"Literchoor Is My Beat"

A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

Ian S. MacNiven

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780374712433
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

A biography—thoughtful and playful—of the man who founded New Directions and transformed American publishing
James Laughlin—poet, publisher, world-class skier—was the man behind some of the most daring, revolutionary works in verse and prose of the twentieth century. As the founder of New Directions, he published Ezra Pound's The Cantos and William Carlos Williams's Paterson; he brought Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges to an American audience. Throughout his life, this tall, charismatic intellectual, athlete, and entrepreneur preferred to stay hidden. But no longer—in "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, Ian S. MacNiven has given us a sensitive and revealing portrait of this visionary and the understory of the last century of American letters.
Laughlin—or J, as MacNiven calls him—emerges as an impressive and complex figure: energetic, idealistic, and hardworking, but also plagued by doubts—not about his ability to identify and nurture talent but about his own worth as a writer. Haunted by his father's struggles with bipolar disorder, J threw himself into a flurry of activity, pulling together the first New Directions anthology before he'd graduated from Harvard and purchasing and managing a ski resort in Utah.
MacNiven's portrait is comprehensive and vital, spiced with Ezra Pound's eccentric letters, J's romantic foibles, and anecdotes from a seat-of-your-pants era of publishing now gone by. A story about the struggle to publish only the best, it is itself an example of literary biography at its finest.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Ancestors
• 2. Discoveries: The Intellect
• 3. Harvard, Part One
• 4. Correspondence Course in Rebellion: Ezra Pound by Sea-Post
• 5. “The Charismatic Pyramid”: Gertrude Stein
• 6. The Ezuversity
• 7. New Directions: From Poet to Publisher
• 8. Amateur Publisher, Amateur Ski Impresario
• 9. Enter Kenneth Rexroth and Delmore Schwartz
• 10. Death, Marriage, and Love Considered and Reconsidered
• 11. The World at War
• 12. Worlds Apart: Books at Cambridge, Ski Lifts at Alta
• 13. Real Butterflies and Metaphorical Chess: Vladimir Nabokov
• 14. Tennessee Williams Triumphs
• 15. Norfolk: The Eastern Seaboard Reclaims J
• 16. The Prodigal Returns: Ezra in the Dock
• 17. San Francisco, Alta, and Ezra (Again)
• 18. Guide to the Godhead: Tom Merton
• 19. Troubles in Europe, Public and Private
• 20. Bollingen Affair Rocks Library of Congress
• 21. Crises at New Directions
• 22. Crisis at Home
• 23. Public Service: Intercultural Publications and Other Efforts
• 24. “Le Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche”
• 25. Missing a Few Beats
• 26. Trumped in the Marriage Game
• 27. Fade-Out in Burma, New Directions Revisited
• 28. New Directions Twenty-Five Years On
• 29. Tennessee, Henry, and Tom
• 30. Publishing and Writing: They Never Get Easier
• 31. Confessor to a Monk
• 32. This Obdurate World: The Sword Falls
• 33. One Troubadour Revives, Another Departs
• 34. Dropping the Pilot
• 35. On the Road: Performer and Poet
• 36. Lured by the Apsaras
• 37. “Il Catullo americano”
• 38. Revision of Things Past
• 39. Witness to Mortality
• 40. The Somnambulist
• 41. Race Toward Self-Knowledge
• 42. Nunc dimittis servum tuum
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Authors Published by New Directions
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photographs
• Also by Ian S. MacNiven
• A Note About the Author
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Copyright