Flipping through old annuals to find James Agee's missing year

by Jack Neely

It's well known, of course, that author James Agee spent his early childhood in Knoxville. His memories of family life in Fort Sanders became the basis for two of his best-known works, "Knoxville: Summer 1915," published in 1938; and A Death in the Family, the autobiographical novel that won the Pulitzer in 1957, after Agee's own death.

Agee was almost 10 when he moved with his family to the Sewanee area and attended the Episcopal academy, St. Andrews. That's well known, too—partly because it's the basis of his other novel, Morning Watch—as is the fact that he later attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he published his first stories, before moving on to Harvard.

Short bios relate Agee's adolescence in terms of private schools: Agee at St. Andrews, Agee at Phillips Exeter, Agee at Harvard. It's easier to tell the story that way, of course—without mentioning that for an untidy year and a half, the teenage Agee was back in Knoxville, enrolled in a crowded public high school.

Moving back home wasn't necessarily a happy occasion. He moved here mainly because his widowed mother was at loose ends: her father, Joel Tyler, was ill, and she was contemplating a second marriage. They moved in with his grandparents and Uncle Hugh, the artist, on Clinch near 11th. And he went to Knoxville High.

Most kids who lived within the city limits went there too. It was bigger and more crowded than St. Andrews, upward of 2,000 students in one big building on the north side of downtown. Just find the 1924 and 1925 yearbooks and look at the freshman and sophomore classes. They're crowded by the hundreds onto the front steps of that building: the boys, most of them wearing ties, generally jammed up front or lounging in the back, leaning against those columns; most of the girls, in bobbed hair, clustered in the middle. There are too many to make out identities clearly. Their faces are only lines and dots.

Look at the place today, if you want to; the big columned brick building at the corner of Central and Fifth, it's now called the Board of Education. There's a statue of a charging doughboy, his fist raised in defiance, out front. Installed in 1921, it commemorates the 192 former KHS students and nine KHS teachers who died in the war. The adolescent Agee observed it skeptically.

In 1924 Knoxville High was especially proud of its football team, which regularly traveled as far as Chattanooga for a match. That year they beat both McCallie and Baylor. KHS also made pretensions toward a literary life, devoting several pages of its annual to poetry and short stories. Some are interesting, but none of is Agee's. Only seniors were allowed to contribute.

That year the seniors taunted the freshmen with their "Freshmen Yell." It went like this: "Rah! Rah! Ma! Ma! Pa! Pa!

M-I-L-K! Milk!"

A few months after Agee and his mother arrived back in Knoxville, Laura Agee took off to remarry; she left her son and his sister with their grandparents on Clinch. As he turned 15, Agee didn't necessarily like his hometown more than any teenager does. In stark contrast to St. Andrews, Knoxville in 1924-25 was a dirty, noisy, chaotic place. There were interesting things happening here, especially concerning music—but probably not much that a 15-year-old middle-class white kid would know about.

When he finished the school year in '25, he went to England and France on a bike tour with his old St. Andrews mentor, Father Flye. After that, he returned to Knoxville mainly in his prose.

His mother, who had already moved to Maine with her new husband, enrolled him at Phillips Exeter Academy. That October, he wrote to Father Flye, "I have written stuff for the Monthly. . .a story and 2 or 3 poems in this month. This will get me into the Lantern Club, I hope. That is one of the big things to be in here."

The "stuff" that 16-year-old Jim Agee wrote to impress the Lantern Club was largely stuff that ridiculed his old home. (He learned, as many of us have since, that the easiest way for a Southerner to make friends with a Northerner is to make fun of the South.)

One story is called "Jenkinsville," which scholars are pretty sure must be Knoxville. Fortunately for Knoxville's reputation, the story's difficult to find except in the archives of Phillips Exeter.

"Jenkinsville has a White Way," it goes. "It is a hundred yards long, and it leads from the depot straight to the Court House. It is lighted at regular intervals by very new, very chaste street lamps, and it has been carelessly splashed with asphalt, which lies along the street's center like a tattered and wrinkled ribbon. At the Court House, however, all improvements end in a dusty loop, well shaded, and frequented by mountaineers, hounds, sows, and other animals."

He may have been referring to a smaller place than Knoxville, of course, since Gay Street from the old (Southern) depot to the Court House is several hundred yards long; but the other details ring true.

I've never read "Knoxton High," another early Agee satire. But I've heard that in the story, that doughboy statue in front of the school is inscribed, "IT WAS HELL, BUDDY."

The fact that Agee's first fiction about Knoxville was sarcastic and a little snobbish may startle those who know his reputation for intelligent sympathy. But in his study, A Way of Seeing, scholar Alfred Barson comments that regardless of what he became later, in 1926 Agee was in some ways still a typical American teenager and, worse, a "New England preppie writing about a past which had not yet fully touched him."

Still, Agee's early letters to Father Flye are also surprisingly thoughtful, articulate, and, somehow, urgent. He may have understood on some level that even when he left Knoxville High at 15, his life was already more than a third over.