“A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR”
A baron. A shipping tycoon. A lord. A prince. Denny had mastered Glenway Wescott’s lessons very well indeed, and was prepared for his next conquest.
To be young, handsome, bright, and rich were the blessings bestowed upon Peter Watson, and he wore those blessings lightly, with grace and style. He was the youngest child of Sir George Watson, Lord of the Manor of Sulhamstead Abbotts, who had invented margarine and made a fortune when butter was rationed in Great Britain during the First World War. Peter was educated at Eton and Oxford and studied in Munich where his interest in modern art awakened and where he purchased his first Picasso drawing. When his father died in 1930, Peter at twenty-two was the beneficiary of trusts, which gave him the wealth to be a gentleman of leisure and to pursue his passion for art. The world became his playground—letters written on stationery of the finest hotels, postcards from the best resorts, spewed forth to his friends, and if, for instance, it happened to be raining when he was in Salzburg, he simply packed up and headed off to Venice. Everyone who became his friend considered themselves fortunate. Alan Pryce-Jones, a classmate from his Eton days, described Peter as “slow-speaking, irresistibly beguiling ...from fourteen or so onwards, one of the most sophisticated beings I ever knew: rich, funny, and wise . . .”1 Cecil Beaton found that Peter’s “wry sense of humor and mysterious qualities of charm made him unlike anyone I had known,”2 that he was “an independent, courageous person, on terms of absolute honesty with himself, with the world and with everybody he talks to.”3 The poet Stephen Spender thought Peter “quite unsnobbish, completely generous, quite unvulgar.”4 Spender recalled his first encounters with Peter: “When I think of him then, I think of his clothes, which were beautiful, his general neatness and cleanness, which seemed almost those of a handsome young Bostonian, his Bentley and his chauffeur who had been the chauffeur of the Prince of Wales, one wonderful meal we had in some village of the Savoie, and his knowing that the best food in Switzerland is often to be found at the buffets of railway stations.”5
Peter was tall, imperially slim, debonair, with a smile that “was so disarming that people could not but like him,” as Cecil Beaton described it.6 Beaton called him “the best person at the art of living I know.”7 He was, in Beaton’s judgment, “a completely fulfilled, integrated person; someone who has been through many vicissitudes and has now discovered himself.”8 Beaton also described Peter’s thick brown hair as being “sexily lotioned” with brilliantine,9 a choice of words that pretty much summed up the problem: Peter was so perfect that woman, and men, kept weaving their fantasies around him and falling in love with him. And Beaton, who would become the famed society photographer, fell very hard indeed.
Beaton knew exactly the moment it happened. It was late summer, 1930. Cecil was twenty-six, four years older than Peter. They were in Vienna, each with his own friends, when they met. Peter went with Cecil to antique shops to help him select furnishings for Ashcombe, his new country estate. Cecil could not understand why his friends were making such a fuss about this young man until several days later, as they went down on the same elevator from their hotel rooms, “he shot me a glance of sympathy, of amusement—it may have been a wink—but it did its work—it went straight to my heart—and from that moment I was hypnotized by him: watching every gesture of his heavy hands, the casual languid way he walked.”10 As they got out of the elevator, “we burst into laughter, and arm-in-arm walked off into the Vienna side-streets to become the greatest of friends.”11
Cecil was a man obsessed. He began molding himself to be just like Peter, buying the same clothes, using the same cologne, combing his hair the same way, imitating his walk, the way he talked—to the extent that Cecil’s family could not distinguish Cecil from Peter on the telephone. Hoping that he could make Peter fall in love with him, he invited Peter to join him on a tour of the southern United States, of the Bahamas, Haiti, Havana, Vera Cruz, Mexico City, and Honolulu. Peter, who in spite of his wealth had never been abroad, thought it might be fun.
