Transition and Internationalism as Praxis

TRANSITION AND INTERNATIONALISM AS PRAXIS

Celia Aijmer Rydsjö and AnnKatrin Jonsson

The modernists were expatriates, travellers and translators,

and studies of the early twentieth century often employ the

terms ‘internationalism’, ‘transnationalism’ and

‘cosmopolitanism’. Today these concepts can all be regarded

under the umbrella term ‘globalisation’, which is a concept of

more recent date.1 As numerous historians, sociologists and

political scientists have noted, the history of globalisation

is one of a long and multidimensional process, especially if

the term implies a combination of intensified global

interconnections and interdependencies and an increasing

critical awareness of these processes.2

Unsurprisingly then, the modernist period has attracted

substantial attention in globalisation studies. As Melba Cuddy-

Keane points out, the period around the end of the nineteenth

century and the beginning of the twentieth is often regarded as

a starting point for the modern globalisation process.3 For

example, political scientist David Held and sociologist Roland

Robertson both recognise the first stages of a ‘global

consciousness’ appearing in the second half of the nineteenth

1 The noun ‘globalisation’ first appeared in the American Merriam Webster dictionary in 1961.2 See for example, Robertson, R., Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture (London,1992); Waters, M., Globalisation, (London/New York, 1995).3 Cuddy-Keane, M., ‘Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization’, Modernism/modernity, 10:3 (2003), pp. 539-540.

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century.4 While agreeing with the historical outline presented

by these scholars, Cuddy-Keane finds potential limitations in

any strictly economic or political description of a rising

global awareness. She argues instead for the relevance of art

and aesthetics as an integrated part of the investigation of

changing perceptions of nation-states and social and

geographical spaces. In her reading, modernist literary styles

and techniques create multiple perspectives and a pluralism

that engender an alternative ‘cultural and critical’ discourse

on globalisation. This critical discourse ‘deflects the

appropriation of “globalisation” for a process driven and

determined solely by economics, claiming cultural globalisation

as an equally important, if indeed not earlier, development’.5

Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the

Nation offers another relevant analysis of internationality in

modernism, in which she coins the term ‘critical

cosmopolitanism’, characterised by ‘an aversion to heroic tones

of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of

epistemological privilege, views from above or from the centre

that assume a consistent distinction between who is seeing and

what is seen’.6 Both Cuddy-Keane and Walkowitz explore the

aesthetic, ethical, political and cultural aspects of

cosmopolitanism, and both represent attempts to address the

4 Held et al. ascribes the modern period of globalisation to the years between 1850 and 1945, while Robertson understands the period between 1879 and 1925 as the take-off phase for globalisation. See Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge, 1999).5 Cuddy-Keane, ‘Modernism’, p. 540.6 Walkowitz, R., Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation, (New York, 2006), p. 2.

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formal properties of literature, a dimension lacking in much

cultural criticism of the 1990s.

However, even if a reconceptualisation of globalisation

and cosmopolitanism is at stake in the works of these critics,

their interest is primarily in individual modernist writers and

narrative strategies such as perspectivism, focalisation,

pluralism, self-reflexivity and collage.7 This means that both

projects remain philosophical and literary ventures, fixed

within an abstract textual sphere.

Internationality in modernism can also be approached from

a different perspective, primarily by addressing concrete

historical events and cosmopolitan experience – meaning the

crossing, questioning and destabilising of national borders.

Although the identification of aesthetic models of openness

towards different cultural expressions is a valid project, it

is not enough to consider modernist art as merely a reflection

or critique of historical processes such as globalisation,

imperialism or new communication technologies. We wish to draw

attention to modernism’s very real and practical concerns about

internationalism. This involvement can be seen as a praxis,

meaning that time and place are always specific and specified.

Moreover, cultural production involves money and a market. Most

importantly, it includes agency. As Patricia Clavin puts it,

‘transnationalism is first and foremost about people: the

social space that they inhabit, the networks they form and the

ideas they exchange’.8

7 Walkowitz’s argument also includes the contemporary writers Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and W. G. Sebald. 8 Clavin, P., ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, 14: 4 (2005), p. 422.

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By examining these concrete social spaces, it is possible

to learn more about the mechanisms of international networking

and its effects, but also about modernism per se. As we will

show in our analysis of the little magazine transition, published

in Paris and New York between 1927 and 1938,9 the emphasis on

creating, assembling and undermining the concept of art is

intricately linked with the idea of questioning and

destabilising national borders.10 Jolas’s interpretation of

internationality is interesting, not least since his thoughts

on border crossings and their relation to art coincide with

more recent accounts. For example, transnationalism, as Clavin

expresses it (2005), ‘carries a poetic potency’ that entails

transformation:

‘Border crossings’ permits the study of encounters that both

attract and repel, between people, institutions and artefacts

of all kinds, which are represented and analysed through a

host of different types of evidence. (…) [T]he notion of

‘border crossing’ does suggests [sic] a horizontal movement

through frontiers, be they of a nation or a differently

defined social culture. The expression also carries with it

the implication that, through these crossings, borders break

down.11

9 A total of 27 issues were published, the first appearing in April 1927 andthe last in April-May 1938. However, publication was suspended between the issue 19/20 and 21 from June 1930 to March 1932.10 When transition changed from a monthly to a quarterly magazine with the thirteenth issue in the summer of 1928, it took the subtitle ‘An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment’. In 1932, this subtitle was replaced, but the international emphasis was maintained as it became ‘An International Workshop for Orphic Creation’.11 Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, p. 423.

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Although the idea of a universal art that bridges differences

across national borders is essentially romantic, the emphasis

on praxis, on ‘doing’, is, as we suggest, a decidedly modernist

feature. Our contention is that transition points to an essential

element of modernism, one that indicates how international

interconnectivity becomes praxis, as ideas, work and practices

literally cross and question borders.

The example of transition

The editor of transition, Eugene Jolas,12 had an interest in

language and art beyond national boundaries that can in part be

explained by his background. Born in 1894 to immigrant parents

in New Jersey, the young Eugene was raised in the bilingual

French-German culture of Alsace Lorraine. In the introduction

to Jolas’s autobiography, Man from Babel, Andreas Kramer and

Rainer Rumold discuss how Jolas’s experiences from this region

inspired the publication of transition and fuelled his ambition

to make the magazine a forum for and promoter of

internationalism.13 At the age of fifteen, Jolas immigrated to

New York, before finally heading back to Europe in 1923, now

fluent in English as well as German and French. Jolas describes

the confusion that arises from using three world languages,

while also envisioning the possibility of a new, international

language:

12 transition was founded by Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria Jolas, the latter was also an unofficial co-editor. Its associate editors were Elliot Paul (1927-1928), Robert Sage (1928-1929), and James John Sweeney (1936-1937).13 Kramer and Rumold, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Man from Babel, pp. xvi-xvii.

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Language became a neurosis. I used three of the basic world

languages in conversation, in poetry and in my newspaper

work. I was never able to decide which of them I preferred.

An almost inextricable chaos ensued, and sometimes I sought

the facile escape by intermingling the three. I dreamed a new

language, a super-tongue for inter-continental expression

(…).14

Jolas’s trilingualism came to affect his career and his

thoughts about modern art, language and writing in significant

ways. Aspiring as a youth to become a great poet, he sent his

English poetry to Pearson’s Magazine, only to be informed by the

editor that great poetry could only be written in one’s native

tongue.15 Jolas was unmoved by this verdict and never let

himself be restrained from expressing himself in whatever

language he chose. His lack of identification with any

particular language was instead developed into an asset,

increasingly taking the shape of dreams about a new

international language.

In the February 1929 issue of transition, for example, Jolas

stresses the need for a ‘universal word’.16 The characteristics

of this universal or international language remains somewhat

unclear, although Jolas envisaged the ‘language of the future’

as absorbing ‘Anglo-Saxon, Greco-Latin, Celtic, Indian,

Spanish, French, Canadian French, German, Pennsylvania German,

Dutch, Hebrew, the Slavic and Slavonic languages, American

slanguage and all the elements of language now active on

14 Jolas, Man from Babel, p. 2.15 Ibidem, pp. 49-50.16 Jolas, ‘Super-Occident’, transition 15, Feb. 1929, p. 15.

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American soil’.17 The editor of transition acknowledged the need

for a literature with a multilingual component, published

multilingual poems and encouraged others to also do so. These

language experiments were not merely an expression of

linguistic creativity. Jolas also nurtured the utopian dream

that a multilingual language could pave the way for a new

society: ‘The new vocabulary and the new syntax must help

destroy the ideology of a rotting civilisation’.18 For Jolas, internationalism and transnationalism became practical

strategies to create a new ideology and new values.

