The Standard Reader

I first met Fred Morgan in 1970, and I began writing for him not long afterward. The Hudson Review paid much lower rates than other magazines; it even had a policy, before the onset of computer printing, of charging contributors for changes on galley proofs, which meant that, theoretically, one could actually lose money writing for it. Yet it always delighted me to find my prose in its pages. Sydney Smith, listing his motives for writing to Lord Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, included, along with the jollity of punishing folly and making money, “the love of you.” I myself felt something of this last-named motive in writing for Fred.

Fred was rich, though he displayed few obvious outward signs–no ritz, no glitz–of his family’s wealth. I once met his mother, a gracious woman then in her eighties, who resembled nothing so much as one of those upper-class women in the Helen Hokinson cartoons. As a young man, Fred had the luxury of deciding to become richer through dull work or to devote himself to his love, which was literature. He sensibly chose the latter, and he never, in my presence, expressed the least doubt about the rightness of the decision.

The first time I met Fred was in his magazine’s old office on 55th Street. He had just brought in a milkshake and a turkey sandwich, which he ate, as we talked, with what seemed to me serious pleasure. On our second meeting he took me to lunch at Giovanni’s, a restaurant his father used to patronize, where everything tasted wonderful and a quiet but pleasing fuss was made over Fred and his wife, Paula Deitz.

Fred Morgan had the ability to concentrate on the moment and enjoy it to the maximum, but, like so many people with genuine joie de vivre, behind it lay deep sadness. Fred buried three of his children. He was too manly to talk about, or even hint at, the effect of these horrific events in his life. Paula, whom he married in 1969 and who currently edits the Hudson Review, was a great find for him, and his adoration of her never seemed, when I was with them, less than complete.

I spent an afternoon in Fred’s company once at his summer home on the ocean at Blue Hill, Maine, driving there in a rented white Lincoln Towncar. I recall saying to Fred that “White Lincoln at Blue Hill” sounded like a Wallace Stevens poem, and then remembered that he was old enough to know Stevens, whom he had convinced to contribute to his magazine. He had also gone to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., to see Ezra Pound, from whom he acquired a contribution for the magazine. He once told me of a visit to his apartment from T.S. Eliot, who sat on the sofa, seeming shy and holding hands the entire time with his second wife Valerie.

FRED MORGAN was a man of the age of the quarterlies. When he and two Princeton classmates–Joseph Bennett and William Arrowsmith–began the Hudson Review in 1948, the quarterly literary magazine was a thriving and, in its own quiet way, powerful literary institution. Editors of the quarterlies–John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon Review, Allen Tate at Sewanee Review, Philip Rahv and William Phillips at Partisan Review, Karl Shapiro at Prairie Schooner–were great figures. Fred Morgan, though younger than all these men, was their peer.

In some ways he was superior to them in editing a magazine that was astonishingly free from literary and intellectual and political fashion. Although I knew Fred for more than thirty years, he died without my knowing his politics. Many professors wrote for the Hudson Review, but, through the skill of Fred’s editing, it always seemed more a metropolitan than academic magazine. I knew many of the things he loved in the realm of art, but even more, I knew that he had very little tolerance for nonsense and cant. Because he wasn’t afraid to act on this low tolerance through his magazine, he was never a prize-winning poet, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, or an establishment figure. One of the specialties of the Hudson Review in the 1960s and 1970s was the deflation of the second- and third-rate in literature, film, and theater. Marvin Mudrick (on literature), Vernon Young (on chiefly European film), and John Simon (on theater) wrote in nearly every issue, three tough guys guarding the gates against the tawdry and pretentious.

ALTHOUGH QUARTERLY MAGAZINES retain their usefulness as places to publish a thoughtful essay, a well-made longer poem, or a short story that is not freakish but quietly situated in everyday life, quarterlies themselves no longer seem central to the hum and rhythm of contemporary intellectual life. In the age of email, fax, FedEx, and omnipresent cell phones, it sometimes seems as if the only fit periodical would be an hourly.

I never spoke with Fred, a quarterly man to the bone, about this, but my guess is that he would have made a persuasive case for the literary and intellectual quarterly–as a place to be more reflective and to impose the old standards, a tent from which to watch the ever-more speedily passing caravans and hear the ever-more loudly barking dogs, and, with ample space and leisurely deadlines provided, make a scrupulous attempt to understand what is really going on in the world of intellect and culture. That, after all, is what Fred Morgan did for all his adult life, and did it, over a longer haul, better than anyone else.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.