AGEE AND PLANS FOR THE

CRITICISM OF POPULAR CULTUBE

By VICTOR A. KRAMER

James Agee was capable of devising many different, and often

unfinishable, projects; and while he accomplished many of his goals,
some of these tasks never came to fruition. One of his hopes remains
applicable today, perhaps more so than when, over thirty years ago,
he first argued for some form of its implementation. Agee realized
the need for a new type of analysis to be concerned primarily with
facets of popular culture which routinely go unquestioned in contemporary American society. He saw that a regular outlet, perhaps
a magazine, might be developed. Its primary function would be the
scrutiny of words and images as they are employed in everyday contexts. With the electronic age a fact, and individualism more threatened than ever before, even partial implementation of Agees suggestions could still have import.
At several different times he proposed a magazine (or perhaps
a continuing series of books) for the criticism of popular culture.
His enthusiasm for what would have had to be an extended, and admittedly herculean chore, probably was received by his associates in
the nineteen-thirties and forties with about as much excitement as
was his final projected screenplay, a fantasy about mans captivity of

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JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

elephants which he described in an unposted letter to Father Flye.

In that letter Agee mentioned his plans for the elephant screenplay,
and added, Almost nobody Ive described it to likes this idea, except me. It has its weaknesses, but I like it.l That projected film
would have been about mans cruelty and stupidity toward elephants.
One can be sure that a similar exuberance must have gone into Agees
projections for the development of a method of analysis of the
everyday reality of how man reveals himself. No fantasy would be
necessary to perceive the cruelty and stupidity of contemporary
man; this is daily revealed in his actions and speech and use of the
printed word.
The problem was how to make men aware of their misuses of
both language and image. Agee knew that a careful appraisal of what
might not be even noticed as unusual would be as fascinating and as
revealing as any study of a work of ars2 But in addition such analysis could be of benefit to others because it might make them aware
of incongruities before unnoticed. Thus in letters to friends, in enthusiastic memoranda to editors, in a beautiful (and unsuccessful)
Guggenheim application in 1937, and in scattered notes, Agee articulated his hopes for such a critical project-or a series of them. His
ideas have their basis in the development of procedures which would
allow news stories, advertisements, public speeches, private letters,
movies, etc.-often accepted as correct, or right, or factual-to be
subjected to a critical assessment like that which editorials in newspaper begin to provide for certain public issues.
of course he realized that this scheme would have to be a seriiously developed project built on,a continuing basis. An adequate
staff and patronage would have been absolutely essential. Whether
such a project was workable as originally proposed is questionable.
His hopes were for a project which would finally require several persons (and considerable funds) to be sustained.
The ideas which he espoused are certainly not completely original with him. New approaches to criticism, and a developing concern
with the lively arts was part of the atmosphere of the twenties and
thirties when Agee was coming of age. As an undergraduate he had
met with, and was fascinated by the ideas of I. A. Richards. And it
is somewhat ironic to recall that Agees initial position, as a staff
writer at Fortune magazine, secured during the height of the depression in 1932, was attained, at least partly because of a successful

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757

parody of Time magazine which he helped engineer as an editor of

The Haruard A duocate.
In 1937 he called one facet of what he had in mind Hung with
their own rope.3 He felt no one word covered what he meant, but
the material was abundant. His idea was that the self-deceived
and corrupted betray themselves and their world more definitively
than invented satire can. Examples: Eleanor Roosevelts syndicated newspaper column My Day; court records; editorials; the
literature concerning and justifying the castration of Eisenstein;
etc. Such material, he felt, might well be simply exhibited in a
book or magazine. And while no extended project like this was ever
accomplished, much of Agees later writing incorporates facets of
what he realized could be done.
His Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, among other things, an
attempt to represent the real world; yet because of the difficulty of
what was attempted in that work, its text finally stands as a document with its ostensible subject a study of tenant farming, while just
as important a subject is the inquiry into the impossibility of any
true communication because Agee knew and admitted it was impossible to give the texture of what had been experienced. One thing he
did know as he wrote that text: it was the merest beginning, only a
gesture (however elaborate) which reflected the difficulty of recording and communicating accurately any unimagined part of existence.
One of the most important things accomplished in Famous
Men is that the text stands as an honest attempt to deal with the difficulty (in fact, the impossibility) of communicating about the true
nature of reality. Agees complicated development of technique
within that book illustrates how a complex subject experienced, recalled, remembered, and imagined had to be approached in several
different ways. One recalls one of his prefatory statements about
Famous Men:
I f I could do it, Id do no writing at all here. It would be
photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of
cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood
and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.4

