476
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
SOMETHING OLD , SOMETHING NEW
A NEW DIRECTIONS READER. Edited by Hayden Carruth and James
Laughlin. New Directions. $1.95.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN PROSE AND POETRY, No. 18. Edited by James
Laughlin. New Directions. $2.25.
The
New Directions Reader,
an anthology of passages from
books published by New Directions, reminds us how extraordinary ND's
publishing career has been and how much we owe to its founder and
editor, James Laughlin. Heir to a steel fortune, he had the education of
an American artistocrat, attending Andover, where Dudley Fitts shaped
his interests, and later going on to Harvard. At 19, according to John
Malcolm Brinnin, he was in Paris helping Gertrude Stein prepare her
manuscripts, and in 1936, while still an undergraduate, he founded
New Directions, having his first book "printed by the same printer in a
Vermont country town who used to get up the
Harvard Advocate."
Because of his resources he could escape the vise of commercialism,
and his own good taste in literature and literary advisors insured that his
fortune was put to the best use in a country strewn with short-lived
publishers who had piles of backing and good intentions, with dreadful
results. By the middle of the forties, ND had become one of the most
important American publishers of first-rate contemporary literature. The
list of the firm's publications (an appendix to the
Reader)
not only
confirms ND's reputation for the highest quality-and just compare the
Reader
to other "house" anthologies-but reaffirms ND's impact as
a cultural force.
Like Alfred A. Knopf, Laughlin achieved particular ' distinction by
importing the latest in European writing; just as Knopf had published
many of the leading European writers of the period 1910 to 1930,
Laughlin focused upon those who emerged in the thirties. ND became,
as far as I can tell, the first American firm to release books by Boris
Pasternak, Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas, Henri Michaux, Raymond
Queneau, Paul Eluard, Elio Vittorini, and Frederico Garcia Lorca. Even
as late as the sixties, it issued the first translations in America of other
writers of that generation, such as Gottfried Benn, Tommaso Landolfi,
and Jorge Luis Borges. In addition, between 1935 and 1945, Laughlin
published the first books of a variety of American writers whose works,
in those days, brought more prestige than commercial profit-John Berry–
man, Thomas Merton, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Rahv, Henry Miller ,
