"Horizon" and Cyril Connolly

by STEPHEN SPENDER

1

IN October, 1939, Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson, and I planned a new magazine, and one of our most difficult tasks was to choose a name for it. Connolly thought first of Equinox, with the quotation from Marlowe’s Faustus, “ Currite equi noctis,” on the title page. Yet Equinox seemed unoriginal, and the quotation rather discouraging. For some time we weighed the claims of Orion. As I remember (though Connolly seems to remember differently) we chose Horizon in a moment of despair, when I took a copy of Gide’s Journal from the bookshelf and my eye fell on the word horizon, which occurred rather frequently. (But when, quite recently, I told Connolly that this was my recollection of the origin of the name Horizon he looked at me amusedly and said, “Think again, Stephen. If you think hard enough, you’ll remember that you thought first of everything.”)

We inserted a few quarter-page advertisements in the literary weeklies. Two or three hundred people filled in the little form which was part of the advertisement, and these were the original subscribers for Horizon. We began editing in the Bloomsbury flat where I had lived with my first wife. The long, black-topped inlaid desk which I had built in Hammersmith was used by the secretary and business manager. Connolly sat reading manuscripts in the editorial chair by the window, occasionally glancing up to see whether any German aeroplanes were coming over, for during the “phony war” period there were constant false alarms, and we expected a raid which would demolish whole districts of London. When the bombs did come we had to evacuate for a few weeks to Thurlstone in Devonshire.

The first number of Horizon, which appeared in January, 1940, ran into a second edition, in which one or two misprints were corrected. In his editorial Comment for the second number, Connolly discussed the reception of the first by the critics: “To run through the first number, the editorial is escapist and cagey, the poetry out of date (except Auden which is obscure), Priestley is Priestley, Grigson is spiteful, Bates is Bates. There are too many political articles, and, while full of dull things, the magazine is also much too short. Another line of attack is to concede that the first number is interesting, but to add that it is middlebrow and ‘smarty, and a third is to abandon the contents to their own merit and attack the policy or absence of policy, ’Horizon is full of lovely things but . . . should a magazine be just full of lovely things? Shouldn’t it stand for something? Be animated by a serious purpose? Be getting somewhere?’”

Connolly’s policy was to publish what he liked. This included, in the early numbers particularly, the work of several new young poets: among them, Laurie Lee, W. R. Rodgers, Adam Drinan, Francis Scarfe, and several others, some of whom became well known afterwards. But to prefer the young to the old, or to support a movement or follow a party, was not Horizon’s function. Although Connolly was inconsistent, being energetic, enthusiastic, indolent, interested and bored, by turns, he held his own views passionately and, on the whole, with judgment; and he faced adverse criticism with an equanimity which astonished me, as I knew him, in personal relationships, at any rate, to care greatly whether he was or wasn’t liked. There were days when, if I showed him a poem by some poet whom I thought should be encouraged, he handed it back saying: “Are you certain that anyone will want to read it in twenty years time? On other occasions he seemed to show a more relaxed standard. The point is, though, that Horizon was always his own.

As an editor he was like a cook, producing with each number a new dish with a new flavor. Sometimes the readers objected, finding it too light, too sweet, too lumpy, or too stodgy, but he had somehow created in them a need to taste more. Or, to change the metaphor, he carried on a kind of editorial flirtation with his readers, so that they were all in some peculiar way admitted to his moods, his tastes, his fantasies, his generous giving of himself, combined with his temperamental coyness.

We began by inviting some of the best-known living writers to send in contributions. One with a world-wide reputation responded with a lengthy work by no means unworthy of him. When it had been set up in proof, Connolly, on reading it in print, rejected it. On another occasion I was with him when a writer introduced himself with the words: “Mr. Connolly, why didn’t you publish an article by me which you accepted six months ago?" Connolly snapped: “ Because it was good enough to print but not good enough to publish.”

