Highbrows' Horizon

In its six years, a little English magazine called Horizon has come closer than anything in sight to filling the void left by the U.S.'s famed Dial (1880-1929) and T. S. Eliot's London Criterion (1922-39). Horizon's influence is out of all proportion to its 10,000 circulation.

Of all times to start a literary magazine in Britain, Cyril Connolly picked December 1939. Europe's lights were blinking out, and England was in for it, when he lit his brave little cultural candle. He called it Horizon, and got a millionaire milkman's son to foot the bills.

Connolly knew that sooner or later, by accident or design, most highbrow "little mags" duck down some intellectual by path.* At its end is a trap: mixed up in parlor politics, or tripped up by literary politics, they spend their days tootling for whatever cause they are stuck with. To save his long-haired baby from that fate, Connolly kept its own horizon wide. He refused to embrace -- or to exclude -- any cultural point of view, held to a catholic determination to work both sides of civilization's broad thoroughfares.

His two-shilling, pocket-sized monthly attracted such leading talents as J. B. Priestley, W. H. Auden, Andre Gide, T. S, Eliot, E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender. Between their bylines he sandwiched pieces (bought for a few pounds apiece) by hopeful unknowns.

Editor Connolly, 42, who looks like a plump, middle-aged baby, is the grandson of an admiral, and the son of an Army officer. He went to Eton and Balliol, where he studied the classics, served the late Logan Pearsall Smith as secretary and disciple, covered the Spanish war for the New Statesman. Rejected for World War II, he mounted the cultural ramparts instead.

Snob Value. As it did to all Londoners, the war came to Connolly. A German bomb fell across the street from his office, delaying one issue for weeks. He never did catch up with his schedule. Last week his February issue, on the stands in London, had not yet reached its 500 U.S. subscribers. When the paper shortage pinched Britain in 1941, Horizon all but starved to death. Appeals from such surprising readers as Manhattan's Fiorello LaGuardia convinced the British Government that the magazine should be kept alive. (Last year it lost only -L-30 and considered it a victory.)

Four out of ten of his readers, Editor Connolly figures, are teachers and students; three are writers and editors; "the other three keep it around for table decoration." Last month, feeling no compulsion to cater to their cultural allergies, he devoted his entire issue to an exhaustive look at present-day Swiss literature. Conclusion: the Swiss haven't got much.

The French Touch. Because he believes that "an island fortress must always be on its guard against provincialism," Connolly prints French poetry to mix with book reviews, essays on novelist-philosophers, letters from Continental capitals (by such contributors as Clarissa Churchill, Winston's niece), the autobiography of still sprightly Painter Augustus John (now at Installment XVI). In politics Connolly is a Socialist, but (to the bafflement of the literary left) he thinks that is none of his magazine's business.

A friendly, easygoing man, Connolly works himself and his staff (two young women) only from 2 to 6 p.m. daily, "so we won't kill ourselves off." Since many of his contributors have the same attitude (he is convinced that today's British writers are mentally and physically fagged out), he counts himself lucky to get one out of ten pieces he asks for.

Heads Up. Horizon's critics berate the magazine for being too cultish, for not being cultish enough. Recently, in his column of comment, Connolly taunted complainers who said that his magazine is over their heads:

"Ah! your head, reader? What recent gains in sensibility have you to register? Do you read or think as much as you used to? You are aware no doubt that your consumption of tobacco and alcohol has practically doubled . . . you will plank down three quid for a bottle of Scotch, you can't be trusted with a railway towel or a piece of hotel soap . . . and [you] write to the Times against Picasso; you're more antiSemitic, even, than before...."

To a U.S. reporter, Connolly grinned that "according to your standards, I'm just a sissy writer." But he has a horror of becoming too fashionable: "We don't want to be known as the Vogue of literature." To avoid that, he pledged the magazine "to work for a new humanism which considers human life vulgar but sacred. . . .

"It is time we tried clearly to assess where English literature stands . . . what one really thinks of Mr. Eliot's prose. And what is the matter with the young? And the BBC? And America? Why are its serious writers so very pretentious and its popular writers so bad? All these problems must be tackled with wholesome blasphemy."

* U.S. examples: Partisan Review, Politics, Kenyon Review, the late Southern Review.

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