In notes which were apparently composed as he wrote a revision

of Famous Mens Preamble, he outlined a series of periodicals, the
point of which would be, he wrote, a hardness of standard, and lack
of concession, nowhere else to be found in American publishing.5

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But these periodicals were to be different in kind from anything

else published. The notes project a series (perhaps volumes?)
edited by W. E. [Walker Evans] and J. A. The general content
was to have been some text, some pictures. Records, symbols,
scenic analysis and criticism. Some of the subjects listed were the
following: Travelling in America: text and photographs, 60 days
travelling: as exactly as possible recorded and analyzed; an attack
on the M of M [Museum of Modern?] Art; a study of motion
pictures as caught midway in becoming respectable. Each of these
projected studies would have focused on an aspect of the culture as
it revealed itself.
Other subjects which were listed as possibilities included these:
An exposition of methods by which corruption betrays itself.
A sampling of letters.
A sampling of news and magazine clips.
Series: poems: composed of advertisements, news photographs and photographs personally made. . . .
A record and analysis of one weeks work on Time. . . .

This series, of course also never developed. But Agees interest in

such subjects was to continue. His introductions to volumes of photographs by both Walker Evans and Helen Levitt are the natural outgrowth of an aesthetic vision which has its basis in an apprehension
of the real world.
Agees letters are also sprinkled with references t o aspects of an
everyday world that demanded analysis. And in 1944 he wrote an
article entitled Pseudo-Folk , in which he illustrated the complexity
of our cultures confusion when different levels of experience blend
together, while those who are participants in the culture remain unaware of the mutations which have taken place. There he wrote that
the quintessence of this special kind of vicious psuedo-folk [was]
Hazel Scott. She plays the sort ofjazz one could probably pick up,
by now, through a correspondence school. She plays her classics
with a slobbering, anarchic, vindictive, rushing affectation which any
mediocre elementary piano teacher would slap her silly for.6
Agee is inattentive to the fact that the reflectiveness which his
ideas call for is in conflict with the irreflective quality of much popular culture. Apparently he did not think much about the distinction
between making judgments about aspects of culture and the fact that
such reflection would be isolated from the thing under scrutiny. This

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759

problem suggests the difficulty of what he hoped to accomplish.

In other places, such as in the caustic satire Dedication Day
(1946) Agee satirized a society which forgets how to criticize itself.
That satire, a sketch for a motion picture, but also a parody of a
news story, is about the elaborately developed dedicatory ceremonies
for a monument commemorating mans first horrid use of atomic
energy.
I t is certainly not surprising that when Agee began to write film
criticism for The Nation in 1941 he immediately indicated how he
felt as an amateur who had assumed the task of reviewing the complexity of cinema. He did not feel his amateur status was a handicap. That unprofessional status allowed him the freedom to react as
an individual. In his initial column he included paragraphs elaborating his doubts about the screen version of The Grapes of Wrath, (a
subject which had also rated commentary in the notebook mentioned
earlier about a projected series dealing with aspects of popular culture).
The truth which Steinbeck had attempted to reveal was too much
distorted through the making of a movie, and this problem is compounded when such a film is disguised as reality. Also in an early
column doubts about whether war atrocity films could ever in conscience be viewed were elaborated. His concern in both instances is
that when reality is at the heart of a film, it must be honored, or
the result can only be a betrayal of what is real, and of what it is
possible both for the motion picture to reflect and distort.
Agees film criticism, a major recipient of his energies throughout the forties, is in fact, the practice of the kind of analysis hGknew
might be applied to other cultural forms, but restricted to only one
aspect of Americas culture. That criticism provides a modus operandi for an approach which might be applied to many other aspects
of a culture which often go unquestioned. A basic ingredient in the
criticism is a constant recognition that the banal, even the deceitful,
as well as poetic and honest attempts to mirror reality, are all equally
indicative of our culture. Finally they are as revealing as the most
complex kind of dream. Agees comments on The Blue Dahlia (1946)
are, I think, typical of an ability to see in films values which probably
even their makers were unaware of. He said he hoped
there will be more fdms of the quality of The Blue Dahlia,
rather than fewer. The picture is as neatly stylized and
synchronized, and as uninterested in moral excitement, as

