The imperative of personal journalism: James Agee and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Background

James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ (2001 [1941]) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families began as a magazine piece assigned by editors at Henry Luce’s business magazine Fortune in 1936, an article that was ultimately rejected by the editors. ¹ Luce initially wanted poets and other literary writers, even if they had leftist political views, to staff his business magazine because he believed the tension between the artists and the pedestrian subjects of business and businessmen would result in interesting, dynamic articles flush with the romance of business. He attracted Ralph Ingersoll as editor and writers such as Dwight Macdonald and Archibald MacLeish (Bergreen, 1985: 107).

Agee was employed as a staff writer for Fortune only a few days after graduating in 1932 from Harvard University (Bergreen, 1985: 118). When Agee was assigned the article on sharecroppers in the South, he had already completed articles on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s rural electrification program (during which he first encountered and wrote about rural poverty), cockfighting, commercial orchid production, and the American highway system, among other subjects (Ashdown, 2005: xi–xlvi). Luce’s magazines were noted for mixing interpretation and factual reporting, but even so, Agee came to despise the corporate journalism they represented. He saw himself as a poet and had ambitions to be a novelist; journalism was a way to pay his bills until he could establish himself among the literati (Bergreen, 1985: 123). Indeed, Agee’s criticism of commercial journalism found in Famous Men does not come from his role as journalist, but from Agee’s stance as a social and cultural critic (Lofaro and Davis, 2007).

Agee also came to begrudge his editors’ heavy-handed editing needed to mold his articles to the Fortune style and told Evans he was determined to write the share-cropper article the way he wanted to and would not allow his editors’ ‘well-meant misconceptions’ to distort the piece (Bergreen, 1985: 162). Dow (2011) writes that Agee ‘sees himself foremost as a social and cultural critic’ and tried to position himself as an intellectual and artist even as he worked at journalism (pp. 226–227). Hence, his desire to control his work, regardless of whether it meant the resulting article would not be accepted by the editors who commissioned it. In this, he shared a distinction made by literary writers since the 18th century who saw journalism as a lesser literary form because it did not give the writer control over the text he wrote, whereas the serious writer maintained control over his writing (Keeble, 2007). Evans, an accomplished and respected photographer, worked for the federal government in the Farm Security Administration and took on the Fortune assignment on loan from the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

The assignment, made by the magazine’s managing editor Ingersoll, was for a sociological article about how White cotton sharecroppers were faring in the midst of the Great Depression (Doty, 1981: 31). Since 1929, an economic depression of unimagined proportions had ravaged the United States. Newspapers were either ignorant of the now-obvious story of joblessness, hunger, and despair or purposely ignored the negative news for fear they would make matters worse by upsetting people (Sims, 2007: 133). Magazines and books, though, carried the message of the devastation the depression was causing (Sims, 2007: 134). Among the worst affected, because of their already precarious positions, were the tenant farmers. ‘Southern tenancy was a vicious, self-perpetuating system … The workers were little more than serfs, held to the land by debt, ignorance, poverty, and dependence on the landlord’ (Conrad, 1965: 8). About 9 million people struggled as Southern cotton tenants. By 1932, when the price of cotton fell below what it cost to produce, already threadbare families lacked the wherewithal to put in the next year’s crop, dashing their meager hope for a better time to come (Conn, 2009: 35–36). The Fortune editors wanted Agee and Evans to find a representative tenant farmer, interview him and his family, discuss his economic plight, report the sociological and economic data from academic and government studies about cotton production, and explain the government efforts to help tenant farmers and to what extent they were helping – the purpose being to cause the wealthy business executives reading Fortune to feel pity for the tenant families or at least to be entertained by their stories (Fishkin, 2008: 145).

