The New Criterion

A few months hence we shall be observing the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Horizon, the literary monthly which Cyril Connolly founded in London in the early months of the Second World War. We shall also be observing the fortieth anniversary of the magazine’s demise. Calling itself “A Review of Literature & Art,” Horizon was published for exactly a decade—and what a decade it was! The first issue went to press barely three months after Britain, still a world power but woefully ill-prepared to fight a major war, found itself locked in lonely combat against the Nazis, who were very shortly in control of most of Europe. The last issue, with its unforgettable dirge— “. .. it is closing time in the gardens of the West,” etc.—emerged from a weaker and even bleaker, now “socialist” England, which was so impoverished and dispirited that it looked more and more like a casualty of the war in which it had been victorious. Through the darkest days of the Blitz and the V-l (“doodle bug”) bombings, with British losses steadily mounting abroad and what remained of cultural life—the life of the mind—under attack at home from the philistine press as frivolous and escapist, Connolly went right on producing, month after month, an unabashedly highbrow literary journal of extraordinary quality and vivacity. It was an amazing feat, and all the more amazing because Connolly had already pronounced himself a failure—“a lazy, irresolute person, overvain and over-modest, unsure in my judgments and unable to finish what I have begun.” But then, as David Pryce-Jones has written, “the depiction of himself as some sort of royal failure was the foundation of [Connolly’s] success.” My own view is that Horizon was Connolly’s greatest achievement—greater, certainly, than any of his own books. It was also one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of its period, a triumph of spirit over circumstance.

Announcing in the first number that “The aim of Horizon is to give the writers a place to express themselves, and to readers the best writing we can obtain,” Connolly also emphasized that “Our standards are aesthetic, and our politics are in abeyance.” The first point, about aesthetic standards, was valiantly adhered to. The point about politics was more complicated. The very number in which the claim was made contained political articles by J. B. Priestley and Herbert Read—“vague political ramblings,” as Horizon’s patron Peter Watson correctly observed—and others were expected to follow, as Connolly himself promptly acknowledged. Yet there is an important sense in which Connolly meant what he said about a suspension of what he called “our” politics. He was clearly referring to the kind of Marxism that had exerted so powerful an influence on his generation of British writers in the 193 os. In his “Comment” for Horizon’s inaugural issue he noted that “the impetus given by Left Wing politics is for the time exhausted.” (For Connolly, the departure of Auden and Isherwood for America marked the end of the movement.) So, too, in Connolly’s view, was the age of literary experiment drawing to a close. (He was right about that, too.) Thus, as he also wrote in Horizon’s first number, “however much we should like to have a paper that was revolutionary in opinions and original in technique,” he did not believe that the customary amalgam of Marxism and modernism was any longer possible or appropriate to the task at hand. “At the moment,” he wrote in one of those lapidary statements for which he was already celebrated, “civilization is on the operating table and we sit in the waiting room.”

As Connolly conceived of it, Horizon was to be one of the instruments for securing the patient’s survival. He supported the war— there was no mistaking his, or Horizon’s, position on that question—but he was adamant about keeping the journal’s pages free of the canting propaganda that the war inevitably engendered. Horizon was to be a kind of literary sanctuary—"The Ivory Shelter,” he called it—a demilitarized zone of the mind in which the creative and critical intelligence might prosper even at a time when so many lethal forces were arrayed against it. If an important part of Horizon’s task was to keep alive the memory of past artistic achievements (Mozart and Mallarmé, French classical drama and Henry James), and thus provide a sense of continuity and kinship with the very civilization that was now threatened with extinction, it was also the magazine’s function to find and publish the writers who would carry on the work of that civilization into whatever future there might be. Connolly found them, too-most notably, his old school friend George Orwell, so opposed in so many ways to Connolly’s own literary outlook but many of whose now famous essays on politics and popular culture nonetheless made their first appearance in Horizon’s pages during the war.

