from New Partisan, 2006
Pari passus stopped me dead in my tracks the other day. When was the last time I saw that in print,
and was I kidding myself to think I remembered — more or less — what it
meant? The context was an essay by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith
on the life, times and ideas of his great 18th-century predecessor,
Adam Smith. Though intended for the non-specialist but culturally
literate layman, so unapologetically “elitist” a locution could only
have surfaced 35 years ago in a magazine called Horizon, and Lord, how I wish something like it existed today.
No,
I don’t mean Cyril Connolly’s intellectually supercharged periodical
out of wartime London in which the classic George Orwell essays first
appeared. Mine was the hardbound coffee table quarterly from the same
outfit that brought out American Heritage and pitched it to a
similarly profiled readership: a subset of American suburbia educated
enough to have acquired a nodding acquaintance with the world’s
cultures, desirous of learning more about the same, and receptive to
richly anecdotal history and low-jargon criticism and essays on
contemporary trends arranged in debate format.
It sounds, and it was,
very “midcult,” to use the term invented around that same time by
Dwight Macdonald and used here in its taxonomic rather than derisory
sense. It is a category in which I am happy to include myself because I
found I could read Horizon with pleasure and learn a few things
in the process. Others must have, too; the magazine had a fair run
through the 1960s, fizzling out of existence some time after Watergate.
Thumbing
though a half-dozen sun-faded issues salvaged from a library sell-off,
the implicit mindset connecting the magazine’s readers and writers comes
across as unlike most anything going down today, notwithstanding such
occasional bylines as art critic Robert Hughes and the late science
maven Stephen Jay Gould’s early excursions in print.
In Horizon,
you’d get a tour of the past by mandarin Oxbridge historians H.R.
Trevor Roper and J.H. Plumb, or a vivid evocation of high times in
ancient Athens by Gilbert Highet. A personal favorite: Morris Bishop, a
legendary professor of romance languages at Cornell, who turned out many
witty, knowledgeable words on any subject that engaged his first-class
mind: female pirates, the cynicism of La Rouchefoucauld or the world
into which St. Francis of Assisi was born. Saul Bellow’s piece on
filmmaker Luis Buñuel certainly deserves reprinting — and I want the
record to show that Stanley Kauffmann, moonlighting from his then-day
job at the New York Times, could clean Pauline Kael’s critical clock, as it were, so far as cinema is concerned.
Horizon
managed to be topical without pushing political agendas. At the height
of the Vietnam mess, its editors put together a primer of Indochinese
history, but object lessons, if any, were for the reader to draw. Nor
could its editors stand accused of the heinous crime of Eurocentricity.
To this day it shames me to admit that blissed-out Buddhas and shimmying
Shivas in the basement "grotto" of the Norton Simon Museum only bring
out my inner Homer Simpson, but after re-reading Edmund White or William
K. Zinsser on the arts and civilizations of Asia, I am encouraged to
give it another dutiful shot.
The timeframe in which Horizon
flourished was also that of Leonard Bernstein and his Young People’s
Concerts and Kenneth Clark’s guided tour of capital-C Civilization,
while universities offered “appreciation” courses to non-majors in the
belief that certain cultural artifacts were entitled to it. But no
patronizing footnotes of the Van Gogh who-he? variety or atrocious
“study guides”. Most amazing of all was the editors’ underlying
assumption that there really were enough readers out there who knew some
of the basics about, say, the Opium War or Baroque chamber music, and
wanted to be taken some distance beyond them, without being snowed under
with technicalities and academic game playing.
And
I was not too surprised to note that in the same issue (Summer 1971) as
the Galbraith piece, Stanley Kauffmann lets drop the word “footling”
during a scene-by-scene dissection of Bergman’s Persona, as if to say
“it won’t kill you if you go look it up, you know”. So okay, I did look
it up and can report that my self-esteem suffered no bruising as a
result. I also learned something, pari passus,
from an extinct magazine that did its readers a huge favor by never
assuming there were pre-set limitations on their cultural and
intellectual horizons.