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Review by William Corbett
This is a silly book that captures the man I knew over the last five years of his remarkable life Silly in its title—if these fragments of autobiography aren’t the way it was then what are they?—and silly in the way cut and paste scrapbooks of ephemera often are. What’s a snapshot of Robert Frost with Oscar Williams doing here? It was in Laughlin’s files so… The man I worked with when he hired me to write a history of New Directions, a project that later came to nothing, is here, but readers who discover Laughlin in this book will have to take on faith Eliot Weinberger’s statement, “Laughlin was more than the greatest American publisher of the Twentieth Century: his press was the Twentieth Century.” To get a clearer sense of Laughlin’s achievement as publisher, ski lodge builder and poet, readers must go to the New Directions list and read his essays, his autobiographical poem Byways, his collected poems and the books of letters to and from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and other writers Laughlin published.
What Barbara Epler, Editor-in-Chief of New Directions, and Daniel Javitch, Laughlin’s son-in-law, have done is let the Laughlin who wanted to be known by anecdotes hold forth. During our many conversations I heard the same stories about his growing up in Pittsburgh, his discovering literature at Choate, his dropping out of Harvard to attend Ezra Pound’s “EZUversity,” his becoming a publisher at Pound’s urging, his meeting with James Joyce, summer with Gertrude Stein—stories he must have told countless times. They are here as he wrote them in one form or another, and many are illustrated by photographs from his files. The Laughlin they present is aristocratic, petty—entries of Paul Bowles and Helen Vendler—wry, loyal—see the pages on Pound—a charmer who needed to seduce, in one way or another, every woman he found attractive, a victim of depression from his fifties until his death at 83 and a man of the world, at ease on several continents and at ease, more or less, with some of the most difficult writers of his time.
What is missing is the man who wanted to be known and unknown, the “shadow figure” as he called himself and as his friend Hayden Carruth titled his memoir of Laughlin. You will not find in this book the Laughlin of wide-ranging and conflicted generosity. Yes, he had money, after forty lots of it, but generosity is an impulse that cannot be measured by a bank account. Laughlin constantly helped writers and others from a discreet distance. I remember seeing Cormac McCarthy’s name and address in his files. I asked if he had ever thought of publishing McCarthy. No, he replied, Saul Bellow had told him that McCarthy needed help and so Laughlin had sent him a check. Laughlin certainly wanted me to know about his generosity, but he didn’t want it to be part of the New Directions story even when he aided writers he published in the way a patron would. He gave me the impression that he didn’t want to be thanked for this, but that he wanted to be recognized—a very complex, and surely painful, position to put oneself in.
What is also missing, or it is deep between the lines, is his ambivalence toward writers. He loved some of them—Pound, William Carlos Williams, the impossible Rexroth—and he did what few publishers do, he listened to them. New Directions was built on Laughlin’s openness to writers urged on him by writers he trusted. But he also had a fine contempt for writers. In the entry on the totally impossible Edward Dahlberg, Laughlin brags, “Over a BLT on 4th Street (no New Directions author has ever lunched at the Four Seasons).” Throughout our conversations he proudly remembered the cheapskate lunches to which he treated his authors. Some writers must have felt he treated them like the help. Only Tennessee Williams got around this. Lunching with Laughlin—a story that is not in this book—at New York’s Century Club, Williams waited for Laughlin to go to the men’s room then ordered a second martini or an expensive bottle of wine.
Laughlin also proudly recalled the meager advances paid out by New Directions. He liked to quote his mentor Alfred Knopf. “I don’t,” Knopf pointed out to Laughlin, “pay the mason until he finished building the wall.” You won’t find this anecdote in The Way It Wasn’t, but you will see that Laughlin refers to manuscripts as “scripts.” Everything he published became a book—“New Directions books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions” appeared in every N.D. title while Laughlin lived—when he published it and not before. It is the contradictions in Laughlin’s character, the salt and pepper, that are largely absent from this book.
In the end his ambivalence toward writers is amusing and matters very little. As a publisher Laughlin kept his writers in print. He might not advertise their books—he believed in word of mouth—but the books were there when readers caught up with them. In The Way It Wasn’t, he ascribes this to his having money. Lots of publishers have money, and they do not show the faith in their writers that Laughlin did. Laughlin published writers like Pound, Williams and numerous foreign writers for whom tiny audiences existed. This is what Weinberger refers to, and this is a splendid achievement.
When Albert Camus looked at the New Directions list he told Laughlin, “I see you are not a grocer.” Indeed, the aristocratic Laughlin was no tradesman stocking the shelves of bookstores. He wanted his good name on books that would not sell and be gone, on books that were ahead of their time and were, once their time arrived, understood to be essential to Twentieth Century writing.
Laughlin’s other splendid achievement, equally as avant-garde, was developing Alta, Utah’s ski resort. Just as few Americans knew the work of Pound and Williams in the late 1930s, few skied when Laughlin, a passionate skier, began Alta shortly before World War II. He often emphasized to me that he considered Alta more important than N.D. This may have been a case of the way it wasn’t, but I understood that the money Alta made meant to Laughlin that he measured up to his entrepreneur ancestors. He could be a great patron of the arts and make a fortune with his other hand.
I regard Laughlin as a genius who followed the simple rule of doing exactly what he pleased. It is the best of the American character to be so direct. But this was a complicated man who, while avoiding many of the snares of inherited wealth, took it for granted that he was to the manor born. Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell’s biographer, is writing Laughlin’s biography. The book I wrote on New Directions foundered, in part, because Laughlin wanted the story of New Directions told with himself mentioned in passing, a demand that I found impossible to satisfy. The way it was for the man of the “way it wasn’t “ought to make for a fascinating life.
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