It was quite a voyage across on the Aquitania that January of 1931. As Cecil wrote in his diary: “My eyes were glued to him throughout the day and as he lay asleep. The sea air knocked him out most of the time and as he lay, big hands clasped on his chest with his head thrown to the side, I would get out a sketching book and make drawings of him. It was the most heavenly experience in the world to live here in this cabin with him, to dress together in the morning and evening, to play the gramophone ... to have baths together.”12 Peter seemed unaware of the longing eyes locked upon him until the moment Cecil made the mistake of giving words to his fantasy and saying to Peter, “One day when we are lovers ...”13 Cecil instantly knew from Peter’s annoyance that the object of his desire did not feel the same way about him. Cecil already had arranged for an enormous bouquet of lillies-of-the-valley and violets to be delivered to Peter when they landed in New York City, to be accompanied with a note: “To Peter who I love so much.”14 The arrival of the flowers led to Peter initiating a frank conversation about the nature and boundaries of their friendship, though this discussion did little to cool Cecil’s infatuation. For the remainder of the trip Cecil played the role of friend, while internally going through soaring highs and plunging lows, times when Peter’s “dirty handkerchiefs, his every belonging possessed a glamour,” and other times when he concluded that Peter was “independent, selfish, rude, insolent, conceited, young and silly and completely unimportant.”15
Peter certainly didn’t make it any easier for Cecil and seemed oblivious to the powers he held over his traveling companion. Often on their journey they slept in the same bed. As Beaton confided to his diary: “How we gossiped. We giggled ...We fought gaily in bed, completely upsetting the bedclothes. We tickled each other, lay in one another’s arms and I was completely happy—as completely as I ever will be with this poppet because he is the most unperturbed bastard, uninfluencible and I shall never alas become his lover.”16 This realization could not stop Cecil from spending “half the night looking lovingly and longingly at him in his poses of profound unconsciousness. I loved his big fat veiny hands and would clasp them around me in his sleep.”17
Truman Capote knew both Watson and Beaton. He and Cecil were lifelong friends, but Capote was one of the very few who had no use for Peter. Capote felt Watson had a sadistic streak, and brutally portrayed this voyage abroad the Aquitania in “Unspoiled Monsters,” a chapter of his never-completed, long-anticipated novel, Answered Prayers. “Once,” Capote wrote in a parenthetical remark in this chapter, “Watson deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in the same narrow bed—that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an aching scrotum.”18
Back in London, Cecil time and again would resign himself to their being no more than “affectionate companions,”19 though each time Peter would call him to go horseback riding, to visit an antique shop or gallery, to play backgammon, Cecil once again fell under his spell, convinced anew he could win his love, only to discover anew each time that he could not. The emotional turmoil was too much for him and through hypnosis he sought a cure for his addiction to Peter, a procedure that brought only temporary relief. While going on with his work and his life, he waited for the telephone to ring, for Peter to call. When he was ill, he attributed his illness to not having seen Peter for too long a time. When a friend told him Peter had asked about him, he was ecstatic and wrote in his diary: “I now feel I would like to get physically well, my body in good trim, my tummy muscles tightened, my skin a different colour, my hair thicker and then go back to the friendship that has cost me so much happiness, but which on account of its disadvantages I was silly (?) strong (?) enough to relinquish.”20
In May of 1935, Peter and Cecil both happened to be in Paris and made plans to meet for dinner, but Peter did not appear at the agreed upon time. Cecil later learned that Peter that night had met in a nightclub a young American named Denham Fouts.
As Peter recalled the moment: “He took me back to his hotel where he gave himself cocaine injections.” And there, in Denny’s hotel room, Peter stayed.21
Stephen Spender once noted that Peter’s education “had all been through love: through love of beautiful works and through love of people in whom he saw beauty.”22 When Peter saw Denny in that Parisian nightclub, he had an instantaneous physical response to what he saw, as though he had discovered beauty itself, and he knew he had to possess this god-like creature as much as he had to possess the museum quality paintings of de Chirico, Gris, Klee, Miro, and Picasso he had been collecting. Denny may have found himself falling in love, though, more likely, he sensed he had found himself someone who might be a worthy acolyte; he played his hand and, as scheduled, a few days later left on a tramp steamer for New York. Peter was hooked.
