’ permission. For example, though the tenants allowed him to stay in their homes and observe their daily lives, assumedly they would not have wanted Agee rifling through their belongings when they went off to work. Though his desire to give as full a representation of their lives as possible allowed him to violate their privacy in this way, he was not so focused on being thorough (in both his own and the reader’s interests) that he did not feel conflicted about his actions. “In knowledge of those hidden places I have opened,” he wrote, “…I receive a strong shock at my heart…It is not going to be easy to look into their eyes” (165). Agee did not believe allowing the tenants say or influence over how they were portrayed would allow him to create the most accurate sense of their lives possible in the book. However, his ability to violate what one assumes would be their wishes was not incompatible with his strong desire for the tenants to like him; he simply felt guilty when his standards for recording information clashed with his need for their respect.

Indeed, Agee only violated the trust of the tenant families when he knew they would not find out about it, as above when he looked through their things. That is, he was concerned above all else with their perception of him, not whether he actually lived up to that perception. It would not “be easy to look into their eyes” partially because they, in looking back at him, may have been able to sense what he had done. This moment reveals the impossibility of Agee being a detached observer and recorder of the tenants’ lives. His consciousness that they were observing him just as he observed them appears repeatedly, especially in his preoccupation with how his eyes and their eyes communicate. Another example is his description of first meeting the Ricketts. He sensed Mrs. Ricketts feels “naked in front of the cold absorption of the camera in all [her] shame and pitiableness to be pried into and laughed at”; he saw her “eyes were wild with fury and shame and fear” (321). His guilt about subjecting her to scrutiny was emphasized by the fact that “[her] eyes upon [him], time after time, held nothing but the same terror, the same feeling at very most, of ‘if you are our friend, lift this weight and piercing from us’” (323). Her eyes accused him of both creating her discomfort at being the observed and refusing to alleviate it. Agee tried to lessen her discomfort by looking at her in a more comforting way than the camera was, communicating with his eyes that “it [was] all right, it [was] truly and all the way all right” (322). Agee seemed to be justifying the overall project of the book: “it” (his and Evans’s intentions, the effect the book will have, et cetera) was “all right” even if the project required the use of methods that made the tenants uncomfortable. The ends justified the means.

Thus, he didn’t do what would really make Mrs. Ricketts feel better and not make her the object of his and the camera’s gaze. Instead, he tried to reassure her with that gaze, hoping she would look at him differently as well. Again, he was less concerned with actually acting in a way toward the tenants that would alleviate his guilt than he was with ensuring they didn’t see him as wanting to make them uncomfortable. Of course, he didn’t want to make them uncomfortable, but not as much as he wanted to collect information for the book. It is too easy to dismiss Agee’s guilt about his role as observer by pointing to the fact he continued to observe, however. He did not try to hide the fact he sought the tenants’ approval, nor that his own agenda outweighed theirs in influencing his actions. By allowing this contradiction to show up in the book, he opened himself to criticism. Agee could have chosen to write his book without talking about his experience as an observer at all. It could have been a third-person account, which would have been "safer” for him. In a sense, he expressed his discomfort with playing the role of observer by turning himself into an object for observation. Not only did the tenants watch him, as mentioned above, but so would his readers. Though he believed his observation of the tenants was, in the end, for the best, he showed sympathy for their difficulty in being observed by letting himself be observed as well.

Agee cared much less how his audience perceived him than how the tenants did. The tenants would probably not read his book; it is uncertain whether they even understood the final form Agee and Evans’s project would take. Thus, Agee could be candid about going through their personal items, being sexually attracted to Emma, and a host of other activities that might have upset the families had they known about them. In contrast, his contempt for his privileged audience suggested that, while he may have shaped his book to appeal to them in some respects, he was not particularly concerned with their approval of him. He was not afraid, for example, to write (during a discussion of education),

Oh, I am very well aware how adolescent this is and how easily

laughable. I will nevertheless insist that any persons milder, more

obedient to or compromising with ‘the obstacles as they are,’ more

‘realistic,’ contented with the effort for less, are dreamy and

insufficiently skeptical. Those are the worst of the enemies, and always

have been (272-3).

Agee acknowledged he may have appeared to be overreacting, but argued his intense feelings on the subject were less dangerous than feelings not intense enough. It is hard to imagine that most of Agee’s readers would feel as strongly about the tenant issue as he did. Thus, they are implicitly criticized as the “any persons” whose lackluster response (compared to his) made them enemies of the cause. He felt no need to apologize for what the reader could criticize in him.

Indeed, the interests of the project were served by Agee opening himself up for criticism. The typical reader of his book would be able to identify with him much more easily than the tenant families. Even though he was busy challenging middle class values, Agee’s background tied him to that class much more strongly than to the lower class. Thus, the guilt he felt over the tenants’ plight ideally would transfer to the reader. As the narrator, he mediates the reader’s experience, so that the reader would develop his or her response to the tenants through Agee’s. In making himself an object of scrutiny, then, Agee also made the reader an object of it to the extent he or she would identify with him. The disdain the reader could feel for Agee’s hypocrisy, condescension toward his subjects, or any other of a host of his failings could ultimately also be disdain for himself or herself. The book’s audience could come to understand the discomfort of the observed by finally being looked at themselves.