Ian S. MacNiven - Literchoor Is My Beat: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

With endless love and devotion to my wife, Peggy Lee Fox, who suggested this book to me and whose detailed knowledge and critical eye made possible its eventual completion

Contents

Born handsome, brilliant, and rich, all his life James Laughlin courted the art of self-effacement. But even as he practiced disappearance, a behind-the-scenes master rather than a public figure, he, more than any other person of the twentieth century, directed the course of American writing and crested the waves of American passions and preoccupations. His life is mirrored in his friendships and in the careers of the many writers he championed.

Laughlin lived eighty-three years and thirteen days, and he was planning, writing, editing, and publishing until the very end. His importance to American and to world literature has been and will continue to be measured by the authors he published under the New Directions imprint, the firm that he founded in 1936 while he was still a Harvard undergraduatenurturing authors who in many cases would owe their reputations to his early support. He published almost fifteen hundred books by others and wrote more than thirty of his own: poetry, essays, short stories, translations. He developed the Alta ski area in Utah at the very dawn of skiing in America. He loved India and worked there with the Ford Foundation in various publishing ventures over a five-year period. A mere sentence about his relationship with each of the more than two and a half thousand people he corresponded with, entertained, and skied alongside would fill this volume. Getting around the world as I have done has been a marvelous experience, he wrote to Thomas Merton, but you pay for it, in a way, in keeping up with all the contacts that youve made in foreign parts.

This story of a life is perforce selective, focused, and yes, arbitrary. It is also the story of the publishing house Laughlin founded. And it is emblematic rather than exhaustive. My greatest regret on committing this work to the publisher is that so many persons significant to Laughlins life and to the history of New Directions have been accorded mere passing mention, or even omitted entirely. But I have tried to present a true portrait, with the clear outlines of a remarkable personality, a force in publishing, an original voice in American poetry, a visionary in skiing, and a world traveler of discernment and judgment.

More than anything else, perhaps, Laughlin provided a nexus: he brought writers together. He introduced them to other writers whom they needed for their artistic development. Sometimes it was a personal introduction, as when he sent Charles Olson, who needed a mentor, to Ezra Pound, who needed a friendPound, accused of treason, had just been committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital. More often, Laughlin furnished books that served as another kind of introductionto a literary circle that would become vital to a writer then just starting out: The first person who introduced me to writing as a craft, said the poet Robert Creeley, was Ezra Pound, whom Creeley encountered in the New Directions editions of Polite Essays and Guide to Kulchur . Soon Creeley was corresponding with Pound and William Carlos Williams, and he became influenced by others in the extended Laughlin circle: Olson, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, Louis Zukofsky.

Surrounded by an immense and constantly growing cast, Laughlin himself lived beset by crises. The courage, intelligence, and humor with which he confronted each challenge form the dramatic contours of his life story. Early on, he overcame a physical handicap and injuries; later, he was faced with family opposition to his publishing, public condemnation of some of his authors, marital disruption, and financial constraints. All his life he was threatened by the genetic curse of bipolar illness. In the truest sense, he was a self-created personality. And while he remained, throughout, vitally engaged with the cultural, social, and political being of America and beyond, he was at times the most unhappy of menlonely and yearning, even when he appeared the most fortunate.

When Laughlin included them in the first of his series of fifty-five anthologies of poetry and prose, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams were virtual unknowns, sometimes driven to self-publishing. Fifty years later, these three would frequently be singled out as the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. No less discerning when it came to foreign literature, Laughlin became either the first or one of the earliest American publishers of a long list of world figures that includes Baudelaire, Borges, Cline, Hermann Hesse, Garca Lorca, Thomas Merton, Henry Miller, Eugenio Montale, Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Pasternak, Octavio Paz, Raja Rao, Rimbaud, and countless others. Personally involved in steering his publishing company right up until his death, James Laughlin created the New Directions backlist, a tally of largely modern and modernist authors that is unequaled in American publishing. And he was no mere publishing tycoon, sitting comfortably in a posh office and directing others to scout, edit, print, and sell books. He began as a one-man operation: editing text, selecting type fonts and paper, designing covers, negotiating with printers in America and Europe, driving cross-country to cajole bookstores into stocking his titles.

And while Laughlins early print runs might be tinyoften only 100 to 1,500 copiesgradually his choices would define the course of modernism. All his life he scanned countless journals for new writing and followed through on recommendations from a great many friends. He was engaged with his authors on the most intimate level: he argued over Fascism and anti-Semitism with Pound, and scolded Henry Miller for his obscenity and his pecuniary fecklessness; he was raucously denounced by Kenneth Rexroth for publishing fairies like Tennessee Williams, and cursed by Edward Dahlberg for printing nearly everyone but himself; he sought advice from paranoiac Delmore Schwartz, bought ballet shoes for Clines wife, paid Kenneth Patchens medical bills, went to the morgue to identify Dylan Thomas, helped Nabokov with his lepidopterology, meticulously arranged into the acclaimed Asian Journal the chaos of notes that his friend Merton left behind after his tragic electrocution, dined with Octavio Paz at the Century, and discovered Paul Bowles, Denise Levertov, and John Hawkes.

And he was adventurous physically as well as intellectually. He skied down mountains and broke many bones long before extreme skiing had even been named; he climbed up the Matterhorn. When he knew that he would be near trout streams or golf courses, he added fly rods or clubs to his kit; dangled from the end of a lifeline while rock climbing in the Sierras; and punctured a lung scaling a fence to reach a mountain brook.

Born into the wealth of Jones & Laughlin Steel in Pittsburgh, paradoxically Laughlin was forced to run his businesses for decades on tight budgets. The Great Depression still gripped America when he founded New Directions, and Laughlin grew up with habits of thrift. For this reason, there is a fair amount here about dollars and even pennies in sales figures and book advances; in fact, for many years, Laughlin insisted upon writing out each authors royalty check himself, no matter how small. The reader should bear in mind that these figures need adjustment for inflation. Roughly computed, $100 in 1936, when Laughlin founded New Directions, would be worth at least $1,500 in 2014 dollars. At the peak of his publishing career, Laughlin would list his occupation on his tax return as Investor, and there was truth to this claim: he never took a salary from either his publishing or his skiing ventures, and aside from inheritances, his substantial net worth on his death was owed in part to prudent investment. The more New Directions achieved publishing successes, the less proud Laughlin allowed himself to appear, although he was always pleased when one of his authors sold well.