The editorial policy Connolly adopted for Horizon was avowedly eclectic, and he knew very well that this was bound to incur the wrath of both radicals and conservatives, who were alike in preferring a more homogenous “party” line. The first objective, as Connolly saw it, was to repair the damage that a decade of Marxist aesthetics had wrought: “it is our duty,” he wrote in February 1940, “gradually to re-educate the peppery palates of our detractors to an appreciation of delicate poetry and fine prose.”

If literature is an art [he wrote in the same issue], then a literary magazine should encourage the artists, whether they are Left or Right, known or unknown, old or young, and Horizon therefore makes no more apology for Priestley’s admirable essay, or Sir Hugh Walpole’s revealing glimpse of Henry James, than it does for Orwell’s analysis of Boy’s papers or Auden’s Elegy on Freud which will appear in the next number. Names mean nothing. Horizon is not to be judged by its names but by the quality of its contents and we hope eventually that the presence of the most detested best-seller or the most obscure young poet on the cover of Horizon will be enough to indicate that they have written something remarkably good. As to discovering a Joyce or an Eliot in one number, all we can do is bait the trap, to provide a medium where the future Rimbaud will find payment, good company and a sympathetic public. But it is possible that there are no Rimbauds, and that we must fall back on being the publishers of [Stephen Spender’s] September Journal.

That last line was a characteristic example of Connolly’s mordant candor, for Stephen Spender, although unnamed on the masthead, was at this time one of Connolly’s closest collaborators on Horizon, and an excerpt from his “September Journal” was featured in the issue in which this not very flattering comparison was made.

The story of how Connolly accomplished what he did in Horizon, of the other people who made that accomplishment possible, and of Connolly’s own life during the Horizon period, has now been told for the first time in a splendid new book—Michael Shelden’s Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of' ”Horizon.”

[1] Mr. Shelden, an American academic who was born in Oklahoma and now teaches at Indiana State University, is himself a first-rate writer, and the book he has given us in Friends of Promise—his first, by the way—is the kind of literary history, replete with vivid biographical portraits and shrewd critical judgments, that one had quite given up expecting from our professors of literature. One would like to think that Mr. Shelden represents a new turn in the vicissitudes of academic literary study—a murn, that is, to a tradition that has been largely lost—but that is probably too much to hope for. Talent of this sort rarely represents anything but itself.

In any event, the account of Connolly in this book is the best I have read, its only serious rival being David Pryce-Jones’s Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir (1984), an excellent book of much smaller compass. For its absorbing picture of literary life in wartime London, moreover, Friends of Promise is likewise exemplary, and not least because of the fine sense of proportion it exhibits in dealing with a subject which, given its large cast of characters and the drama of the war itself, could so easily have been distended into one of those inert, outsize chronicles that exhaust our patience and defeat their own purposes. Mr. Shelden is clearly a master researcher, and he has been obliged to ferret out a good deal of elusive detail both in the archives and from surviving witnesses. Yet the result is scholarship that has been completely assimilated into a shapely and unflagging narrative. One would be tempted to say that Friends of Promise reads at times like a good novel, if only there were still novels that gave us as many well-drawn characters as this book does.

Besides Connolly himself, these characters include his first wife, Jean Bakewell, a wealthy American girl from Baltimore whom Connolly met in Paris; Peter Watson, art collector, aesthete, and heir to a British margarine fortune, who put up all the money for Horizon and served as its art editor; three of Watson’s homosexual lovers, Denham Fouts, Waldemar Hansen, and Norman Fowler, who were Americans; Stephen Spender, Horizon’s associate editor during its first year; Sonia Brownell, Connolly’s young assistant who married Horizon’s most celebrated contributor, George Orwell, on his deathbed; and Lys Lubbock, Connolly’s beautiful mistress and Horizon’s business manager, who eventually moved to New York and married an American. Among the minor characters in the narrative, playing walk-on roles, are such figures as Logan Pearsall Smith, Evelyn Waugh, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Clement Greenberg, Lucian Freud, Arthur Koestler, Elizabeth Bowen, and, not least, Connolly’s father, a retired army major, who enters the story as a somewhat farcical character but makes his exit as a very poignant figure.

