Word: horizons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life cycle of little magazines compares unfavorably to that of horses, dogs, kangaroos and duck-billed platypuses. When death, as it must to all little mags, came to London's highbrow monthly Horizon in December 1949, the magazine had beaten the actuarial tables and reached the advanced old age of ten years. Since there was always more red ink than red blood in its circulation (peak figure: 10,-ooo), Horizon owed much of its vitality to two men: 1) Angel Peter Watson, the millionaire son of a milkman, who blotted up some $20,000 in losses; and 2) Editor...
...Horizon worthwhile? For himself, Editor Connolly is sure of it: "Editing a magazine is a form of the good life; it is creating when the world is destroying . . . being given once a month the opportunity to produce a perfect number and every month failing, and just when despair sets in, being presented with one more chance. Plop...
Connolly operated on a single ground rule, "the pursuit of quality." He pursued and printed such first-rate writers as T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden. Even in wartime, Connolly kept Horizon's standards up and its voice down, made the magazine a kind of semiprecious touchstone of the arts. Earnest literati in England and the U.S. used it to deck their coffee tables and to restock their mental shelves. In The Golden Horizon, Connolly picks a scant 600 pages to represent the original 10,000. The result suggests that Horizon often...
...taken up with unsparing accounts of World War II. Expertly written-if by now rather familiar-are the deadpan horrors of Alan Moorehead's graphic Belsen and the explosive shock of a Sunday-morning air raid in London as described by William Sansom in Building Alive. Often, Horizon's writers add a reflective dimension to war reporting possible only to men who have known a country before it became the enemy. In Rhineland Journal, Poet Stephen Spender sensitively compares pre-Nazi to postwar Germany and also tells of the human ruins in terms of a brilliant scholar friend...
...that it scarcely need have been signed. Maurice Richardson begins Way Out in the Continuum, a chillingly funny satire of the post-atomic-war age, with the sentence: "This is decapitated head No. 63, Universal Institute of Cerebral Physiology, electrotelepathecast ing in all directions in space-time." Typical of Horizon's gnawing sense that the times are out of joint is Paul Goodman's Iddings Clark, a surrealistic tale of a mousy English teacher whose personality splinters until finally he enters his classroom "stark naked except for his spectacles and a Whittier in his right hand...