POEM FOR A SUNDAY
I have been catching up with This Is Us, which one has to watch on Amazon Prime here in London since Hulu doesn’t offer it. I would watch each episode in this new season on Hulu for free back in Hudson where I also live. Amazon Prime charges $2.99 an episode and it kind of pisses me off to have to pay even that pittance (less than a cup of coffee over here in London in many of the places where I get an Americana coffee or filter one) since I had been getting the series for free - so I know how some of you might be a bit bothered because you were reading me for free on Facebook and don’t want to pay the $5 a month or $50 a year for a subscription. I hope you’ll change your mind as you see how committed I am to this. But I get it. I am grateful for every subscriber in this community we are building - free and paid ones. On Sundays, this POEM FOR A SUNDAY feature I am navigating over from Facebook as I have navigated the RUBRICS of Stars in Black Turtlenecks and Some Joy and Before Google, will be for everyone. The RUBRICS starting tomorrow will only be for paid subscribers.
This is Us - the early years of the family - takes place in Pittsburgh and I woke up thinking of this poem by James Laughlin on this Easter morning. Laughlin - I keep a book of his collected poems by my bed back in Hudson - was from a very different sort of Pittsburgh family. In a 2015 review titled THE FATHER OF MODERNISM, which was about those collected poems edited by Peter Glassgold as well as Ian S. MacNiven’s biography of Laughlin titled Literchoor Is My Beat, Charles Simic wrote in his opening paragraphs at The New York Review of Books (yes, I have a subscription):
“It’s not often that a biographer is as fortunate with his subject as Ian S. MacNiven has been with James Laughlin. As the founder and publisher of New Directions, the most prominent press in this country of modernist American and foreign literature, Laughlin not only had an interesting life, or more accurately several lives that he somehow managed to lead concurrently, he also exchanged thousands of letters with writers he published, friends, and family members, thus leaving behind an astounding amount of material for his future biographer.
“His story and the story of the company he ran for over fifty years as well as the history of modernism in this country are so intertwined that they cannot be told separately. It is worth recalling that avant-garde writing in the 1930s, when he started his press, was either totally unknown or regarded as a joke. I don’t believe Laughlin ever thought of himself as a missionary, but he ended by influencing what generations of educated Americans read and what poetry and fiction were taught in schools.
“Fifty years ago, when libraries on army posts in the United States and overseas were often as well stocked as small-town libraries, I came across a large collection of New Directions books in Toul, France, and over a period of fifteen months I got myself an education in modern literature no college course could equal. I’d lie on my bunk in the barracks reading Céline, Sartre, Nabokov, Djuna Barnes, Pound, and Williams late into the night, while my buddies played cards and listened to their radios. I may have been just a lowly private, but unknown to anyone else there, with the sole exception of a Frenchwoman who was the post librarian, I was in heaven.
“James Laughlin was born in 1914 in Pittsburgh, into a wealthy family in the steel business. The Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation had been founded three generations earlier in 1856 by his great-grandfather, who with his partner made a fortune during the Civil War as the main producers of iron rails. By 1900 they were the second-largest steel producer in the United States. Andrew Carnegie and the Mellons lived down the street from them. Laughlin ‘would later characterize his birthplace as tough-minded, practical, and philistine,’ recalling how after the coffee a butler would pass around chewing gum on a silver tray.
“There was a lot of Bible reading and catechism, but no deep religious feelings. He once asked an uncle what the sacred studies were and the uncle replied that he wasn’t really sure, but guessed they came in a bottle. Laughlin’s mother attended the Presbyterian Church and was one of its benefactors, but his father, who had resigned his position in the company and held no job, left religion alone, spending Sundays boating, hunting, or going to the races and the rest of the week diverting himself with long-hooded cars and women.
“His son was an insecure child well cared for by servants. His interest in literature didn’t develop until he was exposed to French poetry in boarding school at Le Rosey in Switzerland and subsequently at Choate in Connecticut, which he started attending at fourteen and where one of his teachers, Dudley Fitts, made him read the classics and modernists and later provided him with introductions to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. His parenting, by the time he had moved east to attend school, was taken up by an aunt and uncle living in Norfolk, Connecticut. What he retained from his upbringing was a social conscience that placed wealth second in importance to service and left him with residual guilt for being rich. Jones & Laughlin had a reputation as the toughest anti-union company in America, so it is worth noting that in his forties Laughlin divested himself of whatever holdings he had in the steel business.
“Harvard University, where Laughlin matriculated in 1932, was an aloof and cliquish place in comparison to Choate. Nonetheless, he got close to a few professors, most importantly to Harry Levin, a scholar of enormous learning in many literatures and subsequent author of James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, which New Directions published in 1941. One would think that such a brilliant circle of acquaintances would have made him content, but to everyone’s surprise, he went to Europe after his freshman year.
