On the copyright page of every volume brought into the world by New Directions Press, a notice proclaims: “New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin.” Although Laughlin died in 1997, at age 83, the publishing house he founded continues the practice, a tribute to the role played by one extraordinary personality in shaping New Directions’ list as well as much of the canon of 20th-century literature.
The panoply of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama that Laughlin assembled—by Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Robert Creeley, H.D., Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Nathanael West, Tennessee Williams, and William Carlos Williams, among hundreds of others—would constitute a solid education in modern literature in English. But he also foraged restlessly throughout the world and was the first to make Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Éluard, Shusaku Endo, Federico García Lorca, and Boris Pasternak available to American readers.
Laughlin extended the tradition of human dynamos, such as Frank Doubleday, James Harper, Henry Holt, and George Palmer Putnam, who drove book publishing in the United States. These strong-willed men dominated their companies and, by choosing and enthusing over what Americans got to read, the course of literary history.
Few casual readers give much thought to the brand of the books they read, although a connoisseur could, even without looking at the colophon, deduce from the typography, paper, author, and content a volume’s publisher. Today, a substantial proportion of the books published in the United States are produced by five conglomerates. But the house that Laughlin built still stands apart.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Ian S. MacNiven’s new biography, ‘Literchoor Is My Beat’: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, coincides with its subject’s centenary. New Directions is also honoring the occasion with a new edition of The Collected Poems of James Laughlin. The inscription on Laughlin’s tombstone suggests the man’s own priorities: “James Laughlin/ 1914-1997/ Poet/ Publisher,” but it is as a publisher that he made his most significant contributions to literary history.
Not only will we never again see the likes of Laughlin, as well as such other formidable publishing buccaneers as Bennett Cerf, Pascal Covici, Alfred A. Knopf Sr., Barney Rosset, and Roger W. Straus Jr., but e-books, print-on-demand, self-publishing, media conglomeration, the disappearance of bookstores, and the decline of reading have transformed the codex culture more profoundly than at any other time since Gutenberg.
MacNiven’s absorbing biography follows by a year two other studies of publishing luminaries: Loren Glass’s Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford University Press, 2013), and Boris Kachka’s Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (Simon & Schuster, 2013). The story of Grove Press, which won landmark legal victories over the right to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch, is very much the story of Barney Rosset. Hothouse is primarily the story of the productive symbiosis of the extrovert Roger W. Straus Jr. and the introvert Robert Giroux. A biography of Blanche Knopf, wife and publishing partner of Alfred A. Knopf Sr., is forthcoming from FSG.
These books arrive at a crepuscular moment, appropriate for reflecting back on a vanishing world of publishing entrepreneurs. The explicit premise in the title of Al Silverman’s The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors (Truman Talley, 2008), is that, having attained its greatest glory during the decades following World War II, book publishing is in decline. That premise is both true and not true.
New technologies have given birth to a profusion of small, independent presses. And the sheer number of new books, many of them self-published, increases almost every year. A very few titles sell hundreds of thousands—even millions—of copies, but most sell only a few hundred. Furthermore, the Internet, satellite and cable TV, and other media that did not exist during the glory days of New Directions have marginalized book reading. A new collection of poetry is no longer the cultural event it was when Laughlin brought out the latest volume by Dylan Thomas.
MacNiven takes the biography’s title, “Literchoor Is My Beat,” from a mockingly misanthropic letter that Laughlin sent to Pound. “The world is conducted by buffoons, ignoramy and nuts. I don’t want to bother with it,” Laughlin wrote to his old friend. “Literchoor is my beat.” He was ridiculing the dandified notion of majusculed Literature and yoking it to the lowly notion of a gig. He never quite shook off the class-bound notion that patronizing poets, novelists, and playwrights constituted slumming.
Within the exalted circles in which Laughlin—heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune—grew up, poetry and publishing were not appropriate pursuits. Family connections and money sent him to Choate and Harvard, where he fell in love with Greek and Latin. But, restless in a classroom, he decamped to Europe, where he served as a secretary to Gertrude Stein. Later he spent several months studying at what he called “Ezraversity,” under the tutelage of the polymath Pound at the poet’s home in Rapallo, Italy. In 1936, Laughlin returned to Harvard and founded New Directions.
