The World of C. P. Snow

The World of C. P. Snow PATRICK S W I N D E N

The world of C. P. Snow is clearly circumscribed, it has evident limits. Inside, there is a large population of usually very busy people. They, too, are conscious of limits. Sometimes these are imposed on them by their families, their jobs, the society in which they live, even the country they serve. Sometimes they are self-created, barriers thrown up by the temperament and moral character of the individual who strives to overcome them. Also, in spite of the large public issues raised in it, the world of C. P. Snow has rigorous physical limits. For the most part it is contained in a triangle drawn between the three points of an anonymous midland town (Leicester), Cam- bridge and London. Excursions from any of these three points into unknown territory are rare. When they do occur, the place at which we arrive is never in any important respect different from the places we left behind. Its inhabitants are still scientists, academics, Civil servants and government officials, with one or two other professional people (especially lawyers) and their appendages (clerks, landladies, messengers, wives) thrown in for good measure. They live in large detached houses and professional flats (one of them prefers a modest four-roomed flat in a Victorian high rise, but he is being uncharac- teristically eccenlic); they work in government offices, colleges, laboratories and law courts; and they spend their leisure time going to parties and wadching cricket.

That is why the most unusual thing in Strangers and Brothers is not the invention of the atomic bomb, the resignation of a Minister of Defence, not even the murder of an eight year old boy by a pair of sadistic Lesbians. They can be explained. Even the murder is, with difficulty, susceptible to reasonable explanation. As such it plays its part in 1 he development of Lewis Eliot’s understanding of the world he lives in. No. The most unusual thing in Strangers and Brothers is an imperturbable Indian who is encountered strolling down Peas Hill in Cambridge one cold, wintry, May afternoon1. He is unusual because he has absolutely no reason for being there. But he is there, and Snow feels constrained to mention the fact in passing.

People who have no ascertainable reason for being where they are appear very rarely in the world of C. P. Snow. It is a world in which people, almost by definition, have functions. And these functions are either evident (the same thing as their jobs, perhaps) or, where not evident, susceptible to investigation. They are hardly ever genuinely mysterious or even non-existent. That is why the solitary Indian is so unusual. He tells us nothing about Cambridge, Sir Lewis Eliot, or anyone or anything else. He is gratuitous. But the lLast Things ch. 28.

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world is not gratuitous. It is the sum total of the ambition, the striving, the calculation and the cross-purposes of just such individuals as populate the rest of the novels. The Indian slipped in from outside that population. He is an impressive but genuine reminder of the limits of a world that has rejected the rest of his kind.

Lionel Trilling’s celebrated essay on Snow in A Gathering of Fugitives strikes me as being witty but unjust. In it, we meet Snow at his club, taking odds on the continued health of the novel and volunteering to prove that the novel is not dead by writing one himself. The eleven volumes of Strangers and Brothers are presumably the fruits of this gamble. Trilling insinuates that Snow lacks the basic stuff of which novelists are made, and that he compensates for this by his intelligence, his grasp of affairs, his weighty common sense about people’s behaviour and, I suppose, sheer doggedness. One has to agree that these are among the most immediate characteristics of Snow’s writing. He is intelligent, he is sensible and, yes, he is dogged. But also he possesses other gifts which are peculiarly appropriate to a novelist. In particular, he displays quite remarkable powers of narrative, the sort of thing he admires in his reviews of work by William Cooper and Kingsley Amis. It is a conventional narrative skill-the ability to control the pace of events, the tact with which information is disclosed at the right time, the handling of suspense- indeed, all those attributes which explain why his first literary effort, Death Under Sail, was a detective story. Critics agree that Snow’s virtues are mid-nineteenth century ones. Most of them agree also that a mid-twentieth century writer ought to have better things to do with his time than emulating Trollope. Of course, they may be right. But it is clearly incumbent upon them to demonstrate what all of Snow’s virtues are, before grouping them under a single heading (Victorian, Trollopeian) and pronouncing them insufficient and out of date.

