Thank you, Ed.
[APPLAUSE]
I want to thank you, sir, as chairman of the department,
and your colleague Lois Shelton is
director of the Poetry Center for
co-sponsoring this twin bill.
Yesterday, was her day, and tonight is mine.
And we were delighted to have J. Laughlin and Mrs. Laughlin
as our guests.
I'm up here, not because I'm chairman
of the friends of the library, but because J. Laughlin asked
me to be here and pitch questions to him,
to be an interlocutor because he has an abhorrence
of a formal lecture.
He doesn't realize this is a dangerous thing
to put Larry Powell on the stage,
but I'm going to do my best, J, to control myself.
But there are a few things I do want
to say on this, your first visit back to Tucson, in what is it--
40 years?
About 40, I'd say.
Yeah.
Slight change in the weather.
You came in the spring, I guess, before encamped on the desert.
This time he came down in an amphibious vehicle from Utah,
and we have put on a pretty nice day for him today.
And he got some golf in.
I sent a postcard this morning to a gentleman in Purchase, New
York, regretting his absence.
And I said, dear Alfred Knapp if you could be with us tonight,
I'd confer the Nobel Prize on you
jointly with J. Laughlin, the Nobel Prize for publishing.
Of course, there is none, but here are
they, two outstanding American publishers of the 20th century,
without any doubt.
And of the two, the most daring is certainly our guest tonight
because he published unknowns more than Mr. Knapp, who,
unless his wife went out and brought them in alive,
tended to be a more conservative publisher.
But J. Laughlin has been willing to take chances
when no other publisher would.
This is also our first meeting in 40--
or second meeting-- our first re-meeting in 42 years.
I was a junior typist at UCLA, pecking away on my typewriter
in the order department, and this tall, very tall man
came in and looked down at me at my little typewriter and said,
I'm J. Laughlin, and I've come to thank you and UCLA
for being the first library in the United States
to place this standing order for every book published
by New Directions.
And this was a pretty bold thing,
I must say, that I got my boss there to do in 1939, I guess,
when I first came on those annuals that you published.
He looked down at me, and I looked down at his feet.
They were bare.
He was wearing Mexican sandals, and when
I invited him to come back, and come out, and speak, I said, J,
do you still have a sandals?
Like a good Scott, he replied, yes,
do you want me to bring them?
Many a young man from a wealthy industrial family
has gone to Harvard and gone back
into the family business, whatever it was.
Here was the exception, who came up from Pittsburgh
through Choate to Harvard, and did not go back to the Jones
and Laughlin Steel Mills.
He told me he had made that resolve early.
He went on instead overseas, and I'd
like to ask him, if he would, to account
for what led to this bold move.
He didn't finish his degree that year.
He went abroad and finished it later.
What took you?
What was the motive, J, that led you to leave Harvard and go off
to Europe when you were still a boy, really.
Well, before I answer that question
I'd like to say what a great pleasure
it is to be with Larry here.
He must certainly be one of my oldest friends from California,
and although I haven't often seen him as I would wish,
we've been in touch one way and another.
He sent me the series of wonderful little memoirs,
and tributes, and books that he has published
in such a beautiful format, and he
is, I would say, perhaps, the outstanding book
man in the good sense in our country.
To get now to why I ran out on Harvard after my freshman year,
it was simply because I was bored to death.
This is not reverential, but it's the truth.
I happened to get there--
I got there, I think, in '32 or '33.
And it was between two great generations of Harvard English
professors, the old boys like Kittredge, and Lowes, and Kofi,
and those had retired, and the new great generation
of Teddy Spencer, and FO Mathiessen, and that group
had not yet come on.
And the luminary of the English department, at least,
of the poetry part of the department
was a fellow named Robert Hillier
and frankly, he was dismal.
He thought of himself as a poet, and so
that you may evaluate his standing,
I will recite the first two lines of one
of his most famous poems, which went as follows, "One, two,
three, four, the swift canoe and the shadowy shore,"
Actually, I think he did win a Pulitzer Prize,
once but I think he must have had the jury rigged.
He was also not very endearing because if, in his class,
you mentioned the name of Ezra Pound or of TS Eliot,
you were invited to depart the classroom.
So the only real fun at Harvard for people
with literary aspirations that year were healing The Advocate.
That was the literary magazine, where
there were some really superb bibulous parties.
Jim Agee, James Agee-- you may remember
him a very great writer.
He's dead now and was the head of The Advocate.
And he liked a little nip, and he would share it
with the healers, the fellows who were
trying to make the magazine.
So I got really pretty fed up then,
and fortunately, however, I had had
in Choate a marvelous English master, whom you may
have heard of, Dudley Fitts.
He was the man who did those wonderful translations
of the Greek tragedies with Robert Fitzgerald, who
has since translated The Odyssey and so forth.
And Fitts had-- he had inoculated me
with the virus of modern literature.
I mean, when I came to Choate, I knew nothing
about any literature at all because in Pittsburgh,
the books were only there to fill the library shelves,
and the only person who ever touched them
was the Irish maid who dusted them every two weeks.
But in Fitts-- under Fitts' tutelage,
I had started reading modern literature
and also reading the classics, that he put me onto.
And through him, I learned about Joyce, and about Eliot,
and about Pound, about Gertrude Stein, and I also--
it's rather surprised me, learned about Thomas Wolfe, who
didn't seem to me to be exactly Fitts' type of author
because, you know, Wolfe's motto was--
why do it in one adjective if you can do it in five?
Fitts had been corresponding with Pound in Italy,
through a connection that he'd had with Lincoln Kirstein's
magazine the Hound & Horn, which was not a hunting magazine.
It was a very highbrow, wonderful literary magazine,
and this was a magazine that Pound always
referred to in his letters as the Bitch and Bugle.
So Fitts-- I told Fitts about how disgruntled
I was at Harvard, and he said, well, I'll write to Pound.
And he did write Pound, and Pound said, send him over,
and if he ain't too dumb, maybe I
can drill something into his head.
This was the way Ezra talked.
He had a wonderful cracker-barrel accent.
He preserved-- although he's an expatriate,
he preserved his Americanism to the days of his death.
And he had about five or six marvelous accents,
which I may have something to say about later.
So I went over there and went down to Rapallo,
and we seemed to hit it off right away.
And he accepted me into his private college, which
was called-- he called it the Ezuversity,
and this was a great institution.
First of all, it had no tuition at all.
You don't have to pay anything.
All you had to do is to pay for your own meals, and he would,
he found me a little room, where I boarded
with an old German lady for about $4 a week in those days,
if you can believe it.
And he found me an old lady to teach me Italian Signorina
Canessa, who was a dear old lady who
hated Mussolini passionately because he
had put a tax on canaries.
The curriculum in the college all
took-- well, there were three, there
were three parts of the educational program
in Pound's college.
First, he would lend me books from his own library,
and these were, of course, fascinating to read.
And he led me all--
lent me all of the books that he thought a young man, who
had had his tastes malformed by, what he called,
that beanery at Harvard should read.
