Sorry to be so vague

Hugh Haughton

  • Man from Babel by Eugene Jolas
    Yale, 352 pp, £20.00, January 1999, ISBN 0 300 07536 7
  • No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider edited by Maurice Harmon
    Harvard, 486 pp, £21.95, October 1998, ISBN 0 674 62522 6

‘Transition began and of course it meant a great deal to everybody,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her story of ‘how two americans happened to be at the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at the time knew nothing’. The two Americans she had in mind, as so often, were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. One reason the transatlantic review transition (founded soon after the demise of the Transatlantic Review itself) meant a great deal to Stein, was that its first issue included ‘An Elucidation’, her ‘first effort to explain herself’ (as she explained). Stein soon changed her mind (though not her priorities), prematurely using the Autobiography to announce the magazine’s demise: ‘In the last numbers of transition nothing of hers appeared. transition died.’

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