86
PARTISAN REVIEW
"thought" is all posture and froth, without significance or coherence
except insofar as it furnishes a kind of parallel (who can say cause or
effect?) to his final failure as an artist. For, among his prized confusions,
that between art and "self-expression" is fundamental and abiding.
And
it is the perpetual anarchic spilling of seed on the ground (not the actual
content of his ideas) which sends him off to limbo.
H.
J.
KAPLAN
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN.
By
James Agee and Walker
Evans
Houghton, Mifflin. $3.00
This remarkable book began as a journalistic assignment "of" share·
croppers, hut the editors did not reckon with their men, and the result is a
serious effort to present three Alabama families and their little houses
in
their inner humanity and divinity on the rolling world. Agee's subjective
sobriety is deeper than could be imagined, and perhaps the best portions
of the work are those very ones in which he describes his misgivings at
being a spy and a stranger, his refusal to submit to the categories of sociol–
ogy or the devices of drama, and (to my mind a place of intense beauty)
the description of his guilty joy as he fine-combs the house when the
family is away.
Of the farmers, very little reality is conveyed, but there is a striking
presentation of Agee himself. In rejecting the ordinary frames of explana–
tion, he falls back on his immediate awareness and a passionate desire,
and occasional sentiment, of being "with" or even "in" his subjects.
At
the same time, he seems to know himself not at all--but just the feeling of
his anxiety and longing-so that he is always reading into their situation
his own qualities, frailties, and often prejudices. Sometimes this is done
with insufferable arrogance, as when he feels, on the briefest acquaintance,
that a girl is going off to a marriage of misery.
He speaks always as
if
there were a norm of virtue and happiness: he
is too modest to think this out: he continually feels and judges on the
basis of it: and he occasionally explains that being as such is a disease.
Obviously, whether conscious or not, to present one's-self thru objec–
tive descriptions is a good method; but when Agee raises his art to the
level of theory, which requires understanding, he is far off. His passages
on the poetics of what he is doing are confusion, and he seems not to
realize that many other writers, faced with the white page and their past
and immediate experience, also ask what they are about, and that there are
several ways to go from there. When his scrupulousness is raised to theory,
he is for all the world like the girl who tries for the prize for Conspicuous
Modesty. Above all, till he acquires the gift of objective personal intuition,
he should shun like the plague the matter of educational psychology.
What is surprising to me is that a writer so conscious and ashamed
of his "own kind" (journalist, Harvard, urban, etc.) is so unable to shake
all that off, to treat it ironically, or with scientific heat.