And one of the most fascinating parts of this reading his books
were his marginal notations.
As he'd go through the book, he'd
write in pencil what he thought about the author,
even it was a famous classic author.
And the most frequent notation was one which was written
in capital letters and it said "B-A-L-L-S," exclamation point.
The second part of the curriculum
took place at lunch and dinner, when we would--
Ezra took, because his wife was a lovely English lady,
a descendant of Shakespeare's brother,
who of course, being a lady could not possibly
learn to cook, all of the meals were taken in what--
in the albergo Rappalo, but which Ezra referred to
as the al-buggero Rappalo.
And we would be gathered there to lunch,
Mrs. Pound, and myself, and Ezra, and whoever else--
This, the population of this college was very fluctuating.
People would drift in, stay for a few days,
go on stay for a week or so.
I stayed actually for nearly a year, and whoever was there,
would participate in listening to his monologues,
and occasionally, in a timid voice,
offering some very slight conjecture
as to the veracity of the professor's remarks.
And what he would usually start the day's work with
and lunch would be, he would read his mail to us.
And he had an enormous correspondence with people
all over the world.
Most of it having to do with economics because,
as you may recall, in about the 1920s,
when he was living in England, he
fell under the spell of the CH Douglas,
the founder of Social credit.
And this became an obsession with him
for the rest of his life.
The gist of social credit is that you blow up the banks,
and you return the issuance of currency to the people--
very nice arrangement, but it never worked out.
But the mail would be done first and a great deal of comment.
And after that, he would drift off
into whatever was on his mind, and we would sort of
try to steer him, of course, to literature,
and the ancient classics, and the modern classics,
and to stories about his friend Joyce, and his friend Yates,
and so forth.
And he was marvelous because he could mimic everything
that he'd ever heard.
He had a Joyce's accent down, down to pat.
He had Yates' accent down pat, and he was really
great in imitating Yates.
And if you'd like, just to give you
a sample of the way he talked, this is a bunch of--
I have about thousand letters from him,
and I've culled out a few that are interesting.
And here's one I can read about Yates,
and I'll try and read it in his imitation of Yates.
This is Ezra imitating Yates.
This is from a letter he wrote me in 1934.
"An aged Yates, a lefty Esther, I
had a several serious reflections
array, doing a formal document, requesting you to chloroform me
before I get to that state.
However, must be a trial to be Irish in Ireland."
He could do this on anybody you know that he'd ever heard.
I mean, he was, he was a priceless mimic.
So that was one phase of the curriculum.
And I guess we've been on two phases
now, and then the third phase with the athletic program.
And this was really delightful because Ezra
loved to play tennis.
There was a fairly decent court in Rapallo,
and he sort of fenced it himself.
He had the most cannonball-- not a serve, but his--
what he'd like to do is to get in the middle
of the court, sort of about 10 feet back of the net.
And he was quite hefty already in those days.
And he would just wait there until the ball came,
and then he would pivot around.
And with this terrific pivot, he would smite the ball,
and nobody could return it.
And sometimes, he hit it so hard that it wedged itself
into the mesh of the wire at the back of the court.
That was fun.
And then other days, if it was hot, as it got to be often,
we would go out swimming in the beautiful Tegullian
Gulf, which is the--
Rapallo, as you know, is just down the line from Geneva,
and it's a very beautiful bay there,
with Portofino, romantic Portofino,
standing out with its lighthouse at the end of the thing.
And we'd go out in, what was called, a pattino
A pattino was two pontoons, and two crossed seats,
and oar locks.
We'd go out in this, and the reason, of course,
for going out into the bay was that the sewage from the town
of Rapallo ran onto the beach.
But he loved, he loved swimming.
We had very good times swimming.
He was a good swimmer.
And then if it was raining, the thing that we did is--
Rapallo, right behind it, has steep mountains going up,
beautiful mountains, and they are all threaded
with what are called salite.
These are little steep paths made with crosses,
crossed pieces of stones all the way up the hill.
And we would walk up, if it was raining up these hills,
and look into this beautiful region, where
the peasants had their olive trees, behind stone walls
and so forth.
And he loved cats, and if we were going walking,
he would always take a few snacks
from the al-buggero Rapallo, and we would go up along the--
and the cats would be waiting for him.
I mean, cats are very smart.
On a rainy day, they'd get on top of these low walls
and waiting for Ezra.
And Ezra would come up with his snacks, and he'd say,
[ITALIAN],, and the cats would all come and get fed.
So as you can see, it was a very,
it was a very diverting college to attend.
Then the other final, final part of it,
I suppose, you would call the arts program,
and the arts program took place in the local movie theater.
Ezra would get up in the back, back balcony with his--
he wore a cowboy hat.
And he'd be up there with his cowboy hat, stuffing peanuts,
with his feet up onto the ledge of the beginning
of the balcony, and we watched these terrible--
I mean, in those days, art had not
arrived in the Italian cinema.
These were the worst pictures you have ever seen.
I mean, absolutely, the worst, and he loved them.
And he would bellow with laughter,
and I always went with him because I
would be able to pick up a few words of Italian
from each attendance at the movies.
That was the Ezuversity, and it was a great beginning.
And I wish that I could have stayed longer,
but there was so much pressure from, so much
pressure from my family to come back to Harvard.
And Ezra finally said, well, yes, you better
go back and finish up.
And then they'll think you're a good boy and be nice to you.
So it worked out.
Didn't you go, really, with a bundle of your own poems?
Yes, I-- well, no, I took a few poems,
and I tried to write others when I was there.
What did he say?
What did he say to you?
Well, he thought they were terrible.
I would take a venture to show them to him never.
I would never show them in public at the school lunches.
I would show them later at tea, sometimes.
He'd invite me to tea.
And I'd show him these things, and he'd start to look at them.
And he'd fuss with his glasses.
And then he'd get out his stub pencil,
and he'd start crossing out words.
And he'd say, you don't need that word,
and you don't need that word.
And finally, he'd say, well, this
is what you really mean to say, and he'd write it out.
Unfortunately, those notes-- I'm sure, I have them somewhere,
and I'm going to find them because they're really
little treasures.
But he thoroughly discouraged-- he said,
he said, you're never going to be able-- you're never going
to make a writer, he said.
Of course, I was writing stories, too,
but he wouldn't look at those because he
said, there's no point in your wasting your time with fiction.
Didn't you publish a story in The Atlantic Monthly
when you were still a Choate?
Yes, but he didn't want to see it.
Did hie like that?
He wouldn't read it.
That was because of The Atlantic Monthly,
not because of you I'm sure.
He said that there was no point in wasting time with fiction
because he said the Stendhal, Flaubert, Joyce, and Henry
James had done everything that could possibly
be done in fiction, and therefore, why bother to try?
But these poems, he would look at,
and then he told me, he said, you're
never going to make a writer.
This is hopeless.
And so I said, whoa, what am I going to do?
And he said, well, you said you must do something useful.
So I said, well, what's useful?
