The Press: Land of the Middlebrow

Editor Cyril Connolly’s Horizon is wide and highbrow. In his little (circ. 9,500) London magazine, he likes to wield a brush on big intellectual canvases. Six years ago Editor Connolly put out an all-Irish number, a year ago an all-Swiss edition. In the October issue of Horizon, Connolly paid his respects to the U.S.

The New York Herald Tribune’s Joe Alsop contributed a brisk piece on U.S. foreign policy; Christopher Isherwood drew an amusing portrait of Los Angeles. But to the average U.S. reader, at least, most of the 20 bylines in the 160-page, all-American number were unknown.They belonged to the rarefied atmosphere of the little magazines and literary groups to which Connolly gravitated on a trip to the U.S. last winter. Horizon’s 3,300 American readers would find the picture of the U.S. disappointingly familiar. H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell et al. had painted most of it before.

Lower Learning. Horizon’s contributors saw the U.S. as a land of Main Streets, movies and middlebrows. Columbia Professor Jacques (Teacher in America) Barzun, searching for “the Higher Learning in America,” found only “an immense amount of Lower Learning. . . .” Writing, painting and sculpture were in a bad way, too. Observed Partisan Review’s co-Editor William Phillips: “. . . It is almost impossible for a writer to starve, since [there is so much] easy money [that] it is difficult to be the kind of writer who might starve.”

Fledgling Literary Critic William Barrett wondered whether his brethren had not been too quick to assume that the U.S. would eventually grow up and produce a culture of its own. Barrett recalled what a French monk in Carthage had told him when he looked in vain for relics of Carthaginian art: “They had none. They were not artists. They were business people . . . the Americans of antiquity.”

Liberating Impotence. Editor Connolly, in the most perceptive look at the U.S. in the issue, wrote: “At a time when the American way has made the country into the greatest power the world has known, there has never been more doubting and questioning. . . . The higher up one goes, the more searching becomes this selfcriticism. . . . Those who rule America are enormously conscious of the total inadequacy of the crude material philosophy of life in which they grew up. …

“As Europe becomes more helpless the Americans are compelled to become far-seeing and responsible, as Rome was forced by the long decline of Greece to produce an Augustus, a Vergil. Our [European] impotence liberates their [American] potentialities. Something important is about to happen. . . .”