Byways: James Laughlin and the New Directions Story
by Greg Scruggs

"You said I was / Such a terrible poet, I'd better / Do something useful and become / A publisher, a profession which / You inferred required no talent / And only limited intelligence."

These are the words in which James Laughlin describes the scathing judgment passed on him by Ezra Pound. Frustrated by the constraints of academia, Laughlin ’36-’39 took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1933 to travel to Rapallo, Italy, where Pound famously held court. Laughlin had hoped that Pound would take him on as a protégé, but his tenure at “Ezuversity” was cut short. After coming back to America, Laughlin decided to take Pound’s advice: he would forget poetry and devote himself to publishing.

Laughlin, the son of Pittsburgh steel magnates, had ample resources for such a project. In 1936, at age 22, Laughlin launched New Directions, a publishing house with high standards of literary quality. A sampling of the roster from New Directions in Poetry and Prose 1936, the first of an annual anthology published until 1991, gives a sense of its standards: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens. While writers of undisputed talent now, they often faced an arduous route to publication back when their reputations were less assured. New Directions, with its willingness to sacrifice commercial success for artistic value, thus quickly became a haven for all that was controversial, experimental, censorable, avant-grade, or otherwise hard to sell.

With ND36 as a springboard, the New Directions stable reads like a staggering who’s who of modern literature. In addition to those previously mentioned, add Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, Delmore Schwratz, Octavio Paz, Thomas Merton, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kenneth Rexroth, Hermann Hesse, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

In such esteemed company, clients became friends and friends became clients. There are several published volumes of selected letters between Laughlin and his writers. These letters, a mix of contract discussions, commentary on writers’ work, and a healthy dose of literary gossip, offer a revealing portrait of New Directions and the writers it published.

Initially, optimism reigned supreme. Many writers were excited by the prospect of a truly new direction in American publishing. Certainly Laughlin had Pound’s confidence, it being his idea, and the poet helped Laughlin get the project of the ground. While Laughlin was still in Italy, Pound passed him some of Miller’s early work, beginning a longstanding publishing relationship. Laughlin’s generous terms for Tropic of Cancer at first made New Directions a godsend, prompting Miller, writing from Paris on November 16, 1938, to declare ecstatically, “You are the Jesus Christ of the publishing world!” (Henry Miller and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. George Wickes, New York: W. W. Norton, 1996, p. 17). In a March 4, 1940 letter from New York, Miller wrote, “People are expecting great things of you – even your rival publishers, I find.”

Williams, who Laughlin first contacted as a member of the Advocate, responded to an offer to publish a novel in similarly reverential terms. Addressed, “Dear God,” Williams wrote, “You mention, casually, that you are willing to publishing my White Mule, that you will pay for it and that we shall share, if any, the profits! My God! It must be that you are so tall that separate clouds circle around that head giving thoughts of other metal than those the under sides of which we are in the habit of seeing” (William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Hugh Witemeyer, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989, p. 5). White Mule was a crucial early landmark for New Directions, containing a postscript by Laughlin that criticized publishers who “have made literature a business” and announced, “White Mule is a symbol – a symbol of his whole hope and will. New Directions exists only to publish books like this one”(qtd. in William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 8). Concerning the postscript, Williams wrote on May 31, 1937, “You have put a critical estimate upon [the novel] which has made it yours somewhat to my amazement. This is the rare collaboration between writer and publisher which is almost unheard of today” (William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 7).

Despite New Directions’ idealistic desire to remain above the fray of financial disputes, publishing is and always was a business, and tension over money matters quickly became a constant thorn. In 1937, Williams pondered taking his next book to a commercial publisher. Laughlin was apoplectic, replying, “Your thinking that you want somebody else is a crisis in my life. [. . .] You are the cornerstone of New Directions and if you left me I think I wouldn’t be able to go on with it. I have built my plans around you. You are my symbol of everything that is good in writing, and if you go over to the enemy I just won’t know where the hell I’m at” (William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 13). When that fear was realized in 1950, Laughlin’s opinion hadn’t changed: “Oh Bill, when you do a thing like this to me I feel like quitting. If you of all people don’t understanding what New Directions is about and don’t want to back me up, then what is the use of my going on with it?” (William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 183). While this move did drive a wedge between the two close friends and Laughlin, the histrionics are also overblown. Laughlin never gave any real thought to shutting down and the iciness eventually thawed, relegating this period to what he euphemistically called “the break.”

