Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee

A Blind Work of Nature: The Ethics of Representing Beauty in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

a BlInd work of nature: the ethICs of rePresentIng Beauty In Let Us Now Praise FamoUs meN Jesse graVes Almost midway through his remarkable book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in a brief and tormented consideration of intention in art, James Agee extends a philosophical question: “Are things beautiful which are not intended as such, but which are created as in convergences of chance, need, innocence or ignorance, or entirely irrelevant purposes?”1 The question encompasses the very nature of Agee’s project in Alabama, and is intended to quantify his response to the house of George and Annie Mae Gudger, one of three tenant farming families whose lives are examined in his work with photographer Walker Evans. Many studies of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men have considered the importance of Agee’s ethics, and have separately examined his aesthetic principles, but none have looked closely at the critical consequence of aesthetic beauty in the formulation of Agee’s ethical intentions for the book.2 Though attempts to understand the role aesthetic beauty plays in both private and social actions goes back at least to Plato’s Phaedrus, much contemporary criticism has dismissed the search for beauty in favor of more seemingly tangible goals, such as political, sociological, and psychological motives and interpretations. Agee’s interest in finding the unrecognized beauty in life, particularly in lives that are hidden from general view, drives much of what he sets out to accomplish in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In the book’s prologue, Agee admits to some confusion about his aims, but one thing that consistently emerges is his commitment to showing the actual living conditions of the tenant farmers. He shows particular Jesse graves ~ 94 ~ attention to dwellings, and his most intense deliberations about aesthetics occur when examining such basic necessities as what the farmers eat and how they keep their houses. Agee sees two forms of “classicism,” in the tenant houses, which are “beautifully euphonious” in their bringing together of need, availability, and “local-primitive traditions,” though he acknowledges that they “are built in the ‘stinginess,’ carelessness, and traditions of an impersonal agency” (178). In other words, the particular type of beauty that he recognizes in the setting exists only to the eyes of a highly cultivated outside observer. Such a vision offers an essential element to the deep paradox of the undertaking of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: how is this “sovereign prince of the English language”3 to create a true document about the lives of individuals toward whom he feels a deeply personal, almost familial, bond, without exploiting the beauty he finds in them, which they themselves are not schooled to recognize? The only way through this paradox, and into the real meaning of the book, involves interpreting Agee both at and against his word about the use and function of art, and as corrupted as Agee may contend that it is, art ranks high on his list of debased “anglosaxon monosyllables” (403). The expression of human feeling through beauty provides the only means by which a family such as the Gudgers can hope to receive any form of recognition in the world and, consequently, any form of justice. One of the chief complaints against Let Us Now Praise Famous Men upon its release in 1941 was the chronic imposition of Agee’s own wandering , occasionally vulgar, self-consciousness into the book, which was supposed to explore the sufferings of the most deeply underprivileged members of our society.4 If Agee had promised a work of pure documentary exposition, then such criticisms would not have been unwarranted. The ethics of this book, however, and of Agee’s lifelong aesthetic mission, required not only that the tenant families are shown but also that they are understood, that their lives are given a fully integrated place in the world, even if that involved linking them to meanings and precedents they might have neither recognized nor understood. These are the ethics which permit Agee to make one of his greatest leaps of continuation and symbiosis, which also tips his hand toward his honest vision of art (as it opposes “Art”), when he reconfigures his answer to the original question about artistic intention, “Or: the Beethoven piano concerto #4 is impor- the ethics of rePresenting BeaUty in Let Us Now Praise FamoUs meN ~ 95 ~ tantly, among other things, a ‘blind’ work of ‘nature,’ of...