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Number
289
January February March
An Unsung
Master
The Many
Lives of James
Laughlin
STEPHEN
KESSLER
Copyright
© 2002 Poetry Flash
The genesis of James Laughlin's New Directions
Publishing Corporation is legendary. Laughlin, not
yet twenty, a Harvard freshman and aspiring poet
bored and restless in that academic setting, fled
to Europe, first to spend part of the summer
working for Gertrude Stein in France, and then in
search of instruction at Ezra Pound's "Ezuversity"
in Rapallo, Italy. At the time, in 1934, despite
his pathological antisemitism and his increasingly
eccentric politics, Pound was the cranky Godfather
of American literary Modernism, preaching the Make
It New! gospel, issuing polemical pronunciamentos,
and promoting his chosen writers, ancient and
contemporary. Stein of course considered herself
the Mother of all Modernists and, as Laughlin
recalled later, "Gertrude and Ezra didn't quite get
on"---Stein dismissing Pound as "a village
explainer" and Pound referring to Stein as "that
old tub of guts." Undaunted by such powerful and
contentious personalities, Laughlin (pronounced
Locklin) stayed and studied with Pound in Rapallo
for six months before the master, with
characteristic tact, declared his poems "worthless"
and told him to "do something useful."
Back at Harvard two years later, with the
financial support of his family's Pittsburgh steel
fortune, Laughlin launched the first of his New
Directions anthologies, a proving ground for the
work of such then-disreputable writers as Pound,
Stein, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings,
Marianne Moore, Henry Miller, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth
Rexroth, William Saroyan, Delmore Schwartz, and
many others.
Eventually, in 1939, at Pound's insistence
(because "then your father will give you some
money"), Laughlin completed his bachelor's degree
at Harvard. By then he had already become a
champion of the avant-garde, beginning a long
career of publishing books by an all-star lineup of
American and international authors, many of whom
remain consistent sellers on the New Directions
backlist. The press operated in the red for more
than twenty years, but Laughlin was confident that
his kinds of writers were a long-term investment
whose works would sooner or later find their
readers. In his Preface to the 1937 New Directions
annual the upstart editor makes clear his mission:
"The only useful function which a book like New
Directions can fulfill is to get into print good
writing which otherwise would go
unpublished.…"
He goes on to pick a fight with the powers that
be: "Anyone can see that there is a chip on my
shoulder. I am angry with the big publishers
because they are not doing their jobs.… In
spite of the money which they must be making on
their wretched bestsellers they are not doing what
they should for the pure writer.
"Who is the pure writer? Simply, he is the
writer who writes for God and not the
Devil.…"
Framing his argument for experimental writing
and publishing as nothing less than a battle of
good against evil, Laughlin went on for the next
six decades to establish himself as arguably the
preeminent literary publisher of his time in
English, resisting the temptations of the
commercial mainstream that had altered the course
(and paid the bills) of other serious bookmen. For
the next two or three generations he ran his own
kind of university for readers who had what he
called "linguistic curiosity," an interest in new
kinds of creative language. Laughlin and New
Directions were and are a model of editorial
independence and artistic integrity for what was to
become, from the 1960's onward, an explosion of
small presses and little magazines. By that time
New Directions Paperbooks, with their distinctive
black-and-white covers, were magical objects in the
hands of any self-respecting bohemian intellectual,
and the diverse poets and fiction writers whose
work appeared under the ND imprint---Dylan Thomas,
Octavio Paz, Paul Bowles, Pablo Neruda, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, García Lorca,
Nabokov, Kafka, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder,
Céline, Borges, Valéry, Rilke, and
the irrepressible Rexroth, to name a few---were all
to leave a lasting mark on literature.
Laughlin's family fortune, which was not to
become his own until well into his publishing
career, is insufficient to explain his persistence
in promoting the kinds of books he knew could not
compete commercially. He had not only vision but
ambition---and the courage to put his money where
his mouth was.
