The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Beside the Shadblow Tree by Hayden CarruthAmy Havel
Hayden Carruth. Beside the Shadblow Tree. Copper Canyon, 1999. 148 pp. Paper: $14.00.
When James Laughlin died in 1997, newspapers around the country listed the many names of poets and writers whom he had published through New Directions. His influence on twentieth-century poetry is obvious, but his personal influence on many individuals is less well-known. Hayden Carruth, the poet who worked with Laughlin in various capacities for over forty years, knows this influence well, and in his memoir of the man (“Jas”), Carruth recounts several key moments in their friendship. Most interesting, however, is the way he relates these memories; Carruth pointedly rejects checking his facts, insisting that he is not a historian and specifics such as exact dates don’t matter. Still, he adds comments or justifies himself (“I’ll leave what I’ve written as is, however, because it represents my feeling”) on the bottom of the page, in effect utilizing a type of anti-footnote. Most of the time, Carruth sticks to his story, and his gruffly nostalgic tone is entertaining; but when he strays to all-encompassing remarks about the current state of poetry, he risks making his story small. (He refers several times to the “young people of today,” dismissing them as “products of their time—lazy and greedy, concerned to discover the easiest way to upgrade their ‘careers.’ ”)
By the end of the book, James Laughlin’s effect on the people around him is clear, and although Carruth has moments of tangential spiraling, the love/hate issues of living in the shadow of a great man withdraw to reveal sincere admiration. In a postscript written after the death of Laughlin’s third wife Gertrude, Carruth explains his loss best, and shows that his most effective words are spare and simple: “I didn’t go to Gertrude’s funeral. I didn’t visit the grave of Jas. Everything I could have known was in my head. And all of it was insufficient.” [Amy Havel]