Frederick Morgan; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Poet and founder of 'The Hudson Review'
27 February 2004
George Frederick Morgan, editor and poet: born New
York 25 April 1922; Editor, Hudson Review 1947-98; married
1942 Constance Canfield (one son, two daughters, and two
sons and one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved), 1957
Rose Fillmore (marriage dissolved), 1969 Paula Deitz; died
New York 20 February 2004.
Traditionally, young men of independent means dream of
starting literary magazines and writing poetry, then keep
their money in the bank. Frederick Morgan was different, for
he put his money where his silver spoon had been.
After founding The Hudson Review in 1947, he remained its
editor for over 50 years, during which it became in a quiet
and undogmatic way arguably America's finest literary
quarterly - no small feat in an age when virtually every
American institution of higher education produced at one
time or another a literary journal. Morgan took longer to
become a poet, only publishing his first book at the
comparatively advanced age of 50, but he proved equally
durable, publishing over a dozen volumes of poems and
translations in the last three decades of his life.
Fred Morgan was born in New York, the heir to a fortune made
from the manufacture of soap. He had the classic education
of the New York upper class: St Bernard's School, St Paul's
in New Hampshire, and Princeton. As an undergraduate he was
taught, and inspired, by the poet and critic Allen Tate, who
encouraged his ambitions for a literary career. Morgan
helped edit an undergraduate literary magazine, the Nassau
Literary Magazine, and was unabashed at asking the most
famous of authors to contribute, including Thomas Mann. He
also once famously imported showgirls from New York City to
hawk subscriptions to his fellow students.
After graduation, Morgan served in the wartime army for two
years but was never sent overseas. On being demobbed, he
found to his relief that his family's business had been
sold, and he was thus spared the conflict he had expected
between his desire for a life in the arts and his family's
assumption that it would be spent in the service of soap.
In 1947 the first issue of The Hudson Review appeared,
founded by Morgan and two fellow Princetonians, Joseph
Bennett and the young classicist William Arrowsmith. In
time, the two others drifted away from the magazine, but
Morgan remained its editor until 1998, when he relinquished
the title to his third wife and fellow office worker, Paula
Deitz.
From inception, the magazine was marked by the calibre of
its contributors. Initially influenced by the New Critics,
it therefore favoured the work of Modernist writers - its
first issue included poems by e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens
and, since Morgan always encouraged young writers, the
20-year-old W.S. Merwin. But there was never in its pages
any dominating ideology, literary or political, and the
writers published were extraordinarily diverse: what, after
all, could be said to link the work of T.S. Eliot, Marianne
Moore, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, Saul Bellow, Robert
Graves, James Merrill, Eudora Welty and Seamus Heaney other
than their excellence and willingness to appear in the
journal's pages?
The Hudson Review's wilful eclecticism contributed to its
comparatively low profile, and it was never provocatively
political like Partisan Review or flamboyant like George
Plimpton's Paris Review. Always generous to poets in terms
of space, the magazine also published many translations,
influenced in this regard by Ezra Pound, confined in the
early years of The Hudson Review to the lunatic asylum at St
Elizabeth's in Washington DC. Morgan visited Pound there
frequently, though in time the friendship lapsed, undone by
Pound's bossiness and the sheer kookiness of many of the
poet's associates.
The Hudson Review was probably best known for the high
quality of its reviewing, encouraging commentary that was
serious rather than sombre, and that criticised with a light
rather than lambasting touch. A roster of eminent critics co
ntributed regularly, including Hugh Kenner, B.H. Haggin (on
music), William Pritchard, R.W.B. Lewis and Maureen Howard.
Morgan also had an eye for young writers, seeing his duty as
editor "not to establish a cadre of stars, but to cultivate
their successors". The critic David Bromwich, who even as a
graduate student wrote book reviews for the magazine,
remembers Morgan as welcoming and genial to the known and
unknown alike, with "an ease and authority that seemed
natural rather than acquired".
Morgan's professional life was devoted to the magazine - he
walked daily from his Upper East Side apartment to its
midtown offices, and other than summer vacations in Maine
worked long hours there. But this happy dedication disguised
a turbulent and for some time unhappy personal life.
His first wife was famously beautiful, intelligent, and
alcoholic, drinking herself to death in 1964, seven years
after she and Morgan were divorced. She was not naturally
maternal, despite having six children, and her sons in
particular suffered from a resulting lack of closeness.
John, the eldest, was especially troubled, and jumped to his
death from the Oakland Bay Bridge.
A younger son, Seth, cut an equally tragic figure, living
off trust-fund money while drifting first into the Drug
Culture in the 1960s (he lived with Janis Joplin until her
own drug-induced death), then gradually into a kinkier and
more violent milieu which landed him in prison for 30 months
for robbery. Having published a novel, Homeboy, to glowing
reviews in 1990, he was killed in the same year with his
girlfriend after driving a motorcycle into some bridge
pilings in New Orleans. The post-mortem revealed that he was
three times over the legal alcohol limit and had cocaine in
his blood.
After divorcing his first wife, Morgan married for a second
time - briefly and unsuccessfully. With his third marriage,
to Paula Dietz, whom he met when she came to work at The
Hudson Review in 1967, Morgan found a deep domestic
happiness. As a friend remarked, "Paula Deitz meant
everything to him. They never stopped being in love, and
were a team in every sense, companions and collaborators."
Whether because of his earlier travails, or this later
happiness, his muse was suddenly unlocked, and from the
1970s Morgan began to write and publish poems in quantity.
Many of them are remarkable, including a moving elegy to his
son John, nine years after his suicide, in which he imagines
his dead son as frozen in time at his age when he died:
Your youngest brother's passed you by
at last: he's older now than you -
and all our lives have ramified
in meanings which you never knew.
But most of Morgan's poetry - from his first book, A Book of
Change (1972), to his last, The One Abiding, published last
year - is overtly unconfessional, and, in the poems'
rhetorical boldness and willingness to tackle the grand
themes of love and death, they manage, as Morgan's best
critic Dana Gioia has remarked, to combine "classical
clarity with direct emotionalism".
Like his magazine, Morgan's poems avoid obvious allegiance
to any school, are deeply considered, quiet, and the more
powerful for their restraint - as in the haunting poem
"1904":
The things they did together, no one knew.
It was late June. Behind the old wood-shed
wild iris was in blossom, white and blue,
but what those proud ones did there no
one knew,
though some suspected there were one
or two
who led the others where they would be led.
Years passed - but what they did there
no one knew,
those summer children long since safely
dead.
Andrew Rosenheim