Genuinely, if discreetly, historic: a first-ever meeting of lovers of Charles Morgan's works will, it is hoped, take place on Sunday, January 31, via Zoom. It will unite Morganians as far afield as the Eastern United States on the one hand, and Australia on the other. This, obviously, means we have to organise the time-slot with care: so for the Eastern US it is 7 AM, for the UK and Ireland it is 12 noon, for Western Europe 1 PM, for Japan 9 PM and for Melbourne and Victoria 10 PM. We thank our recently-joined member Ebba Køber from Norway for lending us her company's facilities. If you have not been contacted about this and would like to take part, please e-mail the Webmaster about having the Zoom-link sent to you.
Not all Morganians have read Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, which Will Gaskony treasured and Severidge coveted. It's a remarkable novel of philosophical discovery and growth, written in Pater's well-known crafted prose which influenced Morgan's writing. And we are now privileged to publish an article comparing Sparkenbroke to Marius, written by Nadia Palazzani, a literary historian and critic from Italy. You will find it on the DIscussions page.
We have discovered, to our considerable surprise, that not one but TWO films have been made from CLM's novels. We have already mentioned the 1934 movie of The Fountain; it now turns out that six years after CLM's death, in 1964, the German director Rudolf Jugert made a film of The River Line, with the German title Kennwort: Reiher ("Password: Heron"). The part of Heron was played by Peter van Eyck, with Marie played by Marie Versini. The film even won an award as the best German feature film of 1964. Unfortunately, it has so far proved impossible to find a DVD of it for sale anywhere, though WorldCat shows several copies in libraries. Press photos and posters of it can be found on eBay. Below is a press photo of the group in the barn, with Heron in the right foreground. One does wonder what CLM, who disliked films, which he referred to contemptuously as "flickers", would have thought of it.
We have been fortunate to be able to look at some of the late Roger Morgan's transcripts of his father's correspondence; and among the letters he wrote to Hilda Vaughan, later Hilda Morgan, there is a fascinating passage from August 1930 describing his thoughts as he is shaping the characters of what became his most popular novel, The Fountain; notably the personality of Julie. It seemed a good idea to let Morganians see this as soon as possible; so we have put it here on the website, on the "Works" page.
Charles Morgan, as a number of us know, lost his mother at an early age and was brought up by his two sisters, Marcie and Mildred. What is perhaps less known is that he also had an older brother, William Watkins Morgan, who was also in the Royal Navy and who died young, on 19 June 1915, in the action at Gallipoli. He is buried there, and his name is one of the many on the Helles Memorial that overlooks the Dardanelles. A portrait of him in Naval uniform, below, is listed as showing him "at age 29", so we may assume that he was born ca. 1886. One does see the family face . . . .
Morganians will remember that the late and beloved Roger Morgan, CM’s son, was Librarian to the House of Lords; that, as a professional librarian, he took the most scrupulous and professional care of his father’s writings and documents; and that, at his death, he left his entire collection of those to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. You will also remember that the Library in question has said it cannot “process” the collection unless very significant funds are found; and that until such time no access can be granted.
However, Roger Morgan had made transcripts of a good deal of CM’s correspondence; and your humble Webmaster was given several folders of these, including CM’s entire surviving correspondence with his long-time lover, the actress Margaret Rawlings. We are currently in the process of correcting and annotating this enormous (500+-page) transcript, and will keep the CM community informed about developments. But in the meantime we can, without any breaches of confidentiality, publish a few extracts which should fascinate you as much as it did us. The first of these is, we think, so important that it needs to be on our front page, at least for a while. It is CM’s absolutely candid and unvarnished self-description; and it should once and for all lay to rest certain rumours that he was snobbish and worldly and stuffy. Two new pictures have been added to the Gallery/Life page: Pietro Annigoni's portrait of Margaret Rawlings, painted in the spring of 1951, and Francis Goodman's photograph of painter, sitter and portrait together in Annigoni's studio. It was painted only two years after Annigoni's first exhibition in England, and is thus one of his earliest English portraits. We imagine it was probably commissioned by Robert Barlow, whom Rawlings had married in 1942. It seems more alive, and more attractive, than the Bassano studio portraits.
This photograph illustrates the April 19, 1936 review of Sparkenbroke in the New York Times Book Review. The caption reads, "From a Portrait Bust by Gordon Alchin". Researching Alchin, we found that he was born in 1894, went up to Brasenose in 1914, had his studies interrupted by the War, and came back in 1919: hence, clearly a friend of CM's. His war was more exciting: he began in the Field Artillery, and then moved to the Royal Flying Corps to become a pilot. He was also a poet, and was published, together with better-known war poets, in The Muse in Arms. Later he became a Liberal MP, a barrister, and eventually a Judge. He died in 1947. This bust, in the family's collection, was clearly made out of friendship: there is no other record of Alchin's having been a sculptor.
A text we had hear about for years but never seen has now been made available to us: CM's Oration to the Saintsbury Club, given on April 23, 1947. It shows him in a rare light-hearted mood. (One note for 2019 readers: this was an all-male society, and CM allows himself a few pleasant galanteries that modern moralists might frown at. As the French would say: âmes sensibles s'abstenir. For the Oration, go to the Works page.
In view of the fact that Nigel Jackson's remarkable The Seed That Falls has now been published and is available, Nigel has allowed us to remove some of the essays on his page that became chapters in The Seed. At his request, we have kept those on Portrait In A Mirror and A Breeze of Morning; and on our own initiative, we have kept a few other pieces that are not in the book and seemed valuable. So the Nigel Jackson page in "Discussions" has a new look. There will some more housekeeping soon; and please remember that any suggestions are very welcome!
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AuthorRoger Kuin, stumbling webmaster and lifelong admirer of Morgan's writing. Archives
June 2023
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