Documentary realism as a tool of social reform had grown in popularity after the collapse of the US economy in 1929. ‘Almost overnight, the rich modernism of the twenties gave way to a new realism’, Reed (1988) points out (p. 156). That realism was expressed in more than a dozen contemporary documentary books about rural life during the Great Depression and other social issues (Stott, 1986: 212; Quinn, 2001: 339–342). The documentary books combined text and photographs, the text for straightforward reports, and the photographs to elicit readers’ emotions (Sims, 2007: 139). The first book about the plight of tenant farmers for a general audience – and the most commercially successful – was You Have Seen Their Faces, by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, which appeared in 1937 (Stott, 1986: 211–212). ² Another notable documentary book of the period is An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor. ³ Much of what Caldwell/Bourke-White and Lange/Taylor and others would write and photograph about the rural poor was well known to their readers, and the documentarians fashioned their texts to meet readers’ expectations. Indeed, Caldwell and Bourke-White’s book covered much of the same ground as Agee and Evans would cover in Famous Men but with considerably more sentimentality and sensationalizing, including the use of fake dramatic quotes that were used as captions for Bourke-White’s carefully orchestrated photos (Stott, 1986: 220–222). When violence flared up throughout the South as labor organizers tried to sign up sharecroppers and tenant farmers, newspapers, newspaper syndicates, press services, filmmakers, and magazines rushed to cover the farmworkers’ troubles (Stott, 1986: 217).

Consequently, the facts about how tenant farmers and other rural residents were faring during the depression were well known from government studies, films, books, magazine and newspaper articles, and newsreels by the time Fortune editors sent Agee and Evans to do their article (Stott, 1986: 216–217). It was this sociological, impersonal reformist tradition that Agee’s editors drew upon in assigning the article, yet Agee ultimately rejected the zeal of the realists because of what he saw as their objectification of their subjects. He also dismissed the documentary genre’s claim of inspiring reform:

[T]he work is in part a response to a pervasive thirties genre, the documentary book that claimed to give its readers ‘real’ access to other worlds, particularly the worlds of the underprivileged. [Agee’s and Evans’ book] is fueled by fury against this genre and the condescension (whether liberal or radical) endemic to its products. (Reed, 1988: 159)

Agee’s personal approach allowed him to distinguish his work from and surpass the reformist documentary work being published (Sims, 2007: 147; Stott, 1986: 266).

Told by their editors to find tenant families who could represent their economic class, Agee and Evans traveled throughout the South in search of the perfect families to write about. Rejecting one man for not being sufficiently poor, the pair settled on three of the man’s relatives and their families who lived 80 miles west of Birmingham, AL. ‘With a mixture of humility, patience, and cunning, Agee and Evans worked their way into the good graces of all three poverty-stricken families’ (Bergreen, 1985: 165). But Agee is appalled at the idea of using the families as representatives of other families in similar economic straits: ‘… [H]ow am I to speak of you as ‘tenant’ ‘farmers’ as ‘representatives’ of your ‘class’, as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends’ – the latter a position he felt compelled to embrace. Indeed, Agee and Evans were appalled that Caldwell and Bourke-White could produce a best-seller about poor families by exploiting them and, worse, not even understand they were exploiting them (Fishkin, 2008: 146). Evans’ photographs reflect his and Agee’s attempt to present the families as ‘individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends’. Evans rejected camera angles and lighting that could sensationalize or dehumanize the individuals (Sims, 2007: 149–151; Stott, 1986: 220–223). He did not want his audience to pity the families; he wanted viewers to accept the families as fellow human beings in difficult circumstances.

Agee also dismissed the more general realists’ belief that they could effect social change. ‘As a matter of fact, nothing I might write could make any difference whatever’, he writes (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 11). He saw the practice of reformist realism as ‘obscene and thoroughly terrifying’ carried out by a group of relatively well-to-do individuals who have formed a company to make a profit by prying

intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings … for money, and for a reputation for crusading … (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 5)

He wrote,

I understand that this particular subject of tenantry is becoming more and more stylish as a focus of ‘reform’, and in view of the people who will suffer and be betrayed at the hands of such ‘reformers’, there could never be enough effort to pry their eyes open even a little wider. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 182)

Agee’s ethical perspective

Agee’s refusal to objectify his subjects is evidence of his moral growth toward, in Buber’s terms, an I–thou relationship with his subjects. Buber (1999 [1937]) theorized that humans exist only in relation to one another, and each possesses two attitudes toward others: the ‘I–it’ relationship and the ‘I–thou’ relationship, the latter being the more ethical. In I–it relationships, the I is an impersonal observer and ‘treats other human beings as things that must be categorized, observed, surveyed, and measured’ (Cooper, 2003: 134; Soffer, 2009: 476). The impersonal journalist speaks to sources, and collects data from documents, and never really has a dialogue with anyone because that would involve giving of oneself and revealing one’s own feelings and interpretations, as much as getting something from another. The impersonal journalist or reformer ‘parades’ the lives of others before readers and viewers in a monologic report ‘for money, and for a reputation for crusading’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 5). The I–thou relationship, in contrast, is a personal relationship among equals, within which true dialogue can occur. This allows each party to the relationship to become aware of each other and reach a true understanding of each other, and causes the observer (the ‘I’) to be affected by the subject just as the subject is affected by the observer (Soffer, 2009: 476). Indeed, Agee approaches the Gudgers, the Ricketts, and the Woods as equals:

… [A]nd what seems to me most important of all: namely, that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world … and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings … (p. 10)

He moves in with them, and they come to respect him, to see him as one of them (Bergreen, 1985: 165). Emma, Bud Woods’ 18-year-old daughter, stated as much, according to Agee:

I want you and Mr. Walker to know how much we all like you, because you make us feel easy with you; we don’t have to act any different from what it comes natural to act, and we don’t have to worry what you’re thinking about us, it’s just like you was our own people and had always lived here with us … we all keer [sic] about you. (Agee and Evans 2001 [1941]: 57–58)

Equally affected by his interactions with the sharecroppers and their families, Agee is changed. In the course of reporting the sharecroppers’ story, he experiences a ‘spiritual rebirth’, according to his biographer Bergreen (1985: 169). Agee expressed his rebirth in a passage near the end of the Famous Men text:

I don’t exactly know why anyone should be ‘happy’ under these circumstances [being beset by bedbugs and fleas while spending the night in the Woods’ spare room], but there’s no use laboring the point: I was: outside the vermin, my senses were taking in nothing but a deep-night, unmeditatable consciousness of a world which was newly touched and beautiful to me. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 376, emphasis added)

Agee asserts that the knowledge and skills to tell readers of the individuals he met came from his common humanity:

I can tell you of him only what I saw, … and this in turn has its chief stature not in any ability of mine but in the fact that I too exist, not as a work of fiction, but as a human being. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 9)

By example, Agee shows how journalists should approach subjects who risk great harm because of their limited power in a society that abuses those who live marginalized lives. His first step is recognition and reflection on the unequal power relationship between him and his subjects. He understands his potential to harm the people he writes about:

… and what seems to me most important of all: namely, that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings [the economic depression] as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of still others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 10)

Those who conspire to ‘use’ these humans, invade their privacy, and lay bare their lives are the journalists, their corporate employers (magazine and book publishers), and the readers of the magazine article or book that is produced. Only by reflecting on the unequal power relationship can journalists become aware of the enormous power they hold over how their subjects are represented and bring that awareness to bear on their storytelling, protecting their subjects from abuse of power and empowering their subjects to take control of their representation by others. In an additional way to protect his subjects, Agee employs a technique that has become a controversial practice in journalism, which is that he changed the names of those he wrote about in such intimate detail. To Agee, changing the families’ names protected their privacy from intrusion by government officials, other journalists, or the general public once the article or book was published. This fits within his ethical approach to cause no harm. The argument against changing their names is that it robs them of their individual identities and hurts the credibility of the report. The loss of identities, however, is mitigated by Agee’s rich descriptions of the people who populate the book and Evans’ respectful photos of the families. Indeed, the identities of the families were revealed by more impersonal journalists who sought to tell the story of Agee’s and Evan’s work (Maharidge and Williamson, 1989: xxiii). On another level, the possible harm to the book’s credibility is mitigated by Agee’s strength of voice and his use of a profusion of details in the book, proving a robust picture of events and people that compels readers to believe him.

Agee’s (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]) second step toward protecting his subjects from abuse of power is to approach his subjects with reverence in recognition of their humanity – what Agee calls their divinity. ‘These I write of are human beings …’ (p. 10). He says that when he or any other journalist ‘sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds … [that which] one may faintly designate the human ‘soul’’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 87–88). In this, Agee adopts a stance that reflects Buber’s I–Thou ethic of mutuality, open-heartedness, and honesty (Guerrière, 1999: 717–718). Moreover, his approach is informed by Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative that demands one should ‘act so as to treat humanity … always as an end and never merely as a means’ (Liddell, 1970: 42–49).

