New reflections: Adam Kirsch on James Laughlin.

BYWAYS

BY JAMES LAUGHLIN, EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY PETER GLASSGOLD, PREFACE BY GUY DAVENPORT

NEW YORK: NEW DIRECTIONS, 336 PAGES, $20.

The worst passages of Ezra Pound's life, and some of the best passages of his poetry, were inspired by his quest for the perfect patron. This was not a selfish desire: Pound's own material needs were modest, and he managed to survive on his wife's small income, along with the little he earned from writing. What Pound dreamed of was the kind of patron--and still more, the kind of culture--that would nourish a whole constellation of artists. "Great art," he wrote, "does not depend on the support of riches, but without such aid it will be individual, separate, and spasmodic; it will not group and become a great period."

Yet Pound found it impossible to marshal even enough "riches" to free T. S. Eliot from his bank job, or to keep the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska from having to scrounge for marble. And as the dream of the perfect patron seemed less and less attainable, it grew in Pound's mind to fantastic dimensions. In the Cantos, that dream produced some of his most passionate verse, such as his paeans to the Renaissance tyrant and benefactor Sigismondo Malatesta, who in Canto 8 is shown assuring a painter, "I mean to make due provision, / So that he can work as he likes, / Or waste his time as he likes." In Pound's life, the same hope attached itself, disastrously, to the figure of Mussolini. "Don't knock Mussolini," he told a correspondent in 1932. "He will end with Sigismondo and the men of order, not with the pus-sacks and destroyers."

It came as quite a surprise, then, that when Pound's great patron finally appeared, he turned out to be not a philosopher-king but a college student. James Laughlin, the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, was just twenty years old when he made his pilgrimage to Pound's "Ezuversity," in what was to become one of the legendary encounters in American literary history: "To Rapallo then I came, / That was in 1934, a student / Bored with the academic conventions / Of Harvard, wanting to get to the source, / To learn about poetry from the best / Poet alive." So Laughlin recalls in Byways, the new book of verse recollections that is the closest thing to an autobiography ever produced by the longtime publisher of New Directions. This is only one of Laughlin's many recountings, in verse and prose, of that life-changing meeting. But it gains in poignancy, and in psychological ambivalence, by appearing alongside dozens of other fragments of memoir--sketches of Laughlin's childhood, college years, literary friendships, and romantic adventures. For Byways reminds us that Laughlin's friendship with Pound was both the making and the unmaking of the young man's career. He came to Rapallo an aspiring poet and went away a publisher: "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."

Laughlin's irony does not entirely conceal what must have been a bitter disappointment. Peter Glassgold--the editor who assembled Byways out of a mass of published and unpublished fragments composed between 1983 and Laughlin's death in 1997--says in his introduction that "Pound's low estimation of [Laughlin's] poetry wounded him deeply," and notes that Laughlin didn't become a prolific writer of verse until the '80s and '90s, after Pound had died. Did Laughlin suspect self-interest in Pound's advice--that in steering the young millionaire away from writing. Pound was trying to create the kind of patron he had so far failed to find?

Yet Byways itself, with its verse that is really no more than serviceable prose, confirms Pound's opinion: There is no doubt that Laughlin accomplished much more as a publisher than he could have as a poet. For Pound's directive, of course, led Laughlin in 1936 to create New Directions, one of the most important publishing houses in American history, and for seven decades the nurse and midwife to avant-garde, experimental, and otherwise challenging writers, from Tennessee Williams to W. G. Sebald.

Even this success, however, could not have entirely erased the bitterness of being relegated to a secondary role in literature and literary history. It seems telling, then, that Byways should devote so little space to Laughlin's career at New Directions, as though he wanted to reclaim in his memoirs the literary independence he had ceded in life. The result is an idiosyncratic book, and a less valuable historical resource than the straight autobiography Laughlin might have written. Out of the hundreds of writers he knew and worked with, only four make significant appearances here: Pound, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Merton, and Kenneth Rexroth. The Pound and Merton sections, however, simply return in verse to experiences Laughlin wrote about more extensively in prose (in his books Pound as Wuz [1987] and Random Essays [1989]). His sketch of Rexroth is amusing but brief, centering on a trick Laughlin played to expose Rexroth's pretense of omniscience: Laughlin dropped the name of a wholly invented French writer, only to watch Rexroth spin out a series of fantastic anecdotes about his close friendship with the man. The Williams section, previously published in 1995 as a short book, is the most detailed, a combination of loving reminiscence and shrewd literary criticism.

What mainly provokes Laughlin to verse, however, is not other people's literature but his own inalienable memories of childhood and sexual adventure. When he writes about his youth, as a pampered scion of Jones and Laughlin Steel, and later as an uncomfortable "boy from the west" at Brahmin Harvard, he often seems to echo Robert Lowell's Life Studies, with its similar settings and properties:

     Granny is an old wet hen.
  She spends her days lying on the
  Upstairs sitting room sofa, giving
  Orders to the servants, who are a
  Bunch of lazy Irish, except for
  Thomas the butler who sneaks me
  The Sunday funny papers, which are
  Forbidden at home. I read them with
  Thomas in the pantry and he gives
  Me ginger ale.

Laughlin's father was a dashing, charismatic figure who left the family business for a life of sailing, gambling, and French mistresses. Laughlin senior initiated his son into this playboy's existence, which would always coexist with his more strenuous commitment to literature. Byways testifies to Laughlin's ingenuous delight in seduction; many sections are devoted to the Southern belle, the Italian teenager, the Jewish girl from Brooklyn, the WASP princess, and other lessons in his erotic education. Erotic and not sentimental: Laughlin's sense of class privilege only becomes obtrusive in his quasi-seigneurial attitude toward his many conquests. Neurotic Liddy, though "she read books / That were above her back- / Ground to please me," could not vault "the barrier of class, / Of cultural background / Between us. I couldn't / Take her out with my class- / Mates from Harvard."

Indeed, given the Leporello's catalogue of lovers in Byways, one sometimes wonders how Laughlin had time for the literary enterprise that Pound, with more justice than he probably knew, called "Nude Erections." In the early years especially, Laughlin's authors were sometimes forced to cool their heels and gnash their teeth while their publisher spent time at his ski resort in Alta, Utah. (There is a painful stretch in his published correspondence with Delmore Schwartz involving a lost manuscript that finally turned up under the floorboards of an Alta mail truck.) But Laughlin's refusal to let New Directions usurp his pleasures may have ensured that, in the long run, it too remained a pleasure as well as a responsibility. And Laughlin finally recognized, as he affirmed after an eight-year quarrel with Williams, that "It had been wrong for me to / Spend so much time building / Ski lifts when my important / Work in life was to promote / The books of great poets."

In the long section of Byways devoted to his memories of Harvard, Laughlin includes a portrait of a classmate who called himself Lord Melcanth, a monitory emblem of the sterile dilettantism that could so easily have consumed a rich young man's life:

  He described himself as
  A writer but so far as I know he
  Never published anything. He
  Would have been a bore except
  That he was very witty. Give him
  A subject and he could reel off
  An amusing epigram for it.

The contrast with Laughlin, who went on to "publish" so many things, could not be plainer. Byways shows that Laughlin's real fortune was not just his wealth but his ability to devote himself to a career equally pleasant and useful--one definition of the good life.

Adam Kirsch is the book critic for the New York Sun and author of The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets, published last spring by Norton.