Gentleman of Letters

Ian S. MacNiven, the author of this scrupulously researched and engaging biography, uncovers the real—and very fallible—man behind this myth. Not that MacNiven isn’t himself under Laughlin’s spell, admiring his literary acumen, his taste, and his ability to rebound from various publishing crises and make New Directions succeed. At the same time, MacNiven does not gloss over Laughlin’s difficulties and weak points. In his verse memoir Byways (2006), the poet-publisher himself described his wealthy family as follows:

Too much money—but frugal Scotch-Irish as his parents were, they gave their son little for his projected publishing business. His father, Hughart, was a playboy-sportsman-philanderer not infrequently hospitalized with bouts of the bipolar illness his son was to inherit. Mother Marjorie was pious, distant, and cold: J, as he was always called, and his brother were raised primarily by servants and were then sent to the elegant LeRosey boarding school in Switzerland. There, J became fluent in French, and his subsequent education at Choate, where he studied with Dudley Fitts, turned him into a lifelong passionate classicist. Fortunately, he also had a family benefactress: Aunt Leila Laughlin Carlisle, whose estate at Robin Hill in Norfolk, Connecticut, became the seat of New Directions for at least a half-century.

But the legacy of J’s dysfunctional family took its toll. He was himself to become a philandering husband (especially to his first wife, Margaret Keyser) and a distant father to his four children, one of whom, Robert, inherited J’s mental illness and later committed suicide. Socially agile, charming, and popular, J had a gift for friendship and conducted affairs with dozens of young women—affairs that were, in his later years, more imaginary than real but which prompted outbursts of erotic poems. Yet there were always dark spells, and in old age, despite the many honors bestowed upon him, J felt increasingly bitter and isolated, especially after the death of his second wife, the indomitable and gifted Ann Clark Resor, who, for more than 30 years, ran Meadow House in Norfolk and organized J’s life with the greatest aplomb. Then, too, in his later years, J came to find the publishing routine merely wearisome, and hence found it difficult to follow Pound’s early shrewd advice, which he himself loved to cite with a chuckle:

Stories like this one are familiar to readers of Laughlin’s own lectures and memoirs. But what is new here is the account MacNiven provides of Laughlin’s relationship with the narrow and bigoted social milieu of upper-class WASP America in the 1930s. All the Laughlin men, for instance, attended Princeton; when J broke with this precedent and opted for Harvard, his father complained to a friend that “J’s deserting Princeton for the college of the Jews & Beaconhillites.” Such remarks were routine in the Laughlin household, and some of it rubbed off on young James, who referred to the editor Gorham Munson (in a letter to Pound) as “a very nice chewish chennlmn inteet.” 

J’s early politics were hardly admirable. “Hitler,” he wrote Aunt Leila, while on a summer trip after his freshman year at Harvard in 1933, “is as perfect an idealist as he could be.”  

In all fairness, J’s perception was not so different from that of another Harvard undergraduate, John F. Kennedy, who on his 1937 tour of Germany wrote in his diary, “Fascism? The right thing for Germany. .  .  . What are the evils of fascism compared to communism?” Condoning the German “experiment” was common enough in Laughlin’s circle, but whereas others came around after the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, J was still insisting that “American participation in the European conflict would be a mistake.” In 1942, J was finally called before his draft board, but he was pronounced 4-F and thus more or less sat out the war, skiing avidly at Alta and working hard for New Directions, which was beginning to make real profits.  

By this time, however shallow his understanding of the war effort, Laughlin had quite publicly abjured the antisemitism of his family and class, and he repeatedly warned Pound to change his ways, though to no avail. MacNiven’s chapters on Pound’s threatened treason trial are especially interesting, containing as they do much new information gleaned from J’s unpublished correspondence. In November 1945, when Pound arrived in Washington to stand trial, he evidently gave his lawyer Julien Cornell “a small suitcase of manuscripts” for Laughlin—a bag that contained “the penciled notebooks of the ‘Pisan Cantos’ and the revised copy typed by Ezra. .  .  . ‘To my thinking,’ J wrote later, ‘this is about as important a literary manuscript as we have in our times.’ He immediately began referring to these as ‘The Pisan Cantos,’ and the name stuck.” J thus deserves credit not only for naming The Pisan Cantos but also for having an immediate sense of the volume’s significance. Today, despite the uproar when the Cantos won the Bollingen Prize, the book is widely acknowledged to be a modernist classic.

