T. S. Eliot’s “cruelest month” has been kind to Bradford Morrow. This April, the novelist, editor, and Bard College professor received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two weeks later, he learned that he’d won the PEN/Nora Magid Award for his excellence in the editing of the literary journal Conjunctions.
How is he planning to celebrate? By working of course.
Morrow plans to spend his “Guggenheim year” concentrating on his novel-in-progress, The Prague Sonatas. “I’ve had it in my head for a decade at least; I have mountains of notes. I’ll finally have time to pull together everything I’ve been thinking about,” he exults. “I adore it as you would an unborn child—it’s not here yet, but I know I’m going to love it.”
Morrow has already fathered five novels—Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (a PEN/Faulkner finalist), Trinity Fields (winner of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Giovanni’s Gift, and Ariel’s Crossing; he’s just finished a new novel with the working title The Diviner’s Tale. He’s also published five collections of poetry, and just released his first children’s book, DIDN’T Didn’t Do It, a deft feat of linguistic gymnastics with illustrations by Gahan Wilson.
Morrow writes like an architect, using intricate mathematical structures to create three-dimensional worlds full of beauty and light. Jonathan Safran Foer (a former student and guest editor of a 2000 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to Morrow’s work) wrote, “His narratives careen from the American West, to Central America, to the Northeastern United States, connecting these blazing sites like a sign of the zodiac that had never been noticed.” Foer paints Morrow as a “writer of the Americas,” but he could have added a couple of continents. Giovanni’s Gift leapfrogs from rural New Mexico to the churches of Rome; Trinity Fields traces a path from Los Alamos to the killing fields of Southeast Asia.
Morrow’s writing, editing, and teaching career forms its own trinity. It’s hard to say which voice sings lead in the trio: He seems to be going full-throttle in all three directions at once. No wonder the bed in his preternaturally tidy Greenwich Village apartment looks as if no one has slept in it. The walls are lined with books, their library-bound spines in perfect alignment. One of Morrow’s two cats licks her paw on a kilim rug.
Morrow has lived in the Village since 1980, the same year he founded Conjunctions. He also maintains a house in the Catskills, and commutes upstate weekly to teach at Bard. He spends most of his editing time in the city, but retreats upstate for long stretches of composition. He writes in intense bursts, especially when starting a project, but “once I’m embarked, I can work anywhere, anytime.”
Morrow’s voice has the flattened vowels and lilt of his native Colorado, and, in spite of his polished black shoes and the round dark-framed glasses he takes on and off, he retains an air of the Western outdoors. His complexion is ruddy, and his hay-colored hair seems more in tune with the wind than the comb. He’s proud of his “pioneer stock”: His paternal grandfather founded a miners’ hospital in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; his maternal ancestors homesteaded in Willa Cather’s Nebraska.
His mother was “a great storyteller” who spun “tales of the old days, narrated with great passion and intensity. I can still hear her stories in my head: The snake that got into the chicken coop, hiding from tornadoes, the lean times after my grandfather lost his farm.”
Morrow’s father recruited scientific talent for aerospace programs and secretive projects his son later came to connect with high-tech weaponry. Both parents were outdoor enthusiasts, driving their children all over the Four Corners states. “Those landscapes are just seared into my memory,” says Morrow.
Trinity Fields opens with a trio of boys joyriding toward Santuario Chimayo, an adobe church built on a site sacred to ancient indigenous peoples. “That one little valley, so near where the atom bomb was,” he says, “politics, secularism, and high physics represented by the one place [Los Alamos] and the pure spirituality and sense of the divinity of the Earth itself, the ancient practice of spiritual questing that’s inherent to Chimayo. It’s really the yin-yang of everything. The political and the spiritual are two poles I work with a lot in my writing,” he asserts.
Morrow has made a Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayo half a dozen times, walking with the penitentes. “I’m not a practicing Catholic, I just like being around those people,” he says, adding that he considers the 15-mile journey “more of a Buddhist meditation.”
That Morrow is able to make such a pilgrimage is its own miracle. A congenital weakness in his digestive system first manifested when he was four, and he’s battled diverticulitis throughout his life. In 1994, an acute attack of peritonitis ruptured his colon. “I had no business surviving that,” he says with an air of puzzlement tempered by gratitude.
Living with chronic illness forced young Morrow to narrow his multiple interests, which also included painting and music. “It was easier to read a book than play piano when convalescing on my back,” he told novelist Patrick McGrath in an interview. He also considered becoming a doctor. At 15, he went to Honduras on a foreign-exchange program with Amigos de los Americas, working with Peace Corps volunteers to inoculate thousands of people in desperately poor rural villages. The experience radicalized him, and led to a deep ideological rift with his father. The Vietnam War was raging, and Morrow applied twice for conscientious objector status. Saved by a high draft lottery number, he threw himself into the anti-war movement, and still sports a “proud little bump” where his nose was broken in a demonstration.
Shards of these experiences are scattered like Southwestern pottery fragments throughout Morrow’s fiction. He likens writing a novel to climbing a mountain, except that “you’re climbing it and inventing it at the same time.”
Narrative voice is paramount. “How it’s being said is part of what’s being said,” he explains. “I think musically—narrative arcs are musical arcs.” Morrow plays the guitar, mostly classical now; he played in rock and jazz-fusion bands when he was younger. “I just got rid of all my electric guitars,” he says wistfully, lingering over a 1930s Epiphone Emperor he found in a pawnshop in Denver.
He’s divested beloved possessions before. During his twenties, Morrow ran a rare-book shop in Santa Barbara, where he befriended poet Kenneth Rexroth, then in his seventies. “He was a real mentor to me. He was a great, great polymathic autodidact, a great poet, a hugely influential translator.” When the older man died, Morrow sold the store and most of his books, and moved to New York to publish a magazine.
Conjunctions was supposed to be a one-shot deal honoring New Directions publisher James Laughlin. It’s now been in print for 25 years; Conjunctions 48: Faces of Desire was released this May. Over 1,000 authors and artists have contributed to its hefty paperback volumes and online edition (www.conjunctions.com). Frequent flyers include Paul Auster, John Barth, Robert Creeley, Ann Lauterbach, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul West, and Can Xue, alongside such wild cards as Red Grooms and Don “Captain Beefheart” Van Vliet. Mary Caponegro, Rick Moody, and William T. Vollmann all launched early works in Conjunctions.
Morrow calls his editing style “intuitional.” His eclectic literary tastes led the PEN judges to marvel, “The range of writers he publishes is a sort of who’s who of 20th/21st century serious writing, and he’s found a way to keep reinventing it. The fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, and art is sometimes described as ‘experimental,’ but we would also say innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful.”
“To be a good editor, you have to really love to read. You also have to be willing to read manuscripts that aren’t successful,” Morrow says. “I have a lot of respect for anyone who uses that tool we all share, language, to express some sort of vision. I think that’s such an honorable enterprise.”
Though he describes editing in almost monastic terms (“a kind of devotion...a seven-day-a-week involvement”), he somehow finds time for another devotion. “I take my teaching really seriously. I love my students at Bard,” Morrow asserts. It’s a tough sort of love: Morrow’s Narrative Strategies students read a book every week, covering a long list of contemporary fiction. “I’m always shocked when young writers don’t read,” he says. “One feeds the other, like inhaling and exhaling.”
It’s time to head back to his Village apartment, where Conjunctions awaits Morrow’s attention. He looks up at a lilac in radiant bloom. “I’m in no hurry to get back inside,” he sighs, then amends, “I can’t wait to write.”