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a good ballet; it knows its own weight and size perfectly and
carries them gracefully and without self-importance; it is,
barring occasional victories and noble accidents, about as
good a movie as can be expected from the big factories. In
its own uninsistent way, for that matter, it does carry a certain amount of social criticism. For it crawls with American
types; and their mannerisms and affectations, and their chief
preoccupations-blackmail and whats-in-it-for-me-all seem
to me to reflect, however coolly, things that are deeply characteristic of this civilization.7

Such criticism alerts a viewer to notice aspects of a film which otherwise might be overlooked.
Throughout his criticism Agee weighs the merits of contemporary movies, both for what they accomplish as films and also for the
ways they reveal the culture. Thus, artifice imposed by a Hollywood
film which denatures reality; or the use of newsreel clips within the
wrong context of a fiction film; or the use of professional actors when
amateurs could have been better employed, often become the objects
of Agees scrutiny.
He was sure much could be revealed by study of little, if one
looked carefully at what is not usually observed. For such reasons
he saw value in simply preserving the ordinary or commonplace in
both verbal and pictorial record. Without comment or editing, the
commonplace reveals when it is properly beheld. Agee was once
asked to recommend a group of films which might be worth preserving for a film library. He wrote extensive notes, and as one might
expect, he was as enthusiastic about the mediocre, as about the good
films. He wrote pages and pages about films which were produced
only for grade 3 distribution and maximum economic return.8
He saw that it was precisely in the ordinary film that one could
see the essence of a culture revealed. In many places in his film criticism he suggests that most films are a variety of anthropological data.
So even the most obviously commercial film can be a means for revealing aspects of society. Properly observed it will reveal all manner
of things about the culture.
In a related manner, Agee realized that much of what makes up
ordinary thinking was, in fact, not thinking at all-but rather a reliance upon a series of cliches and half-truths which the public then
comes to assume possesses truth. He prepared an article (for Time?)
which had the title Popular Religion.g There he elaborated upon

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761

the fact that much of what men in the United States believe (with an
almost religious fervor) is merely an amalgam of ideas assimilated, but
with little basis in truth. Thus during the second world war, he noted,
most Americans simply assumed all Germans were beasts.
Sometimes in the mid nineteen-forties, while still a working
journalist, Agee drafted suggestions in which he proposed a new department for Time magazine. He labeled this proposed new section
Double-Take; and suggested photographs, public speeches and advertising might all be subject to a special kind of analysis. He noted
advertising is, I feel sure, as thoroughly worth reviewing as [theatre, books, movies,] are: it seems to me
a singularly edged and intricate crystallization of a
little that is passable and a great deal that is not, among most of the minds, beliefs, emotions and motives
of the country.1

He then included an elaborate analysis of an ad by a natural gas

transmission company, to which he appended Natural gas, indeed!
After he had provided examples of an inadvertent self-indictment by
the gas people, (part of the copy, unfortunately, had read Some day
peace must fall on a world.) he noted that at first the full, strange,
subconscious, polysemantic horror of must fall on rather amused me
rather nastily instead of appalling me. His point of course is that
other readers might not have been amused; and that the incongruity
of inappropriate uses of language such as those chosen by this copywriter were worth notice. What fascinated him was the realization
that myriads of possibilities offered themselves for analysis throughout the culture as a whole, but that most of what is popularly accepted
is never understood. And because understanding is lacking, the
potential within the culture is usually not fulfilled. If even some of
these things could be analyzed, dissected, and criticized, then perhaps
steps could be taken toward providing insights which would lead to
better appreciation of the potentialities which the culture possessed.
This is to say that Agee knew that so much of what is accepted without question in our society is finally dehumanizing. To make men
aware of how they participate in their own dehumanization would
be a necessary first step toward any rectification.
Agee noted that a Double-Take enterprise would not have to
be limited to self-betrayals in print. Those in unpublished living,
are just as revelatory, and are abundant for collection, he noted.

