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“… Another form of relative truth is any person's imagination of what he knows little or nothing of and has never seen” (Agee 1970, 161).
While speaking to a class at Harvard just two days before his death, photographer Walker Evans mentioned that, although he was in “close sympathy” and “impressed” with the writer James Agee's mind, he nevertheless “disapproved of a whole lot too.” As to artistic aim, Evans felt that Agee was “very subjective. He used to shock me. I have inhibitions about exposing the personal ego and feelings, and he seems to think that is the material and that that is one of the functions of an artist—exposing obscure and hidden parts of the mind and so on” (Caplan 1976, 25).
Evans went on to call Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Agee and Evans' portrayal of 1930s Alabama tenant farmers—“a very big and large and daring undertaking” (25). Many others agree, especially about the book's “daring” qualities. For instance, Dwight Macdonald said of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (abbreviated FM hereafter) that “there's more of Agee in that book than anything else he did” (Spears and Cassidy 1985, 115). Robert Fitzgerald, Agee's college roommate and life-long friend, evidently shared Macdonald's opinion, adding that Agee was well aware of the extent to which writing a book on the disadvantaged would “electrify a great deal of his nature that had not been given an opportunity for full expression” (Spears 1985, 56). To Fitzgerald FM represented the “centerpiece” in Agee's life and writing (Introduction to Agee 1970).
Those are impressive, emphatic sentiments which, partly because of their emphasis, seem oddly suggestive. After all, what made the writing of a book about (of all things) tenant