Man from Babel (Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity) - Hardcover

Jolas, Eugene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300075367 ISBN 13: 9780300075366

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

The autobiography of Eugene Jolas, available for the first time nearly half a century after his death in 1952, is the story of a man who, as the editor of the expatriate American literary magazine transition, was the first publisher of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and other signal works of the modernist period. Jolas’s memoir provides often comical and compelling details about such leading modernist figures as Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, Breton, and Gide, and about the political, aesthetic, and social concerns of the Surrealists, Expressionists, and other literary figures during the 1920s and 1930s. Man from Babel both enriches and challenges our view of international modernism and the historical avant-garde.

Born in New Jersey of immigrant parents, Jolas moved back to France with them at the age of two. He grew up in the borderland of Lorraine and later lived in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York, where he pursued a career as a journalist and aspiring poet. As an American press officer after the war, Jolas was actively involved in the denazification of German intellectual life. A champion of the international avant-garde, he continually sought translinguistic, transcultural, and suprapolitical bridges that would transform Western culture into a unified continuum.

Compiled and edited from Jolas’s drafts and illustrated with contemporary photographs, this memoir not only reveals the multicultural concerns of the man from Babel, as Jolas saw himself, but also illuminates an entire literary and historical era.

About this title

About the Author

Andreas Kramer is lecturer in German, Department of European Languages, Goldsmiths, University of London. Rainer Rumold is associate professor of German literature and critical thought at Northwestern University, has written books on Gottfried Benn, German Expressionism, and Helmut Heissenbüttel. He is coeditor (with Marjorie Perloff) of the series Avant-Garde and Modernsim Studies.

Reviews

Jolas made his mark as a multilingual writer, editor and friend of James Joyce in 1920s and '30s Paris. Jolas worked persistently on this "novel?autobiography?my fact and fiction book" starting in the 1930s, but his death in 1952 prevented him from making final revisions. Although posterity does not remember Jolas's writings, he himself took them very seriously, and he writes much of the evolution of his poetic sensibility as a writer. There are a number of valuable insights here into literary friends like Gertrude Stein, who is quoted as telling him, that "Joyce is a third-rate Irish politician," and announcing that "[t]he greatest living writer of the age is Gertrude Stein." With Joyce, the approach is less anecdotal, given that great writer's taciturnity, but it's clear that Jolas understood the Irishman like few other friends. This would be a valuable text for its perceptions of prewar Paris alone, but fortunately Jolas continued the narrative to his work in postwar Germany, where his view of the defeated Axis powers just after the war is devastating in its total condemnation of all things Teutonic: "Along with his rapaciousness and cruelty the German's capacity for self-pity would appear to be inexhaustible." So acute are Jolas's aesthetic goals and so happy was he to discover new artistic achievement that we may easily forgive his own poems, which he quotes at length and, sadly, to little artistic effect. All told, this is a valuable memoir by someone who was there and knew everyone.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jolas is now best remembered as founder of the modernist magazine transition and as the publisher of James Joyce and other avant-garde writers of the 1920s. But in this fascinating autobiography, compiled from drafts and journals, we meet a man who was a vital factor in the intellectual life of Europe and the United States. Raised in Alsace-Lorraine, Jolas grew up speaking French and German and later learned English as a newspaperman in this country. Although a journalist by trade, he immersed himself in the literary world of whatever city he lived in?New York, Chicago, Paris?and was a fluent poet in all his languages. His life in Paris between the two wars and his many friends among the Dadaists, Surrealists, Modernists, and others involved in his "revolution of the word" will interest most readers. The story of his later years as a World War II censor and newsman for the U.S. Army is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand postwar Germany and Europe. Highly recommended, especially for academic libraries.?Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300075367
• ISBN 13: 9780300075366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Kramer Andreas, Rumold Rainer