Connolly and I did not always agree on the policy of Horizon. I wanted to put in more poems by young poets than he was willing to admit. Partly I wanted to do this on principle to get “the young on our side; partly I was influenced by the fact that I had several protégés whose work I admired. Also I wished Horizon to have a more consistent and “responsible" editorial policy about the war and post-war worlds, instead of its mixture of grumbling, satire, nostalgia, and occasional incursions into the prophetic worlds of strategists like General Fuller or Liddell Hart, or of psychosomatic psychology. Looking back, I now see that if I had had my way we would have been conscientious and priggish, though I still think that an excellent magazine should be able to have a clearly thought-out policy.

2

THE strength of Horizon lay in the vitality and idiosyncrasy of the editor. I, who started out with concern for planning post-war Britain, defending democracy, encouraging young writers, and so forth, was disconcerted to find myself with an editor who showed little sense of responsibility about these things. His editorial Comments were brilliant, wayward, inconsistent, sometimes petulant. But he wrote in a style which was at times like a voice speaking Latin words of honey; and when, for instance, he described a sea anemone on a rock seen through distorting planes of tugging tides, I saw the serious point of what was delightful about him at Thurlstone: his afternoon setting out, dressed in jersey and shorts, carrying bucket, net, and spade, for the rock-and-sand pools along the beach at low tide, into which he would stare, while prodding at the sandy pond-floor with his net. In describing these expeditions, Connolly was a superb mimic. He could be a prawn, crab, or lobster hiding in the crevice of a rock, as he described his attempts to catch one.

Connolly is, I think, the best living parodist, a judgment in which readers of The Condemned Playground will probably concur. For him parody is a spontaneous and immediate response bubbling from his lips twenty times a day, with deceptive amiability. In the evening at Thurlstone we would listen to the six o’clock news. In their refined BBC accents, the announcers would cite from the statements of pilots. “We gave (long pause) Jerry (long pause, followed by the next three words spoken very quickly) a jolly good (long panne) Pranging.”As soon as the news was switched off, Connolly would continue, with an imitation of the BBC announcer’s action, an account of his conflict w ith a prawn.

While the horror of the falling bombs was being demonstrated to us, Connolly’s mind contemplated fantasies of worse things to come; and since he frequently dined with the great, his imagination fed on suggestions which had been thrown to him. He was tremendously knowledgeable about secret weapons called “flying sofas,”cigars, “pencils, and the like, long before the V-ls or V-2s. Sometimes the gourmet in him fused with the military strategist who had written a brilliant satire on the theme of “How to Trap a Tank,”signed by BearColonel Connolly; and he speculated on the slightly wishful thought that the Germans would asphyxiate us with a quite harmless gas which would render us unconscious for a few days, while they invaded. When we had awakened from our agreeable sleep we would behold as far as I remember — German waiters, descended from parachutes, serving us steaks to comfort our bodies while lessening our hostility. Another weapon whose effects he sometimes suspected actually to be working on us was the filling of the air with a high note, so high indeed that no one could actually hear it, but which nevertheless penetrated through our skulls, weakening our wills with its unending shrill monotony.

In our personal relationship Connolly and I got on well, because, although we were for the most part in harmony, we knew that there were moments when we simply had to drop one another for a while. We arrived at a stage when we saw through each other, but our transparency was of a kind which looked on to something better than the qualities in each which were seen through. Beyond what was false the other saw something absurd, and something which could be respected. Sometimes we had rows, but these were always checked by the saving touch of the absurd.

Here is an example of one of our periodic rows. One day Connolly asked me to give him my opinion of a broadcast about the Poets of the 1930s which he had just written for the Eastern Service of the BBC. I read this speech with some astonishment. It said that the outstanding qualit ies of the poets of this decade were their industry and their power to advertise their own wares. The only one of the group in whom he could find anything to admire was Auden.

I handed the manuscript back to him, a little sadly, saying that I thought it excellent and that he should certainly put it on the air. I was determined not to justify his charge that I advertised myself, by attempting to influence whatever publicity he might care to give me. After this I avoided his company for a few days, during which I let mutual friends know how annoyed I was. After a few days I received a letter from C onnolly saying that he was sorry I was annoyed, but he had thought I would realize the broadcast was “only for India.” At first, the implication that he thought I cared nothing for what he thought about me, but only whether it was said to the Indians or the home-grown British, shocked me. But gradually the fact that this incident was so exquisitely C onnollyish consoled and amused me. For I saw that he only partly meant what he had written. He had allowed himself to be peevish on an occasion which he did not think would matter. “It’s only for India” became a saying with which I have often consoled myself subsequent ly.