There was similar volatility in New Directions’ relationship with Miller, who was constantly desperate for money. “I always need funds badly,” he wrote from New York on March 4, 1940, freely admitting, “I have never earned a living since the year 1924 when I walked out of the telegraph company” (Henry Miller and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 34). Sometimes the spats were public, as when Miller published an open letter in The New Republic in 1943, bemoaning Laughlin’s reluctance to fight censorship of Tropic in the U.S. While they always made amends again, as late as 1974 Miller openly expressed disgust with New Directions’ conservative business practices, lamenting the low annual royalties and lack of publicity. Writing from his final roost in Pacific Palisades, California to Robert MacGregor, who became editor-in-chief of New Directions until his death when Laughlin stepped back from day-to-day management in the ’50s to work on a project for the Ford Foundation, Miller angrily asserts, “You are supposed to be the business man and I the dreamer, or poet. Instead, the situation is just the reverse” (Henry Miller and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 262).

Such disgruntlement was in the end transitory, and New Directions’ success in forging enduring, meaningful relationships with its writers stands as a testament to their mission. As “the break” resolved in 1953, Williams wrote, “[. . .] I have no intention of severing my connection with you, too much is involved emotionally and in a business way for me ever as far as I can prevent it to permit that to happen” (William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 207). The entanglement of personal and business relationships is epitomized, however, by Laughlin’s relationship to Pound. From master and apprentice to author and publisher to antagonists to friends, the link between Pound and Laughlin are chronicled in their correspondence from the tumultuous years of the ’30s until Pound’s death in 1972. “I don’t so much write as I roar,” he declared in a letter from Rapallo on June 28, 1941 (Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 132). He was a loose cannon in epistolary form, writing in an erratic, poetic form full of ambiguous images, parodic misspellings, and outlandish nicknames that ranged from the acerbic (“tub of guts” for Gertrude Stein) to the cheeky (“Nude Erections” for New Directions).

But the consequences of dealing with Pound were far more than publishing woes and their effect on amity. Pound’s political leanings – namely, his support for Italian fascism – practically blacklisted him in the American market, a situation that Laughlin tried to rectify in vein. Laughlin, to his credit, also stood up to his former tutor, courageously refusing to print any of his anti-Semitic ramblings and vigorously chastising him for holding such opinions in the first place. After the war, Pound was charged with treason, declared mentally unfit to stand trial, and spent 12 years in a Washington, D.C. mental institution from 1946 to 1958. Laughlin, meanwhile, tried to juggle a public defense of Pound’s character and writing with his continued effort to publish him and correspond during Pound’s saner moments. The St. Elizabeth’s Hospital letters range from the depressed – “aren’t you ever coming” (Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 145. February 1, 1946) – to an embittered requiem: “Here lies our noble lord the Jas [Laughlin] / whose word no man relies on, / He never breathed an unkind word, / His promises are piz’n” (Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 157. February 24, 1947).

Ultimately, letters provide a better portrait of New Directions than they do of Laughlin. Small features of the letters – like the way Laughlin begins by addressing Williams as “Dr. Williams” but ends with Williams signing his letters “Dad” or the manner in which he mimics Pound’s letter writing style – only hint at the sentiments of the young man who became an essential fixture in the 20th century literary world, as well as a man of letters in his own right. A worthy supplement to his correspondence arrived last year, however, with New Directions’ 1,000th publication: Byways, Laughlin’s autobiography in verse.

Both “autobiography” and “verse,” however, deserve clarification. Guy Davenport, Laughlin’s friend and a New Directions author, writes in the preface: “A byway is a side road. A formal autobiography would have been a thoroughfare or highway. The memories that generated these ‘byways’ did not need to be fitted into a chronology or have transitions provided for them” (Byways, James Laughlin, ed. Peter Glassgold, New York: New Directions, 2005, p. ix). This approach allows for Laughlin to meander, spending over a hundred pages on his odyssey from Harvard to Europe, only to follow with a brief digression to remember an old flame. And if there’s any unifying thread to the byways of his life, it comes in his verse form, an homage to both Williams’ “typewriter metrics” in his quest to achieve an “American idiom” in poetry and Rexroth’s terse form in The Dragon and the Unicorn. Laughlin’s lucid, declarative sentences are broken in a fashion that keeps line length variation to a minimum. The simplicity of the style tempers the self-aggrandizement inherent in writing what is essentially an epic poem about one’s self. Instead, Laughlin comes off humbly, deservedly reflecting on a life well-lived.