Putting modernism into public practice

Despite its radicalism and elevation of literary

experimentation, transition has to a certain extent remained

marginalised by literary critics, while Eugene Jolas has often

been described as an eccentric character on the periphery of

high modernism. Although transition promoted now iconic writers

such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Samuel

Beckett and Ernest Hemingway (to name only a few), its editor

has perhaps been perceived as being too much of a romantic

idealist to earn a position among modernism’s prominent

figures.19 Fearing the destructive forces of nationalism, Jolas

17Jolas, Man from Babel, p. 273.18 Jolas, ‘Super-Occident’, p. 15. See also Perloff, M., ‘“Logocinéma of theFrontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s Multilingual Poetics and Its Legacies’ http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/jolas.html, 2010-06-11.19 Another reason why Eugene Jolas remained a marginal figure is the reluctance of literary studies to shift its focus from the literary work itself or its author, to include issues of production and distribution. See

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used transition to expound his ideas on a future of nation-free

universalism: ‘We dont [sic] want to be good Europeans, but

good universalists. Asia, Europe, the two Americas interest us

as much as any narrow ideological Fascistic conception of the

West. There can emerge a beautiful rivalry out of such a

universal competition of the spirits’.20A self-proclaimed

romanticist, Jolas wanted ‘to encourage the creation of a

modern romanticism, a pan-romantic movement in literature and

the arts’.21

Jolas’s references in this context were primarily

contemporary, as he ascribed the romanticist tendencies of the

modern epoch to ‘Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, even

simultaneism’, the common enemy being ‘shallow realism’.22 What

was at stake, however, was less a matter of Jolas’s capacities

as a writer or his literary preferences – his belief in the

spiritual qualities of art, or the degree to which romanticism

can be distinguished from modernism – than how he put his ideas

into practice. Indeed, as his publications reveal, Jolas was

less interested in philosophical quandaries or artistic ideals

per se, than how to live those ideals, how to communicate them,

where to live, what cultural and national identity to belong

for example, Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge, 2001).20 Jolas, ‘On the Quest’, transition 9, Dec.1927, p. 168.21 Jolas, Man from Babel, p. 93, emphasis added.22 Ibidem, p. 152. Although Eugene Jolas introduced surrealism to English readers, he finally bade ‘definitive adieu’ to the movement in 1940 on the grounds of feeling that ‘mere demonological resistance to totalitarian menace was not enough’, ibidem, p. 188. In re-reading the German romanticists he also found that they had ‘a certain share of responsibilityfor the genesis of Nazi ideas’ in their predilection for the ‘totalitarian state, for anti-semitism’ and the belief in German superiority, ibidem, pp. 221-222.

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to, how to publish, in what language, what form, how to make

the right connections and how to make a living. Jolas’s

romantic idealism was never primarily an expression of

authority, but rather an ongoing pragmatic quest for new ways

of life and new ways of communicating.

Importantly, Jolas’s visions of a new language and a new

world order were not harboured in private, and the

international impulse in transition is not directed inwards. Mark

Morrisson’s study of little magazines, The Public Face of Modernism:

Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920, is especially

noteworthy in this context as it draws attention to the public

nature of such British and American magazines and the ways in

which these were engaged in the public sphere and commercial

culture. According to Morrisson, little magazines share the

core assumption ‘that art must have a public function’. The

public nature of the little magazine is itself a breach of

allegedly modernist ideals, often described in terms of a

‘great divide’ between elitist art and mass audiences.23 This

means that even if the editors and contributors saw their work

as aesthetic, they challenged the tendency to isolate the

aesthetic experience and deny it social significance.24

Jolas’s publication transition provides a case in point for

the social and practical function of little magazines. In the

words of surrealist Philippe Soupault, transition was ‘not (…) a

game in which only the form was considered, but rather a project

23 See for example, Huyssen, A., After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, 1986).24 Morrisson, M., The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison, Wisconsin, 2001).

