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225 Chapter 13 James Agee’s “Continual Awareness,” Untold Stories “Saratoga Springs” and “Havana Cruise” William Dow Like his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), James Agee’s shorter literary journalism expresses the hope of trying to invent a new transforming aesthetic practice in which, as he states in his masterwork, “the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell.”1 Agee’s Famous Men, composed of photographs by Walker Evans and Agee’s narrative , began as a straightforward documentary for Fortune’s “Life and Circumstances ” series on the daily existence of “blue- and white-collar families during the depression”2 but soon evolved into a meditation on what Agee defines as “the nominal subject”: “North American cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families” (FM 8). Largely neglected in Agee criticism, Agee’s short essayistic and journalistic pieces, legible through the longer, more substantial work of Famous Men, are essential to understanding his role as a cultural critic in the 1930s and 1940s. While deploying Famous Men as a comparative backdrop for my argument , this essay will examine two of Agee’s shorter pieces, “Saratoga Springs” (Fortune, 1935) and “Havana Cruise” (Fortune, 1937), for both elucidate his often problematic reader-narrator relationships, the tensions between his commitment to mimetic fidelity and his reverent or irreverent stances toward his subjects, and his attempts to fuse his “modernist project”3 with the social implications of his art. Inverting Ella Zohar Ophir’s recent claim that Agee’s “modernist self-consciousness” dissolves “political clarity,”4 I suggest that Famous Men demands and elicits such clarity. “The ‘sense of beauty,’” Agee is compelled to admit in Famous Men, “like nearly everything else, is a class privilege” (FM 271). Agee’s literary journalism never forgets such privilege, for it supports his claim of giving a “true account” of his subjects and places by presenting information that, in concrete practice, cannot be denied. At the 226 William Dow same time, his reliance on fictional devices serves to disturb fixed assumptions and to augment his propositional claims. Agee announces such claims in Famous Men by ontologically distinguishing his conception of fiction from his insistence that “nothing here is invented,” that “you should so far as possible forget that this is a book,” and that “disbelief should not be habitually suspended” (FM 214). He argues: “In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist” (FM 27). Agee is equally hard on journalism: “Journalism can within its own limits be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth” (FM 206). His plea for a kind of journalism that would not “poison the public” (FM 206) but would “perceive in full and . . . present immaculately what was the case”5 has significant ramifications for his class representations in which a “reliable” and “percipient” (participant-)observer “must not be ignored.”6 Obsessed with denying the individual validity of either fiction or journalism, Agee, in Famous Men and in much of his other literary journalism, sees himself foremost as a cultural and social critic. Thus while expediting his “great claims,”7 he never abandons his point of view, and his subjects rarely speak for themselves. Agee’s journalistic assignments for Fortune, Time, and The Nation in the 1930s and 1940s included stories on the Tennessee Valley Authority (a kind of conventional documentary counterpart to Famous Men), cockfighting, industrial pollution, a war-damaged Europe, the death of FDR, and the U.S. commercial orchid industry.8 For my purposes, though, the most important pieces are “Saratoga” and “Havana Cruise,” neither of which has received the critical attention it deserves. Preceding the actual writing of Famous Men by less than a year, “Saratoga” anticipates the Agee narrator of the Alabama experience: prescient yet uncertain, observing himself as much as he observes others, getting close to his subjects by giving us their world as a substitute for themselves. “Havana Cruise,” published a year after Agee’s most celebrated work, extends many of the techniques of Famous Men, revealing, most notably, his...

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