And was it ever. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Laughlin’s early recollections are of Pittsburgh mansions, yachting with his father, and vacations in Europe. In the long sequence “Harvard—Boston—Rapallo,” he moves on to college in 1932, with a lovingly antiquated version of Harvard life – visiting the tailor for tweeds, dances with Boston society girls, and a stint at 21 South St.

In 1933, Laughlin was elected to the Advocate’s editorial board, the genesis of many of his literary contacts as well as some good-natured college hijinx. In an anecdote that has become Advocate lore, Laughlin tells of the solicitation of outside submissions (Pound, Williams, Archibald MacLeish, and others) that led to the publication of a Henry Miller story that was declared obscene by an enterprising young lawyer with an eye on the Cambridge district attorney’s office. Copies of the magazine were seized from newsstands and local newspapers ran headlines like “Pornography at Harvard!” The row was hushed when the prosecutor received prime seats for the Yale game. On a more debaucherous note, Laughlin also recounts a Prohibition-era Advocate party replete with bootlegged liquor that ended in Harvard Square at the hands of the Cambridge constabulary. “It was, shall / We say, a remarkable Advocate / Party. It was not repeated” (Byways, p. 44).

After Harvard, he was on to Europe, where he fondly recalls the sheer intellectual fire that Pound emanated, then back to America and into the publisher’s life. Byways spends minimal time on the minutiae of New Directions, preferring Laughlin’s more personal recollections, which certainly perpetuate his well-to-do lifestyle, from exotic trips abroad at the behest of the Ford Foundation to Laughlin’s other business venture: running the Alta Ski Lodge in Utah, a byproduct of his lifelong hobby (profits from Alta kept New Directions afloat for a period in the ’40s and ’50s).

Most poignant, however, is the long section entitled “Remembering William Carlos Williams.” Spanning Laughlin’s arrival in Rutherford, New Jersey at 9 Ridge Road “To this shrine, a supplicant” through Williams’ final, excruciating letter as he struggled to control the typewriter, the affection and admiration Laughlin occasionally proffers in his letters is on full display (Byways, p. 143). Pound may have been Laughlin’s youthful muse, but Williams’ stability and substance made for Laughlin’s most enduring friendship. He still mourns their quarrel from the early ’50s, excerpting almost in its entirety a kind of roman à clef short story about their rapprochement as if to prove that they ended on amiable terms.

The other notable focus of Byways concerns a more private matter wholly absent from the letters. Laughlin was a prodigious lover, and nearly every excursion or anecdote is made complete by a female companion. An old man at the time of Byways’ composition, Laughlin’s chronicle is peppered with short vignettes about past loves, waxing nostalgically about what was and pondering what could have been.

This more intimate portrayal of Laughlin squares with one of the most important conclusions the reader can draw from Byways: James Laughlin was not just a refined businessman, but a successful poet in his own right, full of wit and tenderness. In spite of Pound’s breezy dismissal, Laughlin’s Collected Poems, published in 1994, contain over five hundred pages of his poetry. Most importantly, as he asserts at the beginning of Byways, he had the writer’s impulse: “Often now as an old man / Who sleeps only four hours a night, / I wake before dawn, dress and go down / To my study to start typing: / Poems, letters, more pages / In the book of recollections. / Anything to get words flowing, / To get them out of my head / Where they’re pressing so hard / For release it’s like a kind / Of pain” (Byways, p. 1).

Having a poet at the head of a publishing house is the real affirmation of the purity of New Directions’ vision. While the traditional enmity between author and publisher crops up in the course of ND’s history, Laughlin possessed a unique empathy because he saw far more than dollar signs in the manuscripts his writers sent him. He summarizes that sentiment succinctly in a March 6, 1943 letter from the Alta Lodge in Utah: “To hell with reputations, making money, poets’ jealousies, ambitions, wars, struggles of all kinds, and mostly anything that impinges on the effect in life of a good art form” (William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 89)

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