Cecil was devastated when he learned of Peter’s feelings for Denny, “again conscious of my failure,” as he wrote in his diary, “that my beloved will never be in love with me and will always fall for strumpets, and that continuously I am going to be miserable through each intrigue.”23 He no longer could deal with this unrequited love, and drafted a letter to Peter:
My dearest Darling, this is so much the saddest thing that happened in my life. It is so serious for me to make the painful wrench but I cannot continue being made miserably unhappy constantly by your peculiar vagaries ...I cannot weep any more, my eyes are swollen and my face unrecognizable from so many tears and so much hysteria.24
Cecil never mailed his letter, but read it to Peter, who tried to heal their friendship and urged that they remain “sane and friends again.”25
Just as Cecil Beaton’s life changed forever when he met Peter Watson—and, to the end of his life, even after many other affairs, including one with Greta Garbo, considered Peter “the love of his life” and still was “sad and sore that it was never a mutual love affair, a friendship only for him,”26—so Peter Watson’s life was to change forever that evening he met Denham Fouts. A friend of both Peter and Denny would call Denny “the great, destructive, love” of Peter’s life.27 Denny well knew what he was doing in leaving for New York after he had aroused Peter’s interest: Peter could not live without him. “We corresponded and he came back to live with me in London.”28
Stephen Spender realized Peter “was too perfectionist to be an easy person to live with ... He was, as it were, essentially made for honeymoons and not for marriages. I mean that the best possible relationship to have with Peter was to be taken up by him very intensely for a few weeks, and then simply to remain on his visiting list for the rest of one’s time.”29 When Denny returned to London, to Peter, the honeymoon began, a whirlwind fantasy Denny never could have imagined. Peter took him to all his favorite haunts in London, in Paris, Zurich, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, St. Moritz, Milan, Florence, Rome, Capri, halcyon days visiting museums, galleries, sightseeing, bicycling, swimming, evenings at the best restaurants and nightclubs, plays, operas, on to China and the Far East.
As Stephen Spender so well recognized, this was the fun part of being with Peter, the magical part, and Denny must have felt the career Glenway Wescott had launched him on had reached its zenith. Thereafter, though the two became co-dependent, Peter’s relationship with Denny never was easy. Denny, Peter came to understand, “had no confidence in anyone—this stimulated me and [I] thought if I took trouble he would in me.”30 Peter may have recognized something of himself in Denny. He once confessed to a friend that “without some money I would have acted worse than you. I can’t do anything and I hate doing things.”31 And this recognition about himself may have led him to keep trying with Denny, to want to help him reach the potential he saw in him, to inspire him to do something more than sit around being beautiful, to make him realize his worth lay in more than his looks.
No matter how much beauty, self assurance, and confidence they project, those select few who look like a god may feel the same insecurities and self doubts as everyone else, sometimes even more if they are unsure, as was Denny, as to just what it was they possessed that drew another’s attention or love. Exactly what was it that he could do with his life? What was his purpose? Denny, Peter discovered, was “terribly neurotic (his drawings are nightmares of frustrations and obscenities).”32 Although only six years younger than Peter, Denny, at twenty-one, still looked like a teenager, and Peter, at twenty-seven, like an adult, and those in fact were the roles they assumed. “I became for him of course the responsible parent who just provided him with money.”33 As hard as Peter tried, he found, to his disappointment, that “we never shared any intellectual interests whatsoever and he always resented that side of me.” And the sexual side of their relationship disappointed Peter, too. “Going to bed is a physical act with him, no more, he is stuck at 16 years old and resists any attempt to grow. And yet I feel it must be my fault, somehow.”34
And yet, Peter could no more move beyond Denny, despite repeated sessions with German émigré psychiatrist Dr. Karl Bluth, than Cecil could get over Peter.
Cecil Beaton, of course, hated Denny with “an unconsumed passion,” and when he heard through his friends of “the appalling dogfights that Denham had with Peter,” he noted with delight in his diary that “they were just what Peter needed.”35
The dogfights typically began with Peter’s concern about Denny’s opium habit, a habit that had begun when he joined the world tour with Lord Tredegar and his wife and with them visited the opium dens in China. Peter always had been frightened of drugs and was distressed at what he saw them doing to Denny. He tried every stratagem to get him to quit—love, reasoning, nagging, threats—nothing, of course, worked against the power of Denny’s addiction. Every once in a while, Peter was able to get Denny into a rehabilitation clinic but those “cures” proved temporary, very temporary, at best. And so their fighting continued.