Agee understands that this mutuality of humanity requires him to be as honest as possible about his subjects out of respect for their humanity, while alerting readers that what is written is imperfect and the truth he tells is as much about himself as about Gudger and the others. Agee emphasizes that everything he writes happened either physically or in his mind (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 213). ‘I am interested in the actual and in telling of it, and so would wish to make clear that nothing here is invented’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 216). Yet, he admits, ‘I am limited. I know him [Gudger] only so far as I know him, and only in those terms in which I know him …’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 211). A journalist’s subjectivity cannot be escaped, Agee insists, and therefore, a more honest approach is to expose his subjectivity and reflect on his personal thoughts and feelings so that readers can more properly judge the story he tells.

Agee further respects his subjects by warning readers that while he writes the truth, it is but a partial truth. Agee instructs, Do not perceive Gudger or any of the others to be as he depicts them. The only truth that journalists can portray is an accurate telling of what they see and feel. Agee’s representation of Gudger and the others is but one accurate, but personal rendering based on physical facts and Agee’s emotional responses to them. Furthermore, the integrity and skills of the journalist will determine the quality of the truth he is capable of capturing and reporting. ‘… and all of that depends as fully on who I am as on who he is’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 211).

Agee also reminds the reader – and journalists – that the writing of the story is part of the experience of reporting it. To get what he calls his ‘own sort of truth out of the experience’, Agee asserts he must approach the undertaking on four planes: that of recall or reception at the time the events occurred; ‘the straight narrative’ (which is his version of objectivity); recall and memory that occurs when he writes: ‘which is a part of the experience: and this includes imagination’; and the experience of writing: ‘problems of recording: which, too, are an organic part of the experience as a whole’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 214–215).

Agee’s epistemology

If impersonal reporting dehumanizes and distorts the people the journalist hopes to write about and is therefore profoundly unethical, it also fails the journalist in his search for a verifiable truth, at least when the truth the journalist wants to discover is about people and their lives. Agee’s rejection of the documentary realists goes much deeper than his disdain for their style and abuse of subjects. Significantly, he rejected the underlying epistemology of realism, which Rorty (1991) places within the objectivist, correspondence theory of truth. ‘Those who wish to ground solidarity (of community) in objectivity – call them “realists” – have to construe truth as correspondence to reality’, Rorty explains (p. 22). Indeed, it was just this grounding that American journalism sought in the late 19th century to mid-20th century. ‘Early in the twentieth century, reporters had to become more than reckless newshounds – namely, responsible, impersonal reporters … [J]ournalists invented a tougher approach to factual reporting – objectivity’ (Ward, 2004: 256–257). Showing disdain for this invented ethical approach, Agee wrote in Famous Men, ‘Who, what, where, when and why (or how)’ – the fundamental correspondent questions of impersonal journalism – ‘is the primal cliché and complacency of journalism. The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 206–207). What journalism lies about, Agee asserted, is its ability to discover the one and only Truth. In other words, journalism’s purported ability to provide readers with a realistic depiction of the world, according to Agee, is a ‘patent, to say nothing of essential, falsehood’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 207).

Agee rejected the prevailing Western positivist notion of truth that was in the 1930s grounding American journalistic method, especially in journalism aimed at inspiring reform. Rorty explains that ever since the Enlightenment, ‘liberal social thought has centered around social reform as made possible by impersonal knowledge of what human beings are like’ rather than what individuals situated in particular cultures are like. ‘We are the heirs of this objectivist tradition’, Rorty (1991) continues, ‘which centers around the assumption that we must step outside our community long enough to examine it in light of something which transcends it, namely, that which it has in common with every other actual and possible human community’ (p. 22). Agee, in Famous Men, rebels against this notion. His subjects – the three tenant farmer families – are not representatives of their economic or social class, they are not ‘social integers in a criminal economy’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 88). Indeed, Agee mocks the journalistic convention of using one person to represent many and insists on representing the individuality of the people he writes about:

We specialize him a little more: yes, he (the tenant farmer he writes about) is of the depth of the working class; of southern Alabamian [sic] tenant farmers; certain individuals are his parents, not like other individuals; they are living in a certain house, it is not quite like other houses; they are farming certain shapes and strengths of land, in a certain exact vicinity, for a certain landholder: all such things as these qualify this midge, this center, a good deal. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 94)

