Man from Babel

Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity

by Eugene Jolas, Andreas Kramer (Editor), Rainer Rumold (Editor)

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.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 1998

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intellectual and cultural significance of Eugene Jolas' memoir, published nearly fifty years after the author's death in 1952, has been comprehensively discussed by other reviewers, and forms the subject of a very helpful introduction by the editors, Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold. Although Jolas is best-remembered for his association with James Joyce, his memoir ranges across the worlds of journalism, avant-garde and modernist artistic and literary movements, and broad intellectual trends in the USA and Europe, and there are also details about life in France (particularly Alsace-Lorraine) and post-war Germany. The editors describe Jolas as "an active, if somewhat naïve player" in the "metamorphosis" of the avant-garde from interwar counter-culture to "quasi-official culture of a free world engaged in the confrontational politics of the Cold War", and judge that his account of his life "retains throughout a unique, if problematic, blend of German romanticism and American optimism."

The title's Babel refers firstly to Jolas' own personal circumstances: he was raised in the borderland of Alsace-Lorraine to French- and German-speaking parents who had returned from the USA, and he pursued a career in American journalism that involved long periods in Europe. However, Babel also evokes Jolas's philosophy of language, which explains his enthusiasm for the work that was to become Joyce's Finnegan's Wake – famously, much of Joyce's extraordinary literary endeavour was originally published under the name "Work in Progress" in serial form in transitions, a literary journal that Jolas co-founded while working in France. Jolas ends his memoir by dismissing artificial languages such as Esperanto as "pedantic, unimaginative creations", but looking forward to a new "language of the future" into which all the great languages would continue to flow, a "monolithic structure of infinite richness and imagery... the language of the New Occident" (it's curious that his vision doesn't appear to have been global: his list of participating languages has only one non-Indo European representative, namely Hebrew).

Jolas was introduced to Joyce by Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses and proprietor of the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris; as a journalist, Jolas' first instinct was to ask Joyce for an interview, although gestures from Beach alerted him that he had committed "lèse Dedalus". Jolas avoided disaster by quickly desisting from this line of enquiry, and a personal friendship developed. Jolas witnessed first-hand Joyce's sadness and despair at his daughter's increasing mental illness, and it's interesting that Joyce's consultation on the matter with Carl Jung was at last resort, rather than because of any intellectual affinity between the two men: Joyce "had little confidence" in Jung’s abilities, and he had mocked him as "Rev. Dr Jung"; Jung had written on Ulysses but had found it to be boring.

Jolas, by contrast, was more attracted to Jung's theories, and a meeting was arranged by Cary Baynes. Jung apparently told Jolas that the last he had heard from Freud had been a note saying "this is not what we set out to do together", on receiving a copy of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.

Kramer and Rumold observe that the battle against Nazism allowed Jolas "to unite his vision of the liberating artistic revolt of the international avant-garde with the pragmatic ethos of the American journalist". As a member of the Psychological Warfare Division, Jolas was assigned to London during the Blitz before landing at Utah Beach tasked with reforming German journalism; he interpreted his brief as a mission eradicate the Nazi "malady of language".

Jolas' work in Germany also included creating a journal, Die Wandlung, with German anti-Nazi intellectuals such as Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber (brother of the late Max Weber). The journal was published by Lambert Schneider, who had worked for Salomon Schocken. Jolas took a sceptical view of intellectual life in post-war Germany; the Kramer and Rumold note that "his appraisal differs markedly from the convenient image many German intellectuals have advanced of post-war German writers' critical incisiveness".

Jolas was also a poet, and the book reproduces a number of his works; some of these, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, play with words and are multilingual. However, Jolas’s prose style is that of straightforward reportage, and although very readable is marred in places by portentous touches (Paris, for example, is "the Seine cosmopolis").

The editors have also included crucial annotations that give background on many of the figures name-checked by Jolas through the course of the narrative.

[Giles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enlightening about relationship with modernism, revolution of the word--but Jolas himself comes across as strangely naive, his relationship with Joyce still a mystery--wish the book would have given more references to where Jolas's other writings can be found

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good biography, covering Jolas's life and significance in his times.