MacNiven’s account of the Laughlin-Pound correspondence makes clear that, far from being held at St. Elizabeth’s (where he was committed upon an insanity plea for 13 years) against his will, the poet actually wanted to stay there. In 1947, Julien Cornell thought he had a good chance of obtaining Pound’s release, but the poet’s wife, Dorothy, fearful that if he returned to Italy it would be to live with his mistress, Olga Rudge, withdrew the appeal. As for Ezra, he was biding his time, content to be able to work without financial worries on his Confucian Odes and other projects, and to receive visitors from around the world. As Ezra boasted to J, “Jas, I will only come out of here with flying colors .  .  . and a letter of apology from the President .  .  . and a statement that I was right all along.” 

Needless to say, this never happened, and Pound’s return to Italy in 1958 led to the depression and silence of his late years. Still, if Laughlin had done nothing at New Directions aside from discovering, nurturing, and publishing Ezra Pound—and Pound’s then hugely underrated poet-friend William Carlos Williams—his place in American letters would be secure.  

At the same time, this biography doesn’t quite make its case for Laughlin as the great disseminator of odernist and avant-garde writing in America. J’s favorites—the writers with whom he actually spent his time—were less Pound and Williams, who were, after all, of an earlier generation, than Henry Miller, Delmore Schwartz, Kenneth Rexroth, Thomas Merton, and, later, Tennessee Williams. Except for Tennessee Williams, who has never been considered avant-garde, these writers are not exactly in everyone’s pantheon, certainly not in mine. J, as MacNiven recounts, missed the boat on Samuel Beckett: Watt had been offered to him early on, but, as J admitted, “the light did not come on,” and he lost Waiting for Godot to Grove Press’s Barney Rossett. Again, despite his early admiration for Gertrude Stein, J never actively tried to become her publisher; to the end, he insisted that her prose was largely a case of automatic writing. He paid little attention to Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, much preferred Dylan Thomas to W. H. Auden (whom he actively disliked), and expressed scant interest in Louis Zukofsky. In the 1950s and ’60s, he studiously ignored Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery as well as the John Cage circle. This neglect might be thought homophobic, but then, J was very keen on Robert Duncan, who had the advantage of being a Pound disciple.   

All told, Laughlin’s taste was more idiosyncratic than his biographer suggests. Ironically, he was much more sure-footed when it came to foreign writers. J published the Ralph Mannheim translation of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1933) at a time when the French novelist was reviled in many quarters, and Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire were first known in the United States through their New Directions selections. Laughlin was, and remains, the American publisher of Octavio Paz and Federico García Lorca, and of many titles by Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. In the 1940s, he brought back into print James Joyce’s Stephen Hero and Exiles, and published Harry Levin’s excellent short introduction, James Joyce. The list goes on and on.  

Accordingly—and this is a happy circumstance—Laughlin was able, as few publishers of the last century have been, to ensure that his legacy would remain intact after his death. The New Directions of the 21st century has placed its central focus on discovering foreign fiction writers like W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marias, Clarisse Lispector, and Yoko Tawada, along with a small list of distinctive experimental poets, many of them women, like Susan Howe and Ann Carson. The whole, in this case, is much greater than the sum of its parts, and despite James Laughlin’s often troubled personal life, recounted in great detail by MacNiven, his devotion to “literchoor” was to make a real—and permanent—difference in American letters. 

Marjorie Perloff, professor emerita of humanities at Stanford, is the author, most recently, of Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays.