Byways: A Memoir

Like his life, Laughlin's memoir is a bold demonstration of good literary ethics. The scion of Pittsburgh steel men, Laughlin founded America's greatest avant-garde press at the behest of Ezra Pound. New Directions brought immortals like Nabokov, Borges and Sartre to the States while sustaining domestic treasures such as William Carlos Williams and Henry Miller. And all the while, Laughlin's gentlemanly manners-a sporting worldliness and a casual erudition-led to proliferating contacts. Although written in verse, his memoir is so plainspoken it can be read as prose. As a writer, he seems simply happy that ""It's / All down on my yellow pad."" In fact, the book is an incomplete project, neatly edited by Glassgold, but it nonetheless covers most of Laughlin's life-from ancestors through Harvard and youthful travels to mature relationships with his writers. He lingers on Williams, with whom he once had an interesting quarrel. Laughlin seems to gauge New Direction's worth in terms of this poet, who, underappreciated for much of his life, might have otherwise been forgotten. Laughlin seldom describes his own intellectual growth or personal life, but he does include love affairs at regular intervals. Smoothly candid, he explains that his freshman girlfriend was ""a toasty little biscuit."" Travels in Germany and India slow the spate of literary anecdote, but probably do justice to Laughlin's life as it was lived. He is an unselfconscious memoirist, who asks ""What harm can there be / In remembering?"" His sentences are short, plentiful declaratives, indicative of a publisher who believed in getting as many good words to the public as possible. New Directions is a genial legend in American letters; this volume may well be its corresponding bible.