A jotted-down life

THE desire to tell one’s own story might overwhelm a man whose life is dedicated to others’ stories. James Laughlin was the respected editor and publisher of New Directions Press. His authors included many, perhaps a majority, of the early 20th century’s most important American writers, notably: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, HD and Djuna Barnes. New Directions also presented many other greats: Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Gregory Corso, Robert Duncan, Delmore Schwartz, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, Clarice Lispector, George Oppen, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Creeley and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as Javier Marias, Guy Davenport, Walter Abish, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Anne Carson.

New Directions was Laughlin’s exquisite creation and achievement. After a long, productive career, during which he appears to have met every Modernist alive, Laughlin died in 1997 at the age of 83. “The Way It Wasn’t” posthumously collects Laughlin’s notes, doggerel, memories, musings and letters from and to him. Laughlin’s concept for his autobiography -- “my auto-bug-offery” -- was to arrange all these entries alphabetically, which the editors have done. This structuralist approach could foster an encyclopedia of Laughlin’s life, but because he did not finish it, the book is, as the editors call it, “a scrapbook loaded with ephemera.”

Laughlin’s career began after visiting Europe as a young man. There he discovered Stein and Pound. “Gertrude Stein was the most charismatic pyramid ever built,” he wrote, acknowledging her monumental literary importance. “I have learned more about writing in these few days than ever I have known before.... “ But it was Pound whose influence was most profound. Laughlin revered and doggedly championed his work. In Rapallo, Italy, Pound’s adopted home, young Laughlin sat at the great poet’s knee and listened. Pound advised Laughlin to stop writing poetry and start a press, which Laughlin did, though he never quit writing.

Laughlin grew up in a wealthy, upper-class family -- steel money -- and with his inheritance, including an excellent education, he lived the life he chose. His background did not necessarily augur the obsession Laughlin showed for new writing or the dedication he brought to it. But one of the curiosities of life is how we make the choices we do, where we learn what we do and develop the chops for the unexpected. Surprisingly, Laughlin became a Modernist patron and publisher, using his patrimony and privilege for avant-garde writing. His literary discernment drew him to its finest -- but to his regret he “really missed out on Samuel Beckett. I don’t know why, but I did.”

“The Way It Wasn’t” captures ephemera and gossip that contemporary writers and students of the Modernist era dine on. Laughlin recalls sending Dylan Thomas $20 a month to keep him going, and he did not mind when Thomas raised $1,000 from him with a lie -- his brother needed an operation, he said. Laughlin deducted Thomas’ “loan” from Thomas’ royalties, without resentment or horror at the poet’s sorry ruse.

His gossip is excellent: “I never knew that [Richard] Ellmann was one of the spooks. I knew him pretty well and never suspected.” Of T.S. Eliot, in a letter to Laughlin, William Carlos Williams declares: “I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the world today. He can write, granted, but it’s like walking into a church to me.” Of Eliot, Laughlin reminisces: “[His] blurbs were superb. What most people don’t know was how he spent days rewriting the texts of Ezra’s prose books so that they made sense.” Laughlin records that “one of Edith Sitwell’s favorite poets was Walt Whitman.” And, although he published Paul Bowles’ exceptional novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” he calls him a “hashish-eating scumbag.”

Though gifted with a prescient literary acumen, Laughlin himself was not a great writer. This appears to justify Pound’s early charge to him, and in this pastiche-like memoir, one reads between the lines to find a lifelong discomfort with his master’s assessment. Laughlin’s poem “Weeding” offers clues to his understanding of his value and mission: “The garden is a riot of / multicolored confusion. / What I like best is to weed. / What does that say?” Perhaps he knew better what to avoid than what to add, what to get rid of rather than what and how to write. He noticed the brilliance and flaws of others around him and sometimes in himself.

His jottings occasionally bear witness to his insecurity and awareness of personal and literary failings. “I don’t want there to be any wars at all, and I want to love a woman with my mind too. I want to be more ashamed than I am that I am so stupid and such a fool.... “ Of his writing: “[B]ut I guess you’ve seen enough of my product, which, like defecation, is an almost daily occurrence.” Laughlin’s gift was, rather, to recognize others’ important writing, which fills the volumes he brought into the world. It remains a marvel that he bet the right horse so often.

Still, Laughlin had “an unfulfilled longing,” toward the end of his life, to have a poem appear in the New Yorker. He beseeches Brendan Gill to put in a word for him: “I want to be published as ME-ME-ME.” It didn’t happen. In another entry, he writes: “Each time you know a great person, you begin to know more and more that you yourself are not a great person....” He mentions, with shocking brevity, being manic-depressive, his son’s suicide, his own psychiatrist’s advice and his taking of anti-depressants. In these passages, one realizes how much is left out, but whenever he does show some of the wounds of his writing and private life, poignancy and sadness salt the book.

“The Way It Wasn’t,” edited by New Directions editor in chief Barbara Epler and Laughlin’s son-in-law Daniel Javitch, contains much tantalizing material, including reproductions of some superbly designed and innovative book covers by Robert Lustig commissioned by Laughlin. Another brilliant discovery! But the book needs more annotation and footnotes to aid the uninitiated of Modernism; even those who have some knowledge might be puzzled by an unexplained “we” here and there. Maybe the editors hoped to keep the flow and zaniness of Laughlin’s original idea, but the method frustrates an uninhibited, spontaneous reading. In the best light, its incompleteness and inadequacies suggest that a life cannot be tidily told or ever contained in a book. More, it begs for a considered, serious biography of this ebullient, difficult, enlightened, generous, petty, old- and new-minded man, whose fascinating life, in part, represents our late Modernist world. *