The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin

by James Laughlin, Barbara Epler (editor), Daniel Javitch (editor)

James Laughlin—poet, ladies' man, heir to a steel fortune, and the founder of New Directions—was still at work on his autobiography when he died at 83. He left behind personal files crammed with memories and memorabilia: in "M" he is taking Marianne Moore to Yankee games (outings captured here in charming snapshots) to discuss "arcane mammals," and in "N" nearly plunging off a mountain, hunting butterflies with Nabokov ("Volya was a doll in a very severe upper-crust Russian way").


With an accent on humor, The Way It Wasn't is a scrapbook loaded with ephemera—letters and memories, clippings and photographs. This richly illustrated album glitters like a magpie's nest, if a magpie could have known Tennessee Williams, W.C. Williams, Merton, Miller, Stein, and Pound. In "C": "I wish that nice Jean Cocteau were still around. He took me to lunch at the Grand Véfours in the Palais-Royal and explained all about flying saucers. He understood mechanical things. He would advise me." In "P": "There was not much 'gracious living' in Pittsburgh, where at one house, the butler passed chewing gum on a silver salver after coffee." And: "The world is full of a large number of irritating people." In "H" there's Lillian Hellman: "What a raspy character. When I knocked at her door to try to borrow one of her books (hoping to butter her up) she only opened her door four inches and said words to the effect: 'Fuck off, you rapist.'" Marketing in "M": "I think it's important to get the 'troubadours' into the title. That's a 'buy-me' word." In "G": "Olga asked Allen Ginsberg if he was also buying Pound Conference T-shirts for his grandchildren. She was most lovable throughout." In "L": "Wyndham Lewis wrote 'Why don't you stop New Directions, your books are crap.'" And we find love in "L": "Cicero noted that an old love pinches like a crab." But in The Way It Wasn't James Laughlin's love of the crazy world and his crazier authors does not pinch a bit: it glows with wit and enlarges our feeling for the late great twentieth century.

Genres: Memoir, Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, American

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 2006

About the author

James Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishing.

One of Laughlin's most anthologized works is "Step on His Head", a poem about his relationship with his children.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every writer has a tale of conversion – “the book that made me want to become a writer” – and for nearly every writer I know, that one book was published by Laughlin...I belong to the last generation to come of age before the tidal wave of the overproduction of everything, and in my adolescence, the black and white photographic covers of ND books were unmistakable on the shelves. I would buy any one of them at random, knowing that if Laughlin published it, it was something that had to be read, the latest oracle from the Temple of the Modern, the place where one went to feel alive in the present.

(Eliot Weinberger)

I’m too young for New Directions to mean so much to me (Weinberger is my father's age), but I spent most of high school and college browsing poetry and fiction in libraries and used bookstores, so it was inevitable that some of my treasured, formative books were “Published for James Laughlin,” as the copyright pages read:

1. Flowers of Evil: A Selection was my bible in high school, the 1955 paperback with Duchamp-Villon’s “Cubo-Futurist” portrait bust of Baudelaire on the cover . If the bust “were to explode,” said the sculptor, Marcel’s brother, “it would do so along certain lines of force” - a good image for the designed disorientation poets hope to effect in readers.

2. Sartre’s speculative psychobiography Baudelaire, Matisse cover, did weird things to my head when I happened to read it in the midst of the FGS Collected Lorca (that’s “the book that made me want to become a writer”).

3. The only Beat stuff I ever liked was in Bob Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness and The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978.


A file is easily a tomb. It is good to see such fascinating ephemera expertly photographed and presented in a large, dramatic format. The full-page young Delmore Schwartz was very affecting.


