When former Tribune columnist Anne Keegan died last May her husband, Leonard Aronson, decided to create a journalism award in her memory. The challenge was defining the kind of work the award would honor, in language that would inspire journalists to want to win it.
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That was the easy part. We won’t be able to judge entries just by counting I‘s and measuring the decibel level of the reporter’s voice. Some actors act to lose themselves and others to find themselves, yet they comfortably share a stage. Some reporters introduce their subjects to their readers and leave the room, others stay to gently manipulate the conversation, and still others stand on a podium and direct it. Yet all can serve their subjects, even when those subjects are “ordinary people.” Like any other award, I suppose, the Anne Keegan Award will ultimately be defined by the work submitted to the judges.
Aronson and I belong to a book club, and the last book we read was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, written by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans. Great swaths of this strange book, Agee’s account of the lives endured by three white sharecropper families he lived among in southern Alabama in 1936, are pretty much unreadable. Someone in our group said the way to approach the book was to read it as a poem, preferably out loud. But 400 pages is a long poem.
I asked Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, if he’d read Agee’s book. “I did read it, years ago,” he replied—”but it’s not an easy read. I’ve picked it up since on a number of occasions, and find it tough to wander back into. It feels closer to prose poetry than it does to journalistic storytelling, but the conceit behind it has of course been inspirational, the idea that people along the margins (those Studs called ‘the etceteras of the world’) have something to say. That the way they live their lives, the way they carry themselves can inform us. Evans’ photos are as much at the heart of that book as Agee’s writing. There’s something respectful, even dignified about them. As if to say, these are our neighbors, and despite (or in spite of) their economic hard times, they, like the rest of us, dream and laugh and mourn and celebrate. And they manage—and do so with some dignity intact.”
I asked Boo what she meant by that.
“Journalism,” he wrote in Famous Men, “can within its own limits be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth. Again, journalism is not to be blamed for this, no more than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse. The difference is . . . that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses. . . . The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism.”
