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

Readers who have dined on a surfeit of private lives this past year might find themselves quipping, la Gertrude Stein: a memoir is a memoir is a memoir is a memoir. But, in the hands of Eugene Jolas, friend and sometimes editor to such pivotal modernist figures as Stein, Joyce, Hemingway, Breton, and Gide, the memoir becomes an invaluable intellectual and historical document. Born in New Jersey and reared in Alsace-Lorraine, the trilingual Jolas was intimately acquainted with borders and frontiers. In fact, his life crossed and recrossed a series of sharp divides: poetry and journalism; romanticism and modernism; France, Germany, and the U.S. After a hardscrabble decade spent chasing after journalism jobs in the United States, Jolas returned to Paris as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. There he made the acquaintance of some of the century's greatest literary and artistic figures; later, he came to found and edit Transition, the influential journal that first published portions of Finnegans Wake. To some extent, his recollections can be read as a paean to being in the right place at the right time (possible subtitle: Famous Surrealists I Have Known). Jolas is a powerful writer in his own right, however, and his anecdotes shed light on far more than just his own individual life. Even in the rarefied avant-garde circles in which Jolas moved, the political movements of the '30s cast their long shadow, and some of the book's most powerful passages detail his disillusionment with the German Romantic poets and their brand of idealized nationalism. Now being published for the first time, almost 50 years after Jolas's death, Man from Babel is a memorable chronicle of the century in the process of being born to itself.