The Pursuit of Quality

THE GOLDEN HORIZON (596 pp.)--Edited by Cyril Connolly--British Book Centre ($5.50).

The 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 Cyril Connolly, the intellectual son of an army officer, whose pudgy face once reminded a reporter of "a cross between Beethoven and Edward G. Robinson."

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 held a monocle rather than a mirror up to nature. But caught in its faintly supercilious eye is a fair share of minor modern masterpieces.

Deadpan Horrors. The pieces range from straight reporting to short stories, from personal reminiscences to literary criticism, with a sprinkling of poetry. Close to one-fourth of the book is 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 who kowtowed to the regime and became an empty, self-hating shell of a man.

The short stories are fashioned more of nerves than sinew. In Back to the Sea, Alberto Moravia offers one of his sensually melancholy battles of the sexes, so arrestingly Moravian 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."

Happy as the Grass Was Green. Connolly admits that he has put in only the poetry that pleases him. It ranges from Randall JarrelPs brief, corrosive The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner to e. e. cummings' lighthearted, lightheaded mike likes all the girls

(the

fat ones, the lean ones ; the mean kind dirty clean) all except the green ones

One poem, Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill, opens with the memorable, smiling first lines:

Now as I was young and easy under the

apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as

the grass was green . . .

From there it moves to its end with the sure authority of a lyrical classic:

Oh as I was young and easy in the

mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dumb Disciples. For the rest, there are serious critiques of Flaubert, Peacock, Leopardi, and personal reminiscences of James Joyce, Franz Kafka. Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde. This section is called Glimpses of Greatness, and Connolly aptly describes it as "a carillon of memories covering a recurring situation, the Maestro in all his simplicity and wisdom garrulously confronting his treacherous dumb disciple."

Was 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!"

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