Arts and Letters

The tragic death in a traffic accident last summer of George L. K. Morris has deprived us of a newly elected colleague, and me of an old friend. The tragedy was not subjective. George was a careful driver, moderate and sensible in his lifestyle—old-fashioned virtues, for his was an old-fashioned temperament. That he should be destroyed in a collision with a trailer-truck at noontime near his home in the Berkshires was related not to his character, but to the violence always lurking under the smooth surface of The Way We Live Now.

Morris was primarily a painter and since I'm not, our colleague, James Brooks, has kindly supplied a note on his place in modern art:

It is difficult to think of the entrance into American painting of the modern or international style without considering the midwifery of George L. K. Morris, who was one of the founders in 1936 and, I believe, the most devoted spokesman for the group that called themselves the American Abstract Artists. The early nucleus, which met for discussion in Ibram Lassaw's studio, included Bolotowsky, Browne, de Kooning, Gorky, Greene, Holty, and McNeil.

I cannot speak intimately of their history. Most of us outsiders respected the organization because, although we recognized our heavy debt to the school of Paris, we had for a while been swept into areas called regionalism, social-message art, and the urge to cover walls with murals as the Mexicans, Rivera, and Orozco, had done. Not so Morris and his friends, whose art we considered a little aseptic, no doubt because of their attempt to eliminate ingratiating texture and color (also reference to known objects) and rely exclusively on what they considered the real meat of art: its structure and the pure meaning of its formal relations.

They painted and they sculpted. They organized exhibitions. They picketed militantly.* And their cause was eloquently expounded by the writings of George L. K. Morris, who was devoted and generous with his time—and even with his money. All true artists, whatever their beliefs, have benefited by the existence of this man and by the continuing presence of his paintings.

To Jim Brooks' portrait of the artist I can add a few memories: of the elegant little white marble house and studio George had built, to his abstract-constructivist design—quite a contrast to the nearby parental mock-Georgian mansion—on the family estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which adjoined Hawthorne's (and Koussevitsky's) Tanglewood; of the enormous Lachaise nude who reclined, dreaming and triumphant, deep in the bosky woods, where one always seemed to come on her unexpectedly, George having sited her so as to merge with the landscape despite her bulk (with her high pedestal she must have weighed several tons) and nature completing the camouflage with moss, rain streak, bird droppings, and dead leaves; and the exhilarating way the paintings of George and his then wife, now widow, Suzy Frelinghuysen, contrasted on the walls of their marble house: his logical, witty, thoughtful, with a classic precision of form; hers spontaneous, playful and with similar control but rococo rather than classic: fluidly graceful, freely inventive and harmonious.

George and I first met as Yale freshmen in 1924, he from the (then) snobbish Groton, I from the (then) democratic Exeter. Yale was (then) a philistine campus, dominated by future stockbrokers—little did they suspect what awaited them a year after graduation!—and present athletes. (All three institutions have long since become culturally homogenized, of course: Groton is less snobbish, Exeter less democratic, and Yale is sometimes actually compared to Harvard.) George and I soon discovered each other as lonely explorers amid the natives of Darkest Yale. I played Stanley to his Dr. Livingston. As Mistah Kurtz's harlequin-patched young Polish disciple, in Heart of Darkness, puts it: "He enlarged my mind." We were both "literary" but George knew and cared about other areas like art and music. He had a large collection of classical records, and we met regularly in his room to hear them, with his explications—he was always a very good explicator. Opera was his passion; he ranked Verdi with Wagner, an odd, indeed heretical, notion in 1924.

After we graduated, he convinced me that until I had experienced "Abroad" I could have no notions of the possibilities of human existence in its, to us, important areas: art and history. Practical—and generous—as always, he invited me in the summer of 1932 to spend a month with him in his Paris apartment. I did—and he was right. He also made visible to me around that time by his informed and articulate enthusiasm a new world of abstract art: the paintings of Léger (his own teacher), Mondrian, Braque, Malevich, Kandinsky, and Picasso (Cubist and "bone," not Blue, periods) and the sculptures of Gabo, Pevsner, Lachaise, Arp, and Brancusi.

In the literary world, we were, in the thirties, among the founding editors of two "little" magazines, the first ephemeral, the second not.

