James Laughlin. New Directions

What follows is the concluding section of the interview with James Laughlin, the poet and publisher, which began in issue 89. In it, Mr. Laughlin discussed his upbringing in Pittsburgh, his years at Harvard during which he started New Directions, his summer abroad in 1933 when he stayed with Gertrude Stein, and subsequently Ezra Pound, the formative years at New Directions, his relationships with Pound, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, and Djuna Barnes, among others.

INTERVIEWER

Let's move into some questions about your relationships with New Directions writers. What features of Pound's art do you admire?

LAUGHLIN

The metrical innovations, the collage structure of the Cantos, the ideogrammic method. I think he was a tremendous technician. Perhaps the greatest of the century. He will endure. His criticism is remarkable and his translations are superb.

INTERVIEWER

Pound and Williams wrote poetry that was so different in many ways. Why do you think they were such good friends during the early years?

LAUGHLIN

They became friends in college at Penn in 1902. They were kindred souls who loved literature. Later Pound helped Williams to change the nature of his poetry from bad Keats to good modern. Ezra was a very loyal person who liked Bill and was supportive. Of course, they fought a lot, but it was a real friendship. Ezra was one of the first to appreciate Kora in Hell when few others but Marianne Moore and Kenneth Burke understood it. And that meant a lot to Bill. Ezra was a strong rooter for Life Along the Passaic River and for White Mule.

INTERVIEWER

This despite the fact that Pound was so very condescending toward him?

LAUGHLIN

Very condescending, but Bill took it. Bill was infuriated with Ezra for doing the Rome broadcasts. Bill had two boys in the service then, and Bill told him to go to hell, but when Ezra landed in St. Elizabeths Hospital, Bill felt sorry for him and went down to see him and made peace.

INTERVIEWER

In a recent book—The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths—a psychiatrist named E. Fuller Torrey argued that Winfred Overholser, the superintendent at St. Elizabeths Hospital, had protected Pound from prosecution on treason charges. Was Pound really as sane as Torrey argues?

LAUGHLIN

Not at first. When Ezra was brought to Washington from Italy I asked my lawyer, Julien Cornell, to go talk to him. Cornell called me up and said, “Jas, I can't do much to help this man. He's out of touch with reality. He has no conception that he has done anything wrong. He can't keep his mind on track. What will we do?” We corresponded with Dorothy Pound's lawyer in England and he said, “Go for insanity,” and that's what we did. A few days after I'd heard from Cornell I went down to see Pound when he was still in Gallinger Hospital. He was hopelessly confused. But he was given very good care in St. Elizabeth's, where he rapidly improved. He got over a lot of his paranoia and confabulation, but elements of it remained. After a year or so he was able to work and he seemed not unhappy. I'd go down to see him and he'd be cheerful, telling stories, but he still had some strange ideas. After three years Cornell wanted to try habeas corpus to get him out on the grounds that there had never been a treason case in law where a man had been held indefinitely for insanity. But Ezra wouldn't let Dorothy, who was his guardian, sign the habeas corpus papers. He said, “I will never leave here except with flying colors and a personal apology from the president.” He was not realistic. He thought he'd been right all along, that we should have been fighting the Russians, not the Germans or the Italians.

INTERVIEWER

Was Pound aware of the heat that you were taking for publishing him during those years?

LAUGHLIN

I don't think he paid any attention to it. There were some Jewish booksellers who wouldn't order his books, but, generally speaking, there wasn't too much stink about it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever feel that your differences with Pound on his anti-Semitism affected your relationship with him?

