Literchoor Is My Beat: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions by Ian S. MacNiven (PDF)

Description

A biography—thoughtful and playful—of the man who founded New Directions and transformed American publishingJames 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐For both those who knew its subject personally, and those who only knew something of him through his own books and those he published, Ian MacNiven’s biography of James Laughlin, “Literchoor Is My Beat…,” is a revelation, a frank and compassionate account of a complex man who, in spite of frequently difficult personal and family issues, lived a life dedicated to the furtherance and preservation of much of what makes up the modern literary canon. Drawing on the immense archive of Laughlin’s personal and professional papers preserved for posterity at Harvard, MacNiven’s impeccably documented and eminently readable biography as well charts the history of New Directions, the publishing firm Laughlin founded and nurtured, and is rich with insight into Laughlin’s personal and business relationships with his occasionally restless and always demanding stable of writers, with the ND staff members who supported and managed Laughlin’s endeavors, and with his colleagues in the publishing world. It serves as an invaluable and illuminating companion to the recently published edition of Laughlin’s Complete Poems. This reader is compelled to observe, however, that wholly apart from considerations of the high quality of MacNiven’s work, its publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, should be called out on an important point: this biography of a man who was for decades intensely attuned to the physical production quality of the books he published, who knew well and appreciated the significance of fine typography, distinctive design and fine binding, is bound in the cheapest, ugliest and least substantial paper board binding from a major publisher this reader – who has been involved professionally in the book business for four decades – has seen in many, many years.

⭐I have NEVER read a finer, more insightful, more beautifully written biography than this. First of all, the man himself. Laughlin was born with many advantages, and he wasted none of them, using them as a springboard to prodigious achievement, suffused with an infectious joie de vivre and a never satisfied yearning for exceptional women. Then there was his early – as a college freshman – realization of the greatness of modernism in literature. Compare him to Peggy Guggenheim’s similar genius as an art collector. Almost any year in Laughlin’s life will give the average reader a lifetime program of self education. And he was a pioneer of American skiing, creating the Alta ski resort and lodge. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the editing of Thomas Merton’s Asian Diaries, one of the great works of spiritual experience. MacNiven has to be proud of this great achievement.

⭐Fascinating insights into the life of James Laughlin, though a bit too long (nearly 500 pages) for my taste!

⭐Was looking for a copy of this book regarding the family that built the Sydonie Mansion in Florida

⭐Brings back good memories.

⭐Gossipy, thus interesting. New Directions story is fascinating. Laughlin’s relationships with Pound and Thomas Merton were particularly interesting. But slow reading in places.

⭐Excellent! Equal space given to literary achievements as well as to personal biography. Well-written and extremely readable.

⭐perfecto

⭐A bit of a dbi – ‘Daddy bought it’ – life dutifully described with, for me, too much about winning cups at skiing and not enough about the poets New Directions published. MacNiven starts well then seems to give up on his enthusiasm, and I gave up after 250 pages, another 320 ahead.. The token photograph illustrations also disappointing. As for the binding, all hope of New Directions elegance and art abandoned here.

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