Aptly, now that we have just published Nigel Jackson's essay on The Empty Room, a review of the same novel surfaced from the then-influential magazine The Saturday Review. It was written by a young and talented American novelist, and it seemed so indicative of a certain way of thinking in its time and place -- New York, three weeks before Pearl Harbor -- that reprinting it was irresistible. You will find it, appropriately, on the Old News page of the website. (I suspect that the "Brenson" who made the etching for the Saturday Review was Theodore Brenson, who had just emigrated to America from Latvia and later became an Abstract Expressionist.)
Faithful Morgan readers will know how difficult it is to obtain a copy of his second novel. Together with The Gunroom, the first, it was by his own wish never republished. Now, through the great generosity of the Charles Morgan Estate, this website has obtained a transcript of My Name Is Legion, with permission to publish it online. Accordingly, we have added it as a separate page: it can be read online or downloaded, but for private use and enjoyment only. It is an extraordinary book, and readers may want to comment on it: that can be done on this page, with its blog format. Once again that most tireless Morganian, Nigel Jackson from Melbourne, favours us with a new essay, this time on The Empty Room (1941), one of Morgan's lesser-known short novels, but one of which I've always been very fond, in part because of its comments on war and peace. Let us hope that Nigel's essay will stimulate more of us to read or reread it -- like most of CM's other titles, it can usually be found on antiquarian websites such as Abebooks, Alibris or AddAll. (NB: As always, beware of cheap paperback reprints from Asia: they are often done by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and of spectacularly poor quality.)
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AuthorRoger Kuin, stumbling webmaster and lifelong admirer of Morgan's writing. Archives
June 2023
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