Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``You are becoming . . . a counter-revolutionary publisher,'' poet-essayist Kenneth Rexroth blasted his friend and publisher James Laughlin. ``You are neurotic as hell,'' Laughlin, head of New Directions, wrote to the tantrum-prone muse of San Francisco's literary renaissance of the 1960s. Despite deadly cutting remarks, their relationship lasted from the 1930s to Rexroth's death in 1982. A flow of literary tabletalk, their correspondence is most interesting for Rexroth's lacerating comments on certain writers: Ezra Pound (``too much plain eccentricity''), Robert Penn Warren (``extremely derivative . . . and derivative from very bad exemplars''), Pablo Neruda (``literary Stalinism'') and many others. Rexroth also records his meetings with Dylan Thomas and Henry Miller, bemoans his penuriousness and literary obscurity, and mulls over his marriages which were constantly falling to pieces. On politics, he sometimes sounds eerily prescient: ``The future Assyrians will unquestionably destroy the race.'' Bartlett is a professor of English at the Univeristy of New Mexico. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Laughlin was the founder of New Directions and a lifelong publisher of Rexroth's works, which included 20 books of poetry, essays, translations, and editions. This selection of their correspondence is drawn from some 350 letters and cards they exchanged between 1937 and 1982. The letters, mostly from Rexroth, are annotated, with essential bits of literary history and biography added. As the letters reveal, Rexroth often abusively lambasted Laughlin for selling out to the establishment. Laughlin bore these outbursts with amazing tolerance, sometimes reminding Rexroth that he could always look for another publisher. Rexroth acknowledged that he would not have had a career without Laughlin and that he thought of Laughlin as his ``best friend, and always a good comrade.'' Their relationship survived five decades until Rexroth's death. The correspondence shows the many sides of Rexroth and also includes commentary on many notable writers of the day. For a biography of Rexroth, see Linda Hamalian's A Life of Kenneth Rexroth , LJ 4/1/91.-- Addie Lee Bracy, Beaver Coll. Lib., Glenside, Pa.