THE STANDARD READER

...He sensibly chose the latter, and he never, in my presence, expressed the least doubt about the rightness of the decision...

...Although I knew Fred for more than thirty years, he died without my knowing his politics...

...The Standard Reader Frederick Morgan(1922-2004) BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN Frederick Morgan, for fifty years the editor of the ^-udson Review and an accomplished poet who died on February 20 in Manhattan at the age of eighty-one, was a serious and substantial and immensely attractive man...

...He once told me of a visit to his apartment from T.S...

...In some ways he was superior to them in editing a magazine that was astonishingly free from literary and intellectual and political fashion...

...He had just brought in a milkshake and a turkey sandwich, which he ate, as we talked, with what seemed to me serious pleasure...

...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...

...Fred buried three of his children...

...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...

...When he and two Princeton classmates—^Joseph Bennett and William Arrowsmith—began the H'uds^-n R^'vi^'w in 1948, the quarterly literary magazine was a thriving and, in its own quiet way, powerful literary institution...

...phone, "it's Fred Morgan"—and a wonderful laugh it always pleased me to be able to evoke...

...In the age of email, fax, FedEx, and omnipresent cell phones, it sometimes seems as if the only fit periodical would be an hourly...

...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...

...He was too manly to talk about, or even hint at, the effect of these horrific events in his life...

...He had also gone to St...

...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...

...The H-uds^^ Review paid much lower rates than other magazines...

...Yet it always delighted me to find my prose in its pages...

...Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., to see Ezra Pound, from whom he acquired a contribution for the 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...

...I first met Fred Morgan in 1970, and I began writing for him not long afterward...

...Fred was rich, though he displayed few obvious outward signs—no ritz, no glitz—of his family's wealth...

...The first time I met Fred was in his magazine's old office on 55th Street...

...Eliot, who sat on the sofa, seeming shy and holding hands the entire time with his second wife Valerie...

...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...

...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...

...I myself felt something of this last-named motive in writing for Fred...

...One of the specialties of the Hudsan Review in the 1960s and 1970s was the deflation of the second- and third-rate in literature, film, and theater...

...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...

...Editors of the quarterlies— John Crowe Ransom at Kenyan Review, Allen Tate and Monroe K. Spears at Se-wanee Review, Philip Rahv and William Phillips at Partisan Review, Karl Shapiro at Prairie Schaaner—^were great figures...

...Many professors wrote for the Hudsan Review, but, through the skill of Fred's editing, it always seemed more a metropolitan than academic magazine...

...That, after all, is what Fred Morgan did for all his adult life, and did it, over a longer haul, better than anyone else...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Fred Morgan was a man of the age of the quarterlies...

...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 Town-car...

...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...

...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...

...Fred Morgan, though younger than all these men, was their peer...

...He also had a smile in his voice, an upper-class version of a New York accent— "Jee-o, hi," he would greet me over the Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...