After such fights, when the two separated, Denny was never at a loss finding room and board. Peter learned later that Denny once had gone and “joined the Hitler Jugend in Germany and was a boy friend of Richtofen, the Nazi ace” with whom he attended Nazi rallies in Berlin.36 Richtofen was Wolfram Freiherr von Richtofen, almost twenty years older than Denny, married, with three children and was the cousin of Manifred von Richtofen who was Germany’s most famous ace, and is still today considered the ace of aces and a legend as the “Red Baron.” Wolfram had served during the First World War and himself achieved the designation of flying ace for the number of enemy aircrafts he shot down; when Hermann Goering formed the Luftwaffe in 1933, he joined, and later became one of only six Luftwaffe officers to become a Field Marshall. It was during his stay in Germany with Richtofen that Denny met Adolf Hitler, which led to Truman Capote’s conjecture, which he loved to repeat, that “had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there would have been no World War Two.”37
Other times after Peter and Denny fought, Denny would go back to Prince Paul, but now, with the national plebiscite in Greece in 1935 that had called for a return of the monarchy, Crown Prince Paul was no longer in London; he had joined his brother’s triumphant return to Greece, and there, in Athens, obtained for Denny a suite of rooms in the Grande Bretagne Hotel.
Denny was well aware of the power he held there, even after Prince Paul on January 8, 1938 married Princess Frederica of Hanover, a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the bar in the Grande Bretagne Hotel, Denny in 1938 had met twenty-two-year-old surrealist artist Brion Gysin, whose acquaintances, including Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas, all agreed he looked like a young Greek god, perhaps Apollo, maybe Dionysus or Narcissus. Denny spotted this classically handsome young man sitting at the bar and took him up to his rooms. There, he picked up the telephone, called the front desk and asked to be put through to the Royal Palace. When Prince Paul was given the telephone, Denny asked that he immediately send over “one of those royal guards in ballet skirts with something for us to smoke.” The Prince did, Denny and Brion did, and as Brion recalled, “we got royally stoned.”38
Brion Gysin was fascinated by everything about Denny, from the suitcases that Salvador Dali had decorated for him with labels like “Hotel Sordide” and “Midnight Motel,” to the expensive sports jackets Peter had brought for him, which appeared to be “itchy tweed but felt like cat’s fur woven into cashmere.”39 For a while they enjoyed each other’s company and together migrated back to Paris. The two were like brothers in their desire to live well, and in their ability, through the largesse of admirers, to live well without working.
In Paris, newlyweds Jane and Paul Bowles befriended Brion at a Left Bank Café, and Brion introduced them to Denny. One evening, Brion and Denny drove the Bowles to dinner and then to the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks Concerto.” Bowles learned that Denny on his journeys with Peter had been to Tibet but could not determine what he had done there except for his story that he had been practicing archery and had brought back with him some large tribal bows. To show off the skills he had developed, Denny took an arrow, which had a built in tampon that he soaked in ether, lit it, aimed out the hotel window, and shot into the night traffic on the Champs-Elyées. Brion found this amusing, though Paul Bowles, who had no use for Denny, found this conduct astounding, and noted in his memoirs that “fortunately there were no repercussions.”40
There are those whose personalities are so addicting that, for all their faults, life is richer, more fun, with them; without them, the world beats empty and hollow. Denny had this power to addict, and Peter, the addict, could not be separated for long from what he had to have. Denny had become addicted to being desired, and, in being the object of desire had found his self worth. The two needed each other and invariably reunited.
Although Peter said that he couldn’t do anything and hated doing things, he had quietly become a forceful presence in London’s art world. He orchestrated major art exhibitions that drew thousands of visitors, organized concerts, and behind the scenes helped many young artists. John Craxton, who became a prominent neo-Romantic artist, was, as a teenager, living in a small flat with his parents and six siblings, with no room to paint. He received a letter from Peter Watson, who had seen his work: “I have been reading an article by Miro called ‘je reve d’un grand atelier,’ and it occurs to me that you must need a studio. Find one and send me the bill.” Craxton came to consider Peter “a second father in a way, tremendously generous, a great catalyst and encourager.”41 Craxton set up a studio in Abercorn Place, which he then shared with another young artist, Lucien Freud, who would become a lionized British realist painter. Peter later paid for Craxton and Freud to visit Greece so that they could see more of the world than London. Peter in 1938 funded the publication costs of Charles Henri Ford’s first book of poems, The Garden of Disorder, and repeatedly helped Dylan Thomas pay off his debts. He introduced young artists to more established artists and took them together to dinner. Stephen Spender called Peter “the last of a rare disinterested, pure and questing human species. No other patron was so individual, so non-institutional: even the word ‘patron’ seems wrong for him—perhaps a better word would be ‘friend.’”42
He was, Spender felt, a knight in shining armor, a characterization that the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchev had understood when he painted Peter as a knight.43
Peter went through periods when he found England depressing, a “dying country”44 as he called it, “a Victorian period piece,”45 as the world, especially the world of modern art, moved beyond it. As Peter wrote to Cecil Beaton: “I am loathing London and can’t wait to get out. The gloom. The cold. The bad plays.”46 He added: “There is some terrible psychological pain which gets me every time I get back to England. It goes back to the times when I used to race abroad to get away from my family I think.”47 He was considering founding in Paris a journal of fine arts, and also was sharing with Denny his idea of buying an orange farm in Arizona where the two of them would live. Paris won out and Peter leased the large apartment at 44 Rue du Bac.
