So we have a genuine double gain for the culture--in political criticism and literary expression at the same time.

I knew of Agee from my studies, but my epiphany came via Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. There, he talks about becoming an anarchist in the wake of the Cotton Tenants assignment, and that led me to further interest in him. I'd been interested in the anarchist tradition in morals and aesthetics, a tradition that no one really knows anything about in this country. Agee called himself a "conservative anarchist" which is the same thing Paul Goodman called himself. C. Wright Mills, Henry Adams, Robert Lowell, William James (who had a wonderful name for what Agee was chasing: "aboriginal sensible muchness.") They all called themselves anarchists. There's a tradition of this kind of anarchist thought, though it's hardly ever recognized as such.

To identify as a "conservative anarchist" is to reject all systems, including systems of concepts as they're expressed in ideology, as forms of cultural power. Agee's anarchism radically exalted perception over conception. He wrote a fragment once called "Now as Awareness," in which the goal is to get you to open up your perceptions, and figure out what's going on around you. Where another kind of writer would write an argument piece about cotton slavery, petitioning the people in power, etc., the message here is to open up your eyes, open up your head, look at what's going on around you. The fact that what's going on now is similar to what was going on when Agee was writing just makes it all the more powerful.

Anarchism isn't only about government power; it has aesthetic and moral ramifications. This attitude is crucial to understanding Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee had to break apart every possible system and genre and form that he'd inherited, including the capital C concept of art, which he loathed. He could have written a sociological documentary, which was very much in fashion then, or he could have written a government report, or he could have written a reformer's document. But Let Us Now Praise Famous Men very consciously avoids being any of these things. He had to transcend the established systems for telling this kind of this story, then to reinhabit it. That's why it's still available to us.

What few people remember is the history of this assignment. It was already a cliché in the summer of 1936, given by northern editors to go down and check out a southern town. It may seem to us sui generis, but it wasn't--for Agee it would have been another northern editor sending another one of us southern boys to go down and report on the folks. The genius of Cotton Tenants lies in how Agee was able to rise above his context and to do something new in what was already a hackneyed form. It shows, too, that it was possible to get to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is often taken as an indulgent book even by people who appreciate Agee--all that "meta," all that putting himself in the way--only after he had already mastered this more restrained and disciplined form. We know now that in order to get there, he needed to do this first.