The trouble is that most self-respecting critics have difficulty bringing themselves to deal with conventional narrative skills. Nobody wants to spoil another person’s enjoyment of a detective story by disclosing who did it, why, and when. The same sort of thing applies to Snow’s novels. How things happen and what is their result are matters of consuming interest. The level of suspense is often high. Lewis Eliot is a barrister. It is not surprising, therefore, that important parts of several of the novels take place in the cri- minal courts, and that the outcome of the cases heard is in doubt until the last pages. George Passant and The Sleep of Reason particularly come to mind. There is a trial of a sort in The Afsair. Elsewhere the suspense is generated outside the courts. The election of a new master to a Cambridge college occupies an important place in The Light and the Dark and is the principal subject of The Masters. (This has called forth some of the most irritating disclosures. Critics have been

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much less subtle than Snow in obscuring the identity of the new master.) And there are different forms of suspense in The New Men (Is Sawbridge really a spy? Can it be proved? Will Martin succeed in getting the top administrative post that Walter Luke, a much better scientist, expects to get for himself?) and Corridors of Power (Will Roger Quaife get the votes he needs in the House of Commons to save his career and push through his far-sighted policy on the ‘independent’ nulclear deterrent ?)

The ‘spine’ novels-Time of Hope, Homecomings, and Last Things-depend less than the others on the tense unravelling of a carefully devised plot. But there is still a problem, and one which applies equally to The Masters and the rest. The techniques of plotting are fascinating in their effect but tedious to explain. Nobody, so far as I kno’w, has written interestingly on the mechanics of traditional story-telling in the novel. There is no Robert Liddell or Percy Lubbock or Joseph Warren Beach of the Trollopeian school of fiction. Probably there doesn’t need to be one. We can all see the virtues of Barchester Towers and The Eustace Diamonds. The only question is what value we are prepared to attach to those virtues. For the time being all I want to do is to establish that Snow does possess them, and to claim that he possesses them to a degree that many contemporary writers who clearly value them-Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, John W a i n 4 0 not.

He does not display them equally skilfully in all the novels. Nor do individual novels display them to equal advantage in all their parts. Frequently the novels fall apart into separate segments, loosely held together by aspects of the theme and by some of the characters. Roy Calvert’s enigmatic personality is not enough to hold together the separate bits and pieces of The Light and the Dark (though who knows but that it might have been if Snow had grasped it firmly throughout, instead of floundering badly in admitted ignorance of almost everything to do with it). The New Men doesn’t appear to know what to do with itself until Martin’s manoeuvre against Walter Luke shapes up, approximately half way through. Worst of all, the trial of the two girls, Corah Ross and Kitty Pateman, takes the form of a random insert into the domestic themes of The Sleep of Reason and Last Things. Take out the trial and you have a single book which is all of a piece, though I agree that when you have done that you have taken out tlhe most interesting part of it.

So I should add to Trilling’s list of virtues the specifically novelistic, though traditional, virtue of narrative power. Sometimes it falters, and usually it is not co-existent with the form of the novel to which it belongs. With the exception of The Masters, individual novels in the Strangers and Brothers sequence are loosely constructed-tautly organized episodes alternating haphazardly with perfunctory incidental matter‘. Nevertheless the dominant plot is usually strong, oddly so, since it exists independently of most other kinds of control.


This leaves us with a novelist of remarkable ability, for there is general agreement about other sources of strength in Snow’s work.

First, there is the large area of modern life he takes as his subject. Snow believes it is his business to show his readers how decisions are arrived at on some of the most important issues of both public and private life. He is interested in relations between the sexes, between man and man and men and women in their merely personal lives, as all novelists are. But he is also interested in the way groups of individuals act with or against one another to produce events which have significant public consequences. He takes his readers inside the business of administration, law, politics, technological experiment. Furthermore he does not create an artificial division between private passion and public behaviour. At a level perceptibly below melodrama he shows how the two are so entangled, so caught up in each other, that they cannot be separated without unacceptable violence being done to their natures. This is true despite the com- partmentalization of events made necessary by the plan of the whole sequence. By this I mean that, for example, when the actions represented in The New Men are taking place, events in Lewis Eliot’s private life are coming to a head in the suicide of his first wife, Sheila, and the attachment he is forming with Margaret Davidson. I have to agree that Lewis Eliot’s behaviour in The New Men betrays little evidence that these private pressures (explained in Homecomings) exist. But in The New Men itself there is ample demonstration of the effect of private passions on the administrative decisions that are taken. As to how far individuals can expect to achieve what they intended to achieve by their actions, and their passions, Snow reserves judgement. Perhaps in all important respects, the outcome would have been the same whatever the personalities of those involved. But this is by no means certain; Lewis Eliot himself, and through him Snow, is not certain. One has the impression that the uncertainty about the relation between private personality and public policy was one of the motives that impelled Snow to write the books in the first place. In my view it can be a fruitful uncertainty, fostered by a sensitive intelligence and considerable experience of public affairs. It can be debilitating too, as I shall explain below. At any rate, the tension one feels in reading large parts of Strangers and Brothers springs as much from this responsible uncertainty as it does from the more obviously technical devices of the plot (courtroom scenes, investigations, debates in committee) to which I have already referred.