LAUGHLIN

When I was in Rapallo, in 1935, there were not quite nice jokes about Sir Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, and other Jewish bankers. I was upset. This despite the fact that I'd been raised in Pittsburgh in a very anti-Semitic atmosphere. But by 1935 I'd gotten some sophistication. I went after him on it, but all he said was, “How do you think a man whose name is Ezra could be anti-Semitic?” He wouldn't face up to it. Dr. Overholser later explained it to me. Anti-Semitism was a recognized symptom of paranoia. One should not, he said, judge Ezra on moral grounds but on medical grounds. Once Overholser, who was eminent in his field, had told me that, I accepted it. I have saved a characteristic postcard from Ezra. It was time to bring out another section of the Cantos and it had some rather unpleasant anti-Semitic lines in it. I wrote to Ezra to ask if I could take those out. He wrote back: “Again in Cantos, all institutions are judged on their merits. Idem religion. No one can be boosted or exempted on grounds of being a Lutheran or a Manichaean. Nor can all philosophy be degraded to a status of propaganda merely because the author has one philosophy and not another. Is the Divina Comedia propaganda or not? From '72 on we shall enter the realm of philosophy, George Santayana, etc. The publisher cannot expect to control the religion and philosophy of his authors. Certain evil habits of language, etc. must be weighed and probably will be found wanting. I shall not accept the specific word anti-Semitic. There will have to be a general formula covering Mennonites, Mohammedans, Lutherans, Calvinists. I wouldn't swear to not being anti-Calvinist but that don't mean I should weigh Protestants in one balance and Anglo-Cats in another. All ideas coming from the Near East are probably shit. If they turn out to be typhus in the laboratory, so is it. So is Taoism. So is probably all Chinese philosophy and religion except Confucius. I am not yet sure.” I never could get anywhere with him on his anti-Semitism. At one point I censored him. In one of the Cantos he talks about the Rothschilds and calls them “Stinkshilds.” At the time a Rothschild family member was living in New York. I thought it might be libelous to call her “Stinkshild,” so I just put a black bar through the name and that survived for several printings.

INTERVIEWER

You've been working recently on a film about Pound in Italy. What can you tell me about that project?

LAUGHLIN

It's being produced by a very interesting group called the New York Center for Visual History, which hopes to get the financing for a series of ten documentary films about poets, beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and coming up through Hart Crane, Lowell and William Carlos Williams. They started with the Pound project because they wanted a contemporary figure who stood out as a key maker of modern poetry. We began in Venice, interviewing Olga Rudge, for so many years Pound's best friend, and then we shot scenes in Venice which Ezra had written about in the Cantos or elsewhere. Last summer we did Provence, or rather the Dordogne, up in the northern part of Provence, where Pound and T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Pound had made a walking tour in 1919 to find old troubadour castles. We were able to follow their route because every day Dorothy had written a postcard to her mother in London. These gave us the dates and where they'd been. The postcard would say, “We found Mareuil today and it was like this. . . . Today we walked to Hautefort.” We had a great time shooting those old castles. We got Yves Roquette, considered the leading speaker of traditional Provençal poetry, to read Bertrand de Born for us from the battlements of Hautefort. And we got another man who plays the vielle à roux, an ancient instrument, to sing canzone of Arnaut Daniel at Excideuil. It was a beautiful experience. Then we went to Italy, to Rapallo, where Pound had lived. We were lucky in being able to get permission from the present owners of his old apartment to shoot the Tigullian Gulf from his terrace. We shot the little house in San Ambrogio where he lived during the war. Next we went up to Sirmione on Lake Garda, one of Pound's “sacred places,” where the famous first meeting with Joyce took place. Then we shot the church of San Zeno in Verona, which Pound considered the finest piece of architecture of the Middle Ages. We also went up to his daughter Mary's castle at Tirolo di Merano. We got a wonderful interview with her. We went down to Siena, a place that he loved and shot some good things there. Then down to Rome, where I was able to recite the “Nox mihi candida” from “Homage to Sextus Propertius” on the Palatine Hill, but the director wouldn't let me wear a toga.

INTERVIEWER

What came to be your role in this film?

LAUGHLIN

It was doing whatever they asked me to do. Literary advice. Interviews. Commentary. Voice-overs. The film's going to have a lot of poetry in it, using the latest electronic techniques. I had to interview some people in Italian, old people who had known him, which was quite a strain since I've forgotten most of my Italian.

INTERVIEWER

Is anybody playing parts?

LAUGHLIN

No. Just interviews with people who knew him. But no one will play Pound, which is good. It would be impossible to find an actor who could play Pound.