'Poet' and 'Playboy': The New York Times Reviews James Laughlin Biography and Collected Poems

The New York Times reviews a new biography about James Laughlin, along with his massive Collected Poems. Laughlin was the founder of New Directions and a prolific poet in his own right. From NYT:

James Laughlin was tall, blue-eyed, athletic, vastly wealthy and, by many accounts, sexually mesmerizing. He could charm the pants off women and usually did. Sometimes he went home and wrote a terrible, simpering poem about the experience.

The heir to a Pittsburgh iron and steel fortune, Laughlin might have become an international playboy, skiing and sampling the thermal springs in elite European hotels. (He did plenty of each.) But he was a courtly man with a sense of noblesse oblige and a bold literary sensibility.

In 1936, while an undergraduate at Harvard, Laughlin used a $100,000 gift from his father to found New Directions, the independent publishing house that would define the course of literary modernism. New Directions revolutionized American reading habits, our parents’ and thus our own.

Gertrude Stein told Laughlin, early on, that the test of a good book is that it must make the bell ring. Laughlin had sensitive ears; his transistors picked up the sound of bells struck on pirate frequencies. It’s impossible to imagine an entire wing of progressive 20th-century literature without him.

Laughlin was Vladimir Nabokov’s first American publisher. He championed Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams when they were little known. He issued the work of Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, Henry Miller and Dylan Thomas. (When Thomas died in 1953, Laughlin was summoned to identify the bloated body.) In translation New Directions published the work of Borges, Céline, Neruda, Hesse, Pasternak and many, many others.

This sounds like a boy’s club, and it was. New Directions might have published Elizabeth Bishop if Laughlin hadn’t offended her by remarking that her presence would give one of his poetry anthologies “sex appeal.”

Two new books — “Literchoor Is My Beat,” a biography of Laughlin by Ian S. MacNiven, and “The Collected Poems of James Laughlin” — are mastodonic in size and fail, rather comprehensively, the Gertrude Stein test. The ringing each made in my ears is the sort you recognize after accidentally banging your head on a car’s back hatch. [...]

Learn more at NYT.