The first New Directions book to sell more than
a million copies was to come, improbably, by way of
Henry Miller, who had read Herman Hesse's
Siddhartha in Europe and informed Laughlin
that this novel could be a hit in the United
States. Miller's own writing was so anticommercial
when it wasn't downright scandalous (Laughlin
declined to publish Tropic of Cancer and
Tropic of Capricorn for fear, he explained
to Miller, of offending his Aunt Leila and thereby
cutting off a source of funding; he begged off on
Nabokov's Lolita for the same reason) that
he was the last person you'd expect to care about
sales. But Miller, like many of Laughlin's other
authors, was an active co-conspirator in keeping
the enterprise alive, part of a network of
contributing editors who offered critiques,
complaints and recommendations, providing the
publisher with a steady stream of advice and
talent-scouting.
No one, after Pound's initial coaching, was more
influential in this regard than Rexroth, who
constantly harangued from the West Coast,
encouraging Laughlin to sign up certain writers,
berating him for publishing others, and generally
being the know-it-all Buddhist-anarcho-pacifist
California counterpoint to Pound. That Laughlin
remained professionally functional and socially
friendly with these and so many other extreme
personages, some of whom hated each other, and
continued to work effectively with all, is
testimony to his psychosocial, diplomatic and
entrepreneurial skills. From persuading Dr.
Williams that switching to a bigger publisher where
he might make more money would be a disaster for
both Williams and New Directions, to sending Dylan
Thomas an occasional twenty dollars in response to
his begging letters, to rescuing Tennessee Williams
from some female admirer who wouldn't leave him
alone, Laughlin was a master of interpersonal
relations. Most of these relationships are
documented in his voluminous correspondence---six
volumes of which (exchanges with W. C. Williams,
Pound, Rexroth, Miller, Delmore Schwartz, and
Thomas Merton) have thus far been published by
Norton. He saved and filed everything, including
carbons of his own letters, and bequeathed to
Harvard on his death in 1997 his entire archive of
1,298 boxes of material, with the stipulation that
everything be catalogued within two
years---otherwise it would go to Yale. The
shrewdness and foresight of the old man's strategy
for keeping his papers available to scholars rather
than stashed away in some inaccessible vault is
typical of the way he ran his business.
Current New Directions publisher Griselda
Ohannessian, who has been with the company for
nearly fifty years, remembers her former boss as a
rather complex individual. "There were so many
aspects of his character," she told me. "He changed
a lot over the years. He was---not arrogant
exactly, but a bit precious and cocky" when he was
younger, later becoming "more thoughtful and
understanding" toward other people. An emblematic
image she has of Laughlin, a lifelong Pittsburgh
Pirates fan, is of him sitting at his desk on a
summer day, smoking a cigar while reviewing
manuscripts and attending to other business, the
radio in his office tuned to the Pirates game.
•
Harvard met the cataloguing deadline, and last
winter celebrated its accomplishment and Laughlin's
contribution with an exhibition of letters,
manuscripts, proofs, artwork, photos and other
memorabilia from the Laughlin/New Directions
Collection now at Houghton Library. The Lamont
Library next door hosted a standing-room-only
symposium where Laughlin biographer Ian MacNiven
(who estimates his book will be ready in three
years), fellow poet and publisher Jonathan
Williams, and essayist and translator Eliot
Weinberger shared their ideas, anecdotes, insights
and speculations about the meaning of what "JL," or
"J," had managed to do. It was clear from the
conversation that we're just beginning to
comprehend what a towering figure he was, over and
above his six-foot-five physique.
As Weinberger pointed out, Laughlin "had the
self-deprecation of the exceedingly tall." He not
only pretended to have become a publisher due to
his failure as a would-be poet, but he kept his
practice and increasing skill and depth as a writer
of verse pretty much out of sight until the last
years of his life, revealing finally what
Weinberger called "one of the secret treasures of
American poetry."
Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books brought out
Laughlin's Selected Poems 1935--1985 in 1986
without much fanfare. Most readers of poetry in the
United States still considered Laughlin mainly a
publisher; he had published Ferlinghetti among
other writers of the San Francisco Renaissance and
Beat movements, and now it appeared that
Ferlinghetti was merely returning the favor. Anyone
who took a close look at that book might have
realized that the founder of New Directions was a
real poet, not some overprivileged self-indulgent
dilettante, but it was only in the 1990's that the
full force and weight of his poetry started to make
itself felt---though, again, hardly anyone noticed.
