Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS Selections of Prose and Poetry From Cyril Connolly's 'Horizon' By Granville Hicks In a summer that, for various reasons, has not provided much time for concentrated reading, I...
...an extract from Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man...
...For one thing, Horizon was more political than I had thought...
...It is just this impressionistic quality that gives the section its interest and importance...
...In its calmness of tone, however, the magazine was distinctively British...
...The rule, as he admits, deprives the volume of a number of admirable stories and essays, but it does permit the inclusion of many good pieces that have been overlooked, and it makes the anthology more representative...
...On the whole, I have been impressed by the fact that the resemblances between American and British writing of the period are more conspicuous than the differences...
...It seems to me that articles of this sort do not appear very often in American magazines comparable to Horizon, and I wonder why...
...None of the essays included has the aridity that is so depressing in the work of some of America's "new" critics, but it is also true that there is nobody here with the breadth or the incisiveness of an Edmund Wilson...
...J. F. Powers's "Prince of Darkness...
...The few overtly political pieces also summon up memories...
...and Lionel Trilling's introduction to The Princess Cassimassima...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS Selections of Prose and Poetry From Cyril Connolly's 'Horizon' By Granville Hicks In a summer that, for various reasons, has not provided much time for concentrated reading, I have been happy to be able to pick up Cyril Connolly's The Golden Horizon (British Book Centre, $5.50...
...The poetry section, called "Personal Anthology," contains a few fine poems...
...Although England nearly lost a war in the '40s and went through a great political upheaval, the British intellectuals represented here were a great deal less excited than their American counterparts...
...There is a little piece by H. G. Wells, called, with his customary grandiloquence, "Fundamental Realities," and there is Orwell's understandably petulant reply to Wells's platitudes...
...on the contrary, there are sketches, stories, even poems...
...Yet, there is no shrillness...
...For Americans, who tend to take the short story seriously, it is significant that this section is entitled "Entertainments...
...There is Sartre's "Case for Responsible Literature," which, almost as completely as the Tolstoy letter, has become a mere sequence, of words...
...For a reader like myself, who never found time to read more than one or two pieces in an issue, this collection makes necessary some revisions of judgment...
...There is Alexei Tolstoy's greetings from Soviet writers to English and American writers, which probably seemed heart-warming in 1942 and now seems so disingenuous as to be embarrassing...
...Virginia Woolf and Sickert...
...In part, this must be because I paid more attention to the work of my fellow-countrymen, but I think it is true that Americans did their share in giving Horizon its distinction...
...It is not for the most part made up of formal political essays and pronunciamentos...
...Connolly says that this section has been "amputated by reprintings," and I can think of some fine essays that he has had to omit, but it is my impression that criticism was not Horizon's forte...
...Robert Lowry's story of American soldiers in Rome— these catch wartime moods with singular immediacy...
...Finally, there is a truly prophetic article by Bertrand Russell, "The Outlook for Mankind...
...Stephen Spender's prewar and postwar impressions of Germany, Joseph Kessel's notes on occupied France, Robin Campbell's account of a German prison camp, Alan Moorehead's reflections on Belsen...
...One might even say that some of them are phlegmatic, but that can only be regarded as a compliment...
...I saw Horizon only occasionally during the dozen years in which the magazine was published...
...They were not living in ivory towers but were, many of them, in the thick of the fray...
...Looking back, I find to my surprise that the contributions I remember best were written by Americans: Mary McCarthy's The Oasis, which filled an entire issue...
...Connolly's anthology because of his rule against including work that has become well known through being reprinted...
...There is considerable variation in quality, but the best of these pieces are not only immensely interesting to read but give a sense of continuity in the arts that one does not often get...
...On the other hand, any highbrow American magazine would have printed more good criticism—as well...
...Another large section in the anthology is made up of reminiscences of such writers and painters as Tolstoy, Mallarme, Wilde, Valery, Kafka, Klee...
...I am afraid, as more bad criticism—than seems to have appeared in Horizon...
...For the rest, Connolly has included a section of stories and a section of poems...
...The first section of the book, called "Horizon's History of the War," is a thought-provoking record of the attitudes of the British intelligentsia from 1939 to 1945...
...None of the pieces mentioned appear in Mr...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 33
