Babel

If time is the best censor, as Chopin said, then John Cournos is one of its victims. I doubt there are fifty people in the world who read one of his books last year, yet Babel (1922), literature of exile that teems with ideas and the search for meaning in a world turned upside down, doesn't deserve total obscurity. Cournos, a Russian Jew born in 1881, moved to the United States at age 10. His alter ego in Babel has a similar story, and flits around Europe trying to be a writer after spending years in what he calls a soul-deadening newspaper job in Philadelphia. Cournos wrote imagist poetry, and some of his descriptions of London, where the character ends up, are subtle and evocative. Babel's cavalcade of characters includes representatives of anarchism, modernism, futurism, and suffragism; prostitutes and spongers; artists and frauds. It adds up to a portrait of an age, often overheated and over-sincere, valuable more as artifact than art.