The first was The Miscellany, which two Yale friends, F. W. Dupee and Geoffrey T. Hellman, joined us in publishing intermittently—eight or nine issues between 1929 and 1931. Circulation fluctuated between six and seven hundred. The Miscellany was high-minded and narrow-minded, also somewhat out of touch. We accepted workmanlike realistic stories by L. A. G. Strong and H. L. Davis and rejected a story by another obscure writer named William Faulkner as manneristic and romantic, which it well may have been… but still. I wrote a two-part article celebrating Robinson Jeffers as our major poet—it still reads plausibly if one disregards the main point—and dismissing, in casual asides, both Whitman and Eliot, surely the critical hat trick of 1930. (I also wrote more sensible articles on Eisenstein, Griffith, and the superiority of cinema to theatre in our time, as did Morris on abstract art, Hellman on the psychopathology of best-sellers, and Dupee on current fiction.)

George was our financial angel then, as he was six years later in a more serious enterprise: the rape of Partisan Review from the Stalinists. In 1937, Dupee, Morris, and I conspired with Philip Rahv and William Phillips, who had been the principal founders and editors of P.R. in its first period (1934-1936) when it was the literary organ of the C.P.'s John Reed Clubs. Like us, they had been disillusioned by the Moscow Trials and the degeneration of the C.P., for reasons of Kremlin foreign policy, into nothing more inspiring than the left wing of the New Deal—FDR's Loyal Opposition. So the five of us agreed the time was ripe to revive P.R.** as an independent literary magazine (no ties to Stalin—or Trotsky) that would be politically revolutionary-Marxist and esthetically avant-garde. Our sense of the intellectual zeitgeist proved correct: the new P.R. was an immediate succès d'estime. It worked, it still works, or anyway exists, and one of the original five, Will Phillips, is editor-in-chief. P.R. is the unique Methuselah of our "little mags," its forty years equalling at least four hundred in the time-span of the Old Testament patriarchs and if it's not in the Guinness Book of Records, it should be.

Our Marxist ideology didn't much interest George, though he followed our heated and intricate disputes with a cool (and rather touristic) interest. But he was no tourist when it came to arts and letters. He tolerated P.R.'s avant-garde politics, but he cherished its avant-garde esthetics, whose standards we resolutely preserved from the contaminations of social progress and proletarian virtue, C.P. style. They were close to his (and my) "Art for Art's Sake" position and far from the Communists' "Art is a Weapon in the Class War" slogan, nor were we impressed by Sartre's "committed" writing ("la littérature engagée'') which we saw as a more sophisticated/sophistical, tactful/tactical formulation that tried to bridge the unbridgeable and kept landing its brilliant but not always sensible inventor in such scholastic dilemmas as the contradiction between Flaubert's revolutionary esthetics and his reactionary political ideas and temperament. Problems that proved insoluble, however much Sartrean subtlety and amplitude were brought to bear, because they were also nonexistent.

To return to our moutons after this cadenza (which would have pleased him), George funded P.R. from 1937 to 1943. In that year, I resigned because, after Pearl Harbor, my fellow editors gave what we leftists called "critical support" to the war (though, as Herzen had remarked a century earlier, why didn't they ever criticize?) and I continued in the old Lenin-Luxemburg tradition of opposition to "imperialist war." Perhaps wrongly, looking back; but it had side benefits: I continued to criticize, for a while in P.R. and then in my own magazine, Politics (1944-1949). When I left, so did George: the two Yale friends who had gotten him into P.R. had departed—Dupee several years earlier, for personal reasons; and the mag had long since made the one big point which interested him: the depoliticalization of art and letters. So he too departed, as editor and "angel;" the wonder is he stuck it out so long, given his interests and background.

The Bible says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. I wouldn't know about that (except it's probably a mistranslation), but I do know it's hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of art. So many distractions; so many easier options like collecting art—as from Morgan and Frick to Lehman and Hirshhorn et al., who made purgatory at best and even that usually with expert assistance. And no spur of necessity. Dr. Johnson exaggerated when he pronounced: "Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." But from my own experience as a professional journalist, I think the Doctor, as usual, had a point. George L. K. Morris, however, entered the kingdom, overcoming all obstacles with a Horatio Alger determination that was diverted—or perverted—from making money into art.

