books

In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine sent James Agee and Walker Evans to Alabama to report on the lives of cotton tenant farmers. What Agee delivered was unpublishable by any magazine standard - a sprawling, anguished, frequently rapturous meditation that finally appeared as a book in 1941, sold a few hundred copies, and vanished. Reissued after Agee's death, it became one of the most influential American books of the twentieth century, a founding document of what would later be called New Journalism. It is also, depending on the page you happen to open, either the most morally serious work of American reportage ever attempted or an exhausting monument to its author's self-regard. The honest answer is that it is both, often within a single paragraph.

The book opens with Evans's photographs, printed without captions: the Gudger, Woods, and Ricketts families (their real names were Burroughs, Fields, and Tingle), their cabins, their churches, their worn faces staring directly into the lens. These images are the steadiest thing in the book. Evans's restraint - spare, level, tautly composed - gives the families a gravity that no amount of prose could supply, and his refusal to editorialize stands as a quiet rebuke to the more theatrical poverty photography of the era, which Agee skewers directly by reprinting a fatuous interview with Margaret Bourke-White. A handful of these photographs rank among the finest ever made in America, and the dialogue between Evans's coolness and Agee's heat is the book's central artistic achievement. Where Evans withholds, Agee pours.

And how he pours. Agee's text is a hybrid of things that should not coexist: exhaustive inventories of shelf contents and clothing, poems, confessional reveries, instructions on how to listen to Beethoven, a furious reply to a Partisan Review questionnaire, and long sentences of startling, poetry-drenched syntax that ask the reader to chase meaning through their turns. At his best - the famous passages on the Gudgers' house at night, the catalogue of overalls, the description of a sharecropper's Sunday clothes - Agee achieves a delicacy and force that recall Melville, transforming the inventory of a poor family's possessions into something close to liturgy. The title, drawn from Ecclesiasticus, lands with deliberate harshness: the people praised here are the most hidden and disregarded in the country, and Agee means the irony to wound.

The weaknesses are real and not minor. Agee's determination to record his every thought and scruple, even when those thoughts fail to cohere, produces long stretches of self-indulgent introspection and adolescent philosophy. His chief failure is the one Evans scrupulously avoids: he intrudes, constantly, between his subjects and his audience. The book agonizes at length over the ethics of looking at the poor - Agee calls himself a spy, frets over the obscenity of prying into other people's lives for art - and yet the agonizing itself becomes a kind of performance, a display of exemplary conscience that keeps circling back to the author. A book ostensibly about three families ends up, for considerable stretches, an autobiography of the man watching them. He cannot explore their inner lives, and mostly does not try; what he explores is the surface of their world and the depths of his own. Whether that is a fatal flaw or the book's actual subject - the tension between witness and intruder made visible on the page - is the question every reading of it must settle.

It is also simply hard going. Many readers abandon it partway through, flipping past pages of dross in search of the gems, and the gems are genuinely buried. This is not a book to be consumed; it demands the kind of patience usually reserved for scripture, which is roughly the register Agee was aiming for.

Eighty-five years on, the book endures precisely because of its contradictions. It remains a touchstone in every serious discussion of documentary ethics - searching, flawed, indispensable - because Agee was among the first to think this hard about what good faith toward one's subjects might require, and to confess how far short of it he fell. You cannot honor what you patronize, he insisted, and the whole maddening apparatus of the book is his attempt to escape patronage. He does not entirely succeed. But the attempt, in all its fury and beauty and failure, has taught generations of writers what the stakes of looking at other people actually are.