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One way to provide access t o such materials would be simply to

print the unconsciously naked sentence, given either with or without context. When Agee suggests that inadvertent slips of phrase
or pen are revealing, he is, of course, relying upon a procedure different from criticism. What he suggests is akin to psychoanalysis.
For related reasons he was vitally interested in the value of personal letters throughout his career. This fascination with letters suggests what he realized could be seen in all artifacts, and uses of language. But letters are as distinct in their own way, and as valuable,
as would be a faultless record of the dreams of many individuals. All
letters have an immediacy and a flawlessness unvariable in any other
written form.l1 And thus he hoped for the possibility of collections of letters published without analysis; and as well he saw the
need, and use for an almost word by word analysis . . . as many
sided and extensive as the given letter requires. Only two months
after the 1939 manuscript for Famous Men was finished Agee had
written Father Flye to ask if he would be willing for some of his
letters to be used in a proposed collection of letters which he, and
two others, were discussing.12 Mention of the value of personal
letters continues to recur throughout the forties.
Agees most extended description of a method which might
have been developed to incorporate many of his ideas about the
criticism of popular culture is an eight page statement written by
him in the mid-1940s. That statement (Notes and Suggestions on
the magazine under discussion) outlines his proposed stance for a
new type of journal. While admitting that the very highest critical
standards should be maintained for the inclusion of fiction and
satire, he admitted that if such standards were consistently followed
there would be an apparent gap in materials available for inclusion.
That gap could be filled in a way that no magazine or other publication so far as he knew attempts to fill. His words capsulize his
hopes:
It is the business of journalism to report; of comment and
analysis it does very little. . . Nominally editors, columists,
etc. make comment and analysis their business; but the results are almost without exception that the mere surface
has been scraped. . . I suggest that this proposed magazine
could work a pincer-movement on experience or reality,
with journalism functioning very importantly as a part of

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763

the opposite arm of the pincers. We would use the fmdings of journalists, in other words, as they in turn use the
findings of researches; we can also supplement or extend
their reporting by direct investigations. . .

This section of the magazine would be subdivided into

many others, and would constitute a complete review,
analysis and documentation of what has been happening
in fields which are not, normally, under very strict review
. . our technique of review would be quite untraditional;
we would, in fact, have to invent it. A best seller, for
instance, should be reviewed not only on its entertainment value; we should investigate the causes of that
particular vdue: and we should treat it, chiefly, as the
valuably su estive anthropological exhibit which it essentially is.

Thus, a new kind of criticism would be developed, and it might

assist readers to understand why particular items in a culture are,
and are not, held in esteem. In addition, an explanation of why, or
how, taste changes at different times would become part of the
analysis. A work under scrutiny would not be analyzed just as a
separate entity, but in relation to other aspects of the culture too.
Agee listed and sketched over a dozen separate categories or
possible departments for this proposed magazine. In some instances he even named specific persons who he felt were best qualified
for a particular kind of criticism. Advertising art and copy; moving
pictures; music; books; public speeches; letters; records; art as well
as rather more specialized areas like sexual ethics were included.
In these plans he included a category labeled self-criticism.
Self-attack and analysis and disagreement among its editors would
be necessary if the enterprise was to be a success. Agee knew it is
hard enough for one man to hold to the standards we are presumably
setting; far harder for a group to do so; the only possible development
and continuance of health is in a wide-open self and mutual-criticism.
One of the things which he hoped might be accomplished by
such a magazine would have been to undeceive readers of their ownand the editors-conditioned reflexes. Agee added the qualification
that poorly run such an endeavor could be one of the most vicious
things that has ever seen print. Essential to his doubts was the
question
whether popularization is intrinsically diseased and self-

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JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

defeating [ ,] or extrinsically [diseased, because most
popularizers are primarily interested in their pocketbooks] .
It might be possible for instance to contrive techniques for
making clear to the most average reader-gradually-what
is true and what is phoney in a photograph or a public
speech or a letter; [sic] without sacrificing or in the long
run simplifying any standard or perception we have. But
if we judge it impossible, then we must by no means try
any next-best thing; for every next-best thing is worst.

