For the past few years I’ve been adding to my collection of Horizon (subtitled “A Magazine of the Arts”) magazines, and after a few minutes online yesterday I have secured, assuming no mishaps in transit, the last three issues of the publication in its classic form. Published by the same folks who did American Heritage, Horizon was launched in September 1958 as a bimonthly, scaling back to a quarterly after 1963. I first became acquainted with it in the early sixties, when my father subscribed to it for a couple of years, and acquired those copies when der Alte gave me first refusal upon thinning out his library thirty years ago—for Horizon was not the kind of magazine one threw away.

It was a handsome, glossy, lavishly illustrated production in hard covers, ad-free, with about 120 pages per issue, boasting a distinguished roster of contributors over the years (Robert Graves, Carl Sagan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Hughes, Igor Stravinsky, Julian Huxley, James Thurber, Arthur C. Clarke and a galaxy of other luminaries). The “arts” were well covered—painting, photography, sculpture, music, film, dance, poetry, architecture &c—but so were history, astronomy, sports, travel, urban planning, archaeology, sociology and a raft of other subjects. To quote from an “Editor’s Note” on the occasion of the magazine’s fifth anniversary:

We came along, of course, at a most appropriate moment, in the midst of the much-heralded “cultural explosion,” that sudden, mid-century outburst of interest in the arts which has resulted in the unprecedented spread of education, wealth and leisure [RC note: And what does this suggest about the consequences of the current contraction and concentration of those desirable elements?]. Never before have so many painters painted, sculptors sculpted, or writers written; never before have so many techniques of mass reproduction and distribution been so highly developed. Movements seem to make their way around the world in a moment, and fads almost fly. The problem for educated people, therefore, becomes one not of availability but of discrimination and quality, of choosing the significant and the enduring out of all this chaotic outpouring. It is Horizon’s task to make selections like this in every issue, and to present our choices from all this vast cultural storehouse, past and present, in the most interesting way we know.

At present, a shelf in the next room holds the first seventy-seven issues, and I expect before the turning of the month to add March, May and July of 1977, following which, after years of declining revenues and circulation, the magazine switched to a conventional softbound, ad-supported monthly model of somewhat diminished editorial quality and greatly inferior art direction. The undertaking struggled along in this attenuated format for another dozen years of melancholy afterlife before it finally folded in 1989, but for those of us who knew the old Horizon, it died with that final issue in the old format.

I wish there was still a place today in the cultural firmament for Horizon, but even more than that, I wish we still had a middle class confident enough in its future to put aside a little energy for cultural striving of the kind that Horizon sought to address. I mean, The New York Review of Books is aimed at an audience with a somewhat higher median level of sophistication, but as far as the bulk of its readership goes, I think it’s preaching to the choir of the well- and very well-educated. Horizon didn’t talk down to its readership, but without being inaccessible, it did encourage them to stretch, I think, and I would guess that in 1962 the magazine would appeal to both the Ivy-educated ad executive in Westchester County and to the sales manager in the San Fernando Valley. I doubt whether there are many culture vessels today that address the modern-day equivalents of the two, and if there are, I suspect that the overlap is at, so to say, a baser and more superficial level. I don’t think we’ll see the likes* of Horizon again, because the culture that supported its modest circulation (≈150,000) has been supplanted by one irretrievably infantilized. Still, those legendary back numbers are still to be had through the online marketplace, and any issue chosen at random will be found brimful of treasures and edification.

I’ve written further about Horizon here, under the heading "Mid-American Middlebrow"

cordially,

*Last minute thought: Although I suspect its own audience is less broad than Horizon's was, and although its editorial approach is quite different (and far more economical, most of its "contributors" being long dead), perhaps the closest equivalent I can think of today is the also ad-free, idiosyncratically eclectic Lapham's Quarterly, which maintains a website here.

I do it as much as the next person, I suppose, although way less than the person next to him. There's a frequent meme on the Book of Face: picture of Kids Today staring at their phones, or wearing their trousers too low, or listening to [insert You call that music?? genre here] or anything else that irks the geriatric and adjacent cohort: "I feel sorry for kids today," followed by a rhapsodic, highly colored and highly selective account of the innocent idyll that was the nineteen-fifties, of the wholesome entertainments we enjoyed, our simple, blameless pleasures, the respect we tots showed to our elders and to authority generally, and so forth. I'll bet you a beet that had you raised the subject of youth to an American of my present age back when I was growing up, you'd have got an earful of kids "today" (then): mindless television! The bestial jungle rhythms of so-called rock and roll (You call that music??)! Lascivious dancing! The threat of nuclear war! Not at all like the vanished golden era when they were young in 1900.

So it's a moving target. Possibly I have linked before to Jon Carroll's marvelous short essay "As You Grow Older, which is well worth the few minutes it will require of your attention.

In the longer term, I suppose these cultural devolutions (as they appear from my own incipient geezerhood) are morally neutral. There is much about the fifties I would not care to reprise. As I said in the referenced blog entry:

I'll pause here to make the standard and obligatory stipulation (obligatory, that is, for those of us outside the fevered fantasies of the nascent brownshirt movement that afflicts our public life today) that the era under consideration is not universally remembered as a vanished golden age by sundry classes of then politically, economically, culturally or sexually disenfranchised Americans. You may imagine this disclaimer to be as eloquent and as detailed as you like, and I will sign it.

But I stand by my assertion that a society in which an optimistic middle class was upscale in its cultural aspirations may reasonably be judged healthier from that standpoint than one in which social mobility has all but frozen in place, at least as far as upward movement is concerned, where a justified bitterness and resentment festers, and where fear and ignorance are merchandising tools tirelessly deployed, and high culture despised except insofar as it may be monetized.

No doubt at mid-century there will be middle-aged people looking back at 2016 as a vanished age of comity and prosperity, and I fervently hope that they are phrasing this in terms of "And we didn't lock our doors!" rather than "And we didn't spend the daylight hours cowering in our bunkers, coming out only at night to gather roots and grubs as we dodged the militia patrols."

cordially,

Edit: linkie fixed; thanx tendered to boxley.