Word: laughlin
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Until he was 16, James Laughlin, heir to a slice of one of Pittsburgh's biggest steel fortunes,* hardly knew the difference between the avant-garde and the guard at a foundry gate. English Teacher Dudley Fitts soon changed all that. At Choate, in 1931, Teacher Fitts took spindling, six-foot Student Laughlin in hand, introduced him to the work of such dedicated modern versifiers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Laughlin, who until then had hardly cracked a book on his own account, burst forthwith into creative bloom, decided to bypass the steel business...
Restless young "J." Laughlin left Harvard after his freshman year, took off for a Wanderjahr in Europe. There U.S. expatriate writers filled his ears with a doleful cry: Why was there no publisher in America willing to take a chance on avant-garde writing? Laughlin went back to Harvard in 1934 with ideas of becoming a publisher. He collected a big eclectic bundle of literary odds & ends (by such writers as Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, Jean Cocteau, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens) and in 1936, while still in college, published them in one volume as the first New Directions annual...
Fourteen years and ten annuals later, moose-tall (6 ft. 5 in.) Publisher Laughlin now runs his mushrooming but so far non-profit-making firm from a bright, sparsely staffed office high above Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He has gained a towering reputation as an incorruptible "esthetic" publisher, while steadfastly maintaining his literary perceptions at the hit-or-miss level of his Harvard days...
...detect the trend; but with sophomoric emphasis N.D. XI detects it anyhow in half a dozen inverted short stories and prose fragments. The queen of the queerer pieces is a collection of excerpts from Parisian Jean Genet's lushly symbolic novel, Our Lady of Flowers (explains Editor Laughlin in an introductory note: "Genet uses the pronouns more or less interchangeably...
Familiar Tunes. Publisher Laughlin's name writers are more readable, though all of them pluck away predictably at familiar tunes. Playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire) explores more horror south of the Mason-Dixon line in the story of a frigid, middle-aged writer's passion for a horsy Mexican girl, also contributes some frank blank verse titled Counsel about Paris whorehouses. Expatriate Novelist Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer) writes his way around his subject (Rimbaud) and plunges defiantly into his own thrice-told life and hard times. Most engaging poet: William Carlos Williams, who keeps...