Jolas, Eugène, 1894-1952

Eugene Jolas (1894-1952), poet, journalist and translator, was the founding editor (with Elliot Paul) of transition . Maria Jolas (1893-1987), his wife, was a translator in her own right, as well as a school administrator and, along with Eugene, a confidant of James Joyce. More complete biographical sketches can be found in the finding aid for the Eugene and Maria Jolas Papers (GEN MSS 108).

Epithet: writer

Eugene Jolas, poet, author and editor of Transition magazine.

Maria Jolas, author and translator.

Eugene Jolas, poet, author and editor of Transition magazine.

Maria Jolas, author and translator.

Eugene Jolas, poet, author and editor of Transition magazine.

Maria Jolas, author and translator.

John George Eugene Jolas was born October 26, 1894, in Union Hill, New Jersey. His parents, Eugene Pierre and Christine (née Ambach) had immigrated to the United States from the Rhine borderland area between France and Germany several years earlier. The family would return to Europe, specifically Forbach in Lorraine, in 1897. Eugene spent his formative years in this part of Europe which had become part of Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War.

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. 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 U. S. 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, Eugene 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, whom he had met in Paris. His first daughter, Betsy MacDonald, was born August 5, 1926. In the early months of their marriage, Jolas and his wife lived in New Orleans, where he reported for the 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. [See historical sketch of transition below for more detailed information].

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 as well as the birth of the Jolas's second daughter, Marie Christine Georgia Jolas (known as Tina). 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 Eugene 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 free-lance 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, Eugene 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 (later changed to DENA). 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 now 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, Eugene 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 free-lance writing, but became very ill over the following two years. He died in Paris on May 26, 1952.

A chronology of events in Eugene Jolas's life, as well as a bibliography of his works, compiled by Maria Jolas, can be found in the original finding aid to this archives in box 1.

Maria McDonald Jolas was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 12 January 1893. Her parents had moved to Kentucky from Virginia, where their English and Scottish forebears had settled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her father, Donald McDonald, was head of the Louisville Gas and Electric Company. Maria McDonald was educated at Semple Collegiate School, a private school in Lousiville, where she majored in French, Latin, and Literature. On graduating, she was offered a scholarship at the University of Chicago which, to her lasting regret, her family turned down. Instead, she concentrated on her musical talents and for two years, from 1910-11, studied the piano at the Finch School in New York. In 1912, she went to Berlin to study singing and remained in Germany until the outbreak of the First World War. She spent the next four years in New York, where she took singing lessons with the soprano Giulia Valda, while working for Charles Scribner and Sons and the Western Union Telegraph Company. In 1919, she followed Giulia Valda who had returned to Paris, her home, to continue with her singing lessons. It was in Paris that she met Eugene Jolas, whom she married on January 12, 1926 at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. After six months in New Orleans, the Jolases returned to France, where they set up residence first in Paris, then in the village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises, in the Haute-Marne, in the house later acquired by General de Gaulle. Their daughter Betsy was born in 1926. In 1929, they had a second daughter, Marie-Christine. A third child, born in 1930, died shortly after her birth.

Maria Jolas collaborated actively with her husband on transition, first as secretary, then more and more as translator: her contributions include work by Léon-Paul Fargue, Philippe Soupault, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, Bernard Faÿ, and Jean Paulhan. In 1928, the Jolases together published Le nègre qui chante, an anthology of spirituals, and in 1936-38, they translated Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis .

In 1932, in collaboration with the French linguist Hermine Priestman-Bréal (daughter of the French linguist Michel Bréal), Maria Jolas founded the École bilingue de Neuilly, which was an attempt at using the most advanced pedagogical methods for teaching in both English and French, while following the official French programs from nursery school through the Baccalauréat.

Throughout the 1930s, Maria Jolas became especially close to James Joyce, with whom she shared a strong interest in music and singing. In the summer of 1932, while the Jolases were on holiday in Feldkirch, in the Austrian Alps, and Joyce was visiting his eye doctor in Zurich, they agreed, at his request, to look after his daughter Lucia, who by that time had showed serious signs of mental deterioration. As Lucia's state worsened in the following years, Maria Jolas was one of the people Joyce turned to for advice and help.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, while her husband returned to the United States, Maria Jolas evacuated her school to La Chapelle, a hamlet near Saint-Gérand-Le Puy, a small village in the Allier, where the school functioned at a reduced level for another year before it was forced to close down. The Joyces, whose grandson Stephen attended the École bilingue, spent Christmas 1939 in Saint-Gérand, and they remained there until their departure for Switzerland in December 1940.

In September 1940, Maria Jolas left France to join her husband in New York with her two daughters. During the war years, she devoted her energy to the support of the Free French cause. In 1941, she joined the "France Forever" organization, and in 1943 founded the "Cantine La Marseillaise" at 789 Second Avenue, which she ran until 1946 for the benefit of soldiers, sailors, and aviators enlisted in the Free French forces. Meanwhile, she continued her work as a translator, and took over her husband's work for the Encyclopaedia Britannica . In March 1944, she joined the Office of War Information as Head of the French language section.

Returning to France in March 1946, Maria Jolas served for one year as director of the Information Service of the relief organization "Aide américaine à la France", visiting schools and orphanages, while actively pursuing her career as translator. In 1949, to benefit the Joyce family, she organized the first major Joyce exhibition at the Gallery La Hune in Paris. In the same year, she compiled the Joyce Yearbook which was published by Transition Press.

After the death of Eugene Jolas in May 1952, Maria Jolas became more involved in translation work: in particular, she translated all the work of Nathalie Sarraute, who became a close friend, and a large number of books and articles on art history and art criticism. An opponent to the Vietnam War, she was an active member of the Paris American Committee to Stop War from 1966 until its forced closure in 1970. (The part of her papers dealing with her involvement in PACS was donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.) In 1970, her translation of Sarraute's Between Life and Death was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize by the Society of Authors in London.

