Maria Jolas, Woman of Action: a Memoir and Other Writings (review)

The Paris Review once dubbed Maria Jolas 'The Leading Lady of Paris Literati of the Thirties'. Eschewing this description, she struck it out, replacing the reference to cultural leadership with one which stressed her adjunct role as close collaborator of her husband, Eugene Jolas, founder and editor of the journal transition. The deliberate self-effacement of the gesture comes as a surprise. In this autobiographical memoir, edited for publication by her long-time friend Mary Ann Caws, Maria Jolas emerges as an independent-minded and intelligent young woman. Born in Kentucky into a stratified social milieu, she instinctively rejected the segregation (racial, sexual and social) which she witnessed all around her. At the age of twenty, she set off for Berlin, to study singing. Obliged to leave Europe with the onset of World War I, she lived for a while in New York and then settled in Paris. She was in her thirties before she met Jolas. Concluding that it was her 'desire for independent action and thought' which 'frightened off most of the young men' (p. 77), she appears nevertheless quickly to have identified Jolas as her life's companion. Marrying in 1926, the couple lived initially in New Orleans before returning to Paris for a double birth — that of their first daughter, Betsy, and then that of the literary magazine transition, twenty-seven issues of which were to appear between 1927 and 1939. Son of a German mother and a French father, Jolas envisaged a literary magazine which, in contrast with This Quarter and Ezra Pound's The Exile, would look beyond Anglo-American writing and engage with artistic experimentation. Encouraged by Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, the Jolases forged ahead with the project. In addition to Joyce, contributors such as Samuel Beckett, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein all became familiar to Maria (the last-named increasingly disliked on account of a perceived malice). In 1932, Maria, desirous of providing an alternative to what she saw as an over-rigorous French education system, set up a successful École Bilingue in Neuilly which flourished until the Occupation period (although the memoir is disappointingly brief in regard to the founding principles of the establishment). Subsequently, Maria returned to America, where she was active in the Free French campaign (her 1941 radio broadcasts are reproduced in this collection). In the long widowhood extending between her husband's death in 1952 and her own in 1987, Maria describes her energy as finding an outlet in three distinct activities: grandmotherhood, translating (Bachelard and Sarraute, among others), and militant dissent from the US war in Vietnam (p. 139). The memoir itself often skates over material deserving of more concentrated attention. Nevertheless, Maria, like her sometime journalist husband, displays the knack of observing, memorably, passing situations and moments. We glimpse, through these pages, the champagne glass tilted by an awestruck French girl towards the temporarily unthreatening and glamorously uniformed German soldier in the early days of the Occupation (p. 108), the smoky whiff of suppers organized by Georges Duthuit in Brancusi's studio, where the company ate beefsteaks barbecued on the sculptor's home-made stove (p. 72), or — most notably of all — the 1975 'End-dream' (its title attributed to Beckett) in which Maria envisages her own post-death scene, an attendant brushing her dead hair, unaware that she always preferred it combed (p. 143). There is a fragmentary character to this collection, which contains some curiously impersonal extracts from Maria's 1946 correspondence with her husband. Caws is, none the less, successful in her goal of bringing into sharper relief a multi-talented and dynamic figure too often occluded by her colourful colocutors.