Desert Bloom

Bradford Morrow's Literary Flowering

Bradford Morrow outside his barn on his property in the western Catskills.

T. S. Eliot’s “cruelest month” has been kind to Bradford Morrow. This April, the novelist, editor, and Bard College professor received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two weeks later, he learned that he’d won the PEN/Nora Magid Award for his excellence in the editing of the literary journal Conjunctions.

How is he planning to celebrate? By working of course.

Morrow plans to spend his “Guggenheim year” concentrating on his novel-in-progress, The Prague Sonatas. “I’ve had it in my head for a decade at least; I have mountains of notes. I’ll finally have time to pull together everything I’ve been thinking about,” he exults. “I adore it as you would an unborn child—it’s not here yet, but I know I’m going to love it.”

Morrow has already fathered five novels—Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (a PEN/Faulkner finalist), Trinity Fields (winner of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Giovanni’s Gift, and Ariel’s Crossing; he’s just finished a new novel with the working title The Diviner’s Tale. He’s also published five collections of poetry, and just released his first children’s book, DIDN’T Didn’t Do It, a deft feat of linguistic gymnastics with illustrations by Gahan Wilson.

Morrow writes like an architect, using intricate mathematical structures to create three-dimensional worlds full of beauty and light. Jonathan Safran Foer (a former student and guest editor of a 2000 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to Morrow’s work) wrote, “His narratives careen from the American West, to Central America, to the Northeastern United States, connecting these blazing sites like a sign of the zodiac that had never been noticed.” Foer paints Morrow as a “writer of the Americas,” but he could have added a couple of continents. Giovanni’s Gift leapfrogs from rural New Mexico to the churches of Rome; Trinity Fields traces a path from Los Alamos to the killing fields of Southeast Asia.

Morrow’s writing, editing, and teaching career forms its own trinity. It’s hard to say which voice sings lead in the trio: He seems to be going full-throttle in all three directions at once. No wonder the bed in his preternaturally tidy Greenwich Village apartment looks as if no one has slept in it. The walls are lined with books, their library-bound spines in perfect alignment. One of Morrow’s two cats licks her paw on a kilim rug.