Murray Morgan to Muriel Cowley, 6 April 1989 -- "You and Malcolm changed our lives"

Malcolm Cowley, who championed Skid Road and named last Wilderness, died March 27, 1989. Murray wrote an appreciation to his widow, Muriel.

Dear Muriel...

Almost forty years have passed since our paths crossed in Seattle during the "dirty poet" of 1950 uproar. We haven't seen you since, but you and Malcolm changed our lives and have remained a strong presence with us. 

Rosa and I never visit the Olympic peninsula without remembering our rainswept trip. I recall my chagrin when Malcolm asked me, as the local expert, to identify a tree at Lake Quinault. I couldn't. He said it looked like a redwood to him. I said that we don't have redwoods this far north. But it was a redwood, an import, but very much redwood. I recall with pleasure you both took at Lake Crescent, with the fog sweeping across the treetops. That trip marked the first time we left small daughter Lane -- then aged three months -- at home; so we think of you when we look after the granddaughters. Lane, like your Robbie, is an editor, writer, and sometimes a college prof. 

Most of all, of course, I remember Malcolm's help in the writing of Skid Road, my book about Seattle. He was the only editor I have encountered who could look at a graph and say "what if you put it this way" and give an example which not only solved the problem but served as a lasting lesson. He broke my addiction to the Associated Press declarative sentence, persuading me to risk occasional prolixity. I still glow on remembering that in my next book, The Last Wilderness, about the peninsula, he said I had achieved a sentence that required sundering.

I owe it to Malcolm that Skid Road is still in print, still picks up honors (it has been named one of the best Washington books of the past hundred years by a committee of scholars for the state centennial), and it has made it possible for me to find publishers for books on topics I care about. Like Faulkner, I owe him a debt no man can pay. And I'll remember you both whenever I see a trillium. 

Rosa joins in love and remembrance,

Murray

Maxine Cushing Gray to Murray, 26 July 1982 -- "Chacun á son goût"

Here is a businesslike and by its end kind for shocking letter from the "Tweed Hornet," Seattle arts writer and critic Maxine Cushing Gray. She was the founder and fierce editor of Northwest Arts, which she ran from 1975 to 1987. (Both Murray and I wrote for her -- he often, me occasionally -- and she made progress in beating sloppy phrasing out of me.) She announces her "astonished pleasure and pride" that she got the latest issue out -- full size and on time -- a week after her husband's death, which came shortly after his diagnosis of lung cancer. Her comment on his 50-year smoking habit: Chacun á son goût. Characteristically, she took time, in her busyness and her grief, to ink in the accents. She was flinty and reliable to the end, putting out her final issue shortly before her own death from liver cancer. Paula Becker's fine profile of her is at HistoryLink.org: https://www.historylink.org/File/11119

 

Two letters from Murray to Lane, 1967 and 1975

I lived mostly in California from 1967 through 1975, which meant I got letters from home. Reading them later, my main impression is how many different things my folks found interesting--politics, architecture, photography, theater, horse racing--and what an avid eavesdropper Murray was. I have inherited his pleasure in the overheard snippet of talk.

[Nov. 5, 1967]

Sunday

Dear daughter-type...

Sorry I missed your phone call on Thursday, though the big widge gave me the good reports, and I trust filled you in on the way things are going here. The snow started just as we got home from the weekend in Vancouver; the first flakes showing up in the Barnard Cadillac headlights as we were going through Seattle and the snow just starting to be visible as we came into our driveway. It was deep and beautiful and it lasted three days. We didn't have a chance to enjoy it, though, because Rosa had a cold and maybe the flu for the whole week, while I was running some kind of low grade virus and though on my feet had no extra energy at all. 

A. L. "Slim" Rasmussen. 

The election campaign here is moving into the final days with everybody sore at everybody: Slim [Rasmussen] at the Manager, the press, the old council, the federal government, the Puget Sound Governmental Conference and targets of opportunity; the Manager at Slim, at those who don't support the Council Manager form enough, at the guys who write the ads for the Trib, and at the crooks for being overactive at a time when the Good Guys are campaigning on their accomplishments in cleaning up the town. I find Slim a classic demagogue and the council members too couth to give him real battle. I can't guess at all how the voting will go on Tuesday night. (The station hasn't asked me to broadcast the results.)

Rosa says she told you about taking Lyla rpt Laila to the psychedelic play at the Off Center last week. [Laila Pearne was the widow of Murray's half-brother Harrison.] The play was a bit embarrassing even for graduates of Daniel-Ostransky Academy [Howard Daniel and LeRoy Ostransky were among Murray and Rosa's most profane friends.] It was like an inexpert version of Homecoming, with a light show thrown in; and attending it with Laila was something like taking Aunt Millie to a brothel. [The production was Christopher, by UW Drama graduate student Clarence Morley. It was billed as the world's first psychedelic play.] The only things she asked about on the way home, though, was why the couple had made love under an American flag in the closing scene...

Vancouver was fine. We had tea at the Bon Ton, a bacon and mushroom sandwich at Clancy's (which has changed names again but not personnel), a bottle of Canadian whiskey at our rooms at the Georgian Towers, a dinner at the roof-restaurant ... and a fine time at the zoo, though we couldn't see Skana [the orca who inspired the creation of Greenpeace] from underwater this time since she put her head thru the window last week and was cut up a bit and the pool level is not being kept low while unbreakable glass is installed -- and high time, I'd say. From above she looked fine, and smiled when fed. The Humuhumu apaapa nuanua went swimming by; the polar bears were wrestling each other happily and breathing clouds; the hornbills hopped and gave us the separate eye; the penguins looked pleased with themselves, and one wagged a literally frozen fanny at us, making the icicles shatter. ...