In 1989 Copper Canyon Press brought out a lovely
collection called The Bird of Endless Time,
whose title poem is typical of Laughlin's delicate
lyric clarity:
Your fingers touch me like a bird's wing
like the feathers of the bird that returns
every hundred years to brush against a
peak in the Himalayas and not until the
rock's been worn away will time and the
kalpas end why do I think of the fable
when I'm close with you surely because
I want so many lives to feel your touch.
Aside from the casual reference to the Hindu
kalpas, or eons of creation, a nod to the poet's
ecumenical studies in world culture, these lines
also illustrate Laughlin's signature typographic
metric, which he said he had learned from Williams:
visually measured couplets in which the second line
is no more than two typewriter spaces longer or
shorter than the line that precedes it. "It's a
very soulful metric," he told Weinberger in an
interview. And it gives his voice on the page a bit
of its classical atmosphere.
With The Collected Poems of James
Laughlin publisher Moyer Bell, in 1994, made a
five-hundred-fifty-page case for this author as a
major American poet. To discover such a volume in a
secondhand bookstore, as I did just a couple of
years ago, is to experience the kind of revelation
bookshop prowlers live for. The poems spoke with a
candor and wit and subtle simplicity and exquisite
syncopation I could scarcely recall encountering
anywhere else, except perhaps in Dudley Fitts's
translations from the Greek Anthology, which as it
happens New Directions had published early on.
(Fitts had been Laughlin's English teacher at prep
school.) Here's a little statement on poetics that
speaks to some of the virtues of Laughlin's
verse:
Some People Think
that poetry should be adorn-
ed or complicated I'm
not so sure I think I'll
take the simple statement
in plain speech compress-
ed to brevity I think that
will do all I want to do.
Not that he's always this succinct, but even in
the poems that go on for a page or two he seems to
be following Pound's advice to "make it simple" and
Williams's advice to "make what / you saw as plain
as you can" and Rexroth's advice to "boil it down
but boil / it with a cold flame."
As if The Collected Poems weren't enough,
New Directions followed, in the poet's final years,
with new collections, The Man in the Wall,
The Secret Room, and Poems New and
Selected, a phenomenal flowering of creative
work for a writer in his seventies and eighties.
What's striking about Laughlin's last poems---and
there are a lot of them---is that the poet, having
mostly retired as an active publisher in New York
City and spending more time at home in rural
Connecticut, seems to have fully come into his own
now that, instead of running a business, he was
free to write with minimal distraction. He ransacks
memory, and dreams, and everyday life, and his vast
reading, as if savoring ever more appreciatively
the experiences and people and emotions and
sensations he knows won't come again. He speaks
directly to this theme in a brief poem called "The
Consolations":
The treasures of old age
Are the little adventures
Of the imagination.
A beautiful face recalls another
That was so much loved long ago,
And we console ourselves
Saying, "I'm young again."
But all is not wistful nostalgia; the bite of
the satirist is also sharp, as in "Poets on
Stilts":
Writing on stilts is in vogue
these days. The taller the stilts
the easier to be in fashion.
Very few poets now want to walk
with their feet on the ground,
they might get their shoes wet.
……………
…Altitude
makes the poet feel important
and it gets him into the club.
But a word of warning to
stiltwalkers. The higher they
fall from their stilts, the
bigger the smash when they
hit the pavement.
And most of all the poet of love, in all his
passion and folly and knowledge and crafty
sentiment, declines to retire; here he writes, in
"Elusive Time":
In love it may be dangerous
to reckon on time to count
on it time's here and then
it's gone I'm not thinking
of death or disaster but of
the slippage the unpredictable
disappearance of days on which
we were depending for happiness.