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for an entente between action and poetry’.25 Indeed, the editors of

transition display a staunch belief in the transformative power

of their publications. For example, in the early years of

transition’s existence, Jolas met with his expressionist German

friends Carl Einstein and Hans Arp to discuss ways in which to

combat the rise of German nationalism with ‘a new expressionist

ethos’.26 The same belief in the political function of art

informs the last issue of transition, no. 27 of April-May 1938.

In this issue, the editor collected ‘such intellectual and

artistic forces of Europe and America as were not already

enslaved by the shallow realism that had been introduced by the

totalitarians’.27

Jolas never expressed a political faith in institutions or

a consistent ethical position. Nevertheless, the bond he

created between the transnational, the social and the aesthetic

was not limited to his writing. Jolas’s internationalist

thoughts were always associated with his actions, whether by

seeking out international communities, publishing, writing or

translating. This work would have appealed to an editor, and

Jolas did not see his career in journalism as a detraction from

his deep commitment to multilingual art and experimentation –

the roles of the poet and the journalist, the little magazine

editor and the newspaper interviewer of movie stars never

clashed. From an early age, Jolas dreamt of becoming a

newspaper man,28 and while certainly proud of Joyce’s ‘Work in

25 Soupault, P., ‘ Transition and France’, transition 19/20, June 1930, p. 376,emphasis added.26 McMillan, D., transition 1927-38: The History of a Literary Era (London 1975), p. 53.27 Jolas, Man from Babel, p. 152.28 Ibidem, p. 26.

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Progress’ appearing in transition, he acknowledged that it was

primarily newspaper work that made him conscious of the ‘malady

of language’ and encouraged him to find ways in which to

facilitate the journalist’s task by ‘using a more precise,

richer and more fluid speech’.29 30

Practical matters: location, financing and networks

The same pragmatic approach determined the location of

transition. In Paris, the city of light and culture in the 1920s

and 1930s,31 transition as well as other little magazines could

flourish. During these decades Paris became a gathering place

for artists, writers and intellectuals and thus became the

setting for social exchange between creative individuals of

many nationalities.32 Evidently, Paris was not the only

European city offering this kind of creative and resourceful

milieu: Munich, Vienna, St Petersburg and Barcelona were also

important modernist and avant-garde hubs at this time. However,

the neighbourhoods on the left bank of the Seine have become

legendary, partly because of the attraction they held for 29 Ibidem, pp. 108-109.30 As the Second World War was approaching, Jolas seems to have felt the need for more direct action. The last issue of transition was published in 1938, and during the war Jolas once again became a journalist and a newspaper man, dedicated to fighting fascism and Nazism. In 1941 he startedworking for the US Office of War Information which brought him to London, Normandy and, after the war, to Germany where he helped establish a new German press, McMillan, transition, p. 73.31 Three issues, no. 24-26, were, however, edited, printed and published in New York, as Jolas returned to the US in 1936 in order to take up journalism again. The very last issue of transition, no. 27, was published back in Paris in 1938.32 See for example, Ford, H. D., Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939 (London, 1975); Fitch, N. R., Sylvia Beach and the LostGeneration: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York, 1983).

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different social groups, especially affluent Americans. Not

only did the inflow of money stimulate an extravagant

nightlife, it also provided possibilities for little magazines

such as transition, and small presses such as Sylvia Beach’s

Shakespeare & Company, publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses.33 These

magazines and presses were not dependent on making a financial

profit, a crucial aspect when it came to introducing,

legitimising and canonising modernist and avant-garde texts.34

It is a well-known fact that Shakespeare & Company relied on

Sylvia Beach’s family funds.35 However, the dependence of

transition on the inheritance of Maria Jolas, the editor’s wife,

is less recognised. Neither Eugene Jolas nor Dougald McMillan

ever disclosed the financial sources behind transition,36 though

Maria Jolas revealed something of her contribution to the

little magazine in her autobiography, where it is mentioned in

passing in a single sentence in her biographical chronology:

‘1924 Visiting in Louisville, where my father died of a stroke

33 In Published in Paris, Ford mentions twelve small presses run by Englishmen and Americans in France between the wars. Apart from Shakespeare & Company,others included Three Mountains Press, Contact Editions, Black Sun Press, Black Manikin Press and Obelisk Press, pp. 404-15.34 See Rainey, L., Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven/London, 1999).35 Sylvia Beach’s mother, Eleanor Orbison Beach, managed to find the capitalneeded to start the bookshop, which amounted to 3,000 dollars; Fitch, Sylvia Beach, pp. 38-40.36 Although it was Maria Jolas’s inheritance that made transition possible at all, and despite the fact that her contribution to transition is noteworthy and indeed vital, neither Eugene Jolas’s autobiography nor Dougald McMillan’s study of transition acknowledge her extensively. Maria Jolas’s autobiography, however, is appropriately entitled Maria Jolas, Woman of Action. Maria Jolas translated extensively for the little magazine, including wholeworks by, for example, James Joyce, Nathalie Sarraute and Gaston Bachelard.She was the magazine’s secretary and thus handled the finances and most correspondence, for example with Frances Steloff, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, the official American agent for transition from 1928.

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in June; left me financially independent (later made transition,

then my school possible)’.37

Eugene Jolas’s contempt for borders and nations, and his

knowledge of the major European languages helped him create

connections and contacts with the avant-garde in Paris and in

several other European cities, a vital part of his work with

transition. In the United States he had met many writers, and

while compiling Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie américaine (1928), had

corresponded with several of them.38 Through his work as a

reporter at the Chicago Tribune he also knew many artists and

writers, both American and European, living in Paris.39 These

contacts, together with a gift for striking up and forming

relationships, became vital aspects of the practical

internationalism of transition. In fact, the importance of

Jolas’s own efforts when it came to forming relationships with

the European avant-garde through personal encounters and

extensive travel cannot be overrated. Each issue of transition

provides ample evidence of the efforts of Jolas and the other

editors, as contributions came from across Europe, including

from those involved in the movements of expressionism (for

example, Doeblin, Benn, Grosz, Kafka, Edschmid, Stramm, Lasker-

Schüler, Trakl, Schickele, Sternheim), dadaism (for example,

Ball, Huelsenbeck, Arp, Schwitters) and surrealism (for

example, Bréton, Aragon, Soupault, Desnos, Eluard, Gracq). In 37 Jolas, M., ‘Dateline’, Maria Jolas, Woman of Action: A Memoir and Other Writings, p.2. 38 McMillan, transition, p. 16.39 Through his work as a journalist, Jolas met and interviewed writers and artists who later would become contributors to transition. They included Philippe Soupault, Léon-Paul Fargue, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris and many more. See Jolas, Man from Babel, pp. 65-86.

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and through transition, Jolas created a modernist avant-garde

network, and these international networking skills awakened the

interest of The Servire Press, providing him with the

opportunity to resume the publication of transition in 1932. The

Dutch modernist press wanted to publish recent works from

different parts of the world, and Jolas had a reputable name

when it came to finding and translating new works of high

literary quality.40

Foreign influences

The sharing of texts across national borders should properly be

seen as one key to the wide influence of the modernist

movement, but the importance of translations to modernist

poetics has been sadly neglected.41 From the outset, transition

had the ambition of inspiring enthusiasm for world literature,

and even in the first issue more than one-third of the

contributions were translations. Several of these were carried

out by the editors themselves, Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul,

and by the unofficial editor, Maria Jolas. Over the years,

French, Russian, Serbian, German, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian,

Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish and Native American

contributions appeared in translation.

The publication of literary works in translation was

intended to bring about a revolution in what Jolas felt to be

an obsolete English language. However, this ambition was

40 McMillan, transition, p. 62.41 Two exceptions are Stephen G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language and Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation.

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increasingly felt to be insufficient. As Craig Monk notes,

Jolas eventually felt that translation should be dispensed with

altogether, since this was the only way one could remain

faithful to the writer’s creativity and intentions.42 To

publish in the original became the next step in the ‘revolution

of the word’. In February 1933, issue no. 22, Jolas writes:

‘With this issue, transition enters upon a new policy of tri-

lingual publication. The crisis of language is now going on in

every part of the Occident. It seems, therefore, essential to

retain the linguistic creative material intact, and to present

constructive work, as much as possible, in the original’ ().43

To publish in the original language becomes yet another way to

disintegrate what Jolas sees as ‘the banal word’ and thus

liberate ‘the creative expression’.44

The many translations published by the editors and Maria

Jolas only constitute one example of the very practical work

involved in making transition a successful promoter of the

international avant-garde. Distribution of the publication,

especially in the United States, was a particular concern. If

the English language and its literature were to be revitalised

by the literature of other countries, it was crucial that

foreign literature gained access to the American continent.

From the outset, transition had a difficult time making it

through the US customs or postal authorities, as US officials

often deemed the contents of the little magazine obscene or in

violation of, for example, the obscenity provisions of the US

42 Monk, ‘Eugene Jolas and the Translation Policies of Transition’, Mosaic 32: 4(1999), p. 17. 43 Jolas, ‘Night Through Night’ transition 22, Feb. 1933, p. 177.44 Jolas, ‘Statement’, transition 18, Nov. 1929, p. 175.

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Postal Code. The presence of James Joyce in the contents list

was presumably enough to have US officials confiscate the

shipments of transition. Ulysses had been banned since 1918 in the

US, and as transition published instalments of Joyce’s ‘Work in

Progress’, which later became Finnegan’s Wake, there were frequent

shipping problems. The US distribution, however, was much helped

by Frances Steloff, the owner and founder of Gotham Book Mart

in New York – the official American agent for transition. An

ardent advocator of freedom of speech for writers, Steloff was

among the first to recognise and promote authors such as James

Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Kay Boyle and André

Gide.45

The many problems with the shipping and distribution of

transition gave the editors the opportunity to vent their

contempt for the US authorities. In transition issue no. 8,

November 1927, Jolas and Paul mocked the customs officials and

‘their understudies’:

As was expected, transition has afforded the United States

officials, and their understudies in the various

commonwealths, continuous opportunities to display their

maudlin instincts.

No. 3 was found by Mr. Fuller, manager of the Old Corner

Book Store of Boston, arsewiper to the late J. Frank Chase,

and the patron saint of the book review pages of the Boston

45 By advertising and selling avant-garde novels, poetry and literary reviews, Gotham Book Mart attracted the attention of censors on several occasions, and on one such occasion, in 1928, the police confiscated more than 80 titles in the store. See Gertzman J. A., Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 113.

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Herald and the Boston Transcript to contain material in

violation of the Massachusetts law.

No. 4 was turned back by the Philadelphia customs

officials on the ground that it was copyrighted material.

No. 5 was held up needlessly and without justification

for weeks by the port authorities of New York.

No. 6 has been confiscated by the same gentlemen and

refused admission on the ground that it contained obscene

matter.

Needless to say, the editors of transition, being more than

sixteen years of age and of sound mind, have no respect

whatever for the law, and certainly none for the underpaid

and scant-witted crew the citizens of the Unites States hire

to annoy them. Occasionally it may be necessary to print a

few extra copies in order to circumvent them, but our

subscribers will be served and the bookstores will be

supplied. (…) Since the newspaper writers from coast to coast

have declared transition to be utterly unintelligible, and have

proved conclusively from their comments that it was, in fact,

quite meaningless to them, any claim that the magazine is

likely to corrupt the morals of American youth seem far

fetched.

Naturally, we shall continue to print whatever we think

best (…).46

The tone is dismissive and the word choice displays contempt

but also triumph, befitting an avant-garde review. However, the

battle against censorship was not primarily fought on the

printed page. The circumvention of the censorship authorities

46 Jolas and Sage, ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’, transition 8, Nov. 1927, p. 179-80.

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in the US had to be handled very practically, as numerous extra

shipments and reprints were needed to supply American readers.

In this context the correspondence between Maria Jolas and

Frances Steloff is particularly revealing, as it voices their

concerns regarding the US customs’ confiscations and the need

for new shipments and reprints of transition.47

Wider implications

The prominent position given to international themes and

practices in transition and other Paris reviews can be regarded as

a strategic distancing from the standards of past publications,

bound to national canons. As we suggest, this is an aspect of

transition that underscores its modernist agenda. From this

perspective our argument diverges from, for example, Craig

Monk’s analysis of transition, which places the little magazine

in a romantic, expansionist tradition. Monk argues that

transition contributed to a ‘new understanding of “tradition”

that drew on the related achievements of artists working in any

number of languages’ and that Jolas desired an ‘expanded

understanding of literary tradition based on greater cultural

communication’.48 It is debatable, however, whether Jolas

wished for an expanded literary tradition or canon, built on

increased cross-cultural understanding. The aim of transition was

hardly to preserve art as tradition or as an institution; more

accurately, its aim was to challenge the conventions of the

47 See Frances Steloff’s correspondence with Maria Jolas in the Gotham Book Mart Records, 1928-1948, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York. 48 Monk, ‘Eugene Jolas’, p. 21.

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publishing industry that had shaped nationalistic canons and

thus, in a manner, had monopolised tradition.49 From this

perspective, Jolas’s elevation of internationalism and

transnationalism should be seen as performing a different task

from that of ‘bring[ing] together diverse peoples, eras[ing]

borders between the European nations (…) produc[ing] a large

cosmopolitan and international consciousness’.50 The

publication of transition can instead be seen as an effort to

disrupt romantic views on the autonomy of art and the link

between nation, culture and language. This attempt also

represented a desire to intervene, linguistically and

aesthetically, with nationalist discourses that were gaining

ground at the time.

The genre of the little magazine would have appealed to

Jolas. In his role as editor, he was free to create a personal

montage of international contributions. Even if it is possible

to see transition as an avant-garde modernist publication on the

basis of the editors’ wishes to revolutionise and

internationalise art and language, it would be a mistake to

call transition an avant-garde publication on the basis of the

texts it features. Certainly, not all of the texts in any one

issue of transition can be called avant-garde; not even the

majority can be said to be driven by the ambition to

revolutionise art. For example, translated short stories by the49 Indeed, transition in many ways seems to meet Peter Bürger’s now classic definition of the avant-garde in his Theory of the Avant-Garde as a movement which criticised the very institution of art. That is, while modernism is seen by Bürger as an internal critique of writing practices, effective within the framework of art, he believes that the avant-garde should be understoodas an attack on the institution of art and its lack of influence outside its own framework.50 Perloff, ‘Logocinéma’, p. 17.

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Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg (hardly in the avant-garde

frontline) were published on two occasions and were featured

between texts by James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and

reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso.51

The point is therefore not that all of the international

contributions to transition were avant-garde in character, but

rather that the genre of the little magazine itself, with its

conglomerate of texts and illustrations, challenged the

institution of art and the established institutions that upheld

art. The magazine wished to provide a ‘new outlet’ in the

publishing industry.

It is highly remarkable that the editors of transition

return again and again to their hopes that the little magazine

could provide the basis for a new literature and, most

importantly, a new way of life. In one of the first issues,

Jolas and Elliot Paul claim that transition should be the

‘quintessence of the modern spirit in evolution’. ‘We believe’,

they wrote, ‘in the ideology of revolt against all diluted and

synthetic poetry’ and are willing to embrace ‘the immense

lyricism and madness of illogic’.52

[There] is no hope for poetry unless there be disintegration

first. We need words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics,

new symbols, new myths (…) We who live in the chaotic age,

are we not aware that living itself is an inferno? And having

51 transition 1, April 1927, transition 5 August 1927.52 Jolas and Paul, ‘Suggestions for a New Magic’. transition 3, June 1927, p. 178.

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experienced it, can we not express it by seeking new outlets and

new regions of probability?53

The little magazine, transition, with its ambition to break down

national barriers and stake out new regions, sought to be precisely

such an outlet for new abstraction and symbols of the ‘modern

spirit in evolution’.54 In issue no. 15, the two editors

express themselves in a similar vein: ‘Literature alone does

not suffice. We also have to mediate about the motives and

directions of our being. We must seek the true conditions of

life around and within us, in order to avoid becoming esthetes

of a dying decade’.55 Jolas and Paul never seem to give up

their conviction that the word was powerful enough to recreate

humanity and the world.

As we have argued, transition is best analysed in terms of

function and reception rather than aesthetics alone. Our

examples show that we need to recognise the making of the

little magazine as a social practice – a praxis. To investigate the

little magazine as a genre it is necessary to involve a much

greater number of agents and mediators. We must look at

publishers, printers, editors, illustrators, photographers,

contributors, distributors and readers, amongst others. Only

then does the true internationality of Jolas’s project become

visible. On a wider scale, by looking at modernism or the

avant-garde as a broader and much more practice-oriented

cultural phenomenon we attain a more complex view of the

movement and the significance of its social infrastructure.53 Ibidem, p. 179, emphasis added.54 Ibidem, p. 178.55 Jolas, ‘Notes’ transition 15, Feb. 1929, p. 187.

21

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