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Books | Review of: The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin

By BENJAMIN LYTAL
December 5, 2006

"Each time you know a great person you begin to know more and more that you yourself are not a great person," wrote James Laughlin after his stay with Gertrude Stein. Laughlin was taking a year off from Harvard; only a sophmore, he was already making great authors his business. On the same trip, Ezra Pound advised him to quit writing and start publishing: New Directions Press was the result.

Laughlin made great writers his friends and his business, and for his whole life his ego had to run on a track parallel with the likes of Dylan Thomas and Robert Fitzgerald. From the evidence, it rarely wavered. It never flew too high or too low. Of a photo of him and Fitzgerald riding in a golf cart, Laughlin was happy to write the following:

One of the golfers knows all there is to know about Homer; he is Robert Fitzgerald, the translator of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" (and also of Virgil's "Aeneid"). The other is one of his publishers who has been struggling for over fifty years trying to learn Greek but, having spread his life in six directions, has never managed to accomplish it.

Laughlin was content, in his way, not to know Greek. His ignorance probably quickened his friendship with Fitzgerald. The above snippet appears in a posthumous scrapbook of photographs, notes, and letters, "The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin" (New Directions, 343 pages, $25). The notes Laughlin kept on himself point to a man who could live among gods without trying to be one. He was proud but without hubris.

Laughlin saw even his own voice as a gift from his friends: "This shows where some of my funny tone comes from," he wrote, considering his correspondence with Delmore Schwartz. Ezra Pound was probably Laughlin's greatest influence; his writing is full of Poundian slang, the same backwoods tattle that infected Jonathan Williams, whose picture book "A Palpable Elysium" ought to be read alongside this one. For Laughlin, the New Yorker is "the New Yawper." This book is "my auto-bug-offery." Bill Clinton "loves the downtrodden peepul." Catholics are "them kaffolix."

For matters of love and business, Laughlin's plainer voice came out. When William Carlos Williams, a good friend, left New Directions for a bigger publisher, Laughlin wrote:

Go to them. Rush. Run. Don't lose a second. Let them slobber their dirt all over your decency and your purity. And offer up to them as a little bribe my pride, and my life's devotion to an ideal. See how dirty they can make that too.

This must be Laughlin's true voice, more Jimmy Stewart than Pound. When he speaks freely about people, his own playboy accent comes out, flitting but appreciative. Wallace Stevens was "Not easy to talk to, not much bubble, a grave counselor." About Elizabeth Bishop: "I found in Elizabeth a delicacy akin to that of her poems, but also a nice sense of humor. I remember quite a tinkle." E.E. Cummings' wife "was serene but with her special sparkle."

Similarly for Laughlin, girls were dolls:

I'm plugging away now on the Harvard segment of Byways [his verse memoir]. It goes slowly as there's so much shame attached to the recollections of my behavior in those days. I'm resolved to limit myself to one doll baby for each college year; otherwise, it would sound like an ambulatory brothel.

Nabokov was a doll, too."Volya was a doll in a very severe, upper-crust Russian way." Stevie Smith "was a doll." Sometimes this term gets mixed up in the faux-cracker-barrel he learned from Pound: Marianne Moore "was a Livin' Doll, and the Soul of Kindness, but she did go on and on when she telephoned."

The main thing that Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and numerous Radcliffe undergraduates, "Cliffies," had in common is James Laughlin. His capacity for appreciation, and a playboy's charisma, gives us a hint of what he brought to the table with his great persons.

Money, an inherited steel fortune, gave Laughlin some of his confidence, and promiscuous affection may have provided the rest: Whatever did it, it hardly faltered.

Laughlin did not read "Ulysses," in its entirety, until he was 60. Meanwhile he had published several books on Joyce. "I'm afraid this tells a lot about the superficiality of my literary life. A skimmer. A dipper. A plucker. A faker?"

What does it take to be a great publisher? Laughlin probably thought that a certain amount of skimming and plucking was necessary, in people as in prose.

blytal@nysun.com