And he thought about that, and then he
said, well, you might assassinate Henry Seidel Canby.
Canby was one of his bete noire.
Canby was the editor of The Saturday Review,
and he wrote that immortal essay,
in which he proved that there was no character
development in Ulysses.
But I said, how am I going to get away with it?
He thought about it, and he said, nope,
you're not smart enough.
So then I said, well, what else is useful can they do?
And he thought about that, and he said, well,
you might become a publisher, and that's what happened.
And the deal was that if I would go back to Harvard
and learn to be a publisher, he would
let me publish some of his books,
and he would give me letters of introduction
to his other writer friends, such as William Carlos
Williams and other people.
And that's how I got to be a publisher.
And how many years ago was that?
What was the year?
That was 19--
I think it was 1936 that the first little pamphlet was
put out, with the name New Directions on it.
Yeah.
Knapp published first in 1914, but then he's
an old man in his 90s.
Right.
You still could overtake him, I suppose.
I wouldn't do that.
Yeah, we'll keep the Nobel Prize split between you.
You went up to Paris at some point.
Was it after you came back to Harvard?
Did you ever graduate from Harvard?
I finally did in 1939, but with--
I kept taking leaves of absence, so that I
could go back to Europe and--
Could you transfer your credits from Ezuversity?
No credits.
No grades.
Wasn't even pass-fail.
All you had to do to stay in that college
was just to listen attentively.
Well, It's not a bad idea, I think.
Having taught and having had students,
I know they're an excellent idea, J. You, all right,
you went back to Europe, and who did you fall under then?
Well, I'm a little perplexed on the chronology, but the next--
Well, just make it up, it doesn't matter.
No, it does.
They're taking notes, but they don't mean a thing.
I think the- the next big influence in my life
was Gertrude Stein.
Yeah, that's what I wanted you to say.
And this was a very odd connection coming, putting it
along with Ezra because Gertrude Stein had referred
to Ezra in one of her--
I guess it was in her Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas.
She spoke of Ezra, and she said, he
was a village explainer, very good
if you want to explain a village.
And Ezra was even less complimentary about Gertrude.
He wrote to me, as I remember, and he said,
I hear you been seeing the old tub of guts.
Oh, awesome.
Watch out, but she was a very fascinating, very fascinating
woman, one of the most charismatic I have ever
known, with it really, in spite of the eccentricities
of her writing, which are really not so eccentric.
I mean, if you read the essays about her by William Carlos
Williams, who took her very seriously, she was really
up to something that needed to be looked at,
which was the question of how you clean up words, and divorce
them from their old associations,
and how you tinker around with new kinds of syntax,
and that sort of thing.
I got to see her because, funny way, I'd been--
I'd gone to Salzburg for the music festival,
and I was in the [GERMAN] one day, the swimming pool,
and I noticed that a rather distinguished
looking gentleman with one leg, who was,
which was an inch shorter than the other was eyeing me.
And I didn't know about such things in those days,
but anyway he turned out to be French.
And I spoke French because I'd been in school in Switzerland
as a boy, and we became friends.
I must say, he was a perfect gentleman,
as soon as he decided that I was not interested.
He couldn't have been more kind, and polite,
and bought me several good dinners,
and then somehow, the current conversation
got around to Gertrude Stein.
It turned out he was Gertrude Stein's best French friend.
His name was Bernard Fay.
He was at the Sorbonne, and he was the great interpreter
of American history for the French.
He said, would you like to meet her?
So I'd love to meet her.
I read her, and I think she's very interesting.
And so he said, oh I'll fix it up for you,
and he wrote Gertrude and said, can I bring a young man along?
She was at her farm there in the South of France that summer,
and she wrote back or she telegraphed back.
A telegram said, will he do any work?
And I was consulted, and I said, yes, he will do some work.
So we went to Gertrude Stein's farm, which
was in, near the Lac d'Annecy near the Savoie mountains,
and so--
Let me just get a word in here.
I don't like to bring this up, but wasn't Fay the librarian
in the Bibliothéque nationale?
Well, there's a whole story about Fay.
Well, you know I'm a librarian.
I used to be one--
Yes, you see, what happened to--
Maybe, we shouldn't have this come up.
No, what happened to poor Bernard was that he,
when the Germans came in, he stayed,
and he became a collaborator and knew the right people,
and he was made, he was made Bibliothéque,
a librarian of the Bibliothéque nationale by his friends,
with the idea that this would keep him out of trouble.
That after all, a librarian is not dangerous,
and so they thought, if they stashed him away
in the Bibliothéque nationale, nothing would happen to him.
But unfortunately, when the French came back in,
they dug up Bernard, and they sent him off to jail somewhere.
And he languished there for many years, but he did get out.
I heard from him later, and he had a reasonably quiet old age.
Well, excuse me that interruption, but--
Yeah, but went down to her beautiful farm there.
It was called Bilignin, near Belley,
near the Lac d'Annecy, where the poet Lamartine used
to sit on his camp chair several centuries before,
writing those atrociously romantic poems.
And the work that she wanted me to do, it turned out
was to write press releases for her American lecture tour.
She was going to lecture-- lecture tours had been set up
for her all through the United States,
and someone had told her that whenever
she went to a new city, she must have ready a one-page press
release digest of her lecture for the press.
So she started me in on these things.
Well, her lectures were brilliant
and totally incomprehensible.
They were written in Steinese, not in her Alice B. Toklas
style, but in pure Steinese.
And they were very epistemological,
and they, I suppose, later on, since the structuralist have
arrived on the scene, we could say, that they
were super deconstructed.
They were very hard to understand.
In the first attempts I made, you know,
I do my best to get this down on a page.
And I'd bring it to her, and she'd say no, go back
and do it again.
So it took me nearly a month to finish the work,
and I might confess that I was having
such a very good time there.
And Alice B. Toklas and her assistant
were such superb cooks that I wasn't hurrying with the work.
But there was also there what you
might call an athletic program in that curriculum,
and the athletic program there for Gertrude
consisted in changing tires on her Ford.
Every afternoon, she and Alice would go out
there this lovely--
I think it was a model A, nice little Ford,
the latest thing in those days.
And she and Alice would sit in front and--
Gertrude driving.
She was very strong driver.
You know, she was a really muscular woman,
and I would be consigned to the back seat,
with two of the most awful dogs I have ever
had any association with.
One of them was a white poodle named Basket,
and the other was a little Mexican nothing dog named Pepe.
And they both licked me continually,
and I was not allowed to smite them,
to stop them from licking because if I
did Alice was keeping an eye on me in the rear view mirror.
And she would say to me, J, be nice to the dogs.
They're nice to you.
Well, in those days, there were a great many nails
on the roads in that part of the country from hikers
and mountain climbers, and so we'd get maybe,
sometimes two, sometimes three, punctures in a day.
And then Gertrude and Alice would get out of the car,
and they would appropriately sit with their backs to the view
because, as you'll recall, Gertrude
has explained, that the only way to take in a view
is to sit with your back to it.