Ultimately what he outlined in these notes was a special kind of

criticism which already, he said, a very small minority of sophisticated readers (which . . . read The Dial or Criterion or Kenyon
Review) used to a small extent in their conversation and in letters,
but which has been used in print little if at all. This many faceted
magazine which Agee dreamed of never materialized.
Agees many suggestions imply a need for a regular medium
which would analyze all manner of things. Had he been able to
develop some of his projects he would have approached these undertakings (given a prodigious amount of energy and minimum support)
in the same amateur way he had already approached the cinema.
It is a commonplace to assert that Agee valued life above Art;
therefore, the fake, the distorted, and the hypocritical as well as the
sincere and genuine were to be observed. His plans for a regular mode
of approach for criticism of popular culture did not develop, but these
ideas remain sensible, and they may still serve as an impetus for
others to pursue. Some journals and magazines do a little of what
Agee had in mind; but usually the material placed under scrutiny is
either banal or esoteric. Thus a misquotation provides a filler for
The New Yorker, and a poorly written church bulletin provides amusement for a miscellaneous column in the National Catholic
Reporter. At the other end of the spectrum scholars shrewdly
haggle about the work of other scholars. Such material would have
interested Agee, but only to a small degree.
He envisaged a medium through which the culture of the day
might be scrutinized. The kind of criticism which he hoped to see
provided is, to some small degree, made available in a few programs
of analysis on television-some of which follow a magazine format.
(Variations on his suggestions for use of everyday materials for
analysis are regularly pursued by teachers of writing who combine
traditional rhetorical methods with an awareness of a students

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765

world.) And in the work of men like McLuhan some of what Agee
foresaw has been accomplished.
The fact that many aspects of culture do not easily lend themselves to analysis remains a fact. The medium is often the message;
and many modern critics have become cautious about too much
analysis. But at the same time those within a culture should be
aware of the changes taking place within it.
Words and images just because they are words and images are
not a faithful representation of reality; and dishonesty and imprecision with the very breath of mans spirit is a most grievous
distortion. It is idealistic to hope that someone might employ Agees
ideas. But they seem a fresh approach, and could be of immense
value for a society which exhibits every evidence of needing to find
methods to examine it conscience systematically.
NOTES
1Letters (New York: B r a d e r , 1962) pp. 231-232.
2See Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960),
and especially pp. 239-242.
3The Collected Short Prose ofJames Agee (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1968) p. 137.
4Famous Men, p. 13.
5Let us now praise famous men: Notes, autograph manuscript notebook,
n.d. [c. 19401 The University of Texas library. This, and other unpublished
material used in this essay, is gratefully used with the permission of The James
Agee Trust.
6Agee on Film, Vol. I (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1967) p. 405.
This article originally appeared in the Partisan Review.
7Ibid., p. 203.
8Letter To Archie and enclosures. Typed carbon copy manuscript,
The University of Texas library.
9Popular Religion, typed carbon copy manuscript, The University of
Texas library.
10Double-Take, typed carbon copy manuscript, The University of
Texas library.
11See Plans for Work: October 1937, CoZlected Short Prose, op. cit.,
p. 134-135.
12letters, p. 118.

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136Notesand Suggestions on the magazine under discussion, typed

carbon copy manuscript, The University of Texas library.
14Of course, in many ways the ideas which Agee propounded are quite
similar to the interests of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. He
would, no doubt, havl been pleased with the type and variety of studies which
are regularly published in the Journal of PopuZar Culture.

Victor A. Kramer teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is

writing a book on James Agee, and his articles on Agee have appeared in the
Texas Quarterly and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Another
essay will soon appear in the Mississippi Quarterly.
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