Young Misfit

By J.D. Reed

TWELVE YEARS: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD IN EAST GERMANY by Joel Agee

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

324 pages; $14.95

When Huck Finn, that free-floating escapee from society's foibles, lit out for the "territory ahead of the others" to avoid being "sivilized," he formalized an American tradition of adolescent rebellion. Now Joel Agee, son of Writer James Agee (A Death in the Family), steps in those boyish footprints in this finely written, moving memoir. From age eight to 20, Agee's life in East Germany reveals a young swashbuckler at odds with collectivism and Teutonic culture, and with his own aspirations. By turns poetic and picturesque, Agee energetically catalogues his expatriate passage to manhood with a pinpoint eye and a healthy American distaste for pretension.

After moving from Mexico to the bomb-pocked G.D.R. in 1948 with his mother Alma, half brother Stefan and stepfather Bodo Uhse, a highly acclaimed Socialist writer, Agee begins to observe with a foreigner's freshness. He remembers the early Iron Curtain: a chicken-wire fence in an old couple's garden, preventing imperialist rabbits of the British Zone from devouring the Voik's lettuce. He recalls the angst of a zealous Red poet when Khrushchev denounced Stalin: "In a fit of self-loathing he wished to be a lumberjack in some remote country like Norway. Very shortly after that, he was introduced to a Norwegian lumberjack who wanted nothing more than to leave his backwoods existence and be a poet engaged in the battles of the day."

Generally, political problems fail to engage Agee's imagination, except for the time a smuggled Monopoly set turns professorial Marxists into board-game landowners, buying play-money hotels with an almost erotic glee. But when a predictable argument about whether Napoleon was a reactionary or a progressive begins in a gray schoolroom, Agee slips a pulp detective novel behind his textbook. The adventures of fearless

Tom Brack speak to his fantasy.

A member of the Intelligenz, an American, a Jew and a capitalist, Agee battles for acceptance by his peers, but a restless private conscience pulls him elsewhere. In an eerie prefigurement of his own condition, Agee's pet magpie is one day besieged by hundreds of wild members of its species outside the window. After Agee puts his bird out to join them, it is pecked to death. But there are lyric moments in this boyhood as well: slingshot escapades, fishing trips, and cowboys-and-Indians in abandoned Nazi foxholes. But that world ends with puberty.

Obsessed with losing his virginity and seething with high spirits, he skips school frequently to shoplift in exotic West Berlin. Agee admires the ducktail haircut, listens to Chuck Berry on American Forces radio, and after flunking eleventh grade, is "tried" by his somber, adultlike classmates of the Free German Youth organization. He makes a final battle to unite with the masses: he finds work as a shipyard laborer. But Agee's fresh starts are doomed by an inner turmoil. His attempts at poetry, painting, music and love end in failure. Near the end of his endurance, his parents' marriage unravels, and he leaves for America with his mother just months before the Berlin Wall is begun in 1960.

After years as a freelance translator, Agee, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter, was named fiction editor at Harper's magazine last month.

The impact of Twelve Years lies not in the record of postwar Eurocommunism that Agee inadvertently chronicles, but in his portrait of the artist as a young misfit.

The notebooks in which he bemoans his lack of talent become the cornerstones of his gifts as a writer and observer.

Huckleberry Finn would have understood, and welcomed Agee as a soulmate on the raft. --By J.D. Reed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.