By Beth Kephart
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—a book some think of as an extended poem and others consider a mystifying elongation of art journalism—recounts two summer months in 1936 when the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee travel south to prepare an article on the lives of sharecroppers. Seeking to observe the daily rhythms of an “average” family, Agee becomes deeply acquainted—spy like, he says—with three particular families, including those he calls the Gudgers. He builds their house with prose.
Among the elements that Agee transports to the page:
The light in the room, which, Agee writes, “is of a lamp. Its flame in the glass is of the dry, silent and famished delicateness of the latest lateness of the night.…”
The odor, “which is of pine that has stood shut on itself through the heat of a hot day: the odor of an attic at white noon…”
The general structure of the house, as viewed from the front, which is, Agee tells us: “Two blocks, of two rooms each, one room behind another. Between these blocks a hallway, floored and roofed, wide open both at front and rear: so that these blocks are two rectangular yoked boats, or coffins, each, by an inner wall, divided into squared chambers.”
The furniture, including “the dark cast-iron treadle of the sewing machine [which] spells out squarely, in the middle of its curlings, the word CONQUEST. This is repeated in gold on the split wooden hood, but most of the gold has been rubbed off.”
The objects on the fireplace mantel, among which are “a jar of menthol salve, smallest size, two thirds gone…A small spool of number 50 white cotton thread, about half gone and half unwound…."
The interior world of the closet, in which, on nails, hang “a short homemade shift of coarse white cotton…a baby’s dress, homemade…a long homemade shift of coarse white cotton” to which Agee adds this detail: “A tincture of perspiration and sex."
The kitchen: “There is a tin roof on the kitchen. It leaks only when the rain is very heavy and then only along the juncture with the roof of the main house.”
Agee has entered the domestic realm of strangers. He has held, as he says, the family’s garments to his lips, taken “odor of and folded and restored so orderly, so reverently as cerements, or priest the blessed cloths….” He has written not just of objects, but of how those objects have been used (gold rubbed out, a spool half wound), detailed not just the clothing hanging on nails but the life those clothes suggest (perspiration, sex), not just of the frame of the house but of its metaphors (yoked boats, coffins), not just of the light in the room, but of its essence (famished delicateness).
It’s all so specific. So hushed, so expressively intimate. In no passage quoted above does an actual human being walk onto the stage, cough, giggle, or sneeze. And yet the humanity of the Gudger house is there at every turn. Their house, in Agee’s hands, is not mere house. It is home.
Every writer writing home must ultimately deliver so much more than floor plan and facade, architecture and the number of tiles on the backsplash. To write home is to write precisely of physical space, on the one hand, and to write evocatively of the way that space is or has been inhabited, on the other. To write home is to see and feel, to delineate and dwell, to exercise the art of the specific and to explore the poetics of soul.
To write home, I guess I’m saying, is to understand not just where something happened (that “something happened” being an Alice Munro phrase), but what it meant, how the physical space shaped others and yourself, and how the idea of home carries forward. Write toward home, and you’ll know what home is.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men nearly destroyed Agee, the writer. It did not ultimately run as the magazine story it was meant to be, and, after Agee expanded the pages into a book that was published in 1941, became a commercial failure, considered “maddeningly obscure,” according to one historian. Still, as his writing career unfolded, Agee maintained his extraordinary literary capacity for making of a house a home. Consider, for example, this paragraph from the opening pages of A Death in the Family, his never-finished semi-autobiographical novel, which was published posthumously:
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there…. After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those who receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now; but will not ever tell me who I am.
What doors might you open to the homes of your past? How might you light their lamps, portray their odors, memorialize their secrets and mysteries? How might you regain, by writing home, that place where you were both a familiar and a person who must discover, on your own, who you, in fact, were waiting to become?
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What do we do, as writers, with the homes we have lost, or the homes we now have, or the homes for which we are still searching? How do we write home? Join Beth Kephart for her CRAFT TALKS Masterclass, Writing Your Way Home: Where the Story Resides, July 13, 11AM-3:30PM Eastern ($175 Early Bird). More Info/Register Now.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning writer of some forty books in multiple genres and an award-winning teacher. Her new books are My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) and You Are Not Vanished Here (Juncture Workshops), an illustrated essay collection. More at bethkephartbooks.com.
