James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (review)

Gregory Barnhisel explores how James Laughlin managed and transformed "Pound's public image and literary reputation in America from the mid-1930s . . . profascist, anti-Semitic crank, to the close of the 1960s when . . . he was seen as the most important and accomplished writer of the modernist period" (3). Operating "as a sort of 'spin doctor'," "Laughlin re-created the public Pound" (4).

To begin, Barnhisel examines Pound's dealings with publishers in England and the United States from 1908 through his first meeting with James Laughlin in August 1933 and the founding, at Pound's instigation, of his New Directions publishing house in 1936. These early experiences with both trade and small presses allowed Pound to advise Laughlin about marketing strategies in the early years of New Directions. But, by 1939, the young disciple from the Ezuversity in Rapallo, Italy had transformed himself into a savvy publisher and equal partner in their joint enterprise. Barnhisel convincingly demonstrates that Laughlin re-established Pound's reputation in the U.S. while Pound's name symbiotically enhanced the growing renown of New Directions as a first-rate press for both national and international authors.

A fourth-generation scion of the founding partner of the huge Jones and Laughlin Steel Company of Pittsburgh, the young Laughlin took no interest in the family business, but used his own money to start a publishing company in the depths of the Great Depression, seeing it through the paper rationing of the Second World War to its first profit in 1946, ten years after its founding. A shrewd businessman, Laughlin was also a significant literary patron who saw New Directions as a way to redeem the family name from its association with the ruthless steel barons of the Gilded Age in America.

During the Second World War, Pound and his American and British publishers (Laughlin and T. S. Eliot) could not exchange letters. Laughlin, finally learning of Pound's whereabouts, wrote to him on September 24, 1945, while the poet was still in the U.S. Army's Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa: "although you have many spiteful enemies, you also have a few friends left who will do their best to help you. No one takes your side, of course, in the political sense, but many feel that the bonds of friendship and the values of literature can transcend a great deal" (95). Publishers Laughlin and Eliot quickly allied themselves to save the life and finally the literary stature of their friend, mentor, and client. Firstly, they used legal means, then they formed a counterintuitive alliance of the largely Southern New Critics and the New York Intellectuals to forge a formalist aesthetics that would sunder life from work. Finally, they organized a publishing campaign (significantly aided in the United States in the 1950s through the introduction of the trade paperback) to get Pound's purely literary work back into print.

Although the question arises as to whether or not we need another account of the Bollingen controversy, Barnhisel's interpretation adds considerable value to the retelling of this important chapter in U.S. literary history because of his meticulous archival research. Chapter Four, "Prying Apart Poetry and Politics," continues the examination of Laughlin's multipart strategy for Pound's rehabilitation. Laughlin first contended that "Pound should be defined by his poetry and not by his person or his activities" (127). Second, he moved "to republish Pound's early writings, omitting any work that had to be read politically or that called too much attention to Pound the person" (127). His third tactic was to reach a "student audience, which in 1948 and 1949 was increasing dramatically" due to the G. I. Bill (127).

Laughlin's intentions, his actions, and his successes are clearly laid out in the concluding chapters, which make a smooth transition from Barnhisel's precise account of publishing history to the field of reception studies in the fifth chapter, "The...