And they would take out their little teapot or whatever
they had, and I would change the tires.
And we would go on, as long as tires were left.
She had about four spares on the top of the car,
then we would return to the garage to Belley.
And the tires would be repaired, and we'd pick them up
for the next day's jaunt.
But it was a very happy life, but I finally
got into trouble on two counts.
The one was solved by Alice B. Toklas.
Gertrude was insistent that I should take a bath every day.
I don't know whether I smelt or why,
but she would ask me before dinner, she would say, J,
have you had your bath today?
And I would usually say, well, or yes, or maybe,
and the reason I was afraid of the bathtub--
I mean I'm reasonably cleanly.
I still take a bath once a week.
And the reason that I was concerned was that--
you know want a geyser is?
This is a thing that you made hot water
with in the old days, where I think
it was, you had to light it as you would light a gas stove,
and then it would heat the water for the bath.
For one bath, that's right.
But the damn thing would spurt a column of flame out at you,
and I was terrified.
And so I finally confessed to Gertrude
what was stopping my cleanliness, and she said,
you are a sissy, j, aren't you?
I said, yes, and she said, well, Alice will
turn on the geyser for you.
So that solved that problem, but a really, really serious
problem developed when one day she caught me reading Proust.
And she said, are you reading that junk?
I said, yes, it's very interesting.
She said don't you realize that both that man Joyce
and that man Proust copied their books
from my Making of Americans?
So I never recovered from that.
I mean, I had by then completed the press releases,
and so I sort of fell from favor.
But I always cherish the dearest thoughts of Gertrude.
She was a very great, great woman.
And of course, the pictures that she
had collected that she had in her apartment there in Paris
were just superb.
Well, just two footnotes here, J,
you did bring her Making of Americans back into print,
didn't you?
No, we brought back the Three Lives,
which is the book modeled on Flaubert's Trois Contes.
It's the three-- fairly long stories, almost novellas,
about servant women.
This is one of the best things, I think,
she ever wrote because this she wrote fairly early on,
and she hadn't gotten so complicated.
And she was still writing conventional syntax.
And she had a marvelous ear, and she had a marvelous knowledge
of psychology.
Did she thank you for that?
Did she appreciate that?
I think vaguely, yes, yes.
She did-- I mean, we didn't break off.
It was just that she wanted from everyone who were around her,
she wanted complete adulation.
I mean, you had to think she was the greatest,
and if you didn't keep voicing that thought,
why you sort of drifted out of her kin.
But we--
But you published Pound.
You, of course, no one else was publishing him when you began--
Oh, yes, he was.
He had had--
He had [INAUDIBLE]
He'd had [INAUDIBLE] He had had, no.
That was Williams, Ed, [INAUDIBLE] He had had Alfred
Knapp had brought out--
Cathay?
No, Alfred Knapp had brought out Instigations,
the book of essays, and the other,
he brought in two books of essays--
But he hadn't kept them in print.
--and he had done Lustra.
He had done one of the early books of poems.
He hadn't kept them in print though.
No.
Well, you published Pound, and you kept him in print.
And he's still in print.
Yeah, I think we have--
in print, we have kept in print every book of Pound's
that we were ever able to get our hands on.
And of course, they don't all sell equally well.
Some of them are just a trickle-ly,
more esoteric books, but the major books.
Now, The Cantos, despite the fact that it's now an $18 book
sells 1500 copies a year.
And the Selected Poems sells about 15,000.
The ABC of Reading sells about 10,000.
So that the good--
what happens in a deal like this is that the books that sell
carry the ones that are slow.
But it's always been my intention, if I could,
when possible, to keep the principle
works of an important author in print.
Indeed, it has been, and you've done it as no one else has.
There are two names I have written down here.
And they're certainly not related,
but they have the same last name.
And you had a close publishing relationship
and a personal friendship with both, namely
William Carlos Williams and Tennessee Williams.
The two Williams's, though they weren't--
they knew each other slightly.
I mean, no relation.
William Carlos Williams was one of the people which--
whom-- sorry, about that--
whom-- is at whom?
Or is it-- no, that is not correct.
Whom is correct-- whom Ezra had put me in touch with.
And he had written to him and said,
here's this young man, who was interested in publishing,
and you should see him.
So I went down to see Williams, where he was living there.
He was a doctor, you know.
He was a pediatrician, an obstetrician
in a little town of Rutherford, New Jersey,
and he lived there all his entire life,
from the time of his--
got out of medical school until he died.
He was, he brought in over 3,000 babies, they tell me.
He was a very lovable, though occasionally could
be a little testy-- not testy.
I mean, a little sharp, a little,
he didn't like something, he would tell you so.
And I remember once, he wrote to me, and he said,
you've got to stop publishing all these second raters
in your anthology, and--
well, Ezra used to say the same thing, too.
I can read you what Ezra said about that.
But Williams was, he was a terribly lovable man, again,
very charismatic, one of the handsomest pictures of him
on our covers of his early books, he is so handsome.
It's unbearable, a most good looking,
rugged, fine, sensitive looking man, and that's what he was.
He had a very split life.
He was a hard practicing doctor, and in those days, of course,
and especially being an obstetrician,
doctors had to make house calls at night.
Isn't that an industrial town, Rutherford?
Well, it's near one.
Rutherford is sort of-- it's not exactly a suburb of New York,
but it's mostly small houses.
But the industrial area, which he wrote about
in his great poem "Paterson", is the towns
of Passaic and Paterson, which are adjacent.
And he was a, he was a wonderful, wonderful character,
and we got on pretty, very well.
And then when I was able to pull together the money,
I brought out, as one of our early books,
I brought out his novel, his first novel in The Stecher
Trilogy, which is the story of his wife's family
is what it's about.
It's a wonderful book.
It's about how immigrants get to be Americans and develop
new attitudes toward life.
And I published that in 19--
I guess, 1936, and at that time, I always
love this letter because I'm sure it's
the only letter in which my divinity has been recognized.
He wrote to me after that-- or before, just before it
he said, "Dear God, you mentioned casually
that you are willing to publish my White Mule,
that you will pay for it, and that we shall then
share, if any of the profits.
My God, it must be that you are so tall that separate clouds
circle around that head, giving thoughts
of other mettle than those the undersides of which we
are in the habit of seeing."
Now, this is a pretty nice letter to get, you know.
Unfortunately, we had quite a--
pretty good success with White Mule.
I think it went into two printings,
and there was a brilliant review by Alfred Kazin in The Times
or someplace, so it got us off to a good start
on the relationship.
And then after that, I did his poems for many years.
And I brought back into print his greatest prose book,
which is In The American Grain.
Those wonderful sort of s-a hyphen poetic prose passages,
where he attempted to recreate the spirit of American history,
going all the way back into the early history in Latin America.
His autobiography is a beautiful book.
Oh, yes, that's lovely book.
I can't think of the name.
It just says autobiography.
Of course, it's-- I think some of his poetry is, to me,
very great though I always remember Donald Davy,
the great British professor, who now teaches here saying at one
conference somewhere, that the worst two influences on young
writers were William Carlos Williams and DH Lawrence.
