Man from Babel

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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. (Oct.)

Library Journal

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

Hugh Haughton

...[T]he story of Jolas as 'Neo-American poet' and avant-garde editor but...also a portrait of the journalist as hero, 'a romantic of the Gutenberg mythos.' The two roles seem uneasily related.
— London Review of Books

Robert Kiely

The writing, even in this unfinished memoir, will strike any reader....If language was his neurosis, he turns it...to his advantage as a reporter....Again and again, Jolas reveals not only his sharp eye and ready ear for a good story but also his sensitivity to human suffering and injustice.
— The New York Times Book Review