It helped that Laughlin, a 22-year-old sophomore when he started New Directions, was able to draw on his family fortune. Although he was known for parsimonious advances to authors and for never taking a salary himself, he called on his Aunt Leila for periodic infusions of cash when the company slipped into the red. He used her rural estate, in Norfolk, Conn., as the business headquarters, until it became more practical to move to Manhattan.
Never one of the behemoths of the industry, New Directions usually got by with seven to nine employees. Despite commercial success with Tennessee Williams (at five million copies, ND’s best-selling author) and an illustrious backlist that provided a steady stream of revenue, a firm that pushes poetry, and which, during the anti-German animosity of World War II, published Goethe and Kafka, could expect deficits. Then as now, investing in serious literature, especially in translation, was rarely a way to get rich.
Straus, a scion of both the Guggenheim and the Straus dynasties, also came from money. So did Richard L. Simon, whose father made a fortune in feathers and silk. Cerf, a co-founder of Random House, benefited from a maternal grandfather who got rich marketing tobacco. Though Horace Liveright did not grow up wealthy, he was able to rely on his father-in-law, a tycoon in the paper industry, to bankroll his publishing career.
It is possible to come away from publishing with a small fortune, but only if you go into it with a large fortune, and the gentlemen publishers responsible for some of the most important books of the 20th century enjoyed the luxury of being able to insulate themselves, to some extent, from market pressures. In its inaugural brochure, New Directions described itself as “concentrating on books of purely literary rather than commercial value.” From the outset, Laughlin conceived of his firm, which did not turn a profit until 1946, as the idealistic antithesis to the mercenary mammoths, especially the “editorial pigsties of Fourth and Madison Avenues.” (The Random House offices were at 457 Madison Avenue.)
The letter that M. Lincoln Schuster sent to Simon on May 20, 1923, outlining the mission of their new partnership, Simon & Schuster, begins by pledging to: “Publish good books—and only good books. Books that we have read and about which we are generally enthusiastic.” A similar objective is proclaimed by the venerable Little, Brown (founded in 1837, sold to Time Inc. in 1968 and then to the French megapublisher Hachette in 2006): “Little, Brown is committed to publishing fiction of the highest quality and nonfiction of lasting significance, by many of America’s finest writers.”
Few publishers broadcast an intention to publish literature of the lowest quality or transient significance. Few admit to an interest in anything but what Simon & Schuster—which began by publishing lucrative collections of crossword puzzles—calls “good books.” However, each house has defined those terms in its own way. What Laughlin meant by “purely literary” value would have precluded him from dealing with the “good books” by and about movie stars, politicians, and athletes that have earned major dividends for the big houses, enabling them to publish works that do not earn back the funds invested in them. Profits from E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which has sold more than 35 million copies in the United States, subsidized Random House’s publication of Stay, Illusion, the latest volume of poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido.
“Contemporary writing,” wrote Laughlin, “the work that really expresses its time, is seldom accepted by the generation it mirrors.” Until writing is accepted by the public, it needs to be made available by publishers willing and able to risk financial loss. Although he did publish the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po and the 19th-century German poet and novelist Heinrich von Kleist, the fact that he chose “New Directions” as the name of his enterprise underlines Laughlin’s principal interest in the contemporary avant-garde.
He adopted Pound’s motto: “MAKE IT NEW … Day by day make it new.” Nevertheless, Laughlin, whose own poetry often echoes that of Catullus, chose Latin books for his leisure reading and was especially drawn to publish contemporary poets who shared his classical interests, such as H.D., Guy Davenport, Pound, and Kenneth Rexroth.
The personal bonds that Laughlin forged with several writers, including Thomas Merton, Kenneth Patchen, Pound, Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz, and Tennessee Williams, was an essential ingredient in the success of New Directions. Both Patchen and Schwartz took staff positions at ND, and Williams appointed Laughlin his literary executor. Cantankerous Pound liked to tease his younger friend by calling his firm “NUDE dye Rectum.”
That the firm published fewer than 30 titles a year made it easier to claim that New Directions was synonymous with James Laughlin. The newly combined Penguin Random House publishes 15,000 titles a year. Among megapublishers, the words of one publisher, said to be Nelson Doubleday Jr., are apt: “I publish books. I don’t read them.” While a smaller house lacks market clout, it enables its staff to edit books rather than merely produce them. Like students in a seminar rather than a mammoth lecture course, authors benefit from individualized attention.
Publishing and poetry did not exhaust Laughlin’s energies. He was a world-class skier who traveled frequently and as far as New Zealand in quest of the perfect snowy slope. For many years, manuscripts had to compete for his attention with the spectacular ski resort in Alta, Utah, that he founded. He was also an avid philanderer, a tall, attractive, thrice-married alpha male for whom monogamy was erotic agony. The publishing business during its “golden age” was a bastion of privileged Y chromosomes, in which sexual adventurers such as Liveright and Straus pursued women as ardently as authors.
The period since the death, in 1984, of Alfred A. Knopf Sr., whom Laughlin called “the greatest thing in publishing that ever was,” has been the best of times and the worst of times for books and publishing.
Of making books there has been no end … yet. American publishing houses release close to 300,000 new titles each year. Laughlin came tardily and reluctantly to the paperback format, though, especially with sales to the college market, it proved a boon to New Directions’ bottom line. It is hard to imagine that he would rejoice in the fact that e-books constitute a rapidly growing share—now about 20 percent—of the business and that, on hand-held digital devices, literature is experienced quite differently than it was when Laughlin fell in love with the classics as a student at Choate.
On the other hand, it is no longer necessary to rely on a family trust fund in order to do what Laughlin and Straus did. Digital technologies have made it easier to publish one’s own book. More than 391,000 self-published books appeared in the United States in 2012, about triple the number just five years earlier. Still, publication is no guarantee of recognition: Of the hundreds of thousands of new titles annually, a handful sell hundreds of thousands of copies; the average book sells fewer than 250 copies a year.
According to a 2012 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, only 47 percent of American adults read any work of literature, and the number of books they read, the time they spend reading, and their comprehension of what they read have been declining precipitously. If reading is in trouble, then publishing certainly is. Additionally, since reading correlates with civic participation and support for the arts, the decline of reading augurs a general cultural decline.
Laughlin was fiercely proud of being accountable to no one but himself, and, while New Directions has worked out a distribution arrangement with W.W. Norton, it remains free of corporate control. However, he would not be pleased by the epidemic of mergers and buyouts that has transformed his industry. Small fish have been swallowed up by bigger fish, which have been swallowed up by even bigger fish … until they are all made to swim within the same corporate tank.
Harper & Row; William Collins, Sons; Avon; Ecco; William Morrow; Thomas Nelson; and Zondervan were combined under the rubric of HarperCollins, which in turn became part of the News Corp multimedia empire. They, along with Bertelsmann, CBS, Hachette, and Holtzbrinck, are the superpowers of American publishing. In addition to cookbooks and celebrity memoirs, they do sometimes publish literature of genuine distinction.
For all Laughlin’s adventurous, sophisticated taste, his lists had glaring gaps. He found Lolita “too toasty,” shunned the Beats, and rejected all of Samuel Beckett. New Directions missed out on the Latin American boom as well as the flowering of African-American, Jewish, and Latino writing. However, a profusion of new, small presses—Archipelago, Black Sparrow, BOA, Coffee House, Copper Canyon, Dalkey Archive, Graywolf, Melville House, Milkweed, Open Letter, Sheep Meadow, Sun & Moon, among many others—ensures that publishing is no longer confined to Manhattan Island and has ceased to be the preserve of high-testosterone legatees.
Many of the new, frugal independents are, by either design or circumstance, nonprofit, which keeps them from signing the most famous authors but also liberates them to publish the poetry and innovative fiction that megacorporations ignore. Faced with diminishing institutional support for scholarly monographs and encouraged by Louisiana State University Press’s surprise best seller with John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), university presses—Georgia, Pittsburgh, Wesleyan, Yale—have turned to creative writing to balance their budgets.
The result is a literary marketplace that resembles cable TV—a plethora of choices and little consensus. As the booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble attempt to muscle into publishing, and tech companies keep refining devices to displace printed texts, the observation that prediction is difficult, especially about the future, seems apt. The American steel industry, which furnished the Laughlin family fortune, is moribund, and publishing survives. But whatever new directions the culture moves in, James Laughlin’s contributions to literary history seem secure.
Steven G. Kellman, author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton) and The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska), is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Correction (11/17/2014, 5:23 p.m.): The 22-year-old James Laughlin set up the business headquarters of New Directions in Norfolk, Conn., not Norwalk, Conn. This article has been updated to reflect that.