There is another respect in which the scope of Snow’s ambition is very great. I refer now not to the area of private and public life which he takes as his subject, but to the manner in which he addresses himself to the subject he has chosen. We could guess from these novels, if we had nothing else to go on, that Snow is deeply interested in the Soviet Union. When Lewis Eliot is under investigation as a

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potential security risk (it is a routine investigation made necessary by his association with the nuclear power project at Barford, and occupies a single chapter near the middle of Corridors of Power) he expresses his political views forcefully, and at some length, to his interrogator. These views are what we should have expected from earlier hints, especially in George Passant and The New Men. He is a moderate but convinced Socialist who was not a fellow traveller, did not join the Communist Party in the ’ ~ O S , and was not deceived by Stalin’s Russia. Nevertheless he believes there is more hope for the future in what Russian society can still become than he believes there is for what the U.S.A. can reasonably be expected to become. One presumes his creator, who on his own confession is in most important respects very similar to him, shares these views or something like them.

But Snow’s interest in Russia goes deeper than that. There is not much direct evidence from the novels (Eliot’s son reads Dostoievsky, and Eliot himself‘ seems to know something about that particular novelist), but there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence, that Snow sees himself as a man who is trying to do for the English novel what the Russians tried to do (and largely succeeded in doing) for their own. He is a sort of Russian Balzac (with Trollopeian modifi- cations).He offers. us his cross section of society with indications as to where are the levers of power, who is really in a position of responsibility, what any individual can do to moderate the blind force of political and soci,sl determinism-he offers all this in the spirit of a nineteenth-century Russian. This is the situation-in the courts, in the laboratories, in the universities, in Whitehall, in governmental committees, even in the Cabinet offices. This is how people behave in those places. This is what individuals might do, can be conceived of doing, in these or similar circumstances. The tone is descriptive, not didactic. But the end is certainly didactic. His readers are being educated into responsibility, just as Dostoievsky’s and Solzhenitsyn’s and Sholokhov’s readers are being educated-in a quite different political situation, of course.

Therefore from time to time in Strangers and Brothers we alight upon scenes that are reminiscent-in a less incandescent way (that is what I meant by the Russians mediated through Trollope)-of other scenes in the great Russian novels, Dostoievsky’s in particular (the ‘political’ part of Last Things is a sort of Devils-and-water; Maurice Hollis is a sort of ‘Idiot’, a Mishka, a holy fool.) More important than that, we discover Snow trying to incorporate those distinctively Russian attributes associated with time passing, faces changing, old friends surprising: and things just bumping along-the unsurpassed representation of unplotted lives and faltering destinies. One keeps coming across moments when, for no particular reason, the meaning of a person’s life comes into clearer focus, and life itself becomes strangely luminous-usually sadly, after a death. I recall Lewi

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Eliot’s glimpse of bottles of wine Roy Calvert has left behind on a rack they shared in the College cellars, immediately after the memorial service to commemorate his death in action; or the short chapter called ‘The Smooth Bedcover’ after Sheila’s death in Homecomings. Sometimes a grotesque note intrudes (duly modified by Snow’s unadventurous English tact)-in Time of Hope, for example, when Eliot breaks Sheila’s attachment to Hugh Smith: it is raining outside, and Smith‘s trousers are steaming in front of the fire. This particular aspect of his ambition does not often strike me as being successful. There is a deliberation, a planned effect about it, that prevents the truth from striking home and substitutes for it rather too much of a literary effect. But it is appallingly hard to write this sort of thing into the English novel, and Snow cannot be criticised severely for failing to reach the level of an Arnold Bennett, a Richard Hughes, or a V. S . Naipaul-the three most successful practitioners of this effect in modern English letters. In Homecomings there is a wise summing up of the situation as Bennett might have done it fifty years earlier: ‘In your deepest relations, there is only one test of what you profoundly want: it consists of what happens to you,. But ‘what happens to you’, in one of the most important senses of the phrase, is unplotted. And Snow’s most distinctive virtue as a novelist lies in the control he exercises over plot. I shall return to the problems this raises in due course.

I have been enumerating the virtues that are generally agreed to belong to Snow’s novels, and I have spent most of my time on what I have called the scope of his ambition. In one of its aspects his achievement is commensurate with his ambition. In the other his achievement falls some way behind it, though not in so far as his political intentions are concerned. I now add to the list Snow’s command of the over-all strategy of the novels-a single aim is kept clearly in view throughout the sequence, though it is enlivened with plenty of subsidiary detail; his familiarity with the minutiae of public life (committee procedure, how interviewing panels work, what barristers say to each other about their cases when they are out of court, etc.) ; and an occasionally penetrating psychological insight into people under stresses of various kinds. This emerges most effectively in his description of Lewis Eliot’s married life with Sheila, about one hundred pages at the end of Time of Hope and the beginning of Homecomings, and it compares very favourably with another rendering of a similar situation in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. I would submit that if we keep these strengths at the back of our minds we shall be less likely to under-value Snow’s achievement when we proceed to look at his weaknesses, which I now propose doing. I think we shall find ourselves having to place those strengths in an unexpectedly different perspective. They might not be so important or so impressive as at first they seemed to be.

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Towards the end of Last Things, the final novel of Strangers and Brothers, Lewis E3liot summarizes the three themes of his life. The -first, which he believes dominated his youth and young manhood (the period that closed with Sheila’s suicide), was the ambition not t o spend his life unknown. It was a merely selfish ambition, and Eliot knew that that was what it was. In order to fulfil it he allows himself to ride roughshod over some of his own deepest feelings, as well as the conflilcting ambitions of other people. He almost ruins his health studying for his bar examinations and, later, trying to carve out a successful practice as a barrister. He deliberately breaks up the relationships that the two women he loves have formed with other men. And old friendships (in particular with George Passant) are awkwardly compromised by his thrusting self concern. It has been argued that Snow treats Lewis Eliot indulgently, too indulgently, and that he is all the more culpable in doing this because of the self-confessed identification of creator and character. There are some ground‘; for this argument, but in my view they are insufficient because they have to do with superficial attributes of his character. For example there is a rather absurd complacency about Eliot’s claim (in Time of Hope) that ‘for all his [George Passant’s] massive intelligence, his vision of life was so different from mine that we could not for long speak the same mental language’. The un- conscious claim to massive intelligence (for himself as well as Passant) does point to a comic pomposity in Snow that is responsible €or his indulgent attitude to Eliot (and so to himself). It emerges again in Corridors of Power when Eliot is describing the procession of peers of the realm entering St. Margaret’s church for the funeral of Sir Thomas Beifill (his old political boss) : ‘People on the pavement were not paying much attention; top hats, a handful of bigwigs, some sort of service’. Then a new paragraph opens: ‘I sat in the middle of the church . . . ’ Eliot/Snow is one of the bigwigs in the church, and he is enjoying it. Furthermore he is in the middle of the church-not the most important person there, but, by suggestion, even so, in the miiddle of things.

There are plenty of other examples of this unthinking pomposity, and it is present in the fruitily cautious tone, or style, throughout. But it is more superficial than it is often represented as being. It would be possible to say, even, that it is a rather endearing complaint. This is because al. the centre of Lewis Eliot’s personality there is a rudimentary self distrust. Just as we feel Snow shares a kind of intellectual complacency with his character, so we must feel also that he shares this intense self criticism. And just as the intelligence Eliot is pompous about strikes us as being real (it is not only intelligence, by the way, but also fair-mindedness and tolerance about everything that does not touch the depths of his nature) so the moral corruption that hiis self criticism discloses to him strikes us as being real also. His treatment of his mother, of Sheila Knight, and, to a


lesser extent, of George Passant, is seriously damaging to his impression of himself and to our impression of him. Fundamentally, therefore, at the level where things really matter, I do not think Eliot is complacent. He grows to recognize and to struggle with his deeply flawed moral nature.

