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

The average rating for The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-18 00:00:00 Eric Johnson 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 used bookstores, so it was inevitable that some of my treasured, formative books were "Published for James Laughlin," as the copyright pages read. Flowers of Evil: A Selection was my bible in high school, the 1955 paperback with Duchamp-Villon's "Cubo-Futurist" bust of Baudelaire on the cover ("if Baudelaire's 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); 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"); and 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."

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-25 00:00:00 Justin Henderson 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.