Except for Peter Watson, whose portrait—the first candid account I have seen of this troubled but sympathetic figure—is one of the best things in the book, none of the other characters is given the attention that is lavished on Connolly, who dominates the story as ringmaster and presiding genius. Mr. Shelden is anything but a starry-eyed admirer of Connolly’s every foible. While the gifts that made Connolly such an exceptional figure are fully acknowledged and brilliantly described in Friends of Promise, Mr. Shelden misses nothing of the restless, egotistical, spoiled-child aspect of the man— all those elements of Connolly’s character that were so egregiously in evidence in his relations with women and, for that matter, with his other benefactors as well. Connolly spent much of his adult life living—and usually living well—off of other people’s money. He envied the rich, and was in the habit of condescending to them—unless he could obtain something from them, in which case he was inclined to court them until the prize had been won and then criticize them to their friends. At school he had learned to make himself amusing to his social superiors, and he turned that gift, too, into an instrument of advantage and preferment. He perfected a posture of charm, talent, mischief, and brilliance that proved to be very appealing, and then enclosed it in the preemptive claim to failure that absolved him from having to fulfill his talents.

It was only with Horizon that, for the first and last time, he delivered what he grandly promised. Otherwise, his well-rehearsed justification for his career as a shameless sponger was his much-vaunted ambition to write a literary masterpiece. In the earlier stages of this fantasy ambition, the great book was to be a novel. Then, in the Horizon period, though novels were from time to time worked on, the talk shifted to a study of Flaubert, one of Connolly’s idols; and then, it was to be a book about France, which had early on claimed his loyalty as a model of civilization. None of these books was ever written, of course. He became an expert, however, at persuading people that he would write them, no doubt because in some part of his mind he believed it himself. Yet somehow there were always more engaging things to occupy his time and give him pleasure. He signed contracts and collected advances, and was remarkably adept at getting people to pay up. On this whole aspect of Connolly’s literary career, the American publisher Cass Canfield made the definitive comment when he finally realized that Connolly was never going to write the books he had contracted for. “I give Connolly full credit,” Mr. Canfield said, “for being one of the most charmingly devious literary gentlemen not actually behind bars.”

Something similar might be said about his relations with women, who pampered him, often paid his bills, flattered his ego, served his pleasures, and otherwise went along with his every scheme, sometimes under threat of suicide and always under the spell of his charm and his need, only to find that the promises were usually broken in affairs of the heart, too, and there was always another candidate in the wings, if not already in bed, to supplant them. Mr. Shelden isn't given to moralizing but he is a keen judge of character, and his account of Connolly’s, while for the most part sympathetic, is unblinking. He knows very well where the virtues of his protagonist are to be found, and is sharp about separating the glamour of Connolly’s life from the sometimes unlovely reality. None of this, I hasten to add, has the effect of diminishing our interest in Connolly. On the contrary, the more we learn about him, the more he comes to resemble a character in a novel—the novel of his life, as it were, which he couldn't write but which he never tired of performing for all who knew him.

Yet it is finally because of his performance as the editor of Horizon that Connolly’s claim on our attention remains more than that of an interesting character. Enemies of Promise (1938), though parts of it can still be read with interest, is now more likely to survive as a literary document of the 1930s than as a living classic. The Unquiet Grave (1944), though it has always had its admirers, among them, oddly enough, Ernest Hemingway, looks more and more like a period piece; and its famous opening line—“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any importance”—looks, in retrospect, like the plea-bargaining of a guilty talent. As for the various collections of essays and parodies—The Condemned Playground (1945), Ideas and Places (1953), Previous Convictions (1963), and The Evening Colonnade (1963)—all of them contain some good things, especially Ideas and Places, which includes material from Horizon, but no one would describe them as great criticism. Horizon itself is Connolly’s monument. Which is another reason why the focus of Mr. Shelden’s book is exactly right.

