Lost Horizon

In his highbrow monthly Horizon, Editor Cyril Connolly once wrote: "We English are never so happy as with our backs to the wall, and an understanding Providence has ordained that we need seldom abandon our favorite position." This week, after struggling for ten years to keep Horizon from going to the wall, Connolly abandoned his favorite position.

After the December issue, a special tenth-anniversary number, the magazine will close down for a year and reopen, "if conditions improve."

Connolly was frank to say that he did not think they would. Founded in 1939 with the money of dairy-fortune heir Peter Watson and the brains of waspish, cherubic Editor Connolly and Poet Stephen Spender, Horizon never reached more than 10,000 subscribers, though it was probably the best of the little magazines. Lately circulation and advertising had been slipping and costs rising. More important, the galaxy of literary lights who had once brightened its pages--T. S. Eliot, Arthur Koestler, Evelyn Waugh--have not shown there in the last year.

Like other little magazines, Horizon could not find enough authors capable of writing what it wanted at prices that it could pay. What good authors it did find were soon lured to other, higher-paying British magazines or dollar-paying U.S. publications.

Although Connolly had once said that Americans would consider Horizon "sissy" writing, it was actually U.S. subscriptions that had encouraged him to keep publishing. They had risen in two years from 500 to 1,200 while a "traveler sent around the big towns of the north [of England] was able to sell only one subscription in a year." Lamented Connolly bitterly: "The public gets the magazine it deserves. London, of course, is a particularly disheartening center from which to operate . . . that sterile, embittered, traditional literary society which has killed so many finer things than a review of literature and art."

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