It was in the summer of 1937, when Peter and Denny were staying in the fashionable Austrian ski resort town of Kitzbuhel, that they met up with Cyril Connolly who had been a student with Peter at Eton, and his wife Jean, an American expatriate just like Denny. Jean was beautiful, witty, caustic, a heavy drinker, sexy, promiscuous, a lover of clubs and late night parties, and she and Denny instantly bonded and became friends and confidants. (“Am suffering for all my sins at once with the most beastly (don’t laugh) WISDOM-TOOTH while P. climbs Mts,” Denny wrote to Jean on a postcard from the Hotel Glacier in Switzerland; “Love from Denham.”48 The Connollys often stayed at Peter’s apartment when they were in Paris. They were there during the 1938 Christmas season, a time of typical chaos in the apartment that another guest remembered: “[It] had the air of a stage set, an extraordinary collection of people wandering in and out all day long, dubious friends of Denham’s, English pansy or café society friends of the Connollys, the actor Jean Marais ...servants, detectives and police inspectors on account of a theft there at a party on Christmas Eve.”49 (Stephen Spender and his wife, Inez, when in Paris in 1938 and 1939, stayed at the apartment with Peter and Denny, always a little afraid of Denny after seeing several displays of his temper. On one occasion, as Peter and Denny were arguing, Denny ran down the stairs out into the garden courtyard, fired a revolver into the air, came charging back into the apartment, and threw the empty revolver on a table.50 Another time in a rage he drove a car straight toward the Seine, jumping clear just as it hit the water.)
As 1939 unfolded, the Connollys were having marital problems and Jean was spending more and more time in Paris, “Pansyhalla” as Cyril called it because his wife was seeing a lot of Peter and Denny and their friends. Peter wrote to Cyril: “Please get it out of your head that I want to see you and Jean separated. I do not and I should be very sorry if it happened and I only wish that a solution could be found and that you could be happy together, as I am fond of you both.”51
At the end of August, Connolly—then, as the literary critic of the New Statesman and the literary editor of the London Observer, the most highly regarded and popular critic in Britain—returned to Paris to talk with Peter. When they sat down for lunch at a sidewalk café that hot summer afternoon, Peter realized that the topic on Cyril’s mind was not Jean, but rather founding a new literary magazine in London. London’s great literary reviews had gone out of existence—T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion, The London Mercury, New Verde—and since 1938, with the gathering war clouds over Europe, many of England’s artists and intellectuals had been seeking refuge in safer countries—W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard all had gone to the United States, Wyndham Lewis to Canada—and England was feeling, at least in Connolly’s opinion, an intellectual and social drain.
Peter was cool to funding Connolly’s proposal. He had no interest in leaving Paris to return to London, and his own plans for a journal on the fine arts were at last beginning to come together.
But Connolly’s timing proved propitious. The next day, September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and France. Two days later, Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at war with Germany. An air raid siren blared within minutes of his announcement, a warning that proved to be a false alarm though many fully expected “the sky to become black with bombers” with “the whole of London laid flat,” as Stephen Spender remembered that ominous day.52 An invasion of Paris seemed inevitable. Connolly returned to London.
Peter asked a Romanian acquaintance who lived in Paris to serve as the caretaker of his apartment while he was away for the duration of the trouble. He feared that his art collection might be confiscated by the Nazis and began to ship the masterpieces to London, including Picasso’s Girl Writing, which was six feet high and four feet wide, had been in his collection for several years and was one of the most valuable. Fear in Paris of invasion was mounting so steadily that even before he could arrange for more paintings to be shipped, Peter left, leaving everything in his apartment, not even packing his luggage, and traveled from Paris to Calais aboard a troop train in a compartment filled with soldiers who “sat all the way in absolute silence, no one saying a word.”53 Denny had been traveling with Jean in Finland and reached London a few days after Peter. Peter was disgusted with both of them; as he told Cyril, if only they had moved faster when he told them to, they’d all be on their way to Mexico or Bali to sit out the war; Peter could have bought their way out for all of them. Now they all were stuck in London for the duration.
