Literary Gem

Princeton University is honoring ‘The Hudson Review’ on its 60th anniversary.

By Adam Grybowski
   For a while in the 1950s, Ezra Pound, the poet and critic who had helped shape the careers of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Robert Frost, wrote two or three letters a week to Frederick Morgan, the editor of The Hudson Review. The letters included exact instructions on editing each issue. Mr. Morgan ignored the advice and continued to put out the magazine he wanted.
   Mr. Morgan’s strong editorship and catholic taste helped The Hudson Review become one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the country, a position it still maintains. In 2006, Princeton University acquired the magazine’s archives: about 250 cartons of corrected manuscripts, authors’ files and correspondence, which includes more than 200 letters, notes and cards that Pound wrote to Mr. Morgan.
   The university is hosting an academic conference Nov. 3 to honor The Hudson Review and mark the opening of the archives for research. Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Hudson Review contributor, is the keynote speaker.
   The Hudson Review, approaching its 60th anniversary, helped shape literary culture over the second half of the 20th century, amassing a distinguished record of publishing little-known or undiscovered writers. The poems of Donald Hall, the 14th U.S. Poet Laureate, appeared in the magazine very early in his career in the 1950s. W. S. Merwin, who would win a Pulitzer Prize, was still in his teens when The Hudson Review first published his poetry in 1948. And the essays of Wendell Berry appeared well before he became a major figure in the environmental movement.
   Mr. Morgan, who edited the quarterly for its first 50 years, said in a 1997 interview that appeared in The Hudson Review that practically all of his writers allowed that the magazine furthered their careers. Editor Paula Deitz, who was married to Mr. Morgan and has worked at the magazine for nearly 40 years, continues to marvel that writers in the current issue may achieve acclaim. Commercial publishers and agents mine the magazine for new storytellers, she says.
   While The Hudson Review publishes famous writers, Ms. Deitz says its mission — and the purpose of literary magazines in general — is to discover new writers. If it is true that the magazine has reinvented itself every decade, as Mr. Gioia said in 1996, it is at least partially due to its willingness to pay attention to young writers.
   The magazine holds on to its youth by responding to new writers, Ms. Deitz says in a foreword to the upcoming Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review.
   Three Princeton graduates founded The Hudson Review in New York City in 1947: Mr. Morgan ‘43, Joseph D. Bennett ‘43 and William Arrowsmith ‘45. Of the three editors, Mr. Morgan was the central figure. All of them studied creative writing with the poet and critic Allen Tate and edited or contributed to the Nassau Lit, Princeton’s undergraduate literary magazine. Mr. Tate encouraged them to pursue literary careers, suggesting they start their own literary magazine.
   Their intent was to publish poetry and prose not bent toward any political or academic ideology. “I have always been allergic to schools and movements,” Mr. Morgan said in 1997. He chose to judge contributions based on individual merit, whether the writer was well known or not, and the magazine’s philosophy has not changed.
   In Mr. Morgan’s obituary, The New York Times described the era of The Hudson Review’s first edition in 1948 as a time “when many educated people knew the classics, recited poetry from memory and dined on literature, music and art.” That climate has certainly cooled.
   Still, Ms. Deitz says her readership remains steady. The magazine’s Web site manages to offer a portion of its contents for free while attracting new subscribers, according to Ms. Deitz. She believes younger readers continue to discover the magazine, although the profile of a typical reader is murky. She describes her readers as people with a strong liberal arts education who don’t want to lose their intellectual spark. She hopes an upcoming reader survey will help clarify her impression.
   Ms. Deitz acknowledges the challenge of keeping subscribers but also gives the impression that The Hudson Review has staked its place in our national culture, allowing it to peer over the upheaval of print media and the decline of literature’s role in daily life without having to compromise its standards to maintain its position.
   Since The Hudson Review relies heavily on the taste of the editor, and no one’s taste is impeccable, Ms. Deitz accepts that she will make mistakes. “You might turn down a very good poem,” she says. “It happens, but you stand behind it and move on.” When Mr. Morgan handed her control of the magazine in 1998, he told her to do what she wanted and enjoy it.
   The Hudson Review’s sole criterion for accepting unsolicited work has always been literary quality, which Ms. Deitz describes as an engaging and fluent style, original ideas that are knowledgeable yet not academic or superficial. Maintaining those standards is a matter of recognizing good work that contains what Mr. Morgan once called “intrinsic excellence.”
   ”It’s like grading papers,” says Ms. Deitz, who taught briefly at Columbia University. “You always know when you get the A paper.”
Writers, Editors, and Literary Magazines, 1947-2007: A Conversation in Honor of The Hudson Review will take place in Stewart Theater, 185 Nassau St., Princeton University, Princeton, Nov. 3, 2 p.m., free. (609) 258-3155;www.hudsonreview.com