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Carl LaFong: Literary Maven By Chris Callard
(The following is a chat with publishing pioneer Carl LaFong, whose legendary little magazine Lettrers featured some of this country's finest writing for three generations. We spoke with Mr. LaFong one day before lunch.)
CC: You started Lettrers-- and how is that pronounced?
CL: Just how it sounds. A lot of people thought it was French. But I just made it up. (Chuckling) We did get a lot of mangled versions. One of our proofreaders called it "Latrice," but that was because he was dating some girl with that name.
CC: You launched Lettrers when many little magazines were in print, when that whole arm, if you will, of the American literary scene was at a veritable peak, an apogee, you could say, when the written word was sacred, when there were tons of small, densely-packed, vibrantly alive temples at which to prostrate one's hungry eyes, don'tcha know, when the nation's consciousness was splayed across the page for those who were most aware to feast upon. No?
CL: No. (Shifts in his seat.) I mean… yes. That was when we started, right. It was a great time. Wouldn't have missed it. We couldn't get any ads to save our ass, but, hell, we had plenty of writers, so we had no problems filling the thing, if that's what you mean. Sure, sure, I've had a great life.
CC: You had an opportunity to publish Ernest Hemingway's first short story in your inaugural edition, and yet you passed, or so the legend goes. Is this a correct telling? Here's your chance.
CL: Yeah, we turned him down. I mean, he was a newspaper man, and we were doing fiction. And he had that staccato, telegraph style that nobody had seen before, in fiction, anyway. It wasn't, you know… I didn't think he had much of a… hell, in hindsight, of course. But, yeah, we said no, like you said.
CC: You passed, as well, on the chance to serialize U.S.A. by Dos Passos. Would that be an able rendering of the situation you faced?
CL: Dos Passos I didn't really like. He was a bad drinker-- and when I say bad, what I mean is a sloppy drunk, used to spill on himself all the time, always had stains on his shirts. Something to do with a war injury to both his thumbs, I heard. Which was surprising because John was actually a guy with very good balance, good hand-to-eye coordination, except whenever he was holding something, grasping something with his fingers. Very strange. And unpleasant, at times, including the time he came to me with the idea of running chapters from the book. I thought about it, but you should have seen the writing style… (waves his hands as if dispersing a bad odor)… just crazy stuff. Unbelievable. So I nixed it.
CC: Was John crushed?
CL: About what?
CC: Your refusal to print his work, your denial of his life's blood to catch a glimpse of the day's light.
CL: Jesus, he got the thing published, or else you wouldn't be asking. I didn't burn it, just didn't think it was right for our audience. Our subscribers were always my primary, um, my first concern. I wanted to make sure they had a good read. A fast-moving story. We got our share of left-wing kook stuff-- although, actually, I didn't care so much about politics, I was looking for character and plot.
CC: As in the work of, say, Irwin Shaw.
CL: Who?
CC: Or, assuredly, Carson McCullers?
CL: Well, yeah, she was great, or turned out to be. We never ran anything of hers. We turned down a few early short stories, because, frankly, I didn't think they were very well-developed. And later she turned one of them into that play about a wedding and another into that novel about hearts and hunting, so naturally I felt kind of vindicated, you know, because obviously they weren't that developed, they had to be expanded. She never offered us anything after those early refusals, and I never actually met her, but I always knew in my soul that she appreciated what I'd done.
CC: Then, when a new wave of young authors were challenging the established credo, exploring places fiction had seldom ventured, you were there, too, still putting out your little quarterly, still offering fresh and priceless papel for those new voices to utilize. Yes?
CL: No.
CC: No?
CL: No. We were not a quarterly. We came out three times a year. And that was a funny story… We never knew how to refer to it, this three-time thing. Trially? Sounded like a legal book. Thricely? A little too pedantic for what we were trying to do. What else? Well, we just didn't know. So we didn't even refer to it at all. Some years we didn't even come out. I thought, the hell with it, it's too much, just too goddamn much. (Pause.)
CC: And when you did come out, say in the 1950s, you were one of the first to showcase the Beats.
CL: I had a few of them writing music reviews. What did I know from bongos? Because, of course, everything else they wrote was lard.
CC: And yet you knew Kerouac personally.
CL: Jack I knew, sure. We never published anything of Jack's. He wrote, as you know, on long roles of paper towels, or butcher paper it may have been, and we just didn't have the technology to transfer it. But the big boys, they could print Jack's stuff. They had the technology. (He shakes a finger.) The odd thing about Jack was that, in his everyday speech, he tended toward nautically-based clichés-- "Things are on an even keel," he'd say, or "Any old port in a storm, Carl." The great irony, of course, was that he wrote about driving in cars, on the land, and hitchhiking. I never got over that.
CC: He was, though, a merchant marine in the days before writing success came his way.
CL: Jack Kerouac?
CC: Yes, absolutely.
CL: Where did you hear that? I do know that he never learned how to swim, that he in fact hated bathing trunks of any kind. (Wistfully.) It was almost a phobia with him.
CC: Of the many poets you gave space to--
CL: Archibald MacLeish was not one of them.
CC: Pardon?
CL: I thought you were going to ask if I'd published any MacLeish.
CC: No.
CL: I see. I'll tell you, we had one poet-- Nat Malone-- we ran a lot of his stuff over the years. Now, he had been a sailor, a friend of Hart Crane's, though not… well, you know. Anyway, this guy's poems… (kisses his fingers like a French chef)… Magnifico! His subject matter, his oeuvre, all of his poems, they were about trees. More specifically, trimming trees. "I Saw a Shapely Branch, I Cut It Down," "Ode to Pruning," and, of course, his one detour, his great Whitman homage, "Leaves of Mown Grass." Amazing stuff.
CC: Well, we're out of tape.
CL: Okay. Tha
Chris Callard lives in Lakewood, California. He has a few silly things posted at www.callardcolumn.blogspot.com. He can be reached at callb@comcast.net.
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