[SCOFFS] But to me, he's been a very great, good influence,
and I think his poetry is very beautiful.
And I think that Paterson, his long, personal epic,
where he was obviously influenced by the fact
that his friend Pound had written a Cantos,
but he's going to write it entirely in his own way,
and he does.
If you can figure out a little bit what's going on,
it's a very wonderful poem.
And then even the poems of his last years,
the Pictures from Brueghel, which
won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, those
are extremely beautiful.
And he was certainly one of the real innovators
in the modern poetic movement, the man who
worked out a different way of writing free verse.
He was always pressing to make his free verse more
measured or structured, and I think
he succeeded toward the end after he worked it out.
How would you connect him with Tennessee Williams if he--
Well, I think the only--
there's not much connection.
Tennessee came from St. Louis and was very southern.
They did, however, both write plays.
Now, William Carlos Williams wrote about five plays.
They never, they have been played.
They have been seen in the Village and off-Broadway,
but they're not really, he didn't really
know how to construct a play for the theater.
If you want to read one of them, the one I would recommend
is the one called A Dream of Love,
which is autobiographical.
And I won't spoil it for you by telling you what the plot is,
but it's pretty good, at least, to read,
even though when it's played, it's a little shaky.
Well, Ezra certainly never sent you to Tennessee Williams.
No, I met, I met Tennessee at a cocktail party at Lincoln
Kirstein's.
Lincoln, you know, is the great, he
was the fellow who first published the Bitch and Bugle,
as Ezra called it.
And then later, he became the patron of Balanchine's ballet.
In fact, he was the one who brought Balanchine
to this country, and he's really the great saint
now of American Ballet.
And it was at a party at his house,
that I first met Tennessee.
I never cared much for cocktail parties and got very shy,
and I noticed in the far end of the apartment,
there was this little guy in sort
of baggy pants and torn gray sweater.
And he was obviously unenjoying the party as much as I was.
So I went and started to talk to him,
and he was very nice, always friendly to talk to,
and I talked, you know, wormed it out of him
that he was a young playwright, that he'd
written a couple of short plays, and that he liked poetry,
and his favorite part was Hart Crane, who was also
one I admired very much and that he
said that when he went around the country hitchhiking,
he would always carry a volume of Hart Crane in his knapsack.
And that was the beginning of a friendship, which lasted up
until his death last year, and I think
I published, oh, about 25 of his plays
and, let's see, three, two volumes of his short stories,
and he is-- if you've never read his short stories,
he is a marvelous short story writer, a simply marvelous
short story writer, and if he hadn't become so famous
in the theater, he would be known for those short stories.
And I earnestly recommend them to you.
He has a simply magical style, which is slightly comic.
Whatever he's talking about, he'll
give it a slightly, softly comic touch,
and then this beautiful, flowing Southern prose.
I mean, you know, Truman Capote isn't a patch on it.
And then we also did two volumes of his poetry,
and his poetry is highly romantic, very romantic,
and a bit lush, reflecting some of his, shall we say,
preferences.
And there again, he would never take any pains with his lines.
Everything was pretty rough, but it's
very-- if you like romantic poetry, he's very, very good.
You took your authors that you thought
were worth publishing, you took them personally,
as you found them, and you didn't bring judgments
to any of these writers, did you?
Well, they weren't the kind-- you mean, did I change things?
You didn't judge them, no.
They were personally-- you didn't tend to judge--
Oh, you mean, did I like their character?
They're so different you see.
Oh, no!
I didn't fuss with their characters, never.
I mean, after all, we published Céline,
the great French novelist, who was a paranoid anti-Semite.
Pound, later in his life, became a paranoid anti-Semite.
I just never thought that it was up to me
to play God and try to tell these guys how
to straighten themselves out.
Yeah, well, Ezra did, of course.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
You didn't learn that from-- you didn't learn anything from Ezra
then that was bad did you?
Well, would you rephrase the question?
Yeah, let's back away from that one.
No, I think we should face up to the truth about Ezra,
that he was anti-Semitic, that he thought
Mussolini was the nuts, but you must
look at this medically, as well as morally.
I learned from Ezra's doctors at the St. Elizabeth's Hospital,
when they had him down there, you
know, after he'd done those broadcasts
and they put him in the hospital instead of hanging him,
that the head doctor there said, this is a medical situation.
He is anti-Semitic because he is paranoid.
He is paranoid because the world never
accepted his economic ideas, and you must
look at it also in that light.
And at the time of the great Bollingen controversy,
after all the poets had given him the Bollingen prize,
it was all this hue and cry about can a bad man
write a good poem?
You know, this was the kernel of it.
Well, I think yeah, he can write a bad poem and good poem.
I mean, obviously the two suppressed Cantos, 72 and 73,
which he wrote in Italian and which I have read
are pretty bad stuff.
And there is bad stuff in those Rome broadcasts,
but there is so much else in The Cantos that is totally
life enhancing and beautiful that I think the answer is
he can write both.
Well, I think this distinguishes you, J, if I may say.
I know you don't like me to speak of you personally.
You'd rather keep New Directions as just a name,
and it was a long time before you
identified your name J. Laughlin with the publishing house.
But still, it seems to me the kind
of tolerance and acceptance that you brought to your authors
list is not unique in American publishing,
but certainly it's a shining example.
Well, I don't know how shining it is,
but you can't interfere in your author's lives,
or they won't stick around.
They're living their lives.
They know what kind of lives they want to live,
and it's not up to the publisher to be a therapist to them.
I mean, you can--
occasionally, I might've said, you
know, oh, come off it so-and-so.
I mean, Edward Dahlberg, I used to tell him
what I thought of his life, but he'd already told me so
many times what he thought of me that it
was sort of just hitting the ball back into his court.
I got on his you know what list, too, one time, and I--
he came to see me at UCLA, and he said, I'm a writer,
you know, but I don't come for that reason.
I want a job for my wife.
She can type, and I want you to hire her as a typist.
And then I can go and write books.
Well, it so happened she was a very good typist,
and she was very attractive person.
And we put her out front at the loan desk,
and it certainly created business.
This was Arlene?
Yes, it was Arlene.
Oh, she was a beauty.
Yeah, exactly.
And what she saw in that awful man--
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought, too,
but certainly, the circulation went up at the wrong desk.
Well, you know, de ni de mortuis nihil nisi bonum,
but I'm still getting back at Edward.
Good, I'm not through either, so--
No.
I should have been tipped off because the first time
that I took him out to lunch, and you know,
I wasn't going to buy him very good lunch first.
I think we went somewhere and got a pastrami sandwich.
And he looked at me, and he said--
we got on the subject of Edmund Wilson,
and he said, Edmund Wilson, he said, the man's an ignoramus.
I should have gotten the message.
And then there was just one succession of terrible fights
about everything, culminating with the day
that he came into the office one day and he--
the telephone girl very beautifully
pasted up on the wall of her cubicle, which
was also the entrance wall, some lovely jackets of recent books.
