On Janet Malcolm's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa."

From Janet Malcolm's Diana & Nikon (1980)

Janet Malcolm was always comparing; it’s one of her signature analytical moves. In her brilliant “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her great 1980 essay collection Diana and Nikon), she compared three versions of a famous Walker Evans portrait: (1) “Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife” (1936), published in Evans’ American Photographs (1938); (2) untitled portrait, published in James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); and (3) “Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama” (1936), published in Walker Evans: First and Last (1978). Malcolm wrote,

The 1938 version shows a young woman of the most delicate, aristocratic beauty, with elegant bones, clear eyes, and smooth white skin, gazing confidently into the camera with a slight smile of humorous indomitability on her lips – a woman who, in her poverty, has the sort of profound beauty that her more fortunate sisters may envy but will seek in their hairdressers’ and dressmakers’. The version in Walker Evans: First and Last shows an ugly hag, her face covered with lines and wrinkles, her brow furrowed with anxiety, her mouth set in a bitter line, her eyes looking out in the expectation of seeing nothing good. What one feels looking at this portrait is no longer envy but outrage at the conditions that should have turned a beautiful woman into such a defeated and desexed being – a member of what James Agee, writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” The photograph of the sharecropper’s wife that appears in Agee’s book gives the same impression of beauty and indomitability as the one in American Photographs, even though it comes from the same negative that is used in the 1978 book. The poor printing of forty years ago did a cosmetic job, washing out lines, smoothing out the brow, minimizing the damage. The printer of the new book has performed an act of restitution, and his mercilessly scrutinizing prints are consequently more in line with Agee’s book: the pictures and the text don’t agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers’ lives. “How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it?” Agee cries. “Don’t listen to him,” the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. “He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It’s not as bad as he says.”

This paragraph contains three arresting revelations: (1) there are three versions of this iconic photo; (2) the 1938 version is slightly different from the other two; and (3) the 1941 version – the one in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – is a “cosmetic” version of the one that appeared in 1978. Malcolm’s passage also contains an interesting opinion – that the 1978 “ugly hag” version is the one “more in line with Agee’s text.” Is Malcolm right? I don’t think so. 

In the text, Allie Mae Burroughs is named Annie May Gudger. At least twice, Agee describes her as beautiful:  

1. Saturday is the day of leaving the farm and going to Cookstown, and from the earliest morning on I can see that she is thinking of it. It is after she has done the housework in a little hurry and got the children ready that she bathes and prepares herself, and as she comes from the bedroom, with her hat on, ready to go, her eyes, in ambush even to herself, look for what I am thinking in such a way that I want to tell her how beautiful she is; and I would not be lying.

2. ... and now for the first time in all this hour we have sat here, Annie Mae takes her stiff hands from her ears and slowly lifts her beautiful face with a long strip of tears drawn, vertical, beneath each eye, and looks at us gravely, saying nothing.

It's true that Agee sees beauty in things that many people would consider ugly, e.g., a tenant farmer’s rough wooden shack, a tenant farmer’s worn overhauls. He eventually has this to say about his sense of beauty: 

They live on land, and in houses, and under skies and seasons, which all happen to seem to me beautiful beyond almost anything else I know, and they themselves, and the clothes they wear, and their motions, and their speech, are beautiful in the same intense and final commonness and purity.

The photo of Allie Mae Burroughs that Evans included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is very much in line with Agee’s sense of her beauty, as expressed in his text. Malcolm’s idea that the “ugly hag” version would’ve been a better match strikes me as wrong. I think it would’ve struck Evans and Agee that way, too. 

From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men