The father takes the son to a Front Page revival at a D.C. theater. The boy is oversold. He will be a newspaperman, a journalist.
Years later, he is on the metro desk at an old gray rag, Mencken’s old paper, the youngest and last-hired scribbler. He prides himself on needing only minutes to bring fifteen clean column inches on anything, to be fast on rewrite when they put him there, to always talk a desk sergeant out of whatever handful of facts are required. It is all easy and good.
Until an older reporter hands him a book. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
So, thinks the young man, something about celebrity.
He begins to read, bored at first, then confused, then with growing alarm at the delicacy of the reporting, the self-awareness of a thinking journalist as he approaches and attempts to represent the love, fear, and sadness of real lives. My God, Agee is feeling this. Feeling what he is seeing. Feeling what he is writing.
And these people, these poor and unguarded sharecroppers, have opened their lives to the monstrous hegemony of reporting. But the journalist—thank God—he’s utterly aware of the stakes involved, the dignity at risk. He gathers it all with caution and nuance. Page after fucking page of unmistakable proof of the true human condition.
“If I could do it,” Agee declares, “I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game… As it is though, I’ll do what little I can in writing.”
After reading Agee, I knew how callow a young reporter’s ambitions can be, how small my sense of craft, my dry professionalism was. Famous Men is the book that made me ashamed and proud to be a journalist—all in the same instant. Reading it made me grow up. Or at least, it demanded that I begin to grow up.
Whatever honor can be found in using the lives of others to tell tales is there, in the pages of that improbable book. Along with one final lesson as well: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is now, in retrospect, a classic work, an exercise in pure, declarative humanism. It will read true forever.
And yet, at the time of publication, it sold 600 copies.
But Agee knew. He had to know.
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I came across Famous Men as part of the reading curriculum for my Literary Aspects of Journalism class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996, taught by the legend known as professor James L. Baughman (rest in peace, king.) As a young man who was only just aspiring towards the literary in his own life, this book exploded any notion I may have had about how to write and what it meant to be a writer. Here was nearly 500 pages of evidence that you could present a story however you wanted, crucifying yourself in the process in order to get it on the page, all the while condemning your own privilege and inability to do justice to the subjects. And yet justice was done to these three families, in the singular way that became the Agee hallmark for symphonic prose: lush and silky sentences that endured for days interwoven with the beauty and anger of a young author railing against a monstrous and generational suffering. Agee was 27 when he began this book and 32 when it was published in 1941 to the complete disinterest of the world (remember, the book came out in August, in the run-up to our involvement in WW2 so the country’s attention had little additional room to focus on Agee’s masterwork.) I connected with his anger, his self-recrimination, his unflinching and relentless effort to paint the truth of his subjects, however feeble he felt his words were as tools. The failure of the book to sell in his lifetime must have been an unparalleled emotional devastation and yet I’m pretty sure he expected it, all the while as Simon says above, knowing that he had captured The Thing that needed capturing, and likely having some small faith well recessed inside him that someday it would reappear and shine and become the sensation he knew it could be. And we are the inheritors of his achievement, because eventually it did.
[…] wrote an opera based on it, and David Simon (creator of ‘The Wire’) considers the book an ‘essential influence’ on his early career and approach to […]
One of my favorite time-machine daydreams involves joining Agee for his final cab ride and letting him know how appreciated and loved LNPFM has become.
I felt the same way when I read this book in college. Until he reached high school, our son, whose full name was Anthony Gareth, was called “Agee.” Now he wants to be a writer.