If you can imagine a world without Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Djuna Barnes, Octavio Paz, H.D., William Carlos Williams—to skim only some prime names from a backlist comprising hundreds of important writers—then you can imagine a world without New Directions. A 1936 publishing start-up, founded by James Laughlin on income derived from his family's steel-industry fortune, New Directions was for decades almost the only place where you could count on finding what was most exciting and most likely to last. From Céline to Borges all the way down to W. G. Sebald, Laughlin picked up what other publishers wouldn't risk, and ended up with absolute bedrock. Generations of young writers found that the way you learned the craft was simply to read every ND book you could lay your hands on.
Laughlin, who died in 1997 at age 83, never finished a projected prose autobiography, or, as he put it, an "auto-bugoffery." In its place, New Directions now offers The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin, a compilation of fragments and photographs adding up to a collage portrait. The effect is like rummaging through the cupboards and closets of someone who led an intricately busy life—fraternizing with Mellons and Heinzes, drinking with Dylan Thomas—and never threw anything away. You come upon snapshots of girlfriends (lots of those), writers, and the occasional dictator or Buddhist monk; poems and cover designs; letters of complaint (sometimes abusive) or gratitude; and memorabilia of Pittsburgh childhood days and countless Alpine skiing vacations.
It's left to the reader to piece together a narrative, but the pivot point is clear: After an undergraduate journey to Europe in which he encountered Gertrude Stein ("She is the most frank person I have ever known . . . no waste material about her at all") and Ezra Pound, who initiated him into his idiosyncratic "Ezuversity" in Rapallo and told him he would be more useful as a publisher than as a poet, Laughlin returned to America in the mid-thirties determined on his path. In 1938, he wrote to Dylan Thomas: "New Directions is the best publisher for you in America because I fight for my books." Laughlin was in it for the long haul, and never wavered. He was rewarded by the popular vindication of most of his judgments and even the occasional runaway hit, like Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha or Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind.
Fighting for his books also at times meant fighting with his authors. Djuna Barnes "threatened me with her cane," Laughlin writes, when he couldn't come up with a paper stock that would last a thousand years. To William Saroyan he wrote: "You don't know what authors are like because you are one." When William Carlos Williams defected to Random House, Laughlin complained: "I am terribly hurt . . . A hundred times when other publishers have told me what faithless bastards writers are I have held you up as an example of loyalty."
It's a pity to lack the full-scale memoir, but there's much to be said for the glancing brevity on display. On Thomas Merton: "He could talk with any kind of person. He could have talked with an Eskimo." Or, skeptical about Henry Miller's erotic exploits: "He was not Errol Flynn. He resembled the clerk in our rural general store and was equally loquacious." No whiff of the academic or the moralistic here. To eavesdrop on Laughlin's publishing life is to be reminded that literature once promised not merely enlightenment but also the most exhilarating kind of fun: more fun, or at least more durable fun, than careering down a ski slope at high speed.
