Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  That is repeated as many times as you have picked a bale. Your field is combed over three, four or five times. The height of the ginning season in that part of the country is early October, and in that time the loaded wagons are on the road before the least crack of daylight, the waiting is endless hours, and the gin is still pulsing and beating after dark. After that comes hog-killing, and the gristing of the corn and milling of the sorghum that were planted late to come ready late; and more urgent and specific meditation of whether or not to move to another man, and of whether you are to be kept; and settlement time; and the sky descends, the air becomes like dark glass, the ground stiffens, the clay honeycombs with frost, the corn and the cotton stand stripped to the naked bone and the trees are black, the odors of pork and woodsmoke sharpen all over the country, the long dark silent sleeping rains stream down in such grieving as nothing shall ever stop, and the houses are cold, fragile drums, and the animals tremble, and the clay is one shapeless sea, and winter has shut.

  Intermission: Conversation in the Lobby

  Conversation in the Lobby

  In May 1939, the Partisan Review sent to a number of writers the questionnaire on the opposite page. It happened succinctly to represent a good deal that made me angry, and I promptly and angrily replied to it My anger and speed made my answers intemperate, inarticulate, and at times definitely foolish: but my later attempts to do the same job more reasonably seemed, in the very fact of the reasonableness, to do such questions more honor than they deserved. I decided to let the answers stand and, in so far as they were an image of my foolishness, to let them accuse me.

  It was not pleasant to do this, for I knew and liked (and like) some of the editors, and felt also, some respect for some of what they were doing; and I thought it likely that my reply would be regarded as a personal attack It was; and the reply was not printed, on the grounds that no magazine is under obligation to print an attack on itself, and that I had not answered the questions. That I differ with both opinions is a point worth mentioning but not worth arguing.

  Readers who think that in printing this here I am (a) digressing from the subject of this volume, or (S) indulging in a literary quarrel, are welcome to their thoughts.

  I wish to thank Mr. Dwight Macdonald for his decency in returning the manuscript to me, knowing how I would use it; and to express my regret over every misunderstanding, unpleasantness, and difference of opinion that is implicit in the incident, or that has arisen from it.

  Some Questions Which

  Face American Writers Today

  1. Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a ‘usable past’? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James’s work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman’s?

  2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years?

  3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary supplements by advertising—in the case of the newspapers—and political pressures—in the case of the liberal weeklies—has made serious literary criticism an isolated cult?

  4. Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches as teaching and editorial work? Do you think there is any place in our present economic system for literature as a profession?

  5. Do you find, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?

  6. How would you describe the political tendency of American writing as a whole since 1930? How do you feel about it yourself? Are you sympathetic to the current tendency toward what may be called ‘literary nationalism’—a renewed emphasis, largely uncritical, on the specifically ‘American’ elements in our culture?

  7. Have you considered the question of your attitude toward the possible entry of the United States into the next world war? What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?

  In reply to your questions:

  In your letter you say: These questions, we think, are central to any discussion of American literature today.’

  Then God help ‘American’ or any other ‘literature.’ Or else let both suspect words become your property and that of your inferiors. The good work will meanwhile be done by those who can use neither word.

  You are supposed to be and I guess are the best ‘American’ ‘literary’ and ‘critical’ magazine. In other words, these questions, the best you can ask, prove a lot about American literature and criticism and about you, the self-assumed ‘vanguard.’ They prove you as bad for, or irrelevant to, good work, as The New Masses or The Saturday Review or Clifton Fadiman or all the parlor talkers or the publishers or most of the writers themselves.

  It sounds like a meeting of the Junior League of Nations at Wellesley; or the Blairstown Conference; or a debate between an episcopal and a unitarian minister on the meaning of god in human experience.

  The questions are so bad and so betraying they are virtually unanswerable; and are indeed more interesting as betrayals, that you only think you know what good work is, and have no right to your proprietary attitude about it.

  1. A ‘usable past’? (The polite substitute for ‘tradition.’ Academic; philosophic; critics’ language.) Beethoven ‘used’ the ‘past’: but do you think he ever sat down to wonder, What am I using: What is useful?

  All of the past one finds useful is ‘usable’ because it is of the present and because both present and past are essentially irrelevant to the whole manner of ‘use.’ Moreover, things are ‘usable’ only by second-rate people and worse. To those who really perceive them they are too hot to handle in any utilitarian way. These same things ‘use’ the good people because they have become a part of their identity.

  You want to ‘use’ these people of the past in the same way you want to ‘use’ the writers and others of the present A lot of the imitation good ones love to be used. Some of the better ones use you, but you don’t know it: you think you are using them.

  Each of these ‘usable’ people are of their time and place, certainly: but essentially they are timeless (or near it), and international neither in the League-of-Nations nor the Esperanto nor the ‘Marxian’ sense, but because they recognize themselves as members and liberators of the human race.

  ‘Usable’: Every good artist; every record of the past; and more particularly, all of the present and past which exists in the ‘actual,’ ‘unrecreated’ world of personal or speculative experience.

