Robert Sage Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Robert Sage

Robert Sage, journalist, editor, and translator, worked in the Paris,Vienna, Rome, and London offices of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald for most of his life; from September 1927 to June 1929 he was also an editor for transition, the important little magazine founded by Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul in 1927. A fine literary critic, Sage contributed to the success of transition and its mission to disseminate some of the best experimental prose and verse being written during the late twenties and early thirties.

Sage was born in Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1922. After working for the Detroit Times for a year, he left for Paris where he began his association with the European edition of the Chicago Tribune, often called the Paris Tribune. Here he met Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul, fellow Americans also working for the Tribune. When Jolas and Paul, with the assistance of Jolas's wife Maria, brought out the first issue of their new literary magazine, transition, in April 1927, Sage wrote a glowing review for the Tribune 's 20 March 1927 issue in which he praised the editors' "tolerance and good judgment" and "creative editorship" and summarized the editorial principles they had stated in the first number. He concluded: "The April number of transition has about it nothing of the belligerent radicalism of Secession nor the passive correctness of T.S. Eliot's Criterion Quarterly. In range it extends from the advanced writing which represents the latest stage of James Joyce's evolution to the conservative but richly woven prose of Ludwig Lewisohn. Each narrative and poetic contribution represents a personal tendency caught at a high degree of perfection. This insistence on uniform quality rather than uniform style is the most reassuring sign that transition is well immunized from arteriosclerosis."

Sage did indeed have much to praise in the new journal, and during its ten-year, erratic life transition became a leading literary magazine, publishing an international group of authors who were for the most part intent upon experimentation in prose and verse. Controversial because of its often bizarre contents and radical views, the journal was soon an outlet for almost every literary movement in Paris, other European capitals, and America. Sage recognized the importance of transition before its reputation was secure, and even though he kept his job with the Tribune, he contributed reviews, short stories, and essays to most of the first twenty issues. His book reviews of such works as H.D.'s Palimpsest (1926), Robert Coates's The Eater of Darkness (1926), E.E. Cummings's is 5 (1926), and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's Le Jeune European (1927) began to appear in the first number. With transition 6 Sage became associate editor, and the editors announced that he would "assume direction of the critical section." He also clearly recognized the tensions between the Jolases and Paul which led to Paul's leaving transition amicably after the twelfth number (March 1928) and thus to Sage's increased editorial responsibilities, beginning with the Summer 1928 issue. As Sage later told Eric Hawkins, Paul, who had always worked quickly, seldom stayed long at the Jolases' house in Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises, where most of the editorial work was done, and he was often unavailable when Jolas, who worked more slowly, wanted to consult him. The two coeditors also differed temperamentally and philosophically, and Sage evidently worked far more successfully with the Jolases than Paul had. (Sage's French wife Maeve had also been hired as secretary and receptionist at transition's hotel-room business office in the rue Fabert in Paris.)

The philosophical compatibility between Sage and Jolas is especially evident in transition 8 (November 1927). In Sage's critical article, "Lilies for Realism," he decries the American refusal to accept experimental novels, such as Conrad Aiken's Blue Voyage (1927), and concludes: "Believing in the elastic and thorough-expressive capacities of the novel, one might only hope for a few more brave Andersons, Franks and Hechts and Aikens to recognize the defunctness of realism. A mob of unjailed imaginations would be as intolerable as the present situation, but there is no hazard of this phenomenon chasing advanced writers into new roads of escape. It will, happily, never be generally recognized that art cannot linger and that revolt, far from requiring justification, is the sole duty an artist can admit." For Sage, James Joyce's work epitomized that revolt as it did for most of transition's regular contributors. In transition 14 Sage added to the critical praise found largely in transition of the fragments of Joyce's Work in Progress (published as Finnegans Wake in 1939). Reviewing "Anna Livia Plurabelle," reprinted in transition 8, he considers whether this fragment is the most beautiful yet to appear and decides that at least "it illustrates as perfectly as a fragment may the difficulties and miracles of the Joycian writing." Finally in transition 18, Sage added his argument in "Word Lore" to the "Revolution of the Word" debate which Jolas had initiated in transition 16/17 with a proclamation signed by Sage, among others. "And I, for one, hope within the next few years to see the english language--and, above all, the american language--begin, thanks to the efforts of the new writers of today, to shed some of its many obstinate tags and reassemble itself into a new form more nearly in tune with the rhythm of the century."

Sage's position with transition, however, had to change because his job with the Tribune took him away from Paris. After he and Jolas edited Transition Stories (1929), a collection of twenty-four prose selections which had appeared in transition, he was called contributing editor in transition 15 (February 1929) and advisory editor in 16/17 (June 1929). Then in 19/20 (June 1930), when transition was temporarily ended, Jolas announced that Sage was now stationed in London as a correspondent for the Tribune. In 19/20, which was intended to be transition's final issue, Jolas also published Sage's "Farewell to Transition," a letter dated 20 March 1930. "In any case it is useless to regret: better to be thankful that transition has existed, with its discoveries, its battles, its controversies, its ideas and its superb work in revivifying literature.... Life for me has been pleasanter since 1927 because of transition's existence, and I feel certain that many others can honestly say the same thing. Possibly I am unjustifiably prejudiced, but I suspect that after the twenty numbers of transition american literature will be a little different just as all literature has been a little different since the publication of Ulysses."

Jolas revived transition in early 1932, but Sage did not contribute. He continued to work as a rewrite man for the Tribune until 1934 when he joined the Herald's editorial staff. During World War II he and his wife stayed in Brittany, and he rejoined the Herald in the mid-forties as travel editor. In 1954 he published an English translation of Stendhal's private diaries. He died of a heart attack in Paris on 27 October 1962.