Not the least difficulty, and one that Horatio never had to face, is that if there exists a hereditary aristocracy in these democratic states, George Lovett Kingsland Morris was a charter member. His middle names suggest lineage as does "Van Cortlandt," his younger brother's middle name—his first name is "Stephanus," a snobbishly archaic inflation of "Stephen" his parents inflicted on him in a Canute gesture against the rising democratic tide. The same note of lineage, WASP style, sounds in the first name of George's older brother, "Newbold," who was Robert Moses' successor as New York City Parks Commissioner, also City Council president under LaGuardia.

"Morris" itself was quite a moniker in the old days. There was Lewis Morris (1677-1746), the founder of the line, first royal governor of New Jersey, who in 1697 established the family manor, Morrisania, still a neighborhood name on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and still a local stop on the New York Central. Also his eponymous grandson, a signer of the Declaration whose half-brother, Gouverneur, helped write our Constitution and later, as Ambassador to France during the Terror, refrained from undue diplomatic effort in the saving of Citizen Tom Paine's neck from Robespierre's guillotine.*** In the next century, the family produced no more historical figures but continued to accumulate wealth by sensible investments and marriages until, when George was born in 1905, they were very well fixed indeed.

Like the late Malcolm X, the late George Lovett Kingsland Morris transcended his family and social heritage, asserting himself as a professional artist as well as a skillful and energetic organizer, promoter, and propagandist for the kind of abstract art he practiced.****

"I think of his gentleness and kindness, especially when I visited him at Lenox, my invitation into the beau monde, or when we went on tours in New England or Europe," Fred Dupee wrote me after I had called him at his California home with the news of George's death. "He was at his most companionable and—to me—aesthetically interesting (I mean Helpful) on such occasions—vastly better informed, more observant of refinements of style than I was. A lover of the Gothic. I often think of him as primarily that, probably because he once showed me an elaborate clay model of some Gothic cathedral which he had made as a child and had preserved in his bedroom in the Lenox house. He must have been making that while I was making things via my Meccano set in Joliet, Illinois! Strange that we should ever have met, I sometimes thought. It took Yale and you to bring this marvel about."

To this appreciation of our dead friend, which interestingly coincides with mine, I'd add one general coda. I think George had two fine old-fashioned qualities: rationality and civility. They were strained to the utmost in our later years when his political/social ideology was becoming a reverse mirror image of mine (and Fred's). The same values on issues like McCarthyism, racial integration, Freedom Rides, the New Left, the Vietnam war, etc., but where he put minus signs, I put plus signs—and, of course, vice versa. A head-on collision. Yet we were able to communicate—often rather edgily, but still, discussion was possible—because he was always willing to meet a rational argument with another that was—formally at least—also rational. Nor, despite my irritating tendency to raise my voice at crucial moments, did he ever raise his. And he never took my indignant philippics personally, understanding they were not so intended, a rare kind of understanding in my long argumentative experience. Even when he was in a tight corner, he didn't lose his cool—or his courtesy, which is even rarer. I shall miss him very much.

* The Museum of Modern Art was their target. "The Modern Museum was riding a surrealist wave that followed the American Scene, and its Art in Our Time show (1939) had continued to ignore American abstraction," Morris writes in "The American Abstract Artists: a Chronicle 1936-1956," his lucid, dispassionate and entertainingly informative contribution to The World of Abstract Art, an anthology edited by the A.A.A. and published by George Wittenborn. "The final straw was an exhibition of drawings for the newspaper PM; it seemed as if the moment had come for protest…. So it was that a drizzly afternoon found the American Abstract Artists posted along 53rd Street in their raincoats distributing a scroll designed by Ad Reinhardt with elaborate and antiquated script appropriate to the Museum's outlook." (Footnote by D.M.)

** Which had not appeared for almost two years, the Party line having taken a "Popular Front" turn, or wiggle, and its cultural commissars therefore shifting their interests from elite to mass culture. *** Another "signer," Robert Morris, the Financier of the Revolution, was no relation, being in fact, Jewish.

**** His close friend and ally, the late Albert Gallatin, a fellow aristocrat whose eponymous ancestor, as Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1814, converted the Republic's fiscal policies from Hamiltonian to Jeffersonian principles, was more typical: he did some painting, but as an amateur diversion, and in general he limited himself to the passive role of collector and is mostly remembered for his Museum of Living Art now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.