When James Joyce first met James Laughlin, Joyce said, “We’ve met before, at Clontarf.” The battle of Clontarf, in 1014, featured Irish king Brian Boru’s victory over the first wave of Viking invaders. Laughlin himself had the looks of a clean-shaven Scandinavian king; his immediate ancestors, however, were Pittsburgh steel barons – it was with their money that Laughlin founded New Directions, the legendary American publisher. But to Joyce, etymology was paramount: “Laughlin” means “Danish pirate.”

Nostalgia for literary times gone by, when everyone seemed to know everyone else, is handmaiden to the conviction that serious poetry has never been more impoverished and neglected than it is now. But, as evinced by the life of Laughlin, one of the main ways people like Joyce – or Eliot, or Pound – became acquainted was by trying to get one another published.

Laughlin was only a sophomore at Harvard when he first visited Pound in Rapallo. The poet famously dismissed Laughlin’s poetry: “it’s hopeless. You’re never gonna make a writer. … do something useful. Go back and be a publisher.” He could not have known what a difference this casual advice would make.

New Directions salvaged Pound’s own reputation stateside and nourished writers like William Carlos Williams and Henry Miller while bringing books like Borges’s “Labyrinths,” Nabokov’s “Sebastian Knight,” and Sartre’s “Nausea” to the United States. In the words of Guy Davenport, New Directions is “a publishing house so inventive and daring that it brought Modernist writing to us as assiduously and triumphantly as the Museum of Modern Art brought twentieth-century painting and sculpture.”

In his new, posthumously published autobiography, “Byways” (New Directions, 336 pages, $35 cloth, $19.95 paper), Laughlin recalls ringing William Carlos William’s doorbell at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, N.J., and asking to publish one of the poet’s books. “All doors were / Open. Bill was a noncutaneous / Man. No skin separated him from / Others. A new acquaintance was / At once a friend.” “White Mule” was New Direction’s first success.

“Byways” is written in verse, but in a plain style anyone can breeze through. In the decade before his death in 1997, Laughlin began to modestly publish his own work – as well as volumes of his correspondence with Williams, Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz, Pound, and Thomas Merton. “Byways” is itself an unfinished project, and many quarrels in Laughlin’s life go undiscussed. He refers to having been “coaxed” into publishing by Pound and deals with Pound’s strange and offensive economic theories by saying “I simply changed the subject / If he brought these topics / Up.”

On rare occasions, Laughlin tries on the slang Pound used in his letters: “Your Ezuversity where there was no / Tuition, the best beanery since / Bologna (1088). Literachoor, you said, / Is news that stays news.” But it seems he puts on these stilts only out of politeness to his mentor. The voice in “Byways” is prepossessing: Laughlin had the nerve – and the monied self-assurance – to mix with literary immortals on equal terms.

Even as an undergraduate, Laughlin was taking T.S. Eliot to lunch and trying to buy some of Pound’s Cantos for the Harvard Advocate. At that time, he wrote Pound, the average sale for a poetry book from a major United States publisher was 250 volumes – a figure that seems slim even by today’s standards. Similarly, Laughlin and Pound spent a great deal of time complaining about the mediocrity of the Saturday Review, a magazine that supposedly strangled American literary taste with a velvet glove. It was in spite of this doom and gloom that Laughlin started New Directions, now a fabled institution in its own right.

Laughlin gave up his life to New Directions only grudgingly. For years he divided his time with a skiing operation in the West. And parts of “Byways” indicate a life larger than the career. Laughlin says of an aunt: “Her consuming love for me has / Penetrated time.” About an old love, he writes, “I used her shamelessly. It’s / All down on my yellow pad.” Fittingly, his style here is utilitarian: a shower of short, assertive sentences. Writing is not the master, but the humble container, of his life. And that life, as presented in “Byways,” is a lesson in how one person’s pluck and insight can alter the literary world.