Cotton Tenants

June 5, 2013 8:35 AM

Cotton Tenants, the newly released book by James Agee, was the precursor to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is the original essay that was rejected by Fortune, presumably because it was too much like Famous Men. But Cotton Tenants "is not merely an early, partial draft of Famous Men, in other words, not just a different book; it’s a different Agee, an unknown Agee... This new book is most properly classed as a lost classic of that ’30s-era documentary renaissance. Five years later he would take this tradition of journalism and inject it with powerful hallucinogens, creating something new, a book that did important documentary work while simultaneously x-raying, through the psyche of its own author, the assumptions underlying such work. That was a greater task. And Cotton Tenants shows us one of the reasons for its greatness: that before Agee transformed the genre, he paused and mastered it."
posted by AceRock (5 comments total)

Technically speaking, what the smallness [of Cotton Tenants] makes possible is a sparseness. You hear it most clearly at the paragraph level. Gone are the torrents and flying buttresses of metaphor and self-analysis. Present instead is a steadiness of gaze. Less ecstatic; more patient and more painterly. In fact, it comes much closer than the book would to what Evans was doing with his pictures.

I had a lot of trouble with Let us Now Praise Famous Men specifically because it was too lush (and almost manic in places) to follow easily; a few pages emerge together here and there with memorable scenes or impressions, but the whole of the book felt only jaggedly coherent and it was hard to push through. I never even got to the halfway point.

The prose was sure vivid, though. I remember especially the early scene when he's writing in the dark shack, imagining monsters peering from behind, or when he's seized by the instinct to follow and explain himself to the black couple on the road.

I'll have to check out Cotten Tenants when I'm not at work and see if I can make it to the end this time.

(Archibald MacLeish's articles too, apparently)
posted by postcommunism at 9:36 AM on June 5, 2013

I was one of the people in my class that didn't like Famous Men - I felt like he wrote primarily about himself rather than the family - it was so self-centric. And in later interviews with the family, they said that he had misrepresented them at several points and made assumptions that weren't true.

We were assigned the book as an example of good ethnography, but I always felt it was an example of how not to do ethnography.
posted by jb at 9:43 AM on June 5, 2013

Agee is someone I will forgive always, as he wrote perhaps the best reverie of summer evenings in the South.

"We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." - Knoxville: Summer of 1915
posted by grabbingsand at 9:51 AM on June 5, 2013

I'm interested to read this. Thanks for posting. Saw this post about it on the Times blog yesterday, with great Evans photos.
posted by Miko at 12:45 PM on June 5, 2013

I have this one on hold at the library--thanks for this post.
posted by box at 2:35 PM on June 5, 2013