Man from Babel by Eugene Jolas, ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold Yale 326pp, £20 in UK
The place of Eugene Jolas in literary history is secured by the fact that he published Joyce's ongoing Work in Progress (titled Finnegans Wake when "finished") in the magazine transition. From the first issue in 1927 until transition was suspended in 1938, Joyce's text appeared piecemeal and regularly and the author was paid at the standard rate of twenty francs per page. This arrangement suited Joyce admirably but it suited Jolas even more. By recruiting Joyce for transition Jolas ensured that the magazine took up residence on the very leading edge of the European avant-garde. Additionally, Joyce's polyvalent, multilingual text (written in Bellsybabble, as he called it) sorted well with many of Jolas's own notions of language and culture.
Jolas was born in 1894 in Union City, New Jersey, of parents from Alsace-Lorraine, that cockpit of Franco-German relations. The family returned to the town of Forbach in Lorraine for a visit when Jolas was two years old and was forced by circumstances to remain. Jolas grew up speaking his father's native French and his mother's Rhenish German and the local patois, which was an amalgam of both languages. The rich coal and iron ore deposits of the region drew workers from Italy, Austria, Serbia and Poland, so Jolas was surrounded as he grew by a babble of tongues - it is unsurprising that he finally settled on Man from Babel as the title for his unfinished autobiography.
He completed his education, conducted exclusively in German, with a three-year stint at the Catholic seminary in Montigny-Metz (where he took no vows), and he emigrated to the land of his birth as soon as he could. On arrival he immediately set about learning English and Spanish and, very soon, compounded the paradox of his origins by becoming a journalist on a German-language newspaper in Pittsburgh. His transfer to English-language journalism happened speedily and he consolidated his tabloid techniques while working in the city room of the New York Daily News.
By 1924 he was back in Paris working as city-editor for the Chicago Tribune and, later that year, began producing a weekly column called "Rambles through Literary Paris" for the paper. Over the next two years his work brought him into close contact with the key figures in the European Modernist movements in the arts and certified his credentials as an astute critic and a potential editor of major importance. Jolas and his wife Maria (an echt American singer and a woman of enormous capacities) were first to translate Kafka into English, predating the indiscretions of the Muirs by some time. Both husband and wife were polyglot and the voracious appetite of transition ensured that their translation skills were frequently required during the lifetime of the magazine, and to good effect, too.
Jolas was also a poet - the editors here wisely refrain from quoting too much of his poetry - who was animated by the notion that "the expansion of the frontiers of language", that "the metaphysical word, the word as sacrament, exorcism, conjuration", constituted the proper objective for the writer. He co-wrote the twelve-point "The Revolution of the Word Proclamation" published in tran- sition in 1929 and the "Poetry is Vertical" manifesto a couple of years later. Jolas was committed to liberating the "orphic energies" of expression from the constraints imposed by ideological or political systems, a commitment understandable in the light of his culturally turbulent background.
The present volume, which the editors call "a reader's edition" - a term fully rehabilitated here after the recent depredations of Danis Rose - has been assembled from the Jolas papers held at Yale University. It is the synthetic editorial product of the numerous drafts that Jolas wrote between the late Thirties and his death in 1952. For an autobiography it is curiously impersonal - Jolas had an old-fashioned journalist's faith in facts - but as a record of the creative experimentation of the Twenties and Thirties it is an invaluable source for students of the period. Jolas's final chapters are devoted to his work, from 1942 to 1950, for the US Office of War Information and the Information Control Division in occupied Germany. It is here that the book becomes truly absorbing because Jolas, a lifetime student of German romanticism, confronts in the wreckage of western Europe the warped and disastrous heritage nursed from that nobility by the Nazis.