And Edward inspected them all closely,
and he didn't find one of his.
So then he tore off the wall every jacket that was on it
and stomped out of the office.
He was, he was a bastard.
I lent him books at--
I lent him books at UCLA.
He never brought them back.
I don't know.
That's the last thing to do to a librarian.
I--
Oh.
Any rate, but I kept his wife on.
All right, let's see.
I've got a couple of names here that I'd like to mention,
and there are two foreign writers, one Russian, one
German, that you had something to do with.
The first is Nabokov.
Oh, he was a marvelous, marvelous man as well as
a very great writer.
It had always grieved me that he didn't get the Nobel Prize.
I think he deserved it, just for pure invention
and glorious style.
But he was, he was wonderful, you know.
He was a real Russian aristocrat.
He came on in the great landed families,
and this dawned upon me when one day he
told me that in the old days, before the tsar had fallen,
when his grandfather took the whole family
to the French watering place Biarritz
in the South of France, that the carriage and the family
horses for the carriage were sent on ahead by railroad.
And that's the background he came from.
The wonderful thing was that he survived a complete destruction
of his family and fortune.
And because he had this resolute drive to be a great writer,
and he became a great writer.
My contact with him was through his books.
I did his wonderful book of his, what's the--
Sebastian.
Yeah, Sebastian Knight.
It's a marvelous book.
It's one of these books where you don't know quite what
is happening or who is who.
Who is who?
Who is whom?
Who is who?
But I recommend it to you.
It's a beautiful, beautiful, flawless, exquisite piece
of novel construction.
But you didn't publish Lolita.
Why not?
Well, because I didn't think my mother would like it.
That's not a joke.
That's the truth.
I'm sure.
That's the truth.
Yes I had-- well, that's why I didn't publish Henry Miller's
Tropic books.
Because the way I learned about Henry Miller was
that one day Henry had sent a copy of Tropic of Cancer
to Ezra in Rapallo, and we were having lunch.
And Ezra tossed his book across to me and he said,
here, Jess, is a dirty book that's really pretty good.
And then I wrote to Henry, and we set up a correspondence,
which continued for a great many years, in fact,
up to the time of his death, but-- and I published about 20
books of Henry's, but they were always the essays,
or the books about other writers,
or about anything of that kind because--
Oh, and the travel books, The Colossus of Maroussi.
Yes, that was a beautiful book.
Certainly, one of his finest books, and you've
kept them in print.
Yes, they're-- well, they're not all in print,
but they're most of them in print.
Well, a lot of publishers have published,
and then if it wasn't a big seller,
they let the author die.
But you never let anyone die, did you?
Many authors have gone to the happy hunting ground--
But not because you didn't keep their books in print.
Well, we tried, but of course, the sales
of those kind of books that we published, you know,
they don't really provide an income for anybody.
Let's mention one that did, and it was Herman Hesse Siddhartha.
Yeah.
So how did you get that book?
Now, that book, publishing that, I
owed entirely to Henry Miller.
Henry Miller had received from a lady in England,
who had done a translation of it, Hesse's Siddhartha, which
is this pseudo-Buddhist one about this joker in old time
India, who is sort of like the Buddha.
And it's-- what it is, I thought it was and I still think it is,
is a sort of a popularization of Buddhist principles,
but told in a very glamorous Indian story.
And I read this thing.
That's what I thought it was, and I wrote back to Henry.
And I said, Henry this isn't really so hot.
And he kept writing back to me every few months, and he said,
you got to publish Siddhartha.
So after about two years, I said, OK, Henry, we'll
give it a spling.
And we brought it out.
In the first year, it sold about 400 copies.
The next year was a little more, and the next year,
a little more.
Then the great Hesse boom came on in the American colleges,
when they were reading Steppenwolf,
and Damien, and Goldun and Narcissus, and all that stuff.
And that, I think, it ended up, when at its peak,
it was selling a quarter of a million copies a year.
So that paid for a lot of poets--
Yeah.
--and short story writers, and whatnot.
And there was another one that helped with the poorer sellers,
and that was the Ferlinghetti's you know.
It's that City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco
and Columbus Avenue, his Coney Island of the Mind.
How did you come on that one?
Well, that's thanks to Rexroth, Kenneth Rexroth,
who I might say that Rexroth, when
Ezra got so involved with economics, that that was all he
wanted to write me about, and he wasn't giving me
much advice anymore, I turned to Rexroth,
whom I had met through mountaineering connections,
and he sort of succeeded Pound as my literary mentor.
I used to go down and visit him in California and again,
in San Francisco, and again, it was sort of like the Ezuversity
because I could stay there with him,
and all I had to contribute was the price
of a few groceries every day.
And I had the run of his library and all the benefit
of his explanation of what made literature,
and what in culture was good, and why the Chinese poets were
important, and that kind of thing.
He had that same encyclopedic interest
that Ezra had didn't he?
Mhm.
Wide ranging languages, subjects--
Everything.
--he was interested in it and knew something about it.
Beyond that, he had a photographic memory.
Any piece of paper that went in front of his eyes
went right into that computer-- what
do you call it-- that floppy disk,
and he could remember everything he had ever written.
And I've seen this machine operating.
He used to like after lunch to take a long hot bath
in the tub, and there was across the tub,
there'd be a reading board, and he
would be lying there reading, and the pages were just turning
at about this speed, like, that and everything was
going in there.
It was all just going in, so that when he wrote his essays,
he never had to look anything up,
and he made very few mistakes.
I made one mistake.
I asked him to come and lecture or give a reading at UCLA,
and I persuaded Ed, the chairman of the English Department
then to sponsor this.
And chairman have their uses, sir, you see,
and so I didn't know that it was to be a 9 o'clock class, 9:00
AM, and when I told Kenneth Rexroth,
we're reading at 9:00 AM, he wanted
to go back to San Francisco.
But he came to the class, and he was so mean.
And he was so grumpy, and so curmudgeonly,
that it was a disaster, really.
And I didn't end up reading the poetry
because I slumped to the back of the room
and made myself scarce.
But he could be very sharp indeed.
Well, if you'd had the class at about midnight,
he would have been superb.
I know, but I wouldn't have been awake.
He was a skier, too.
Oh, yeah.
You used to ski together, didn't you?
Yes, we made many, many wonderful trips
all winter and summer, up into the Sierra Mountains
there in California.
He was a great mountain man.
He was a natural mountain man, a tremendous love of nature,
understanding of nature, and we would go up
on both sides of the Sierras.
Often, we would go up in winter, from the Mono Lake side,
and we'd hike up in there.
And we would dig a sort of a cave bed in the snow,
and Kenneth would cut a lot of fur boughs with his knife.
Then we'd sleep on these fur boughs0 in this cave,
and he was a great mountain cook, too.
He could make more good stuff out
of dried apricots and tomato paste.