Moreover, Agee’s editors sent him to Alabama to report on how the tenant system disadvantages the sharecroppers, but Agee would not accept the facile contemporary argument that placed the blame for the families’ poverty solely on the economic system. That conclusion, he says by implication, comes from a positivistic, objectivist view of their plight adopted by liberal reformers. Indeed, Agee admittedly provides none of the trappings of an impersonal news report, which would have included details from government or academic studies on the condition of the tenants, academic studies on the economy of sharecropping, and analyses of official policies. Granted, he provides details from the sharecroppers’ lives that would have been data to sociologists or economists. He reports on their economic situation and goes into rich detail about their homes, their clothes, their food, their education, and their work. But his long and sometimes lyrical descriptions present quite specific, individual lives. He is in the moment, describing those before him, not a vague class of people. As Buber insisted, the I–Thou relationship is ‘an encounter with a particular being at a particular now, which cannot be replaced or repeated’ (Cooper, 2003: 136, emphasis in original). As Agee writes,

[T]he economic source is nothing so limited as the tenant system, but is the whole world-system of which tenantry is one modification; and there are in the people themselves, and in the land and climate, other sources quite as powerful but less easy to define, far less to go about curing: and they are, to suggest them too bluntly, psychological, semantic, traditional, perhaps glandular. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 182)

A journalist, then, cannot force individuals into predetermined abstract ideas about them. Nor can the journalist who strives to know his subject rely on interviews with sources. He talks to residents of the town near where the tenant families live and provides a litany of quotes about the farmers:

Fred Ricketts? Why, that dirty son-of-a-bitch … Ricketts? They’re a bad lot … Why, Ivy Pritchert was one of the worst whores in this whole part of the country: … They’re about the lowest trash you can find … Gudger? He’s a fair farmer. Fair cotton farmer, but he hain’t got a mite of sense … None of these people has any sense, or any initiative. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 71)

Agee decides that the only way to get to know the tenant farmers is to move in with them, spend time with them, and envelop his reporting with empathy. In contrast to what he learned from the town’s residents, Agee, who begins with the moral understanding that the farmers are human and, hence, divine, discovers hard-working, caring, self-respecting families beaten down by a ‘criminal economy’.

Having rejected the objectivist concept of truth, Agee embraces the personal approach as the proper route to truth when a journalist is writing about people’s lives. The personal approach allows the journalist to empathize with his sources and through that empathy to understand them. ‘In other words, one should come away from such material with greater empathy for others … One can do so only if one engages one’s subjectivity with the experiences of others’ (Hartsock, 2011: 31). Agee also observed, ‘I would do just as badly to simplify or eliminate myself from this picture as to simplify or invent characters, places or atmospheres’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 212). Whatever truth he is able to convey to readers is discoverable only within the nexus between Agee and his subjects. His only reporting tool is his rarified consciousness. He announces in the preface ‘the governing instrument’ he will employ to tell the story of the three families ‘is individual, anti-authoritative human consciousness’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: x). He explains that in reporting nonfiction

… there opens before consciousness, and within it, a universe luminous, spacious, incalculably rich and wonderful in each detail … Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 9)

Indeed, he adopts as his methodology an intense, reflexive personal approach, ‘employing an innovative method in which he achieved an unparalleled intimacy with his subjects’ (Maxwell, 2007: 188). As Maxwell further explains, Agee anticipates Derrida’s belief that ‘the truth could only be reached through an unmediated perception of experience’ (p. 193). But Agee also understood that any truth he attained would be limited. In this he reflects Kierkegaard, who wrote a century earlier: ‘Viewed personally, the objectivity that has come about is at its maximum either a hypothesis or an approximation’ (Hong and Hong, 2000: 202). Agee wrote,

Here (in Famous Men), 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 … As for me, I can tell you of him only what I saw, only so accurately as in my terms I know how. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 9, emphasis in original)

Agee’s epistemological argument is similar to the philosophical examination of truth by Hans-Georg Gadamer, who published his work 40 years later and for whom ‘truth is different … – it is not some empirically verifiable object … [T]ruth emerges in fullness of understanding being made manifest’ (Matheson, 2009: 711). Gadamer, drawing on the work of Heidegger, argues that truth is found through understanding during a process in which the observer interprets the other and is changed through self-reflection. Applying our consciousness to interpret others, Gadamer insists, discovers the truth about ourselves, not necessarily about the other (Madison, 1999: 706–708). We see this in the last quarter of Famous Men, as Agee describes his transformation through his experience with the tenant families (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 319–390).

