Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.”

While the book under consideration today is entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it is this latter passage from the poem which is the relevant one.

Great Book.  That’s the quick summary.  

Written by James Agee, the photographs by Walker Evans are equally important.  The importance of the photographs intrigues me—I did not imagine how large they would loom in the work as a whole.  They are printed up front, with no captions, and yet they constitute a haunting refrain throughout the book.  While reading, it is impossible not to constantly be flipping back to the photographs to stare at them a little bit longer.

The project which begat the book was a trip Agee and Walker took in the 1930s to the rural South to write a story about the Southern poor.  The result is a book like nothing I have ever read.  Agee’s prose is…well, throughout the book it is everything from straightforward to hopelessly convoluted, from clean prose narrative to passages of exquisite poetic beauty.  The content of the book is roughly the examination of the families of three (related) tenant farmers in the South.  But, that description does not really tell you anything about the book.

Here is the central problem.  Suppose someone was to write a book about you, and in that book, your soul would be ripped open and put down on the page.  The author will put everything about you in that book.  What would he write?  And when we think about that, we start with imagining a biography telling where you lived and how many siblings you had and all sorts of other safe things.  But, instead, imagine the book started with a detailed description of the place where you live.  How much of your life is going to be exposed by describing the consents of your desk, and the state of your chairs, and the artwork on your walls—both the art itself and its location on the wall—and so on?  We will learn all sorts of things about you, things you might never get around to telling us, but things which capture the essence of a person much better than a narrative description of biographical information.  Suppose the book goes on to describe the way you eat or meet strangers or the details of your financial life.  And now ask yourself the question:  would such a book be an invasive violation of your privacy?  If you agreed to have a book written about you, and the author discovers things about you by paying attention to details you did not know you were providing, then is the resulting book fundamentally immoral?

On top of the questions of whether it is even right to compose this book—a question, which Agee agonizes over during the course of the book—there is the further intriguing question:  Are the lives of these people important?  Reading Agee’s minute descriptions of a house or clothing, the reader gets to know these people in an intimate way.  Do these people matter?  Well, sure, they matter because they are human and humans matter.  But, do they really matter?  Should we actually care about these people?   

And, strangely, I did.  There is absolutely no reason I should think this book is interesting.  It’s about poor people who are now dead.  And yet, Agee and Walker have crafted a book where the essential humanity of these people is present.  I know almost none of the things about these people that I know about the people with whom I daily interact, and yet, by the end of this book, I have glimpsed their souls, I have a seen their essence.  And that essence is important, vitally important.

This relates to what I have long thought of as the grocery store clerk problem.  I hate standing in line at the grocery store listening to the mindless prattle of a grocery store clerk.  I simply don’t care.  I have long been troubled by this fact about myself.  It is, indeed, one of my greatest moral failings.  And yet, try as I might, I have a very hard time listening to a clerk in a grocery store and caring.  This book has given me the beginning of the solution to the problem.  Most of what we meet when we meet people is not the person itself.  We meet some vaguely superficial mask of a person.  And those masks of people are, to be honest, not very interesting.  For a grocery store clerk, that is the only thing you meet—and even the superficial mask isn’t their real mask, it is some vaguely professionalized version of the way they present themselves to get through a rather tedious job.  When I worked at the drugstore in high school, I had just such a mask myself.  It’s not the person who is boring, then, its the mask which does not interest me.

But, then if I imagine being able to sit down and talk, really talk, to that same grocery store clerk,  I realized I would be very interested in that conversation.  A conversation which penetrated beyond the mask is inherently fascinating.  People’s souls matter.  People’s souls are interesting.

We read this book for my tutorial this week.  And I was reminded that one of the reasons I find these tutorials so fascinating is that the discussion are always about things that matter.  Over the course of the tutorial, I get to know the people in the tutorial—get to know them not as simply students on a roster, but as people.  I learn a lot from those conversations, but mostly because we talk about all sorts of questions which one simply does not ask at a cocktail party or in line at a grocery store.  In conversations like that you learn about people not just from what they say, but what they don’t say and the way in which they say or don’t say it.  Ideas get triggered by stray remarks, which seem like extraneous afterthoughts to the person saying them, but end up being a key to deeper insights and Truth.  People, real people, not the plastic exterior we all wear every day are intrinsically fascinating.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the most ambitious attempt I have ever read to rip through all the exterior, to bypass all the sorts of things we normally ask people about themselves, to grope towards the deeply wonderful person.  “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.”   I have a new insight into that verse after reading this book.