We have a big week coming up. Tomorrow (Monday) there is a rally of [Eugene] McCarthy types at the library. Sally Goldmark is to speak. Tuesday, beside the election, there is a talk at PLU by Agnes de Mille (I'll try to get your book autographed). Wednesday night the Seattle Rep opens THE FATHERS by Strindberg with Pauline [Flanagan] in the leading role. Thursday the University of Washington is putting on Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons (it's about a crisis in Jefferson's career) and there is earlier a Stanford Mothers' program that Rosa will attend if not teaching. Friday, the Off Center is offering three one-actors including Kraft's Last Tape by Beckett. Saturday there's a party at Ostranskys to celebrate their new Danish table. Sunday, thank god, is blank; but there may be a good movie available.

...

Love,

father-type

 

Slim Rassmussen (his twin brother was known as "Fat" Rasmussen) won in a landslide, unseating Harold Tollefson and beginning one of the weirder periods in twentieth-century Tacoma government

Sunday

en pleine aire

near SeaTac

(May 1975?)

Darling daughter

Turnagain Arm. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Anchorage was 70,000 when we saw it [in 1965] and claims 170,000 now. It's changing but the change is all in the same old direction. It's an ugly smarmy, grasping place, radiating ineptness, set apart and festering in the austere distances of Alaska. The scenery really is grand: even mud flats are beautiful if they approach being endless. The view from the Top of the World as Turnagain Arm goes from blue to gold to pewter to black makes the International Modern forgivable. But the only really pleasant buildings downtown are out by the point in the shadow of the henshitbrown Captain Cook. One white clapboard two-story has a Historic Marker plaque; it was built in 1915. (I'll get a plaque next) and it's the oldest building in town. ...

 

I was up to talk to the Alaska Press Women about the Hegg photos. I was the banquet speaker at the end of a two day meeting devoted to communicating thru photographs. It was bit of a botch. The woman who had arranged the session came down with whooping heaves, an efficient harridan from Valdez took over with atrocious efficiency and kept everything going ein, zwei, drei up until the banquet at which she was too drunk to present the awards, turning that function over to a blue-haired lady who was too drunk to know that she was too drunk to present the awards. If giving somebody the wrong scroll is good material for repetitive gag comedy, this was classic. 

E. A. Hegg, a Bellingham-based photographer, chronicled the Yukon gold rush. "One Man's Gold Rush," Murray's book about him and his work, was published in 1968.

There was a lot of charm to it though. One of the Eskimo women who skinned seals in Fairbanks got two awards for "special feature" writing. She said she was "walking on feathers."

Two young --(sort of)--women who make up 2/3rds of the editorial staff of the Kodiak paper won twelve awards between them, and hope it will impress their boss who is under pressure because they've been quoting police blotter reports directly and the mayor thinks it makes the city look silly. (I said "sort of" young because one has an 11 year old son. She is very tall and serious as Buster Keaton.) They both feel overworked, underpaid and uncertain how they could be so lucky. But they'd like a year in a big city.

Of the Anchorage people the most interesting was a skinny blonde photographer named Nancy Simmerman who has sailed her own ketch up from California, and specializes in wilderness scenes. Her feeling for rock and flower textures approaches Johsel's. She was able to hold my attention for an hour while talking about light angles; it helped that she doesn't use filters, and never mentioned shutter speed. She kept saying underexpose for warmth.

...

I find myself turning out copy easily and quickly about the Puget Sound area and hope to have a finished ms on the southern sound region ready for the Press by the start of fall semester. It would be a sort of south forty version of Skid Road: what happened downstream from Seattle. I hope I can finish it before my confidence wavers.

...

I saw a rather corny documentary that recreates Athabascan legends. One scene shows man and woman rising and taking form from boiling, seething mud. It was a low budget production and I asked how they could afford such elaborate effects. He said it was easy. They made man and woman out of wax, then photographed them under heat till they became puddles and played creation backwards. Maybe that's how the Voice of America should do programs on Vietnam: from Vietnamization thru Americanization to peasant revolution.

---------

One good thing about writing a letter on the plane is that I don't have to think about the mound of clippings, xerox stuff, and other detritus on the coffee table awaiting forwarding. Things like Stanford's offer of good tickets for WASH-STAN, or USC-STAN, USC being a dollar cheaper, Odd pictures of colts. Winning pictures of Foolish Pleasure. Quotes from Bill Russell: "That man Gray wouldn't walk around a bear." Sad clips from Yugoslavia. Reviews on Erika Jong. Clips from Emmett [Watson]. Also one from Denny [MacGougan]: The chief orphan from Vietnam is seeking to lease Peron's mansion from the Argentine government. He wants to see if Thieu can live as cheaply as Juan. ...

Things at school have worked out so that I shall teach a Tacoma history class as well as NW. It will really be an extension of PNW into the 20th Century: public power, the progressive movement, civic reform movements. Where did we go wrong? 

Back to Anchorage: while waiting for the airport bus in the lobby I heard two Rasmussen looking types with wedding bands on their fat little fingers arguing in Dutch about petrol and dollars--the only words I understood. Two Eskimo kids, 7 and/or 8, brother/sister maybe, were arguing about food. "Yeah, you say tastes like banana but you never tasted no banana, not never." A black in pork pie and shades came in to announce to nobody in particular, "Just flew in from Valdez. Hot enough over there to brown my ass." Mothers, all in pastels, some carrying plastic iris, others real carnations paraded past to the Glorious Mothers Day Brunch.

...

Buckle your seat belts

We are about to attempt to land,

Murray