Dictionary of Literary Biography on Harold J(ason) Salemson
Harold J. Salemson was a very young American writer in Paris at the close of the twenties and one of the few whose work grew largely out of a French education. Unlike the expatriates who went to Paris "to live cheaply and be able to write an American book," Salemson went to France twice as a boy for extended periods of schooling and returned to Paris as a free-lance writer and critic. His wide range of literary and artistic interests placed him in the company of such writers as transition magazine publisher Eugene Jolas, novelist and transition editor Elliot Paul, poet Richard Thoma, novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn, and editor Samuel Putnam. Although he relished the spirit of tolerance in Paris, Salemson viewed his work there from an American orientation. He wrote in transition 14 (Fall 1928): "Those who, like myself, feel that they are here to imbibe everything they can and then help to forge an American entity in the superior elements of life must feel, with me, that they are in a way spies." His critical essays and translations from English to French and French to English helped make the writing of each culture accessible to the other, and his short-lived magazine, Tambour , provided an intelligent perspective on the expatriate writing of the twenties.
Salemson was born in Chicago. His father, a neighborhood physician on the Northwest Side, traveled to house calls by streetcar, and Salemson began his education at an early age by adding up the numbers on the transfers. His parents were allowed by the school authorities to teach him at home until he was eight, when he began his public schooling in the fifth grade. After graduating from grammar school at age eleven, he spent four of the next six years studying in France. In 1927 he was enrolled in the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, but he stayed there only one semester. Since several of his articles had already been published in French periodicals, his professors agreed that he should write independently rather than remain in college. Salemson returned to Paris in 1928, not quite eighteen years old.
Mrs. Salemson gave her son the money no longer needed for tuition to publish the French-English magazine Tambour, which contained both original work and translations of previously published work. It came out irregularly in eight issues from February 1929 to June 1930. Salemson recalls that production costs were only eighty to one hundred dollars an issue: "Nobody got paid anything; there were just the printer's costs." Tambour had a circulation of about fifteen hundred copies, of which some eight hundred went to subscribers; copies were also on sale at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in Paris and at Brentano's and the Gotham Book Mart in New York. Tambour 1 featured the work of Andre Spire, Ralph Cheever Dunning, Philippe Soupault, Countee Cullen, Blaise Cendrars, Stuart Gilbert, and others. Subsequent issues included that of Pierre MacOrlan, Maxwell Bodenheim, Jean Cocteau, Julian L. Shapiro (later known as John Sanford), Richard Thoma, Paul Bowles, and Parker Tyler. Tambour 5 was a special issue on Anatole France. Among the contributors of work in English were Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, and George Bernard Shaw; French articles were written by Andre Gide, Victor Llona, and Andre Maurois. Tambour 7 featured a group of Italian poets in French translation, and the last issue contained prose fiction by James T. Farrell.
Salemson was one of the signers of Eugene and Maria Jolas's "Revolution of the Word Proclamation," which appeared in transition 16/17 (June 1929) and clarified the Jolases' philosophy of experimentation with language and form in literature. In "Essential: 1930 (A Manifesto)" for Tambour 7, Salemson discussed the results of the experimental writing of the twenties. In their effort to break away from traditional forms, he explained, the modernists had "achieved a classicism of antiform." It was now time for a new point of view. "We demand that the artist look at his day with the point-of-view of his day, as he understands it, and without making us feel his presence in it." Salemson elaborated on this point of view in "James Joyce and the New Word," a critical essay in Modern Quarterly (1928-1930): "...we of the younger generation will have to return to the crossroads from which our elders took the wrong path, and seek our direction on another road. That road will be the Revolution of the Idea, the new point-of-view, an entirely renovated outlook, purely ideological, which may be correlated with but will be independent of both the Revolution of the Word and the Revolution of the Act." In 1930 Salemson, Richard Thoma, and Samuel Putnam signed "Direction," a manifesto which set the editorial policy for Putnam's New Review and, like "Essential: 1930," advocated a return to content in writing. These two statements reflected Salemson's developing political interests and foreshadowed the proletarian literature of the thirties.
A series of distorted articles about life and literary personalities in Paris has been unjustly attributed to Salemson. After poet and publisher Harry Crosby's suicide in New York on 10 December 1929, Salemson received a cable from an uncle who was an editor on the Hearst papers asking for information about Crosby and others. He naively supplied what he felt to be basic information; without his prior knowledge, this went into the composition of four articles "by Harold Salemson as told to Nigel Trask," an office name used to cover ghostwritten material. Although the articles bore little resemblance to the material Salemson had provided and were published without his consent, he is still mentioned in some sources as their author.
While he was publishing Tambour , Salemson also contributed criticism to transition, This Quarter, Poetry, and Charles Henri Ford's Blues. He wrote the column "Lettres anglo-americaines" (quarterly reports on American books) for Mercure de France and acted as regular film critic for the weekly Monde. One of his poems, "Chicago," appeared in Blues, and articles were published in Bifur,the French avant-garde magazine for which William Carlos Williams was American editor. Translations were an important part of Salemson's work. His translation into English of Cocteau's poem "Angel Wuthercut" was published in the New Review and reprinted in Putnam's The European Caravan (1931). Others include translations for French periodicals of Eugene O'Neill's "Moon of the Caribbees" and "Bound East for Cardiff," the novellas of V. F. Calverton, and an early piece by Eric Blair (later known as George Orwell) for Monde.
Salemson returned to the United States in November 1930. Pursuing his interest in movies, he went to Hollywood in 1931 as critic and correspondent for L'Intransigeant, then the leading Paris evening newspaper, and its affiliated publications, including the movie weekly Pour Vous and the sports weekly Match (later Paris-Match). These properties were bought in 1938 by Paris-Soir, and Salemson was retained on the staff as Hollywood bureau head until the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940. During the same period he worked in several capacities on films and contributed extensively to periodicals in the United States and abroad. He was then one of the few writers in English giving films the serious critical attention they later came to receive generally. In World War II he was involved in the Mediterranean Theatre during the invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and he wrote the leaflets dropped by plane throughout the landings in the South of France. Although he was blacklisted in the late forties and the fifties, he continued to work in both the artistic and executive ends of the movie industry. Salemson and his wife live in Glen Cove, Long Island. He has taught film courses, subtitled foreign films, worked at free-lance writing and editing assignments, and continues to translate French books into English.
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