By the end of September, it was clear that no one would be returning to France in the near future, and Connolly again raised with Peter the idea of founding a literary magazine. Peter now viewed such a venture as a part of the war effort, an act of defiance in the face of the German threat, an undertaking that could be viewed as an effort to shore up the bulwarks of civilization, to defend culture. This time he agreed with Connolly’s proposal and, on October 18, 1939, their venture began when Peter, as the financial backer and publisher, signed a contract to print the first four issues. In addition to funding the venture, Peter would be the art editor, responsible for securing essays and illustrations on modern art, and would help edit the issues. Cyril Connolly was the editor. Stephen Spender was selected by Peter to be assistant editor, primarily to try to stabilize the mercurial, and lazy, Connolly. And the associate editor on the masthead was: Denham Fouts. It wasn’t long, a month, before Glenway Wescott in New York City received a letter from Denny in London “asking me to contribute and to solicit contributions to a magazine, Horizon.”54
Peter had modest expectations for Horizon. He hoped that it would cover the expenses he was footing of printing the thousand copies of each issue and paying the staff salaries, fees to contributors, postage and advertising. As it happened, the journal was published with just the right formula at just the right time, and from the first issue, was a success. The pre-publication plans for a first printing of one thousand copies to be issued in January of 1940 increased to a run of 2,500. Every copy sold in a few days, as did another quick follow-up printing of 1,000 more. The second issue had a planned printing of 5,000 copies which was increased to 7,000 and which promptly sold out. Horizon built up to a circulation of 100,000 copies per issue, an unheard of figure for a literary magazine. The biggest problem, in fact, became securing enough paper with War rationing to print the magazine.
Peter loved his work because it afforded him another opportunity to discover and promote young artists by featuring their work in Horizon, with high quality reproductions and critical commentary. As Peter wrote to Cecil Beaton (“my dear Cee”), “What this country needs is more and MORE Art. Otherwise life is not worth the trouble. These are my War Aims and I am trying my best to attain them and shall continue to do so. Art must be put into everything—not just Writing, Painting, etc.; the whole World most swim with Art.”55
Peter and Cyril worked well together and became close friends, with Cyril playfully calling Peter “Pierre” or “Peter Wattie,” and Peter calling Cyril “Squirrel,” “Papa,” “Squiggles,” or “Squig”; as another worker at Horizon noted, “they were almost in love with each other—very flirty.”56 But Peter’s genius was in knowing how to stay in the background so that Cyril’s genius would emerge and energize the magazine. “All I want you to do is to put in exactly what you like as you know I think your judgment is better than anyone else’s, you silly thing; if I am asked an opinion I shall try to be sincere. My opinion about something is not a prohibition and I really resent it being taken as one.”57
Cyril Connolly was Horizon. It reflected his moods, his opinions, his interests, his tastes. His work on the review made him something of a celebrity. “I think,” he said, “the chill wind that blows from English publishers with their black suits and thin umbrellas, and their habit of beginning every sentence with ‘We are afraid’ has nipped off more promising buds than it has strengthened.” It was Connolly’s hope to encourage literary and artistic talent through Horizon. In setting his high standards as the benchmark for the magazine, he brought his audience up to those standards. “It was the right moment,” Connolly said later, “to gather all the writers who could be preserved into the Ark.”58 And it was Connolly’s genius, his intuition, to know who to solicit, and his charm that encouraged them to contribute to Horizon. And aboard the ark they came: T.S. Elliott, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Philip Toynbee, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Ellison, W.H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Randall Jarrell, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bowen, V.S. Pritchett, Kenneth Clark, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell. Peter soon saw that his own intuition had been correct, that Connolly is a “brilliant editor because he’s like a brothel keeper, offering his writers to the public as though they were girls, and himself carrying on a flirtation with them.”59
As the threat of invasion of Great Britain grew, Peter sent Denny to the United States to get him out of harm’s way, away from the dangers of a war that now seemed inevitable, away from the easy access to drugs which had become increasingly important in his life. He had Denny bring with him for safe keeping Picasso’s huge painting, Girl Writing.
On June 15, 1940, Denny and Jean Connolly set sail from Dublin for the United States.