I hope that his memoir Byways can supply me more images of his Pittsburgh childhood, an odd world of dour mill owners, Irish maids, black chauffeurs, and inescapable soot; and I hope his poetry is as “witty and erotic” as Davenport and Weinberger say it is. The Laughlin figure in Humboldt’s Gift is called the “playboy publisher,” and the title stuck, though it makes his life sound effortless. A teenage skiing injury and botched treatment permanently weakened his back; the subsequent decades of skiing and seductions have at times a grimly strenuous, Jack Kennedy-like air. Nor was publishing easy. Funded by fitful steel shares and devoted to the best, New Directions took twenty years to turn a profit. Laughlin told Dylan Thomas he fought for his writers, as the vehemence of his bookselling recollections – books loaded in the trunk of his Buick, he went door to door, store to store, arguing and appealing – makes clear. And Weinberger’s claim that Laughlin was good humored about writers leaving him when they got famous is belied by the scathing letters to Paul Bowles and William Carlos Williams.


Weinberger says Nabokov once saved Laughlin’s life, when the two were hiking in the Rockies. Laughlin slipped, reeled – but was able to grab hold of the out-thrust butterfly net.

In a story that sounds too good to be true, Laughlin, Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop, all in Key West in 1940, called upon and took tea with a local madam and her girls; one invited them up to her room and they saw a bed-spread collection of dolls “in dresses that surely the owner had stitched.”

Outside the morgue at St. Vincent’s, Laughlin and John Brinnin flipped a coin to decide which of them would go in and identify Dylan Thomas:

…it was an awful place, smelling of formaldehyde. There was this little old guy trundling corpses around on gurneys. He would pull a rubber sheet back and ask, “Is this him?” “No.” “Is this him?” “No.” Finally we found him. He looked awful, all puffy and purple. “Yeah, that’s him.” And he said, “Well, you go over there to the window and identify him.” In the window was a little girl. She was about four feet high, and I don’t think she had even finished high school yet. She filled out the forms – she couldn’t spell Dylan so I spelled it out for her. “What was his profession?” “He was a poet.” That puzzled her. This little girl said, “What’s a poet?” “He wrote poetry.” So that is what the form says: “Dylan Thomas. He wrote poetry.”

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

This very quickly became a hate-read. TLDR: glib, unreflective heir to a steel fortune goes to Choate and becomes a poetry fanboy, travels the world, achieves tastemaker status, indeed becomes a central figure in Anglosphere literary modernism—and remains, at bottom, just a total fucking meathead.

There’s plenty of literary gossip here, but none of it evinces much depth or insight. Lots of cringey Poundian faux-populist spelling (“Kafflix”); empty failed pronouncements (“Thoreau is our Diogenes”); and embarrassingly immoderate (in both dismissive and bootlicky directions) reporting on varied literary figures. What there’s a total absence of is evidence of sustained aesthetic reflection, much less any attempt to limn deeper questions.

And it’s all in the format of catty, oooh-so-pithy short entries, like so:

FICTION

My fiction tolerance stops with The Good Soldier. Rexroth said, “Jim, only children read novels.” And Griselda published Brooke-Rose’s Texterminations. I think it’s about “the text doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty embarrassing.

I have the recent biography of Laughlin on my t-read shelf, and I'll get to it soon enough. In the meantime, I tried this, which was a posthumously published autobiography.

Except that it's not. It's fragments of an autobiography--or "auto-bug-offery, as Laughlin calls its. Someone had the interesting idea to arrange the fragments alphabetically--a quiet homage to Ezra Pound, who haunts these pages--but the one would still want some unifying thread, some recurrent themes.

There's nothing of the sort.

Bits of it indulge Laughlin's (and Pound's) idiosyncratic word-making--his version of autobiography, for example--but these coinages do not add any depth to the word, and the conceit is only occasional. There are many, many references to Pound, but a complete view is never present. Henry Miller is given short-shrift. Toward the end of the book, there is some interesting material on Rexroth and William Carlos Williams, but, because of the fragmentary structure, these come out of the blue.

I get the sense from what I have read about Laughlin that he's a bit of a conundrum. A lover of poetry and literature, who published some of the most important modernist works, funding experimental works with a fortune inherited from his family--but he himself was rather blithe, un-given to introspection, preferring the superficial and joke-y in his own life.

Which comes through here loud and clear. He references Pound's social credit ideas a lot, and even once tried to distinguish social credit from Silvio Gesell's system, but otherwise just took it to mean banks were bad. A womanizer with no interest in feminism, Laughling makes the sophist's point--maybe the narcissist's--that the word girl is preferable to woman because in Italian the word for girl is prettier than the one for woman.

