"Zululand"

Of the seaweed deposited in Europe by the high tide of U. S. tourism during the 1920's, the lunatic fringe was the Paris group that published the magazine, transition. Passionate toadies to European culture, Editors Eugene Jolas and Elliot Harold Paul printed in 1927 the first fragments of great James Joyce's work in gibberish, provisionally titled Work in Progress, transition writers, uncertain of society's appreciation of their real personalities, thereupon took over Joyce's experimental style to conceal murky thinking behind an inscrutable jabberwocky.

With Depression, literary expatriates began pouring home to the U. S. in the steerage. President Roosevelt's devaluation of the dollar in 1934 made prices in terms of French francs exorbitant, further cleared out the garrets of Paris. Last week Eugene Jolas, whose magazine had long since begun to miss issues, brought out the first issue of transition edited in the U. S. For the U. S. the title had been capitalized into TRANSITION. Sold at U. S. bookstores for 50P:, it was still being printed at The Hague in The Netherlands.

First U. S. issue led off with poems under the editorial heading, VERTIGRAL, presumably meaning giddy. Presumably speaking of death, Samuel Beckett, author of More Pricks Than Kicks, wrote:

veronica mundi veronica munda

give us a wipe for the love of Jesus

sweating like Judas tired of dying tired of policemen feet in marmalade

thrice he came

the undertaker's man

impassable behind his scutal bowler

In Alphabet Book, Richard Eberhart solved the g's with:

Gibbous geometry, by gadfly

Gaffed in galactic galaxy

Is a ghostly gangrened grapery

Where granite giant germs glance.

This same transitional poet ticked off the z's as follows:

Zero without zither zest

Never zephyr-zigzags either,

Nor even has the zone a zyme; But is the sceptics Zululand.

In one of TRANSITION'S few intelligible works, he rhapsodized:

Her eyes are like the putrid sores of infants Born into the world from syphilitic

mothers,

Her mouth is a joke, a leer, a sewer, Her teeth lacerate her tongue when she speaks.

If my mistress is different than

this

Discover it to me, come show me.

We will look lower, and we will see her

breasts Like a musty barn full of rotten fodder,

Like two young rats, consumptive and affectionate,

Gnawing the daylight in a purple fever. If my mistress is different than

this

Discover it to me, come show me.

Editor Jolas himself contributes Ergrif-fenheit, dimly based on Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

"in the island of the trees in the greenland of the silk-silence I stand before a so afternoon in fire it is himmelstufig in the bramble-world the stems sheen the birds flute-twitter in an oubli of temps what am I waiting for"

His Hypnologues run:

"was I afraid a fearface came slow-bobbing in a crevice and a shape white linen-swathed

"a hundred devileens now joined the broohaha nerve-freezing into dances"

TRANSITION'S editorial heading for its stories was PARAMYTHS, presumably meaning disordered or abnormal myths. That the sane human mind instinctively tries to communicate intelligible ideas and that the production of long stretches of gibberish is extremely difficult was proved by the fact that most of TRANSITION'S prose-writers kept breaking through into something like sense and good syntax.

Painter Kurt Schwitters contributed, in addition to Description by a Schizophrenic Patient, a piece on how he composed his Cathedral of Erotic Misery (abbreviated, P:o E M) by pasting on a big column "the leftovers of daily refuse."

TRANSITION also printed some modernistic musical scores, black-&-white reproductions of modern paintings and sculptures, a Mickey Mouse cartoon, the songs of the Fox Indians of Iowa, a plan for an elaborate surgical pavilion on the bank of the Suez Canal and a list of the words that crop out most often in the dreams of Editor Jolas.

In an editorial Jolas says: "The world-crisis and its resultant suicidal nihilism and materialism is still running its historic course. Chiliastic schemers with a rationalist bias are vulgarising the issues. . . ."

"In creative literature [TRANSITION] . . . wants to substitute for the short story and the novel such forms as the modern magic tale, the myth, the legend, the dream, the saga, the folktale. . . ."

''We are perhaps on the threshold of a new art of the word."

Eugene Jolas, who claims to have enough backing to publish four issues a year for three years, is a large, shaggy, moody 39-year-old. Born in Union City, N. J., but taken to Lorraine, he learned French and German first, was 16 before he mastered English in Manhattan's DeWitt Clinton High School. Last December he helped get his brother Emile, French nurseryman, out of a Nazi jail after Emile had insulted Adolf Hitler on French soil, been yanked across the border by a German tobacconist and nabbed by frontier police. Another Jolas brother is Jacques, until last year dean of University of Louisville's School of Music.

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