And he, of course, we had slightly different objectives
on these ski trips because I would be tearing up
the mountain, and trying to ski down without flattening myself,
and kind of very often, if the weather was nice,
would spend the whole day sitting
on a stump meditating, I mean, absolutely
motionless meditating.
He was a Buddhist, and meditation
was very important to him.
And even when he was living in San Francisco,
he had kind of a little den up toward Muir Woods there
and not in the redwoods, but in some place in the woods.
And he'd go up there and spend the whole day just
meditating or reading.
You fell on evil days, as you know,
and he spent his last years in Santa Barbara near the campus.
His latter years, as you know, he
was paralyzed and not able to speak, and it was--
and you'll forgive me but saying this, J--
but it was J. Laughlin who provided
Kenneth Rexroth with nursing care up to his death.
You've taken care of your authors in more than one way.
There are a lot of other things I've noted here,
but I think it's a good time to turn to the audience
and recognize them anybody that wants to pitch them up here
at J. Laughlin.
He'll be glad to respond.
Questions, please.
No speeches.
One, at the back.
When you began publishing, how did you get into distribution
with your father?
That was the most difficult problem.
There were, in those days, none of these wholesalers
who handle a small press books, and so that--
I tried first to send out circulars to libraries, lists
that you could get from that Bowker Directory of Libraries,
and then I try--
I think I bought a couple of lists
from magazines like the Partisan Review.
But it didn't go very well because the writers I
was involved with had no reputations, and Pound did.
I mean, Pound, we could always sell 500 or 600 of his.
So then, I tried going out, myself, during the-- they
had a thing at Harvard in those days,
called a reading period before exams,
when you're supposed to read, and instead of reading,
I would just drive west, stopping in bookstores,
as far as I had time to go.
But the response was pathetic.
I mean, I'd wander in there.
In those days, I wore an Austrian Loden Mantel,
which was a sort of a peasants cape,
and I think this apparition of this new type of salesman
did nothing much to move the books.
But usually, there were, usually,
these nice ladies who were buyers,
and bookstores would take pity on me, you know.
And they'd say, William Carlos Williams, who's he?
Ezra Pound, who's he?
And they didn't have time for me to educate them,
so they'd buy a couple of books, maybe,
and this didn't work out very well.
I mean, so very little.
So then we hit on the idea of having
what is called commission men.
These are bookstores' traveler salesmen, who take--
will represent five or six companies,
and that began to help a little bit.
But the books, really, never circulated
very well until some of the people like Pound,
or Williams, or Dylan Thomas, or Merton became famous enough,
so that the college bookstores where professors would suggest
them, please stock this book, I want to use it in my class.
And it wasn't until that point was reached
that we were in the black.
But I have no answer to the problem of distribution.
I think it's-- you know how it is.
You send the books out and the stores send them
back in three weeks for credit because they haven't
got shelf space, and they haven't got inventory money
to carry them.
And the books-- kind of books we do, don't get reviewed quickly.
They get reviewed three or four months later, and by that time,
the bookstores have returned them.
It's a very sticky problem.
And it wasn't just money that did this, J. It wasn't that you
had a family bankroll behind you.
It was something else, and it was taste.
It was discrimination.
It was persistence.
It was also the prudence of a thrifty Scot, wasn't it?
Well, we--
You never spent more than you had, did you?
Well, if I did, then I had to write to my mother.
Yeah, it's a combination, and it's a rare combination.
And that's why there's only one New Direction and only one
J. Laughlin.
And that's how simple it is.
Here's a question here.
How did you come to know Thomas Merton?
Merton?
Well, at Columbia, his most beloved professor
was Mark Van Doren.
And Mark Van Doren lived-- by this time,
I'd moved to Connecticut.
Mark Van Doren had a farm about 10 miles away,
and I got to know him.
I think we met at a square dance, and--
well that's all right, square dance--
and Merton sent his poems, from the monastery, up to Van Doren,
asking for his advice about them.
And Van Doren liked them, and he sent them to me.
And I liked them, and so that's how we
started publishing his poetry.
And we published, I think, almost all
of his poetry and some of his other prose books, too.
Though, not all of him because Merton was such a steamroller
writer.
I mean, he would finish three and four books in a year.
I don't know how he did it because you
know those monks down there in that monastery,
they're in the church singing liturgy six times a day.
And then in between, they have to produce all that cheese
to keep the place going.
And I don't know how he managed to write the way he did.
So to-- was he a Trappist?
Yeah, he was a Cistercian.
Cistercian in Kentucky?
In Gethseman, Kentucky, below Bardstown.
Would you perhaps [INAUDIBLE] that that what
keeps you so interested in Latin American poets?
I know you translated a lot of his--
Yeah well, yes, Quadra, Pablo Antonio Quadra,
who is still surviving in Nicaragua, and also
Ernesto Cardinale, who is now Minister of Culture
in the government, revolutionary government of Nicaragua,
but some of the other ones came to me from other sources.
I mean I knew Parra, Nicanor Parra,
from Chile before I took him to visit Merton at the monastery,
and it was through Parra that Merton began to write,
what he called, the anti-poems of the book [AUDIO OUT]
And we had part of--
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in that, with the wonderful Walker
Evans photographs, and I saw him, maybe, two, twice a year,
up to the time of his death and revered him very much.
I think that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
is one of the great modern American prose classics.
And another question, the lady in blue.
Can you [INAUDIBLE]
What?
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, you want to do Djuna first?
Well, Djuna-- Djuna, hmm.
She was an astonishing lady, and we got along pretty well
at first, until she decided--
she came in the office one day, and she
says-- she always called me Mr. Laughlin,
and I called her Miss Barnes.
And she said, Mr. Laughlin, I would
like you to publish a new edition of Nightwood on paper,
which will last for 1,000 years.
And I gulped because I knew that this was rather unlikely, even
with a handmade European paper.
But I went through the motions and researched it, and finally
said, Ms. Barnes, the best we can do for you is 500 years.
Then she got, she got rather affronted by that.
And she got a bit angry, and she was obviously--
she loved to bait me, and you know, she was,
you know what her nature was, and she was trying to bait me.
And so I controlled my anger, and I said,
Ms. Barnes, I learned at my mother's knee
that I must never fight with a lady.
So she stomped out.
The next day, I was walking up Sixth Avenue from the office.
And she was walking down the other side of Sixth Avenue,
and she always carried a sort of big stick.
She stopped, and she saw me.
And she waved her stick, and she shouted
through the traffic of Sixth Avenue, she said, Mr. Laughlin,
how is your mother's knee today?
[LAUGHTER]
But she was quite, she was quite wonderful,
but you couldn't really do anything for her.
She thought that all publishers, except TS Eliot, who
had helped her write Nightwood, were just crooks.
And any kind of offer that you made to her,
she would smell a rat in it.
I remember there was one time that I
knew she was pretty hard up, so I said now,
Ms. Barnes, Nightwood is a great book,
and it is going to last for 500 years.
And money will be coming in on this book
long after you are dead.
I said, I would like to make you the following proposition.
