David Traxel is an avid reader of century-old newsprint, a man of infectious enthusiasms, and an engaging storyteller, but none of this makes him an especially good historian. He has dropped his bucket down the well of time and hauled up 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, “twelve months of rich confusion, wild contradiction, and violent change” during which the United States “would turn from a long history of isolation and preoccupation with its own affairs to active foreign involvement and the challenges of being a world power.” The bucket brims with rich material—T. R. and McKinley, Pulitzer and Hearst, the sinking of the Maine, and the Battle of Manila Bay—and Traxel ladles it out in sparkling cupfuls. But the book is all sparkle, all anecdote, in love with facts and people and events but wary of interpreting them; it brings us vivid pictures of the year as it unfolded but never in the context of the years that will follow. When, for example, McKinley chooses to acquire the Philippines from Spain, we learn how he struggled to make that decision and how Kipling applauded it, Mark Twain deplored it, and Mr. Dooley found the joke in it. What we don’t learn, what we get no inkling of, is why the decision mattered, and what our sudden imperial relationship with the Philippines will mean in the decades to come—for America, for the Filipinos, for democracy, trade, and United States military strategy. The author’s reluctance to shoulder the historian’s burden is almost fatal to the book when it deals with matters of lasting consequence.

Luckily, this account of the “Birth of the American Century” does not always concern itself with the epochal.

Luckily, this account of the “Birth of the American Century” does not always concern itself with the epochal. Traxel, whose previous book was a life of Rockwell Kent, is more at home with minor topics, with fads, trends, and the trivial-but-telling— with the personal rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse, the ethos of Omaha businessmen’s clubs, the baking and marketing of the Uneeda Biscuit, and magazine pieces addressing such questions as “What becomes of the gentleman in the age of democratic equality?” Consistently amusing, maddeningly myopic, as busy, bright, and inconclusive as a year-end issue of Time, 1898 isn’t new light on history, it’s history lite.

As befits the enchanted hero of a real-life fairy story, Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873–1932) was born the smallest, bravest, cleverest child of an indulgent king—Henrique Dumont, the fabulously wealthy “Coffee King of Brazil.” When not lost inside the novels of Jules Verne, “Little Santos” tinkered with, and sometimes improved, the family plantation’s ultra-modern machinery; mostly, however, he lay on the veranda and stared into the blue equatorial sky, dreaming of the day when he would conquer the heavens in a Verne-inspired airship of his own design. By the age of eighteen he was living in Paris, the sudden heir to his father’s fortune.

What this brilliant, stylish, and utterly fearless young man did with his inheritance is the subject of Nancy Winters’s beguiling book-length essay. He joined the Aero Club of France and, nattily dressed in high collars and boater, crashed several hot-air contraptions. He hired private tutors in engine-building and aerostatics. He began to make sketches for a new kind of balloon—ribbed, ruddered, hydrogen-filled, propelled by a gasoline motor: the world’s first practical dirigible. By 1898 he had assembled a crew of workmen to execute his designs, a team which, over the next decade, would create twenty-three different Santos aircraft, each adding something permanent to the history of aviation. His interest in dirigibles peaked, in 1901, with airship No. 6, a yellow-silk cigar some 100 feet long, in which he cut a graceful arc around the Eiffel Tower on a half-hour flight from St.-Cloud to Paris and back, at one point scrambling out among the cables to kick the misfiring engine. After that he worked exclusively on heavier-than-air projects—biplanes, monoplanes, even an abortive helicopter—his designs independent of those of the Wright brothers, whose unpublished experiments were then only rumors in Europe. His greatest triumph came on November 12, 1906, when, at the Bois de Boulogne, he flew his No. 14-bis, a biplane with a forward box-kite rudder, in the first airplane flight to be officially timed and measured (21.2 seconds, 220 meters).

Winters, whom the jacket flap describes as a London-based writer with a “particular interest in style and adventure,” attempts neither clinical biography nor aviation history (for that see Peter Wykeham’s Santos-Dumont: A Study in Obsession, 1962). Instead she gives us Santos’s story as a sort of flowering dream, allowing us to appreciate it as the Belle Epoque did, with wonder, amusement, and delight in its unfolding. If the charm of her prose is sometimes forced, that of her illustrations is always genuine, and there are more than 100 of them—photographs, caricatures, Santos’s own sketches. Here are four captions: “He often crashed into the Park of the Rothschilds, where champagne was sent up during repairs.” “She was a famous Cuban beauty and the only other person ever to fly a Santos-Dumont airship. Her picture dominated his desk for years.” “His illness [multiple sclerosis] put a halt to work [at the age of thirty-six]. He closed up his apartment, and never flew again.” “‘Those who knew him could not help but love him.’—Gabriel Voisin.”

To come into consciousness in a troubled borderland, where rival languages, politics, myths, and ideas are forever at one another’s throats, is to suffer a terrible psychic wound. Eugene Jolas (1894–1952), poet, journalist, and impresario of modernism, was raised in the crucible of Alsace-Lorraine, that frontier-world where France and Germany glared at each other “through the spite-fences of history” and the local patois traded public blows with the official Hochdeutsch. Jolas felt at home in neither culture, neither tongue; emigration to America, and mastery of English, only deepened his sense of exile and his tragic “glotto-pathology.” “I belonged everywhere and nowhere,” he writes in these remarkable memoirs, begun (in German) in the late 1930s and left unfinished (in English) upon his death. “I was forever homesick for other shores, for other river-banks, for other chimerical cities of my fancy.” And for other chimerical languages—for the common language lost to man at Babel, for the spirit-freeing tongue of the angels, for some universal idiom, some super-English of the future that would at last unite the continents and wash the West clean of all its Alsaces. (Jolas was, at bottom, a “white” Romantic mystic like Novalis, who thought the world would be redeemed only when we learned to speak the one true human language, whose linguistics lies dormant in the racial unconscious.)

The closest Jolas ever came to an earthly paradise was Paris in the 1920s.

The closest Jolas ever came to an earthly paradise was Paris in the 1920s; there he found happiness among the Anglo-American and French avant-garde and their polyglot experiments in Dada, Surrealism, and Stein-ese. It was in Paris that Jolas launched transition, the little magazine in which he attempted “to build a bridge between Europe and America,” a transatlantic highway for the currents of high modernism. During the magazine’s eleven-year run (1927–38), he published Hemingway, Hart Crane, Beckett, and Dylan Thomas; he promoted Duchamp, Miró, Man Ray, and Grosz; he translated (with his American wife, Maria) Kafka, Döblin, Jung, Benn, Paul Eluard, and Léon-Paul Fargue. But mostly transition was about James Joyce and the editor’s longed-for “Revolution of the Word”: Finnegans Wake was the Revolution’s gospel and Jolas himself its greatest evangelist. Readers coming to these memoirs for news about the Joyce and Jolas friendship will not be disappointed; the pages that describe it are affectionate, detailed, gossipy, and moving. The book’s greatest interest, however, lies in Jolas’s account of his war and postwar years, when he fought, as an American press officer, in the Allies’ war of words against the Germans. His chapters on the work of anti-Nazi propagandists are riveting, as are those on his own efforts, as editor-in-chief of a postwar German news service, to help rid the German press of Nazi diction and ideology. They go far to make us see that what Jolas called the “malady of language” was more than a personal wound, an artistic pose, or the stuff of little-magazine manifestoes. It was, indeed, a deeply moral matter, “the real metaphysical problem of the day.”

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 Number 3, on page 73
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