Even with Horizon, however, a distinction must be made between the first half of the decade in which it was published—in other words, the war years—and the second. With exceptions to be noted, the magazine’s real achievement lies in those first five years. The poetry—much of it written by W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas—was better, and so was most of the prose. And the attention to art, though no match for what Horizon was able to bring its readers after the war, was nonetheless more important because the life of art had suffered even more restrictions during the war than literature had. Moreover, the momentum sustained in those first five years had a fervor—a sense of mission—that was lost in the drab, spiritually constricted period which followed.

During the war [Mr. Shelden writes] Horizon’s purpose had been clear. Every issue had been a reaffirmation of the importance of culture in wartime; and the enemies of culture had been easy to spot and to criticize. But in the post-war period those enemies were more difficult to define, the battle lines were more loosely drawn, and the purpose of the struggle was much less certain. Horizon’s historical moment had come and gone; never again would one small independent magazine assume such an important place in the cultural life of the nation, attracting so many important writers without cash, political interest or a new literary movement as bait. Watson and Connolly had seized the moment and made the most of it; the decline of their extraordinary partnership was unavoidable.

It was a measure of Connolly’s sense of the historical moment that he so eagerly welcomed writers whose literary purposes were so different from his own.

In December 1939 George Orwell told him that he had just finished a book called Inside the Whale, which contained three long essays. Connolly asked whether he could publish part of it in Horizon. At that point the book had no publisher, and Orwell was not sure that he would find one. He was also uncertain that the essays were suitable for Horizon. The shortest of the three, “Boys’ Weeklies,” was still rather long for magazine publication, and its subject hardly seemed appropriate for Horizon’s “highbrow” readership.... Serious essays on popular culture are common today, but “Boys’ Weeklies” was the first important essay of its kind written in England. Much to his credit, Connolly had the foresight to accept it, even though it took up nearly a third of the magazine .... Over the next ten years many writers would benefit from this policy, but no one used it to better advantage than Orwell, who wrote half a dozen important essays for the magazine.

As Mr. Shelden correctly observes, “Connolly’s decision to publish “Boys’ Weeklies” demonstrated that Horizon was not going to be a simple caretaker for literature during wartime. It would take risks and do the unpredictable, without much regard for what was happening in the war.”

Connolly did much the same thing for Arthur Koestler, who was in England as a refugee and just beginning his career as an English-language writer.

When Koestler arrived in London, Connolly took it upon himself to provide him with a place to stay, and shortly afterwards helped him to become an established writer in London. In turn, Koesder gave Horizon three important articles: “The Yogi and the Commissar” in 1942, “The Birth of a Myth” in 1943, and “The Intelligentsia” in 1944. The second essay, which was about the death of Richard Hillary, was chosen by readers as the most popular work in the magazine for 1943 .... Koestler remained forever grateful for Connolly’s support, saying many years later: “Cyril took me under his wing. I want to emphasize very warmly my indebtedness to Cyril. Instead of spending my time in loneliness and isolation like so many exiles, or confined to an emigre clique, I was welcomed into the Horizon crowd.”

The postwar period was inevitably different. Connolly made an important discovery in Angus Wilson, who was then working at the British Museum and had written about a dozen short stories which had never been published. A friend showed a few of these to Connolly in 1947, and he promptly accepted two for Horizon. Years later Wilson wrote Connolly that “If I had not been chosen by you for publication in Horizon it is almost certain that my writing would have petered out as the unfertilized hobby of a man who was looking for some means of expression but never found it.”

For the most part, however, Connolly looked abroad for new stimulation—first to his beloved Paris, of course, and then more and more to the United States. The many articles he published by or about Sartre, Camus, Gide, and other French writers cannot have for us today the kind of excitement they undoubtedly had for Connolly and his readers at the time—our whole relation to the postwar French literary scene has so drastically changed—but it was nonetheless a sign of his editorial acumen that Connolly immediately grasped what was new and important in Paris and gave it full play in the magazine. At times this enthusiastic interest in “abroad” led him astray—most conspicuously in a special number of Horizon devoted to Switzerland which today is all but unreadable. But even this misfired effort has to be understood as part of Connolly’s attempt to re-establish a sense of cultural connection between a diminished Britain and whatever remnants of a shattered Europe showed some evidence of intellectual vitality.

