Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) By James Agee; Photography By Walker Evans

 

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was not originally meant to be a book. It was a feature story assignment by Fortune Magazine to journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. They were sent to rural Alabama during what elsewhere were the final years of the depression era. They were to record the plight of sharecroppers. They so accurately documented the daily reality of these poorest of Americans that the magazine declined to use their stories fearing subscribers to Fortune would not want to read about it. When Agree finally received permission to take the stories to other publishers he met with little success, finally getting it printed in book format, and then it was a commercial failure. It was not until years later the literary world began to recognize its value.

Agee and Evans spent an entire summer visiting and interviewing three different families, often staying at their homes, meeting their extended families, neighbors, ministers. It was a difficult assignment because they had to win the trust of the people whose privacy was being invaded and put on display for the general public, making them fodder for a magazine’s commercial use. Arguing their stories needed to be told was understandably met with skepticism by people whose lives and backbreaking labors had been used repeatedly by landowners and others to make a buck, while they got table scraps – the very root of sharecropping (tenant farming), and only one step above serfdom.

Since the project was imagined as a series of stand-alone articles on each family, putting it in book form was somewhat difficult. In its final form the book is comprised of three family profiles with connecting essays, most of which are philosophical in nature and occasionally make no direct reference to the families. The book’s introduction does a lousy job of preparing the reader for this format. The Library of America publication of the book, which is what I read, includes sixty-four pages of remarkable black & white photography by Walker Evans.

This project and book took place early in the writing career of Agee. He went on to do extensive assignment magazine reporting including coverage of World War II, and earned a reputation as a book, arts, and film critic. Later he became a script writer in Hollywood with his most famous work being on The African Queen (Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn), and the bone-chilling drama The Night of the Hunter (Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters).

Agee is known for compound sentences, wonderfully descriptive, but one random sample from the book contains 365 words, ten colons and twenty-seven commas before breaking to a new paragraph, not with a period, but with another colon.

Recommendation:  For casual readers I would not recommend this. The problem is not his writing, which while complex is superb; the problem is the lack of structure in the story. 

The Sea-Wolf (1904) By Jack London

 

One does not get through English literature classes in America without being exposed to Jack London, remembered today mostly for his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), both of which are set in Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush and feature sled dogs. The central theme is survival.

The Sea-Wolf (1904) has the same underlying theme but transfers the setting to seal hunting in the far North Pacific and changes the focus to human survival under the most violent of situations. As a “sea novel” it fits in the genre of Two Years Before the Mast (1840) by Richard Henry Dana; Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville; not to mention Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson. All have been made into movies multiple times.

In Sea-Wolf a well-known literary critic, Humphrey Van Weyden, was a passenger on a ferry boat struck and sank by another boat in the dense fog of San Francisco Bay. He survives but is floating out of the bay into the Pacific Ocean. He is spotted by a ship of seal hunters and brought onboard. He appeals to the ship’s captain, the notorious Wolf Larsen to deliver him or transfer him to other ships heading into the bay. Larsen declines, and instead presses him into servitude on board from which he cannot escape. Much later in the book, the ship rescues survivors of another shipwreck, one of whom is Maud Brewster, an author headed to Japan for health reasons. Turns out Van Weyden and Brewster, though they have never met, are familiar with each other's work.

The amount of violence detailed in the novel is incredible, not just the clubbing of seals, but also violence on and between crew members. It is easy to understand how Call of the Wild and White Fang eventually became “Disney-like” family classics, and Sea-Wolf did not.

The captain, Wolf Larsen, is a monster of a character, surpassing any pirate captain I have ever read of. Although definitely a sailor, he is also self-taught and well-read. His conversations with Van Weyden on morality and other philosophical topics are informative, though do not erase the fact that he is an evil monster.

Long story short, Van Weyden with Maud Brewster eventually will steal a boat and escape. At six hundred miles from Japan, they light upon a deserted island, adding another lesson on survival to their characters. The ending includes their love story, and the return of Wolf Larsen.

Recommendation:  As an adventure story this cannot be beat. But if you are squeamish about violence you might want to skip this.