He spends time talking about the ugliness of gay sex.

And this in a book that references Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas: meaning he had time to outgrow these sophomoric musings.

But sophomoric was what he did best, it seems.

So, in the end, the book is hardly revelatory and I'm not sure what New Directions hoped to get by putting it out. Disappointing.

[Catherine Bishop · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can send your son to Finishing School in The Swiss Alps, but if he was born in Pittsburgh, he will always be a Yinzer. Though the life of a steel-industry-nepo-baby turned playboy-publisher-of-unwanted-poems does not garner a lot of admiration from the public, I loved this book. I came from the other side of Pittsburgh; my great-grandfathers were the hands that built his steel fortune. I am a woman, the almost-always victim of his playboy escapades. According to sex and class, I should hate this book. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but he's charmed another woman. And this time, he did it from the grave.

There was an essence of Pittsburgh boyhood on every page, and when paired with stories of early, philandering adulthoods composed of swinging from book to book, I found a memoir that almost sang to me. There is something about an Appalachian scoundrel who loves to read that will always be lovable to me.

There are many a celebrity cameo in this, and I don't think I've ever laughed harder at a book than when I read the section for Nin, Anäis that read, "Anäis Nin don't like James too much." There's also an incredible section on a time when Laughlin and Elizabeth Bishop visited a Key West brothel.

And therein lies the beauty of this book, and what Laughlin did with the fortunes my great-grandfathers made him. He told stories that would have otherwise been lost to the drudgery of publishing books that "sell." He created a publishing company that advocated for the low-class poets who didn't have a place to put their art. It opened up a new world of reading and writing and connection for people who were living in places like Pittsburgh and wondering, "Is there a place for people who think like me? Is there a different life available to someone as cynical as me?" It was an inspired thing to do with a steel fortune, better than any museum Carnegie ever gave us. Despite all of our difference, I closed this book and thought "I just read something by someone like me."

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost a coffee-table book, big and heavy with thick/glossy pages. Lots of photos, bits of correspondence (Nabokov, Guy Davenport, Tenn Williams, etc.), diary pieces. A treat for fans of the legendary American small press, (in Pound’s pun) Nude Erections, and its charismatic, troubled, and generous founder.

[Taylor Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reads like a strange love letter and witty testament to the twentieth century and the Anglosphere’s literary modernism.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun compendium of letters, photos, etc from Laughlin’s life.

[Larry-bob Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great format for a memoir of a long, full life. The author was the founder of the publishing comedy New Directions (which he started while he was in college.) He published a lot of the modernist writers. This is more of a scrapbook than a formal memoir, and has lots of short pieces, excerpts from letters, photos, and book covers. Nice open design. Definitely a model I would examine if working on a memoir. It's already sparked following up on a few of the names mentioned. Among those most mentioned in the book are Ezra Pound, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, and there are also tidbits on more obscure people like Edouard Roditi.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vastly entertaining dish on modernist writers, and an appealing mosaic self-portrait of Laughlin. I had him for a teacher one semester at Brown and so reading this compilation of his notes-toward-a-memoir had a special poignance for me. I was making a little xeroxed zine at the time, and kept leaving copies and a solicitation in his mailbox. His TA kept throwing them away. When he found out that she'd done that, he was quite irked with her and promptly gave me something to print. So I like to feel I share a small part in his legacy. This book is a blast to read in any case. I don't trust myself to give examples because I'd have to reread the whole thing and quote interminably.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about an interesting man. James Laughlin never wrote his autobiography, so two colleagues created a scrapbook biography from his collected papers and photographs. This book just might give a clearer picture of the man than a real autobiography would have.
Recommended even to those who have no knowledge of Mr. Laughlin or of New Directions.

[Susanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun to pick up and read in small doses - high literary gossip.

[Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely prose and lots of dope about all the modernists. Laughlin lived in my corner of Connecticut. My oldest friend knew his wife.

[Word Artisan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Redefines the autobiography. Like reading a blog in book form, from a poet and publisher of the early 20th Century. So fantastic.