Granted, the truth that emerges in Agee’s reporting is not final and absolute like an objective, impersonal reporter would hope to find. ‘[H]is true meaning’, Agee wrote, ‘is much huger’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 9). Gadamer would agree. For Gadamer, ‘Truth is not an inert state of affairs consisting of the correspondence at any given moment of “ideas” and “things”; rather it is essentially of an ongoing or procedural nature’ (Madison, 1999: 709). Agee does not believe even his ‘truth’ – the truth that a reporter carries back to readers – will be more than one version to be added to by others: ‘But of course it will be only a relative truth. Name me one truth within human range that is not relative and I will feel a shade more apologetic of that’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 211). In this, Agee would agree with the historian Hayden White (1978) who argues, ‘we should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past ‘correspond’ to some preexistent body of “raw facts”’ (p. 47). Consequently, Agee appropriately invites his readers to contribute to the final truth about the tenant families’ plight. In the book’s preface, Agee writes,

[I]t (the book) is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell. Those who wish actively to participate in the subject, in whatever degree of understanding, friendship, or hostility, are invited to address the authors in care of the publishers. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: xi)

Later, he acknowledges that his writing may falter and, if so, the readers should

restore them what strength you can of yourself: for I must say to you (the reader), this is not a work of art or of entertainment, nor will I assume the obligations of the artist or entertainer, but is a human effort which must require human co-operation. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 98)

Agee understood the tremendous responsibility that accompanies personal reporting. He said he was terrified that by relying solely on his observations and impressions, he would be unable to truly depict the individuals in the three tenant families he lived with for 5 weeks in the summer of 1936. In one of his letters to his lifelong friend, Father James Flye, Agee (1962) tells him of his assignment from Fortune, explaining that ‘[I] feel terrific personal responsibility toward story; considerable doubts of my ability to bring it off’ (p. 92).

Agee also understood that this responsibility demands that a reporter be as honest and careful as he can be:

George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously, in the effort to tell of him (by example) as truthfully as I can, I am limited. I know him only so far as I know him, and only in those terms in which I know him; and all of that depends as fully on who I am as on who he is. I am confident of being able to get at a certain form of the truth about him, only if I am as faithful as possible to Gudger as I know him … (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 211, emphasis in original)

Throughout the book, Agee reflects on this responsibility, on what his purpose is, on why he was doing the reporting he is doing, and on his reporting process. He saw this reflexivity as an essential characteristic of a reporter’s integrity toward his subjects. As Reed (1988) notes, Famous Men ‘embodies the proposition that representational systems are always inadequate, always miss the real, but that this inevitable inadequacy calls for greater aesthetic-political reflexivity and commitment rather than the abandonment of the attempt to imagine the real’ (p. 156).

It is this reflexivity that Agee contributes to our understanding of the personal as a legitimate approach to journalism. If a journalist does not know himself or herself, then how can truth be told? For his part, Agee approaches his subjects with the full awareness of the unequal power relationship between him, the reporter from a national publication, and his sources – ‘an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 5). He refers to himself and Evans as ‘spies, guardians, and cheats’ and says their employers were ‘among their most dangerous enemies’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 6). To limit the publication’s or the government’s power to define the contours of the sharecroppers’ lives, Agee and Evans (2001 [1941]) determined to trust ‘no judgment, however authoritative it claimed to be, save their own’ which he recognizes to be ‘untrained and uninformed’, meaning that they were void of ideological preconceptions or social science-created ‘truths’ handed down by those in power about the disadvantaged and repressed of society (p. 6). ‘It may be well to make the explicit statement’, Agee writes in a footnote, ‘that neither these words nor the authors are the property of any political party, faith, or faction’ (p. xiii). He understands that he must constantly check himself, question his motives and actions, and allow his subjects to represent themselves to the world through his eyes. Agee reached for what the historian Keith Jenkins (2003) asked of historians: ‘to develop a self-conscious reflexivity not only of the questions one asks and the answers one accepts, but why one asks and answers in the way one does and not another’ (p. 69). Halfway through his 400-plus page book, Agee pauses, ‘On the Porch: 2’ for a 28-page interlude in which he revisits and expands his self-reflections from the preface and chapter 1, and in a later chapter, ‘Intermission: Conversation in the Lobby’, he reflects on his responsibilities as a writer (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 197–224; 309–313). In addition, he speaks frequently of his ‘responsibility’ to his subject because what he is doing, he writes – this act of reporting and writing – is both ‘obscene and thoroughly terrifying’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 5).

