What publication connects Frank Sargeson, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams?
This slight, 32-page pamphlet was gifted to Sargeson, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers of the 20th century, by James Laughlin ‘the publisher who single-handedly invented the canon of twentieth-century American modernism.’ This is a special copy notable for its rarity as well its associations; it was acquired by the library as part of a box lot at auction in 2018.
James Laughlin was an American publisher and poet whose ‘decisions shaped English-language modernist poetry’ and an occasional publisher of Frank Sargeson.
This is not the only copy with famous literary provenance. Copies at the Beinecke Library at Yale University contain presentation inscriptions from Laughlin to Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.
Laughlin founded the publishing company New Directions in 1936 while he was still a student. He had taken a year off from university and travelled to Europe where he visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He went on to Italy to visit Ezra Pound, who famously encouraged him to become a publisher. The apocryphal story is that Pound told him, “You’re never gonna be any good as a poet” but that he should do something ‘useful’ which was publishing.
The river was published by New Directions in 1938.
Laughlin accepted Sargeson’s stories for his annual literary anthology - New Directions in Prose and Poetry in 1938 and 1939. As well as Sargeson, other writers in these early New Directions anthologies include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams.
Skiing was another passion for Laughlin. By funding the trip of the best skier, Dick Durrance, he managed to form an official U.S.A. college ski team to tour New Zealand and Australia in our winter of 1937, which was covered with interest by the local papers.
When William Carlos Williams’ first novel The white mule, quickly sold out its initial print run, excited about breaking into the mainstream and wanting more copies printed Williams went to see Laughlin only to be told that his publisher was away skiing in New Zealand.
A prolific letter writer, Laughlin's correspondence with William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound and others has been published in a series of volumes issued by Norton. Laughlin was great friends with Tennessee Williams, and their letters were published in 2018.
He also corresponded extensively with Sargeson; the letters in the Turnbull Library between the pair range from 1944 to 1979. After declining to publish one of Sargeson’s books Laughlin replied instead by offering literary gossip:
“James Laughlin in New York rejected When the Wind Blows. He compensated for this by accepting Frank’s story ‘Gods Live in Woods’ for New Directions in Prose and Poetry [1946], and by writing gossipy letters about the likes of Henry Miller, Saul Bellow and Tennessee Williams.”
The River
The River is a bildungsroman describing a gap year of two American boys in Europe between graduating high school and beginning university.
Aspiring writers, they lament the Paris they visit has no Hemingways, only med students and bank clerks, while they, trying not to look like Americans, sit, doing nothing, beside the Seine – the eponymous river of the title. As a writer Laughlin’s reputation endures as a poet and his
play with rhyme and rhythm in this book foreshadows that.
The connection between Laughlin and Sargeson gives another meaning to what biographer Michael King wrote in Being pakeha now when he says that 'Sargeson turned New Zealand literature in new directions.'Author: Andrew Henry
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