James Laughlin: Easter in Pittsburgh

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.

Copyright 1940 estate of James Laughlin. First published in Poetry (Chicago) March 1940. Included in Vox Populi for educational uses only.

James Laughlin (1914 – 1997) was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishing. He was born in Pittsburgh, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin. Laughlin’s family had made its fortune with the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, founded three generations earlier by his great grandfather, James H. Laughlin and this wealth would partially fund Laughlin’s future endeavors in publishing. As Laughlin once wrote, “none of this would have been possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishmen who immigrated in 1824 from County Down to Pittsburgh, where they built up what became the fourth largest steel company in the country. I bless them with every breath.” Laughlin’s boyhood home is now part of the campus of Chatham University.

In 1934, Laughlin traveled to France, where he met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Laughlin accompanied the two on a motoring tour of southern France and wrote press releases for Stein’s upcoming visit to the U.S. He proceeded to Italy to meet and study with Ezra Pound, who famously told him, “You’re never going to be any good as a poet. Why don’t you take up something useful?” Pound suggested publishing. Later, Laughlin took a leave of absence from Harvard and stayed with Pound in Rapallo for several months. When Laughlin returned to Harvard, he used money from his father to found New Directions, which he ran first from his dorm room and later from a barn on his Aunt Leila Laughlin Carlisle’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. (The firm opened offices in New York soon after, first at 333 Sixth Avenue and later at 80 Eighth Avenue, where it remains today.) With funds from his graduation gift, Laughlin endowed New Directions with more money, ensuring that the company could stay afloat even though it did not turn a profit until 1946.

The first publication of the new press, in 1936, was New Directions in Prose & Poetry, an anthology of poetry and writings by authors such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings, a roster that heralded the fledgling company’s future as a preeminent publisher of modernist literature. The volume also included a poem by “Tasilo Ribischka,” a pseudonym for Laughlin himself. New Directions in Prose and Poetry became an annual publication, issuing its final number in 1991.

Within just a few years New Directions had become an important publisher of modernist literature. Initially, it emphasized contemporary American writers with whom Laughlin had personal connections, such as William Carlos Williams and Pound. A born cosmopolitan, though, Laughlin also sought out cutting-edge European and Latin American authors and introduced their work to the American market. One important example of this was Hermann Hesse‘s novel Siddhartha, which New Directions initially published in 1951. Laughlin often remarked that the popularity of Siddhartha subsidized the publication of many other money-losing books of greater importance.

Although of draft age, Laughlin avoided service in World War II due to a 4-F classification. Laughlin, like several of his male ancestors and like his son Robert, suffered from depression. Robert committed suicide in 1986 by stabbing himself multiple times in the bathtub. Laughlin later wrote a poem about this, called Experience of Blood, in which he expresses his shock at the amount of blood in the human body. Despite the horrific mess left as a result, Laughlin reasons that he cannot ask anyone else to clean it up, “because after all, it was my blood too.”

bio adapted from several articles in Wikipedia