Books: Dithyrambic Sex

Last week publishers' trade papers announced that New Directions of Norfolk, Conn, would soon publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. This was sensational news, since publishing Henry Miller is a task that might well make any publisher blanch. Brought out in Paris four years ago, Tropic of Cancer has a bigger subterranean reputation than any recent book, based partly on the extravagant praise of critics like T. S. Eliot, partly on the difficulty of buying smuggled copies, but mostly because it is a low book, "the lowest book," in the words of Edmund Wilson, "I can ever remember to have read."

Announcement of the U. S. publication of Tropic of Cancer was surprising literary news not only because of its underground reputation. It revealed the recent revival of interest in the neglected field of experimental writing—that cloudy area of modern letters with its little magazines, obscure poems, defiant manifestoes, communications from Ezra Pound. In Manhattan a plump, handsome periodical, Twice a Year, took up where The Dial left off a decade ago. In Paris appeared The Black Book, a novel by Lawrence Durrell, who gave promise of outdoing Henry Miller in the form that admirers call the dithyrambic novel and that others call plain old-fashioned pornography.

Publisher. Centre for experimental writing in the U. S. is New Directions. In a roomy rebuilt stable on his uncle's estate near Norfolk, Conn., James Laughlin IV runs New Directions between sessions at Harvard, where he has been in intermittent attendance for the last six years. Born in Pittsburgh 24 years ago, James Laughlin IV is a descendant of the founder of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.— a tall (6 ft. 3 in.), dark, personable young man with an earnest, attentive manner, a stubborn jaw and much practical business sense. He grew up on Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill and Laughlin says that he never read a book until he was 16. Then, at Choate, he studied under the erudite poet and translator Dudley Fitts, read Pound and Eliot before he read Wordsworth, began to write with such success that he won an Atlantic Monthly prize at 18.

Thereafter his career sounds like something by Evelyn Waugh, filled with wrecks, broken legs, poetry, rebellion, with great leaps from continent to continent, and terms at Harvard sandwiched between visits to New Zealand for skiing, to Rapallo, Italy to see Ezra Pound. Recovering after breaking his legs skiing down Mt. Washington, he got a job as literary editor of New Democracy, a short-lived weekly preaching Social Credit. When New Democracy folded, he decided to keep on publishing his own department as a literary annual.

As a publisher, Laughlin brought out well-printed books of obscure verse by Dudley Fitts, Kay Boyle, essays by Yvor Winters, a novel, White Mule, by William Carlos Williams, three anthologies of new writing. Loading his car with copies of his books, he sells them himself, arguing with hard-boiled booksellers from Manhattan to Detroit, who almost unanimously urge him to get out of the book business. Books are merchandise, they say, which clearly rules out New Directions publications.