I will pay you $100, first of every month--
and in those days, $100 was pretty good money--
And this will simply be charged up against Nightwood,
and you will be under no obligation
and myself or my heirs will recoup
this in the course of time.
She was absolutely convinced that this
was some kind of a crooked deal, and she wouldn't take it.
Though she was, she was having a very hard time living.
But I admired her very much.
I think Nightwood is one of the great prose
masterpieces of this century.
I agree with her that it will live, but she drifted off,
you know.
I mean she was there.
I'd see her occasionally on the street,
and she stopped asking about my mother's knee.
But she really was sort of going off,
and it was sort of a limbo of her own.
There is a nice story about Pound and Djuna Barnes,
that I was visiting him in Venice in the '60s.
That was when he had gone into his silent period,
you know, when he wasn't talking anymore,
which can be interpreted in various ways.
Some people say it was meditation,
and other people say it was mental disturbance.
I don't think-- I think he just, as he told me, he said,
I've talked enough.
I'm not going to talk anymore.
Well, anyway it was at this time when he was silent,
and I'd taken him--
Olga, his lady, looked after him, and I'd do some shopping,
suggest we take Ezra out to lunch,
so I took him out to lunch.
And I talked, and I talked, and I talked, never an answer.
Nothing for an hour.
And finally, I thought I said, Ezra
what was Djuna Barnes like when she was in Paris.
But she's so beautiful, and he suddenly spoke,
and he said, well, she weren't exactly cuddly.
And she never, she never was cuddly.
I mean, if you met her on, if you met her on Sixth Avenue
or in The Jumble Shop restaurant, she weren't cuddly,
but she was a marvelous writer.
Anymore, here?
We're-- yes.
Was there any other [INAUDIBLE]?
He wrote a couple of them.
Well, Dahlberg was a string.
But I think that that autobiographical book of his
Because I Was Flesh is a masterpiece.
I think it's one of the masterpieces.
I put up, you know, but I didn't want
to go on waiting for another one,
when going through these scenes with him.
Here's a question back here.
[INAUDIBLE]
Very little.
Ezra, you see, his books were edited for him by TS Eliot, who
would then pass sheets along with us,
if you know what I mean.
Our sheets of his books would be printed
by Faer & Faber in England, and we'd bind them up here.
And Eliot, of course, was a great editor,
and he could get away with fixing Ezra up a bit
because they were such great friends, but other people,
not much.
Henry Miller, you couldn't touch a word.
Nabokov, you couldn't touch a word.
Merton would accept a little bit of changing the word here
and there, but you'd have to show it to him
and get his approval of it.
Rexroth, you couldn't change.
Most of these people, they were not beginning writers.
They were mature people, who knew what they wanted,
and that was the way it was going to be.
And I think the only time that I ever
got away with changing anything was in John Hawkes' great novel
Lime Twig, which is the one, you know,
about the rigged horse race in England.
And there I felt that some connectives were
needed between the sections.
And I told him that, and he thought about it.
And he said, yes, you're right, and then he wrote those superb
little, they're--
sound like sporting columns in the English press about horse
racing, by a man whom he invented named Sidney Slyter.
But I didn't write them.
I just told him something was needed.
We do very little editing.
You're designing-- Alvin Lustig.
Oh, yes, he was a great designer.
He came out of Los Angeles.
We knew him over there in his beginning.
The only trouble is he thought he was the Messiah.
Oh, he was.
Oh.
You're more perceptive than I am, J. I--
He was.
Oh, he was, he was just absolute revolution in book cover design
when he came along, and you can see those
on the covers he did for us, the new classic series.
I mean, they're stunning and absolutely original.
And then he was the one--
it became too expensive for us to use a lot of color
on the jackets, and he said, well,
I'll design a pattern for you to use only black and white.
That's what we've done ever since.
And your logo-- who did your, originally, that logo?
You mean, the sitting down horse?
Yes.
That may be a centaur.
That was done by a sculptor protégé of Pound's.
Pound was always very good to artists,
beginning with [INAUDIBLE] and many others.
He paid artists, and that was a German fellow
named Angus who turned up in Rapallo, stony broke.
And having walked down from Hamburg to see Pound because he
wanted to talk about Gaudier.
And Ezra having no beds in his place
put him up in the dog kennel on the terrace.
It was a nice big dog kennel, and then Ezra fed him.
And he took him over to the local gravestone then,
and he vouched for his being given a piece of--
I don't it was marble.
I think it was granite or something,
and Angus did this beautiful sculpture of what I suppose
is a sitting down horse.
And then as return salesman, as he was doing all his life
with so many authors, and sold it
to Signora Agnelli, the wife of the fiat man.
And this put Angus on his feet, and then he left the dog kennel
and became the terror of husbands
in the town of Rapallo.
Well, here's one, yeah.
In your experience as a publisher,
do you prefer [INAUDIBLE] author represented by an agent
or vice-versa [INAUDIBLE]?
Well, I think that it's nice to deal directly with the author,
but we have dealt with many agents
where an author had an agent.
I think most publishers would prefer to deal with the author
unless we're Edward Dahlberg.
It would have been great if Edward had had an agent,
but unfortunately, no agent would have him.
I wanted to ask you about Sun Valley.
Is it true that you started skiing at Sun Valley, Idaho?
No, I started skiing on the slopes
of what was then called the Pennsylvania College for Women
in Woodland Road, Pittsburgh at the age of eight.
All right, when did you get the Sun Valley?
Oh, I don't know.
30-- I, 38 maybe?
38.
38, but I quickly left there.
It was too social and went down to Alta Utah, which
is when I first went there, it was marvelously wild
and practically nobody there.
It was great.
Well, we're going to wind up very quickly here now,
but I'll recognize a final question if it's a good one.
Is it?
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, supposedly, supposedly, I am doing that,
but the circumstances were a little peculiar.
I was teaching up at a wonderful, marvelous writers
conference named Centrum, up in Pacific Northwest last year,
and one of the people on the program panel
was Gordon Lish, a very brilliant editor at Knapp.
And we were partying a bit, and the next morning,
when Gordon came around, and he said,
I thought you'd like to see the contract that you
signed last night.
So I don't know whether I'll ever get it written.
It's-- this kind of a problem, I can sit here and buzz along,
but to put it in nice forms, another story,
I'm going to try.
Well, J, we're terribly grateful.
This is one step only on a select reading
tour that's taken him the last two stops, Salt
Lake and Albuquerque.
He's leaving Thursday for Los Angeles,
and then is it back Norfolk, Connecticut?
I hope.
Not that I haven't--
I mean, it's very exciting to come to universities
such as this, and meet students, and graduate students,
and people, but home is home.
And I like to be there with my books and my nice person who
looks after me.
And-- well, she's here now.
I mean, I wouldn't come on these trips
if she wouldn't keep on looking after me.
But it's been a wonderful experience,
and it certainly blows apart the attitudes of the professors
at Harvard and Yale, who think that cultivation and education
staff at the Hudson River.
It isn't so.
Well, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
[APPLAUSE]