Until the end of her life, Maria Jolas remained an important presence in the international community of Joyce scholars, taking part, in particular, in the celebrations of the centenary of Joyce's birth in 1982. She divided her time between Paris and the house she had purchased in 1950 in Chérence, near La Roche-Guyon, in Normandy.

Maria Jolas died in Paris in 1987 at the age of 94.

Founded in 1927 by Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul, transition, an international literary review, became an immediate sensation for its promotion of modernist aesthetics in writing and art and its choice of memorable contributors. Eugene Jolas had made a number of acquaintances in the arts while writing a column for The Chicago Tribune Paris Edition. His friendship with a wide range of writers and artists became a starting point for the magazine's distinctive cadre of talent. The first issue alone was represented by original works by Kay Boyle, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, André Gide, and Archibald MacLeish. Installments of James Joyce's "Work in Progress" (later published as Finnegans Wake ) appeared in eleven of the first fourteen issues, setting the experimental tone for the review.

The magazine continued into the 1930s, despite the replacement, in 1929, of co-editor Elliot Paul by Robert Sage. Issues began to appear with less frequency, due to the monumental task of arranging for contributions and translating works into English, which was done principally by Eugene and Maria Jolas. Numbers of transition began to be focused on themes. Issue 13 was the "America Number"; Issue 16/17 highlighted "The Revolution of the Word." Issues from the mid-1930s began to reflect Eugene Jolas's theses about the interaction of language and artistic creation. Transition printed manifestoes that seemed to signal a change in the editorial policy of the magazine, which had initially set out to be an inclusive forum for modernist expression. In particular, Jolas made public his break with Gertrude Stein in a manifesto entitled "Testimony Against Gertrude Stein," cosigned by Henri Matisse, Tristan Tzara and Georges Braque which appeared in issue 23 (1934-1935).

The review, did however, continue to bring new voices to an appreciative audience. Writers such as James Agee, Dylan Thomas, Raymond Queneau and Muriel Rukeyser were published in later issues. Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis appeared in installments in issues 25-27. Coordinating with literary works were representations of other artistic media. Jolas regularly printed artwork and photographs by Hans Arp, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Alberto Giacometti, Kurt Schwitters and Joan Miró. The final issues in the late 1930s also featured musical scores by Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Edgar Varèse, George Antheil and Chester MacKee, along with stills from motion pictures.

Publication of transition was suspended after issue 27 in 1938, and the following year, Jolas returned to the United States. In February, 1947, after resigning from a succession of military positions involving reestablishing newspapers in occupied Germany, Eugene Jolas attempted to revive transition with Georges Duthuit as principal collaborator. Duthuit eventually became editor, with Eugene Jolas acting as an advisory editor. The new, expanded Transition Press not only produced a new series of transition between 1948-50, but also issued, in 1949, the James Joyce Yearbook, edited by Maria Jolas, and a Transition Anthology of works which had appeared in the original review. The new review, which principally featured works of modern French writers such as Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Pichette, Antonin Artaud, René Char, and André du Bouchet lasted for 6 issues before production was ceased in 1950.

Alexeïeff, Alexander - artist, illustrator, friend of Jolas family

Astafiew, M. - go-between for Jolas and Joyce families in 1940-41

Bernard, Kathleen - typist for Maria Jolas during 1970s

Chambers, Judy - niece of Maria Jolas

Chantalou, Simonne - instructor at École Bilingue de Neuilly

Dillenschneider, Célestin - brother-in-law of Eugene Jolas

Dillenschneider, Maria - sister of Eugene Jolas

Du Bouchet, André - divorced husband of Tina Jolas

Duthuit, Claude - son of Georges and Marguerite Duthuit

Duthuit, Marguerite - wife of George Duthuit, daughter of Henri Matisse

Gheerbrandt, Bernard - owner of La Hune Gallery

Greacan, Patricia - organizer of Joyce exposition at ICA, London, 1950

Gutovska, Maria - Member of Polish refugee association in contact with Maria Jolas 1939-40

Humphrey, Mar - close friend of Maria Jolas from Louisville

Irwin, Laetitia (and family) - sister (and relatives) of Maria Jolas

Jaryc, Augusta - sister-in-law of Camille Schuwer

Jolas, Armand - brother of Eugene Jolas

Jolas, Christine - mother of Eugene Jolas

Jolas, Emile - brother of Eugene Jolas

Jolas, Jacques - pianist, composer, brother of Eugene Jolas

Jolas, Helen - wife of Jacques Jolas

Jolas, Helène - daughter of Jacques and Helen Jolas

Jolas, Marie-Louise - unidentified cousin of Jolas family

Jolas, Pierre - unidentified cousin of Jolas family

Lainé, Stella - mother of Gabriel Illouz (husband of Betsy Jolas)

McDonald, Donald - brother of Maria Jolas

McDonald, Josie - wife of Donald McDonald

Noufflard, Berthe - painter Pemberton, Cornelia - sister of Maria Jolas

Phillips, Ewan - organizer of Joyce exhibition at ICA, London

Ponizowski, Eugénie - member of Polish refugee association in contact with Maria Jolas 1939-40

Rasquin, Marthe and Roger - acquaintances of Maria Jolas from the École Bilingue de Neuilly

Sprigge, Sylvia - author, translator

Therèse - cook for the Jolas family prior to World War II Tompkins,

Lionel - translator, friend of Maria Jolas

Vail, Sharon - daughter of Kay Boyle and Laurence Vail