  Christ: Blake: Dostoyevsky: Brady’s photographs: everybody’s letters: family albums: postcards: Whitman: Crane: Melville: Cummings: Kafka: Joyce: Malraux: Gide: Mann: Beethoven: Eisenstein: Dovschenko: Chaplin: Griffith: von Stroheim: Miller: Evans: Cartier: Levitt: Van Gogh: race records: Swift: Céline:

  Some you ‘study’; some you learn from; some corroborate you; some ‘stimulate’ you; some are gods; some are brothers, much closer than colleagues or gods; some choke the heart out of you and make you dubious of ever reading or looking at work again: but in general, you know yourself to be at least by knowledge and feeling, of and among these, a member in a race which is much superior to any organization or Group or Movement or Affiliation, and the bloody enemy of all such, no matter what their ‘sincerity,’ ‘honesty,’ or ‘good intentions’

  And all the bad and the confused and self-deceiving stuff: Life; The Reader’s Digest; any daily paper; any best-seller, the Partisan Review; the Museum of Modern Art: you learn as much out of corruption and confusion and more, than out of the best work that has ever been done. Only after a while you begin to know certain sectors by heart and in advance,
and then they are no further use to you.

  And why does it have to do with ‘American’ writing, present or future, when Whitman, Beethoven, Blake, Christ, Céline, and Tolstoy have so much in common?

  2. What do you mean, ‘audience’? It draws in to the point of a pin and it spreads out flat like a quoit. Some of the time you are writing for all men who are your equals and your superiors, and some of the time for all the deceived and captured, and some of the time for nobody. Some of the time you are trying to communicate (not necessarily to please); some of the time you are trying to state, communication or none. In the terms you are setting it, no decent writer can possibly be interested in the question. And what sort of conception of ‘audience’ and of ‘serious’ writing can you have, that you can wonder, journalistically, whether this past or any other ten years can make any but an illusory and dangerous difference to it?

  3. Do I place much value on criticism. I sometimes place value on the criticism of a few whom I respect, in one way or another. Few of these happen to be writing critics. I would agree that the literary supplements and the liberal weeklies are corrupted: but more by the corruption of the minds which hold forth in them than by any amount of advertising or politics. I will have to add that in this respect of unsound mind I think nearly everything I have read in the Partisan Review is quite as seriously corrupting, and able further to corrupt the corruptible.

  4. No; no living. Nor do I think there is any place in our etcetera for ‘literature’ as a ‘profession,’ unless you mean for professional litterateurs, who are a sort of high-class spiritual journalist and the antichrist of all good work. Nor do I think your implied desire that under a ‘good system’ there would be such a place for real ‘writers’ is to be respected or other than deplored. A good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist Only no one need worry: for this same good artist is about the one sort of human being alive who can be trusted to take care of himself.

  5. ’I find, in retrospect,’ that I have felt forms of allegiance or part-allegiance to Catholicism and to the communist party. I felt less and less at ease with them and I am done with them. I feel sufficiently intense allegiance toward certain shapes of fact and toward certain ideas that I prefer not to speak of them here, beyond saying that no organization of thought or of persons has ever held them, that they are antipathetic to any such, and that I feel a rarity but by no means a lack of com pany, and that this company is made up entirely of men who do not breathe one another’s breath nor require anything of one another: but are of the only free human beings (and being such, are the only conceivable liberators of others): and that this freedom appears to me impossible under a ‘democracy’ or in any self-compromising, ‘co-operative’ effort I am most certainly ‘for’ an ‘intelligent’ ‘communism’; no other form or theory of government seems to me conceivable; but even this is only a part of much more, and a means to an end: and in every concession to a means, the end is put in danger of all but certain death. I feel violent enmity and contempt toward all factions and all joiners. I ‘conceive of my work as an effort to be faithful to my perceptions. I am not interested in ‘expressing’ ‘myself as an ‘individual’ except when it is suggested that I ‘express’ someone else.

  6. The political tendency of American writing as a whole since 1930’ smells no more nor less to heaven than all the other tendencies of all the tendential sheep who make up the bulk of what they please to call literature and who are perhaps the worst of all poisoners of the air against good writing and the most effective secondary stimulants toward the development of ferocity in personal integrity. No, I don’t like ‘literary nationalism’ either. Nor ‘peace,’ nor ‘democracy,’ nor ‘war,’ nor ‘fascism,’ nor ‘science,’ nor ‘art,’ nor your evident self-assurance that by the act of talking in favor of the ‘necessary independence of the revolutionary artist’ you know any more about it than Granville Hicks does.

  7. I have often considered this question (though I might better respect a writer who hadn’t done so in the least); first glibly (‘on no condition will I enter a war’); later with more and more perplexity, distress, and immediate interest, fascination, and fear. I think I know that I would do one of the following: 1) Enlist in that part of the war which seemed most dangerous, least glamorous, least relevant to any choice I might have through ‘education,’ ‘class,’ ‘connections,’ or personal craftiness. This either for personal-’religious’ reasons or out of an ‘artist’s’ curiosity, or more likely both. 2) Join the stalinist party and do as I was told or Bore from Within it 3) Stay wherever I happened to be, mind my own business, refuse every order, and take the consequences. 4) Stay wherever I happened to be, and write what I thought of the War, the Pacifists, etc., wherever I could get it printed. 5) Escape from it by whatever means possible and by the same means continue to do my own work. Of these I believe my likeliest efforts would be between 1, 3, and 5. On my ‘responsibility as a writer? I suspect 1 or 5 would be my choice, and that the steepest responsibility would favor 5. 2 is least attractive to me. I am worst confused between ‘responsibilities’ as a ‘writer’ and as a ‘human being’; which I would presume are identical, yet which involve constant ‘inhumanity’ even in times of no official war. Or, in other words, I consider myself to have been continuously at war for some years, and can imagine no form of armistice. In that war I feel ‘responsible.’ I doubt any other form of war could make me feel more so.*

  Part Three: Inductions

  I will go unto the altar of God:

  Even unto the God of my joy and gladness.

  Give sentence with me, 0 God, that I may hear thee, and defend my cause against the ungodly people: 0 deliver me from the deceitful and wicked man:

  For thou art the God of my strength: why hast thou put me from thee: and why go I so heavily while the enemy oppress me?

  O send out thy light and thy truth that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy dwelling:

  For I will go unto the altar of God, even unto the God of my joy and gladness, and upon the harp will I give thanks unto thee, O God, my God:

  Why art thou so heavy, O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within me?

  O put thy trust in God, for I will yet give him thanks, which is the help of my countenance, and my God.

  Inductions

  I remember so well, the first night I spent under one of these roofs:

  We knew you already, a little, some of you, most of you:

  First

  First meetings

  Down in front of the courthouse Walker had picked up talk with you, Fred, Fred Ricketts (it was easy enough to do, you talk so much; you are so insecure, before the eyes of any human being); and there you were, when I came out of the courthouse, the two of you sitting at the base of that pedestal wherefrom a brave stone soldier, frowning, blows the silence of a stone bugle searching into the North; and we sat and talked; or rather, you did the talking, and the loudest laughing at your own hyperboles, stripping to the roots of the lips your shattered teeth, and your vermilion gums; and watching me with fear from behind the glittering of laughter in your eyes, a fear that was saying, ‘o lord god please for once, just for once, don’t let this man laugh at me up his sleeve, or do me any meanness or harm’ (I think you never got over this; I suppose you never will); while Walker under the smoke screen of our talking made a dozen pictures of you using the angle finder ( you never caught on; I notice how much slower white people are to catch on than negroes, who understand the meaning of a camera, a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil eye): and then two men came up and stood shyly, a little away; they were you, George, and you, Mr. Woods, Bud; you both stood there a little off side, shy, and taciturn, George, watching us out of your yellow eyes, and you, Woods, quietly modeling the qu
id between your molars and your cheek; and this was the first we saw of you:

  You had come down to see if you could get relief or relief work, but there is none of that for your kind, you are technically employed; and now we all stood there, having introduced ourselves, talking a little, and the eyes of people on us, and you gained a little confidence in us when I met these eyes with a comic-contemptuous stare and a sneering smile; and we drove you out home: out to your home, Ricketts, the furthest along that branch road: and there you showed us your draughted corn, for you could not get it out of your head that we were Government men, who could help you: and there on the side porch of the house Walker made pictures, with the big camera; and we sat around and talked, eating the small sweet peaches that had been heating on a piece of tin in the sun, and drinking the warm and fever-tasting water from the cistern sunk beneath the porch; and we kept you from your dinners an hour at least; and I was very sorry and ashamed of that then, and am the same at all times since to think of it:

  And it was here that we first saw most of you, scarcely knowing you by families apart: I can remember it so clearly, as if it were five minutes ago, and we were just drawn away from your company, and were riding the light ridges of the winding road, in the silence before we were able to speak a word of you, when the whole time was like one chord and shock of music: how you, Paralee, came up a path barefooted carrying two heavy buckets, a cornshuck hat on the back of your head; you were wearing a dress that had been torn apart a dozen times and sewn together again with whatever thread was handy; so far gone, so all-the-way broken down into a work dress, there had been no sense to wash it in a year; it had a big ruffle of wrecked curtain lace down the breast; and as you came toward us you looked at us shyly yet very directly and smiling through your friendly and beautiful, orange-freckled black eyes; and I shall not forget you soon, your courtesy, your dreadful and unanswerable need; your manure-stained feet and legs as you stood in the path and smiled at us; nor God knows, you, Margaret, a year and a whole world more hopeless; nor you children: you started out from behind bushes and hid behind one another and flirted at us and ridiculed us like young wild animals, and even then we knew you were wonderful, and yet it is amazing to me now how relatively lightly we realized you then: I think it was that there was so much going on, so richly, and so disturbing: such a strangeness of meaning and precariousness of balance, which I was wishing so much as never before to make secure; chiefly in one: in you, Mrs. Ricketts: