A landmark event for Modernism in America occurred in 1934, when James Laughlin, a Harvard sophomore, went on a leave of absence to spend a few months in Italy with Ezra Pound. The heir of a Pittsburgh steel fortune, Laughlin (1914-97) was fed up with the reactionary views of teachers like the poet Robert Hillyer, who made a point of leaving a room when Pound or T. S. Eliot was mentioned. With a letter of introduction from his English master at Choate, Dudley Fitts, the 19-year-old Laughlin was admitted to what Pound called his “Ezuversity” at Rapallo, the idea being that Pound would help the young man with his poetry. As it happened, the two got along swimmingly, except for the poetry part. “You’re never going to be any good as a poet,” Pound said. “Why don’t you take up something useful?” That Laughlin saw fit to follow this advice would prove an immeasurable boon for American literature. While still at Harvard, Laughlin founded New Directions, which would soon become the most important publisher of experimental prose and poetry in the United States. Laughlin piled books into his Buick and drove as far as Omaha to extol the greatness of Pound and Henry Miller and Elizabeth Bishop and many other heroes of contemporary lit.
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When Laughlin fell afoul of his authors, it was usually because of his blithe attitude toward minutiae like filing and check-writing. Take the case of Nabokov, whose first American books were published by New Directions: “I wanted to be his friend,” Laughlin writes wistfully, “but he didn’t want any jejune ninkapoop to be his friend. ... He had Vera write his terse little letters to me.” Actually, Nabokov himself wrote many friendly, playful letters to his publisher. The two even went butterfly-hunting in Utah, after which Nabokov wrote at length about having misplaced “the pabulum of two allied forms of butterflies,” and attached a meticulous map so Laughlin could find the pabulum in question. In the fullness of time, however, Nabokov — whom Laughlin describes (perfectly, I think) as “a doll in a very severe, upper-crust Russian way” — became exasperated with Laughlin qua publisher. “After all,” he wrote, when Laughlin didn’t bother to mail some pertinent paperwork, “literature is not only fun, it is also business.”
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