If, about the many pages devoted to France in these postwar issues of Horizon, there is a sense of piety—of worshipping at a familiar shrine in the hope of recapturing a lost emotion, if not indeed a lost youth— there is about the attention paid to the United States a more vivid sense of genuine discovery. From the outset Connolly had taken an uncommon interest in American writing and painting, reprinting Clement Greenberg’s classic essay on “Avant-garde and Kitsch” shortly after its initial appearance in Partisan Review and publishing an essay on “Painting in America,” by John Rothenstein, as early as 1941. But it was in the postwar period that this interest flowered. The special double number devoted to “Art on the American Horizon” in October 1947 gave its readers a better account of American cultural life at that moment than any single thing published in the United States. It included, among much else, the first publication anywhere of an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; Clement Greenberg’s important essay on “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” in which Jackson Pollock was named as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America” and David Smith was described as “the only other American artist of our time who produces art capable of withstanding the test of international scrutiny”; a report on American architecture written by Philip Johnson and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.; an essay on American advertising by Marshall McLuhan; “The Higher Learning in America” by Jacques Barzun; “American Foreign Policy” by Joseph Alsop; fiction by John Berryman, poems by Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and W. H. Auden, and an account of Los Angeles from Christopher Isherwood.

One of the best things in that issue, moreover, was Connolly’s own lengthy introduction, a chronicle and commentary based on his own visit to the U.S.

At a time [Connolly wrote] when the American way, backed by American resources, has made the country into the greatest power the world has known, there has never been more doubting and questioning of the purpose of the American process; the higher up one goes the more searching becomes this self-criticism, the deeper the thirst for a valid mystique of humanity. Those who rule America, who formulate its foreign policy and form its opinion, are enormously conscious of their responsibility and of the total inadequacy of the crude material philosophy of life in which they grew up. The bloody-minded, the smug, the imperialist, the fascist, are in a minority. Seldom, in fact, has an unwilling world been forced to tolerate, through its own folly, a more unwilling master.

Connolly was by no means an uncritical admirer of what he found in America, but as this passage attests, he never succumbed to the kind of vulgar and uninformed anti-Americanism that was already rampant in Britain and in Europe. And about the literary scene he was, not surprisingly, particularly sharp. In 1947, for example, he appears to have divined the fate of Truman Capote with an almost preternatural foresight.

The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value . . . may yet somehow win the coveted jack-pot, is feverish and incessant .... “Get Capote"—at this minute the words are resounding on many a sixtieth floor, and “get him” of course means make him and break him, smother him with laurels and then vent on him the obscure hatred which is inherent in the notion of another’s superiority .... America is the one country (greatly to its credit) where an author can still make a fortune for life from one book, it is also the country where everyone is obsessed with the idea, where publishers live like stockbrokers, and where authors, like film-stars, are condemned to meditate from minute to minute last year’s income tax, next week’s publicity.

About many things, indeed, Connolly had a very clear understanding. For an American reader some forty years later, this issue on “Art on the American Horizon” marks the high point of Horizon’s postwar period, and it remains an invaluable guide to the onset of our own postwar era.

Early on in the war Connolly had foreseen the shape of things to come for both Britain and America.

Whatever happens in the war [he wrote in his “Comment” for the February 1940 issue], America will be the gainer. It will gain enormously in wealth, and enormously (through the refugees) in culture. England will be poverty-stricken, even in victory, and will have either to be a poor reactionary state, a Victorian museum piece, like Hungary or Austria, or a poor progressive country, like Denmark or Scandinavia.

He was a remarkable man, despite his flaws and his failures, and Horizon was his most remarkable accomplishment. Michael Shelden is to be congratulated for having written a book that does him—and Horizon—justice in every respect.

1. Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of “Horizon,” by Michael Shelden; Harper & Row, 304 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.