Queen of Our Times (2022) By Robert Hardman

 

It can be and has been argued that Robert Hardman’s biography of Queen Elizabeth II is a rebuttal to the Netflix series The Crown. I have never watched an entire episode of the series but know from the clips of it I’ve seen its emphasis was on the more dramatic aspects of her reign, surrounding her and the often times dysfunctional Royal Family as a whole. Hardman, with access to the official record, was determined to set the record straight, or at least clear.

As a work of history Queen of Our Times is mammoth in scale. She ascended to the throne in 1952 the year before I was born and reigned for over 70 years. To a great many people, she really was the Queen of “Our Times.”

Born in 1926, her life coincided with nearly a century of events, including the Great Depression, both World Wars, the fairy-story abdication of her uncle King Edward, the death of her father King George V who ruled during World War II familiar to today’s cultural audience from the movie The King’s Speech, the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, the disastrous Suez Canal incident, and numerous other highlights, too many to list.  She died peacefully in 2022, having outlived the likes of Winston Churchill  and multiple other Prime Ministers. She reigned during the ascent and then restructuring of the Commonwealth. Then there are the inner workings of the Royal Family, her marriage to Philip, her four children, including Charles, the current King, his divorce from Princess Diana and remarriage to Camilla, and of course the heir apparent, Prince William and the “spare” Prince Harry.

There is a reason the book is nearly 1,000 pages in length.

All of her history has been front page material. I have learned much from the book, linking together multiple phases of her life and “our times.” My guess is that she has had more media coverage than anyone in world history. Yet, this coverage has not always been favorable, everyone loves her, but nearly all hate her family. Though this coverage has not always been fair, or even true, it sells newspapers. And that is why Hardman’s book is important, it tells another version of everything, trying to put it all in perspective.

Recommendation: Yes, and do not let the length of the book dissuade you, it reads like a good novel.

The Day of the Locust (1939) By Nathanael West

 

The Day of the Locust is one of several novels written by Nathanael West. I do not think it is well written, but I will give the author a pass for now because I have not read his other works, not even the well-regarded Miss Lonelyhearts.

The novel is set in Hollywood in the 1930s and details the lives of individuals who have migrated there with the hope of making it big in the movie industry. But “Mecca of broken dreams” is the common denominator and bottom line for all of them. The novel presents in detail the downside of hoping without hope.

There are three primary characters: Tod, a studio production illustrator; Faye a young and blonde wannabee actress; and Homer, an accountant who has come to southern California for his health. There are several secondary characters, some quite memorable, all stereotypes, to represent the dreams of others.

I found the movie (1975) to be every bit the downer as the book, and in fact I was surprised anyone would even think of making this into a movie. The movie was though perfectly cast, with William Atherton as Tod, Karen Black as Faye, and Donald Sutherland as Homer. It received a half dozen or so award nominations, but won only in the costume category, a win I agree with.

Recommendation:  No, though I will at some point read Miss Lonelyhearts.

A Son at the Front (1923) By Edith Wharton

 

I have never read anything by Edith Wharton before, even though her Age of Innocence book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, the first woman author to be so honored. I always considered her just another “gilded age” writer, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald. How wrong I was.

This week I read her 1923 novel A Son at the Front, a title borrowed from the parents of soldiers in the first World War. Wharton lived in Paris throughout the War.

A focal point of the story is a young man named George, his parents are Americans, but he was born while they were in France making him a French national subject to the French military mobilization guidelines even though everyone considers him to be an American.

His father John Campton is a successful portrait artist who went to Paris along with his wife Julia (because do not all artists end up in Paris?). His socialite mother tired of being an artist’s wife, divorced him, and married Anderson Brant, an extremely rich banker.

Campton has spent much of his life bitter that George as a child lived with his mother and her new husband. To put it mildly he hates Brant for being able to provide George with every material thing and all the connections he needs.

Much of the storyline deals with the dynamic between Campton and Brant, who begin the story conspiring, each in his own way, to keep George out of the military. George is indifferent to the service though his thoughts on the “war to end all wars” evolves during the war and he enlists. Over the course of the book Campton and Brant will learn they each care deeply for George and learn to respect each other for the roles they play in his life. And although they want to protect him realize that he has a right to make his own decisions – a point his mother never concedes.

There are many other characters entailed in this story, all interesting subplots, weaving them together is done masterfully.

Recommendation:  Highly Recommended, the book is pure genius.