Agee’s great trepidation comes from his profound belief in the divine nature of all humans, each a ‘tender and helpless human life’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 95). He is conflicted, though. He accepts the moral dimensions of his journalism, but he also posits that to not write about their lives because of the potential to harm them would be unethical as well because telling their stories could move others to reform the social institutions that affect them:

[N]evertheless to name these things and fail to yield their stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious, seems criminal, seems impudent, seems traitorous in the deepest … in withholding of specification I could but betray you (whom I write about) still worse. (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 88–89)

Conclusion

In Agee’s morally charged, reflexive attempt to ‘imagine the real’, to use Reed’s term, in the lives of three tenant cotton farmers in 1936, he approaches what Kirkhorn (1990) calls a ‘virtuous journalist’:

Virtuous journalists are much more likely to hang around … than to practice any form of ‘precision journalism’. A journalism which aims at precise understanding sometimes needs to be imprecise and tentative in its approach – especially at the outset. The voices of these journalists often will be profoundly human. (p. 8)

Likewise, Kirkhorn (1990) would agree with Agee’s refusal to assume the role of the impersonal reporter. He argues that a reporter cannot be detached and still capture the truth. ‘Journalists must move close, and closer’, Kirkhorn insists. ‘The only detachment which has the least value is the detachment which comes through the effort, moral, intellectual, physical, of extricating oneself from a story closely observed and deeply understood’ (p. 12). Kirkhorn further argues that journalistic virtue requires ‘determined attempts to cross boundaries’, including the natural boundaries between journalists and their subjects (p. 12).

Agee crossed those boundaries willingly. He ‘hung around’. He was tentative and unsure. He questioned not only the ideology of his editors, but also his own motives and skills. He humbled himself before the poverty-stricken, uneducated rural folk he met, seeing them as humans of no less value than his self. This is nowhere more obvious than early in the book when he confronts a young Black couple on a dusty country road that ran past a church he and Evans had stopped to explore. The young woman was horrified that a White man was approaching them rapidly. But Agee only wanted to talk to them. When he saw he had frightened them, he groveled for their forgiveness. ‘“I’m very sorry! I’m very sorry if I scared you!” … The least I could have done was to throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet’ (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 38, emphasis in original).

Agee’s humility was grounded in morality and in epistemology. In ethics, Agee reflected the teachings of Buber. In epistemology, he anticipated Gadamer, who later explained that truth can only be found through profound deep understanding, through an interpretation that cannot help but change the one who is observing. Agee believed objectivity to be impossible – a premise not fully appreciated until the late 20th century through the philosophy of Gadamer and other postmodernists. And, hence, he believed that impersonal journalism is a rhetorical deception, a position that Ward (2004) has since argued. Additionally, personal journalism, Agee foresaw, carries a tremendous responsibility with it, because when someone has only his own consciousness to rely on, he must be careful that he represents his subject in as accurate an account as he is able to provide. Anything less would be a betrayal to a subject who has willingly given up his privacy to the reporter.

Taking a personal approach is the only means to what truth can be discovered, but discovering that truth requires honesty and constant reflection about one’s motives and one’s abilities. ‘I am confident of being able to get at a certain form of the truth about him, only if I am as faithful as possible to Gudger as I know him …’, Agee explains (Agee and Evans, 2001 [1941]: 211, emphasis in original). Constant reflection, Agee argues, becomes the means by which journalists can check their biases, their prejudices, and their corrupted ideologies. Through such conscious bracketing, journalists can truly empathize with the people they write about. With empathy, journalists can reach the level of understanding that brings one closer to truth. ‘Out of Agee’s excruciatingly honest and open struggle with his own responses to the world of the sharecroppers came something new’ (Sims, 2007: 147).