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  • William Carlos Williams and New Directions: The Care and Feeding of a Literary Reputation
  • Peggy L. Fox

You have just heard of the sometimes close, sometimes turbulent, sometimes respectful, sometimes antagonistic, but ultimately symbiotic relationship of William Carlos Williams and his publisher James Laughlin. Williams was the foundation of Laughlin’s vision of a “new direction” in American writing. And Laughlin was, finally, the one person on whom Williams could depend for publishing, consolidating, and preserving his literary legacy into the future. After the April, 1960, reconciliation of the two men, Williams wrote to his lawyer, Jim Murray, to say that the “cold war” between himself and Laughlin had ended and by mid-June of that year had terminated his business connections with David McDowell and McDowell, Obolensky Press. He wrote Murray that he was determined to go “back to New Directions for the last time, making a clean sweep of it.” And he wrote to Laughlin that it felt good to be back with his old publisher for what he knew would be “the last time.” (Mariani 756).

But from the publisher’s point of view, exactly what did this vow of eternal devotion mean? What kind of commitment did it entail from a small, always struggling publishing venture, which, at that point, was not self-sustaining. This commitment came in four parts, not necessarily thought out in advance and not all carried out directly by James Laughlin. The first was simply availability—to make all of Williams’s work available both to readers and libraries so that he could simply be read by more than the relatively small coterie of fellow poets, professors and bohemians that had been, in Williams’s earlier career, the main part of his audience. I’ll talk briefly about how James Laughlin personally supervised this first part and then go on to discuss Phase 2 “widening the base,” Phase 3 “the [End Page 83] importance of establishing authoritative texts,” and finally the 4th and final phase, the need for continual renewal of the various parts of an author’s canon.

This “plan” as it developed benefited both parties. Williams’s reputation continued to grow, in part because of the careful attention that New Directions was giving his work. Simultaneously, New Directions finally became profitable (it was incorporated in 1964). This “going into the black” after 25 years of precariousness was due, again in part, to the fact that Williams and other of James Laughlin’s early authors (Ezra Pound for example) were becoming part of the canon of American literature at a time when the paperback revolution was hitting American colleges. At the beginning this mutual success was hardly assured. I remember Williams’s older son, William Eric Williams, telling me (after receiving a particularly nice royalty check) that when he and his brother (with their parents, of course) visited J. Laughlin in Connecticut in 1938, J soberly told him and Paul that one day they’d be getting a lot of money from their father’s poetry. William Eric recalled, “[w]e fell all over ourselves laughing, rolling on the forest floor at the very idea we would ever get money from Dad’s poetry.”

But now I will go into the details of the somewhat sketchy “Master Plan,” which began with the making of all of Williams’s work available. In 1960, Laughlin’s first move to bring Williams back into the fold after the hiatus of the 1950s was to plan for a comprehensive series of all of Williams’s books in matching clothbound “library” format. However, as a sign of the changing times, each “library” edition was complemented by the (usually) simultaneous publication of a paper edition for the college market. The first of these were the volumes The Farmers’ Daughters, a complete edition of “collected stories” (which added the long title story, “The Farmer’s Daughters” to earlier collections) and Many Loves and Other Plays, both published in 1961. And despite his declining health, William continued work on the poetic sequence, “Pictures from Brueghel,” which Laughlin planned to issue in one volume with The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955)—the two volumes of poetry...

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