One of his most disarming characteristics was his frankness about his own feelings. He was liable to explode in anger, to give utterance to some almost inadmissible wish, to tell you exactly what he thought about you, but all with an air of revealing himself to you and asking for your sympathy, even against yourself. Behind whatever he did or said, his whole character was transparent like a landscape, occasionally beautiful (with rock pools and valleys), occasionally dulled by splenetic weather, and genial even in its moodiness because he had a certain genius.

Connolly admitted often that for some reason he was irrationally jealous of me, and he would appeal to me to do something or other to stop him having bad dreams which distressed him. Once, during the war, we traveled together to Dublin at the invitation of the Dublin University Philosophic Society. Connolly, who stayed with John Betjeman, then Press Attaché at the British Embassy, was received by De Valera and entertained by the French as well as by the Irish intelligentsia. I was sent to stay in the country some miles outside Dublin, with a professor and his wife. My hosts were charming and intelligent, and I could not have been happier than I was with them, but nevertheless my stay provided no rational explanation for the distressing dreams which it gave rise to in Connolly’s mind, ruining (as he complained to me) his sleep. Each night, after his dinners at the Embassy, he was racked with dreams of me being received in brilliant gatherings to which he was not invited. Some time after this, he confessed that one of his worst fears was that one day a facsimile of my head would be printed on a postage stamp, issued by UNESCO or some other world organization, which he would have to lick in order to mail his letters from some place where he lived in obscure retirement!

So our relationship always verged on the absurd, beyond the impulsiveness on his side, the priggishness on mine, which irritated each in the other. At a certain point our animosities dissolved in laughter. And in a way this laughter was perhaps the most serious thing of all, and perhaps was even that which brought readers to Horizon.

In 1941 I decided that the magazine could carry on perfectly well without me, under the sole editorship of Connolly. It continued for ten years in all. The point about it was that people wanted to see it, even if sometimes they were mad when it arrived. It was like a person who, however much he annoys you, provokes your interest, curiosity, love, and indignation. It was full of surprises such as its Begging Bowl, which solicited gifts from readers for writers, or its numbers devoted to the printing of a single story, such as Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis.

Towards the end of its ten years, in the latter half of 1949, it showed obvious signs of editorial tiredness, and with the completion of its decade, Connolly closed it down. He took leave of his public with a characteristic editorial Comment, which was a fine mixture of irony, accusation, regret, nostalgia, and disarming personal admissions. The public was at fault for not supporting Horizon when it supported so many less worthy causes; the best writers wrote broadcasts and official tracts instead of devoting themselves to literature; the editor was tired; no review should last longer than ten years anyway; probably Horizon would start up again in a year’s time.

A good many answers could be made to what was accusatory in this. If Horizon had been more economically run, if would have lost less money; in fact no great effort had been made of recent months to encourage the best writers to contribute; and, finally, a considerable public on both sides of the Atlantic supported it devotedly. Still, these arguments would not really have been to the point, which was that the public climate was no longer one in which Connolly could work with enthusiasm. The decay of a good literary atmosphere for producing reviews is undoubtedly part of our English situation. At least four other reviews have gone the way of Horizon in 1950.

When I took the proofs of the autobiography which will contain some of the foregoing pages to Connolly, he said (a) that he liked my book, (b) that he thought there should have been more in it about him, (e) that I could have been much nastier about him if I had written more: in fact, I had not been nasty enough. Having said all this, he pointed out ten or twelve small errors which he had meticulously observed, chiefly in the part about Spain. His generosity in appreciation, which always enabled him to ov ercome any pettier feelings, in short his literary passion, reminded me of those days when I used to call on him at noon, to find him lying in bed, a picture of the man of letters who writes unwillingly (though at the age of a little over forty he had written four books better than most of those of any of our generation), reading Catullus or eager to discuss the metric of Tennyson’s poem “The Daisy.”