(23 stories from "transition" magazine, avant-garde art an...)
23 stories from "transition" magazine, avant-garde art and literary journal of the 1920s, featuring authors: Kafka, Joyce, Stein, Benn, Josephson, Boyle, Schwitters, Paul, Coates, etc.
(The autobiography of Eugene Jolas, available for the firs...)
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.
Eugene Jolas was an American and French critic, journalist, translator, and writer. He lived in both the United States and France but wrote mostly in English.
Background
John George Eugène Jolas was born on October 26, 1894, in Union Hill, New Jersey (what is today Union City, New Jersey) to the family of Eugène Pierre Jolas and Christine Ambach. His parents had immigrated to the United States from the Rhine borderland area between France and Germany several years earlier. In 1897 the family returned to Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen (today in French Lorraine), where Jolas grew up, and which had become part of Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War.
Education
In 1901-1909, Eugene Jolas attended grammar school, High School College in Forbach; Catholic Seminary in Montigny, near Metz, Lorraine. After basic schooling, Eugene decided to return alone to America in 1909. He attended classes in English at De Witt Clinton Evening High School while working a succession of menial delivery jobs.
Career
While studying at De Witt Clinton High School Eugene Jolas was involved in a succession of menial delivery jobs. Eventually, he made contacts in the world of journalism and began writing for the Volksblatt und Freiheitsfreund, and The Pittsburg Sun in Pennsylvania. In 1917, he joined the United States Army Medical Corps and was stationed in Camp Lee, Virginia. During his tenure in the military, he continued his journalistic pursuits, editing small newspapers for enlisted men and veterans.
Shortly after being honorably discharged, Jolas went back and forth between North America and Europe for several years in pursuit of a career in journalism. While in America, he reported for The Savannah Morning News, The Waterbury Republican, and The New York Daily News. His visits to Paris in 1923 and 1924 influenced his decision to take a position with The Chicago Tribune Paris Edition. His work here as the city reporter and as a literary columnist (writing "Rambles Through Literary Paris") provided his first interaction with many artists and writers living in Paris.
During this period, Jolas passed a number of landmarks in his life. In 1924, his first book of poetry, Ink, was published by Rythmus Press in New York. This was followed by a second volume, Cinema, issued in 1926 by Adelphi Press, New York. On January 12, 1926, he returned to New York City where he married Maria MacDonald. Jolas and his wife lived in New Orleans, where he reported for The Item Tribune.
In 1927, after his return with his family to Paris, Eugene Jolas embarked on a more ambitious literary task, the publication of "transition". This now famous literary review was begun by Jolas with the assistance of his first co-editor, Elliot Paul. Transition, published initially over a period of eleven years became known as a major literary laboratory for modern writing.
Editing transition became Eugene Jolas's metier for over a decade. During the same period, however, he continued his own writing and published several works through different publishers. In 1927, in collaboration with his wife, Jolas published Le nègre qui chante, an anthology of spirituals and work-songs, which the two had become acquainted with while living in the American South. 1929 saw the publication of Secession in Astropolis. In nearly every year which followed, Eugene issued a new book of poetry. Among these were: Hypnolog des Scheitelauges (1931), Epivocables of 3 (1932), The Language of Night (1932), Mots Déluge (1933), Angels and Demons (1937), Vertical (1938), I Have Seen Monsters and Angels (1938), Planets and Angels (1940) and Words from the Deluge (1941).
During this same period, Eugene Jolas became more involved with the literary scene in Europe and came to develop strong relationships with a number of writers and artists. During his earliest years in Paris, he had made the acquaintance of James Joyce and was eventually able to secure Joyce's "Work in Progress" for the first issues of transition. Their association grew so that Jolas acted as an unofficial editor of much of Joyce's new writings as well as a confidant and friend. Among Eugene Jolas's other literary and artistic acquaintances in France were Harry and Caresse Crosby, Kay Boyle, André Breton, Padraic Colum, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Georges Pelorson, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Philippe Soupault.
The 1930s were a fruitful time for Jolas in other ways, as well. In 1935, he took a sabbatical from his editorial duties to work in New York City for the Havas News Agency, principally translating news from America for transmission to French-speaking countries. He also continued his work as a professional translator. He had begun translating submissions for transition but eventually was asked to do outside work, such as the English language version of Alfred Doeblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. He would eventually work on writings by André Breton, Gérard de Nerval, and Carl Sternheim.
In 1937, after returning to Paris, he resumed work on transition, which was publishing longer issues, though more infrequently. His energies were directed into publishing anthologies of many of the works that had appeared in transition. Transition Stories was issued in 1939, followed by an anthology, Vertical: A Yearbook for a Romantic-Mystic-Revolution in 1941 featuring work by Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy, and Léon-Paul Fargue. In 1938, Jolas was one of the founders of a new literary monthly, Volontés. Also on the board of editors were Pierre Guéguen, Frédéric Joliot, Georges Pelorson, and Raymond Queneau. Volontés disappeared at the outset of the Second World War. The poetry Jolas produced during this time exhibited his growing interest in religious themes, principally Catholic images from his youth. These themes would expand through the 1940s and 1950s to play an important role in Jolas's art and philosophy.
In 1939, Jolas officially suspended production of transition when he moved back again to New York to work as a freelance literary writer. The increasing tensions in Europe convinced him to have his family join him in America after the fall of France in the summer of 1940.
In the early years of World War II, Jolas worked for the Office of War Information in New York. Chief among his duties were processing news in French for transmission to North Africa and providing hometown news for American soldiers stationed in Hawaii. His success as a news writer led to his transfer to London in March 1944, where he continued to translate war news into French for the Allied forces. His tenure here was brief, as he went to France in July of that year to help reestablish journalistic communications in recently liberated towns and villages. He was finally able to reenter his Lorraine homeland in January 1945. His mission was to set-up non-propagandistic newspapers in captured German towns and eradicate traces of Nazi idiom and ideology from the German journalistic vocabulary. His success in Aachen, with the Aachener Nachrichten, and in Heidelberg, with Die Heidelberger Mitteilungen, led to his being appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Deutsches Allgemeine Nachrichten-Agentur (DANA). The mission of this newly-formed agency was to continue the work in reestablishing newspapers in occupied Germany. Jolas expanded the scope of DANA to introduce a literary review, Die Wandlung, on which he worked with Karl Jaspers.
Eugene Jolas continued working with DANA, separated from his wife and daughters who had not moved to Paris, until February 1947. He resigned his post and rejoined his family, compiling the Transition Anthology and assisting Georges Duthuit, who was working to revive transition under a new formula. He also completed a major part of his autobiography, Man From Babel, which he had been working on since 1939. In 1948, he returned to a career in journalism as news editor for the Neue Zeitung in Munich. As well, he took on the duties in the School of Journalists established by the occupational government's Information Services Divisions, eventually writing a textbook, Der Moderne Reporter. Between 1949 and 1950, Jolas contributed a weekly column, "Across Frontiers" to The New York Herald Tribune Paris Edition.
Jolas resigned his posts in Munich to return to Paris in April 1950. He continued freelance writing but became very ill over the following two years. He died of nephritis in Paris on May 26, 1952.
On January 12, 1926, Eugene Jolas returned to New York City where he married Maria MacDonald, whom he had met in Paris. His first daughter, Betsy MacDonald, was born on August 5, 1926. In 1929 Jolas's second daughter, Marie Christine Georgia Jolas (known as Tina) was born.