Old Directions

NEW DIRECTIONS XI .(512 pp.)--Edited by James Laughlin--New Directions ($4.50).

Until he was 16, James Laughlin, heir to a slice of one of Pittsburgh's biggest steel fortunes,* hardly knew the difference between the avant-garde and the guard at a foundry gate. English Teacher Dudley Fitts soon changed all that. At Choate, in 1931, Teacher Fitts took spindling, six-foot Student Laughlin in hand, introduced him to the work of such dedicated modern versifiers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Laughlin, who until then had hardly cracked a book on his own account, burst forthwith into creative bloom, decided to bypass the steel business and devote his life to writing.

Restless young "J." Laughlin left Harvard after his freshman year, took off for a Wanderjahr in Europe. There U.S. expatriate writers filled his ears with a doleful cry: Why was there no publisher in America willing to take a chance on avant-garde writing? Laughlin went back to Harvard in 1934 with ideas of becoming a publisher. He collected a big eclectic bundle of literary odds & ends (by such writers as Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens) and in 1936, while still in college, published them in one volume as the first New Directions annual. New Directions books and pamphlets quickly followed.

Fourteen years and ten annuals later, moose-tall (6 ft. 5 in.) Publisher Laughlin now runs his mushrooming but so far non-profit-making firm from a bright, sparsely staffed office high above Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He has gained a towering reputation as an incorruptible "esthetic" publisher, while steadfastly maintaining his literary perceptions at the hit-or-miss level of his Harvard days.

Like its hefty predecessors, jumbo-size New Directions XI is a literary junk shop where table after table full of crusty, dusty, doggedly experimental writing will discourage all but the hardiest. But those who do not mind shopping hard for their literary fare will stumble on a few things worth the eyestrain.

Interchangeable Pronouns. After the hail of postwar novels with homosexual themes (The Fall of Valor, Other Voices, Other Rooms, The City and the Pillar), most U.S. readers will hardly need New Directions' radar to detect the trend; but with sophomoric emphasis N.D. XI detects it anyhow in half a dozen inverted short stories and prose fragments. The queen of the queerer pieces is a collection of excerpts from Parisian Jean Genet's lushly symbolic novel, Our Lady of Flowers (explains Editor Laughlin in an introductory note: "Genet uses the pronouns more or less interchangeably").

Prognosticators searching among the unknown contributors for tomorrow's literary white-haired boy will find New Directions' radar scope pretty murky. Most of the brand-new writers in N.D. XI stick to well-worn avant-garde trails, either rediscover a flabby surrealism("The rabbits jumped on the bed and sat in a furry row, staring") or, like Harvard Student John Hawkes, lose their story in a messy Joycean montage of elliptical dialogue and overfertilized imagery. A deadening number of these interior probings take place on college campuses, where they should have been published.

Familiar Tunes. Publisher Laughlin's name writers are more readable, though all of them pluck away predictably at familiar tunes. Playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire) explores more horror south of the Mason-Dixon line in the story of a frigid, middle-aged writer's passion for a horsy Mexican girl, also contributes some frank blank verse titled Counsel about Paris whorehouses. Expatriate Novelist Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer) writes his way around his subject (Rimbaud) and plunges defiantly into his own thrice-told life and hard times. Most engaging poet: William Carlos Williams, who keeps his verse free and his imagery fresh.

The annual's think-piece, by British Man-about-Letters Stephen Spender, mourns The Situation of the American Writer, finds that "the lack of a middle-sized reading public, independent of Book Clubs and capable of choosing for itself, is the main cause of the extraordinary situation by which talent [in America] is less capable of supporting itself for what it is, and to do what it wants to do, than in most European countries." Critic Spender might also have noted that the kind of haphazard judgment displayed fore & aft of his essay is a questionable boon either to serious literary innovators or their determined handful of readers.

* As a great-grandson of James Laughlin, co-founder of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.

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