Unlike some other modernist masters, Laughlin is
a poet one reads for pleasure, not from a sense of
duty or as an intellectual exercise. While his
reading of the early Greek and Roman poets is
evident throughout, and his erudition finds its
expression in numerous allusions and direct
references or quotations, and he occasionally
breaks into French or German or Latin or Greek or
Italian for a few lines or an entire poem (for
which he kindly provides an English translation),
there's nothing lofty or pretentious about his
style. The humor and humility and genial
earnestness are completely engaging. He can write
of personal tragedy---of having to identify Dylan
Thomas's corpse at a New York morgue, or of
cleaning up the blood from his son's suicide---in
such an understated, matter-of-fact way that it's
all the more devastating. And the invocations of
women, of wives and lovers and near misses, are as
tender and poignant and sexy as any such poems I've
ever read.
A Translation
How did you decide to translate me
from one language to another let's
say from the English of friendship
to the French of lovers we'd known
each other half a year when one day
as we were talking (it was about one
of your drawings) suddenly you curl-
ed yourself against me and drew my
lips down to yours it was so deft
an alternance from one language to
the other as if to say yes you can
speak French to me now if you wish.
These are poems of an examined life,
philosophical, yet also with the sportsman's
appreciation of the sensory rush for its own
sake---Laughlin was a mountaineer and an
accomplished downhill skier who pioneered that
sport in the United States by opening a lodge in
Utah, another of the entrepreneurial escapades
pulled off when he wasn't busy being a
publisher.
Beyond the sheer pleasure they afford,
Laughlin's verses are a tonic antidote to
rhetorical excess and metaphysical mumbo jumbo.
Writers can learn a lot from his example about the
power of economy and the strength of poetic
technique so deft and light in its touch as to give
the illusion of effortlessness. He follows
Wordsworth's still-useful admonition that poetry
should speak directly to the common reader, not in
some mannered code encrypted for initiates. In a
curious and unlikely way, which he would no doubt
dispute, Laughlin resembles Charles Bukowski, a
poet whose work he found "vulgar and corny" and
alien to his own more elitist tastes. But like
Bukowski, Laughlin speaks of ordinary experience in
a disarmingly intimate style, almost unliterary in
its simplicity. And while Bukowski cultivated the
hardboiled persona of the drunken racetrack bum and
good-for-nothing bard of the subworking class, in
contrast to Laughlin's casual dignity of the
cosmobohemian aristocrat, both vividly embody
Whitman's notion that whoever touches his book
touches a man.
Why did Laughlin wait so long to reveal himself
as a poet? Did he feel so overshadowed by the
greats he was publishing that it dimmed his
confidence in the value of his own creative work?
Or was his confidence in himself so solid that he
felt the poems could wait to be published because
their quality guaranteed they would outlast their
author? As Jonathan Williams noted at the Harvard
symposium, the Latin poets from whom Laughlin had
learned so much---Catullus, Horace,
Martial---"don't look quite as good as they used
to, compared to Laughlin." Maybe it was the
survival of these ancient models, the freshness of
their voices, even in translation, that convinced
Laughlin his own efforts had plenty of time to find
their readers.
As one of those belated readers, I've been lucky
to come across his books at bargain prices on
remainder tables in some of my favorite bookshops,
but it's sad that they've already dropped off the
retail shelves. Surely New Directions will keep his
books in print, at least in paperback, just as
Laughlin did for his own writers, in the likelihood
that as years go by the interest in his poems will
increase. His press, in its own ongoing, low-key
way, continues to thrive as an outlet for current
innovators (W. G. Sebald, Mary Karr, Bei Dao,
Michael Palmer) as well as for modern classics from
around the world. And in a poetically just example
of the prophet's vision being vindicated by
acceptance into the bosom of the institution where
he began as a radical misfit, Harvard has picked up
the historic mission of keeping Laughlin's paper
trail intact.
For anyone of less than scholarly curiosity, the
poems alone are an eloquent record of an
exceptionally well-lived life.
Stephen Kessler's Tell It to the Rabbis
and Other Poems 1977--2000 was published this
fall by Creative Arts. His new translation of Pablo
Neruda's "Alturas de Macchu Picchu" appears in
Machu Picchu, a book of photographs by Barry
Brukoff (Bulfinch). Stephen Kessler is also Editor
of the Redwood Coast Review.
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