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  • Gentleman Publisher
  • Kurt Hemmer (bio)
“Literchoor is my Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions
Ian S. MacNiven
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux
www.fsgbooks.com
584Pages; Print, $37.50

If Martin Scorsese were to make a film about James Laughlin, perhaps he would call it The Skier, à la his Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004), because of Laughlin’s love and dominance of the slopes. After all, it was Laughlin who developed the Alta ski area in Utah before most Americans knew of the sport. Laughlin, an inducted poet of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, would have preferred to be remembered as a distinguished bard. But most of those familiar with this maverick know him as one of the most important publishers of the twentieth century.

“Literchoor Is My Beat,” one of Laughlin’s “Ezratic Poundisms,” illuminates the nexus among literary lives at the heart of the American avant-garde from 1936 to Laughlin’s death on November 12, 1997. Not only do we learn about Laughlin, known to his friends as J, but we see the fruitions and occasional deteriorations of his relationships with such literary luminaries as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Delmore Schwartz, Kenneth Rexroth, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Merton, Tennessee Williams, and Gary Snyder. Rather than being a myopic portrayal of an isolated life, MacNiven provides us with a complex and fascinating tapestry of profound interminglings that captures the essence of Laughlin’s extremely gregarious life.

I have fond memories of being a graduate student in the 1990s searching through the enormous shelves of Powell’s in Portland looking for the New Directions’s colophon, Heinz Henghes’s sketch of a sculpture depicting a rider on a kneeling horse that Laughlin mistook for a centaur. To me and many others it was the symbol par excellence of Modernist brilliance. I wanted to read every book branded with it. Looking at the appendix of published authors by New Directions, I noticed that I have taught more than fifty of them in the last decade plus, and that a semester has not gone by without at least one of them on one of my syllabi.

Thus it was with tremendous fascination that I read this book about the publisher who had forged so much of my literary imagination. Ian S. MacNiven argues that J, “more than any other person of the twentieth century, directed the course of American writing,” and he provides plenty of evidence to defend his bold statement.

It was Pound who became Laughlin’s most profound mentor, and J was Pound’s most staunch defender, working tirelessly behind the scenes to promote Pound’s poetry and, later, to help deliver him from the sanatorium. MacNiven puts to rest J’s myth that New Directions rose out of the ashes of Pound’s inflammatory dismissal of Laughlin’s poetic gifts. J was pulled toward publishing more than his own writing. With only one good eye, often guided by Ezra, J sifted through an incalculable number of manuscripts. Then Rexroth, whose only competitor as a raconteur was Ezra, became an older-brother figure; he even saved Laughlin’s life while rock climbing in 1941. Schwartz would become a crucial decision maker at New Directions—he disliked Kenneth Patchen and Randall Jarrell. J himself disliked Auden’s poetry and did not think Henry Miller was a major writer, though Miller was a writer often associated with the New Directions brand. Cover designs for New Directions by Alvin Lustig from 1941 to 1955 would come to be recognized as revolutionary. New Directions publications would help revive the reputations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Henry James, Nathanael West, Pound, Stein, and Rexroth. It would also be New Directions that introduced Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, Dylan Thomas, and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha to America. Paul Bowles would get his first taste a literary fame as part of the New Directions stable.

MacNiven has a chapter entitled “Missing a Few Beats,” and though Laughlin did not take opportunities to publish major works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, it must be noted in Laughlin’s defense that...

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