"You're never gonna be any good as a poet.... You'd better become a publisher," Ezra Pound told a young Jim Laughlin. Laughlin hoped to become a poet--and he did turn out to be a pretty good one--but Pound's words were prophetic. As Ian S. MacNiven (Lawrence Durrell) ably demonstrates in this impeccable biography, Laughlin was a born publisher whose work "shaped English-language modernist poetry." More than any other man in the 20th century, "he directed the course of American writing." He was more than just his career, though: Laughlin was a recluse, an excellent skier, an adventurer, an idealist, a lover, a fine poet--a man who lived passionately.
While at Harvard, he took a $10,000 family inheritance ($2 million in today's dollars) and used it to found a publishing house, New Directions. In a letter to his Aunt Leila, he wrote: "I have a new direction and an increased confidence." In 1936, he published his first book, an anthology he designed himself, under this imprint. He thought it his "exhibition gallery" for "untested writers." It included Pound, Henry Miller (who became a life-long friend), Elizabeth Bishop and William Carlos Williams. Next came Federico García Lorca, Henry Miller and Delmore Schwartz's translations of Arthur Rimbaud. Tennessee Williams followed, then Vladimir Nabokov.
MacNiven looks at Laughlin's low points, too, such as his failures as a husband and struggles through various financial crises. But it's hard to shift focus from the authors he championed. It's an amazing story, and MacNiven tells it brilliantly with depth, grace and acuity. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher