Morgan’s first book, a novel called Pursuit, was released in 1966. Writing for the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates, author at the time of the astonishingly low number of three books, said that Morgan produced “an exotic marriage of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor,” with a “distinctive touch” and an “irresistible drama,” right down to the “very look and smell of the old plantation.” But somehow, eight years later, a writer who had merited not one but two reviews in the New York Times for her debut novel didn’t nab a single write-up in that newspaper for her short-story collection about Roxie Stoner. However, Michael Wood (now the chair of Princeton’s English Department, then a professor at Columbia), writing in the New York Review of Books, rated Morgan better than the contemporarily modish Muriel Spark and Evan S. Connell Jr., the other two writers considered in his review. In discussing the eponymous Roxie, he even went so far as to invoke characters created by Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Morgan, he said, offered us not “facts or outlines or diagnoses of life” but “the feel of life”; she “tells us things we don’t know.” Don’t you like to be told things you don’t know? Satisfying that curiosity is one of the reasons I read. So how does a writer such as Berry Morgan vanish? Fame: what a bitch! Well, it requires every kind of excess, as Don DeLillo reminded us. Maybe that wasn’t Morgan’s style.
Her family, I presumed, owned the rights to “The Hill.” This was the twenty-first century. It wouldn’t take much to track them down. But of the four surviving children mentioned in Morgan’s 2002 obituary, two had common names that, paired with “Morgan,” would be near impossible to track down, especially since one lived in Houston. But one of the sons was named after his father, an unusual name. His was the only listing for this name in Virginia Beach, his city of residence. Bingo. But the number was out of service. The last option was the youngest daughter, but her phone number was unlisted. Although there was an address, our deadline was too close to send a letter and wait for a response. The obituary said Morgan had died at a nursing home near her property, Aylmere Farm. I tried the nursing home. The nurse who answered was very kind, but said she had been working there seventeen years and had never known anyone by the name of Berry Morgan to be there. A writer, I said. She was in the New Yorker! No, sorry, the nurse said. Morgan had been Catholic, and a priest had officiated the funeral, according to the obituary. Maybe he would know the family. But he seemed to have moved away, to eastern Maryland. Finally I located a court document from 1998 that showed the youngest daughter as the owner of Avanti’s, a restaurant. Aha! The obituary had said this was where the celebration honoring Morgan’s life would be held. I called the restaurant. It appeared to have changed hands. The woman who answered didn’t know Morgan’s daughter. But the court document also said the daughter lived at Aylmere Farm. The farm! Of course! It had a listing and I called it, numerous times. There was never an answer, and there was no answering machine on which to leave a message. My final lead was the court document’s mention that Morgan’s daughter was an attorney in Washington DC. The document listed not the name but the address of her employer. I tracked it down. But either the offices had moved and this was a new firm, or she was no longer employed by the firm at that address. She was not among the associates listed. So that was it, then. But when I was close to giving up hope (for including the story in this issue, anyway), I stumbled across a 2007 directory for West Virginia county commissioners that listed Morgan’s daughter. Eureka! There was a phone number, and even an e-mail address. When my message to the e-mail address was bounced back as undeliverable and the phone number turned out to be out of service, I began to feel that fate was somehow conspiring to suppress Berry Morgan. Or maybe I just wasn’t a very good private eye. It occurred to me, though, to call the County Commissioners’ Association of West Virginia, in Charleston. I pled my case to the sweet woman who answered the phone, and I could tell, by now, that a low-grade hysteria was creeping in around the edges of my voice. It turned out, though, that Morgan’s daughter was indeed still a commissioner, and after a little more explaining, the sweet woman in Charleston gave me an updated phone number (a cell phone!) and e-mail address. I reached Morgan’s daughter at an airport in Arkansas, of all places. Yes, the family would be thrilled to have the story reprinted! A quick string of e-mails then, and I compress out the denouement, noting only that after all this, it felt strangely as though Edith Pearlman and Ecotone, rather than Houghton Mifflin, had discovered Berry Morgan.
What does discovery mean? Can one “discover” someone who has written the best-selling novel of all time (The Cartier Project) in his native country? Who has written a separate novel (Guarding Hanna) whose translation was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest cash prize in the world for a book of fiction published in English? Perhaps. If you can be a willing penitent and confess your ignorance. And now I mean the Slovenian writer Miha Mazzini. His remarkable story “That Winter,” which is, shockingly, his first publication in a U.S. magazine, came into our mailbox unheralded and announced the singular vision of its creator. Its subject, treachery and its aftermath in the Bosnian War, is one that we Americans could stand to learn more about. In “That Winter,” Miha presents the saga of a self-surrendered Serbian war criminal returning home to a husked life after more than a decade in prison. The story is paired with the essay “Reconciling Hawks and Doves,” by noted science writer and provocateur John Horgan, who contends that we can in fact end war. We feel lucky to be bringing both of these pieces to you. Not to mention the group of other stories, essays, and poems here, all of which moved and delighted us. (Who knew, for instance, about the latent art critic in Rick Bass? Who knew he was every bit as comfortable in the Louvre as in his beloved Montana?)
In a way, sleuthing is what every issue of a good magazine should be about. One of our goals is to find pieces of literature about which we can confidently say, This work, dear reader (to use the anachronistic parlance), is valuable. It will reward your time. It will nourish you in important ways. So we’ve made every effort to gather work here that does just that. We hope to get a conversation clanging in your head that will last for a good long while. And sleuthing is what the reader does as well, isn’t it? Sussing out the intentions, the pleasures, of a poem, a short story, an essay. Plumbing the work, trying to detect whether it has truth and beauty to offer, and what those might be. It’s something we’ve all been doing together in Ecotone, readers and editors alike, for the past five years. Thanks for sleuthing with us. Here’s to the next half decade.
—Ben George