“After a short stay in Austria, he wrote a brash letter to Pound in Rapallo, asking whether he would care to see him and telling him that he was an American ‘said to be clever’ and known to Fitts, who wanted ‘elucidation’ of certain basic aspects of the Cantos so that he may be able to ‘preach’ them intelligently to others. Finally he boasted that as an editor of The Harvard Advocate and Yale’s Harkness Hoot, he had access to ‘the few men in the two universities’ who were ‘worth bothering about’ Pound replied promptly and invited him to visit, and upon meeting Laughlin gave him the names and addresses of people like William Carlos Williams and others he wanted the young man to see when he returned to the States.
“Back at Harvard, Laughlin became the recipient of Pound’s jocular letters addressed to ‘Dilectus Filius’ in Pound’s peculiar lingo, delivering sweeping judgments of everything from American education - ‘No prof. expected to know anything he wasn’t TAUGHT when a student’—to politics - ‘F.D.[R.] has gone communist but New Masses will never find it out.’ When Laughlin said some disparaging things about T.S. Eliot, Pound rushed to the defense of his old friend, saying: ‘When Joyce and Wyndham L. have long since gaga’d or exploded, Old Possum will be totin’ round de golf links and givin’ bright nickels to the lads of 1987.’
“Laughlin took a leave of absence from Harvard the following year and returned to Europe. He stayed with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their country place in Bilignin for a month and accompanied them on a motoring tour of southern France. He found Stein to be the most charismatic person he’d ever met and admired her artistic integrity, but grew weary of her boasting. Once she caught him reading Proust and demanded angrily how he could read such stuff. Didn’t he know, she said, that both Joyce and Proust imitated her novel The Making of Americans?
“After his visit with her, Laughlin continued to Rapallo to take up his ‘studies’ in the ‘Ezuversity,’ a marvelous educational institution with no tuition, where classes consisted of Pound’s nonstop monologue as he ate his meals, played tennis, and went swimming and hiking. “Literachoor is news that stays news,” he told him.”
####
James Laughlin was also a dear friend and confident of Tennessee Williams for over 40 years. A collection of their letters, titled The Luck of Friendship and edited by Peggy Fox and Thomas Keith, has also been kept by my bed. In the letters, Williams reveals his longing to be considered a poet and novelist to such an extent that I sometimes, while dipping into the letters, think the collection of them could have been called The Accidental Playwright. Laughlin and Williams met at a party in 1942 thrown by Lincoln Kirstein. W.W. Norton, the publisher of the letters, in its promotional copy for the book quaintly refers to the gathering as a “mixer.” We who have attended such mixers thrown by such men refer to them as “boy parties.” As for Laughlin, Williams’s own lifelong publisher and his lifelong friend from that boy party onward, he referred to him as his “literary conscience.”
Here is the poem I woke up thinking about this morning.
Easter in Pittsburgh
by JAMES LAUGHLIN
Even on Easter Sunday
when the church was a
jungle of lilies and
ferns fat Uncle Paul
who loved his liquor
so would pound away
with both fists on the
stone pulpit shouting
sin sin sin and the
fiery fires of hell
and I cried all after-
noon the first time I
heard what they did to
Jesus it was something
the children shouldn’t
know about till they
were older but the new
maid told me and both
of us cried a lot and so
mother got another one
right away & she sent
away Miss Richardson
who came all the way
from England because
she kept telling how
her fiancé Mr. Bowles-
Lyon died suddenly of
a heart attack he just
said one day at lunch
I’m afraid I’m not well
and the next thing they
knew he was sliding un-
der the table. Easter
was nice the eggs were
silly but the big lilies
were wonderful & when
Uncle Paul got so fat
from drinking that he
couldn’t squeeze into
the pulpit anymore &
had to preach from the
floor there was an el-
ders’ meeting and they
said they would have
the pulpit rebuilt but
Uncle Paul said no it
was the Lord’s manifest
will and he would pass
his remaining years in
sacred studies I liked
Thanksgiving better be-
cause that was the day
father took us down to
the mills but Easter I
liked next best and the
rabbits died because we
fed them beet tops and
the lamb pulled up the
grass by the roots and
was sold to Mr. Page the
butcher I asked Uncle
Robert what were sacred
studies he said he was
not really sure but he
guessed they came in a
bottle and mother sent
me away from the table
when I wouldn’t eat my
lamb chops that was
ridiculous she said it
wasn’t the lamb of God
it was just Caesar An-
dromache Nibbles but I
couldn’t I just couldn’t
& the year of the strike
we didn’t go to Church
at all on Easter because
they said it wasn’t safe
down town so instead we
had prayers in the library
and then right in the mid-
dle the telephone rang it
was Mr. Shupstead at the
mill they had had to use
tear gas father made a
special prayer right a-
way for God’s protection
& mercy and then he sent
us out to the farm with
mother we stayed a week
and missed school but it
rained a lot and I broke
the bathroom mirror and
had to learn a long psalm.
#####