Even in these early years, however, Eliot’s personal ambitions are compromised by at least two other aspects of his personality, the two other themes of his life. These he defines as ‘love’ and the struggle for a better world.

His search for love, for the ability to love, freely, as well as to expose himself to the demands of other people’s love, is the central theme of the ‘spine’ novels. The problem is stated early in the first of them, the one that chronologically opens the sequence. Near the beginning of Time of Hope, Eliot compares his feelings towards his mother and father in the following terms: ‘he [his father] was dependent on me . . . and otherwise made no claims. He did not invade my feelings, and only wished for a response that it was innate in me to give’. His mother, on the other hand, ‘needed me with all the power of her nature. . . She made demands: without knowing it, I resisted’. A little later he expands what he has said here about his mother:

She knew as well as 1: that if one’s heart is invaded by another, one will either assist the invasion or repel it-and if one repels i t . . . no words or acting can for long disguise the lie. The states of love are many-some of them steal upon one unawares; but one thing one always knows, whether one welcomes an intrusion into one’s heart or whether, against all other wishes and feelings, one has to evade it, turn it aside.

What follows shows with great skill and sensitivity Eliot’s attempts to come to terms with this habit of evasion and resistance. His relationship with Sheila Knight exposes his complicity in the suffering and death of another person, and in his own suffering as a consequence of this. But he is attached to his suffering; it is an organic part of his identity. He possesses a secret pride in his suffering, which strangely co-exists with an unhealthy detachment from life. He has to exchange the isolated, silent, and sterile suffering of an onlooker for the involved and possibly creative suffering of a participant. But to do this is to humble his pride. Homecomings shows how he does this: first of all inadequately and partially, maintaining a reserve of detachment and secrecy; then as fully as his nature will allow. We see this happening in the course of his relationship with Margaret Davidson. And in The New Men we see it again in his relationship with his brother, Martin. My own feeling is that the latter is the most successful representation, because Martin, in the second half of The New Men, is a more fully devel- oped character than Margaret is in the second half of Homecomings. But Eliot’s own description of his limitations, directed as they are

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from the vantage: point of a moderately successful conclusion, are often painfully accurate. His comments on George Passant are not as illuminating as one would wish them to be so far as George is concerned, because we have not got close enough to him to test them properly against what we know of him directly; but those same comments tell us a great deal about Eliot that confirms much of what we have seen in his behaviour: ‘He (George) did not understand the temptation, so insidious, often so satisfying to men like me, of playing God : of giving so much and no more : of being considerate, sometimes kind, but making that considerateness into a curtain with which to shut off the secret self I could not bear to give away.’

Eliot’s growing recognition of his emotional inadequacy coincides with a more realistic assessment of his professional as well as his human capacity. But his work at the bar has already been affected by the failure of his marriage to Sheila. His health has deteriorated and he has come to realise that he will have to put a curb on his ambitions; that a man carrying his load of emotional responsibility (his pride will not let him admit that he need not be, cannot be, as responsible as he insists on being) cannot afford the high ambitions he started out with. And so the first theme of his life, the determina- tion to succeed, riot to spend his life unknown, comes to a close. At the same time the second theme undergoes a dramatic change, as he struggles to submit himself to the emotional demands Margaret Davidson makes of him. And whilst his marriage to Sheila is breaking up and his relatianship with Margaret is forming, the third theme of his life comes more impressively to the foreground.

This is his disinterested struggle for a better world, a struggle that explains much of his behaviour in the college, at the atomic research establishment at Barford, in Whitehall, and, especially, in Roger Quaife’s circle at Westminster. But he has learned enough to know by now that no struggle is entirely disinterested. The same thrusting ambition that faltered during his first marriage is still present in the less trying circumstances of his second. It is bound to get caught up in his perfectly honest and impersonal endeavour to improve the world he lives in. Snow shows how this happens. He also shows how Eliot reconciles himself to it, and so reconciles himself to human imperfection without losing hope -both for himself and for his principles. Fatheir Ailwyn, an Anglican priest and minor character, who appears for the first time in Last Things (he is a friend of Eliot’s step-son), speaks for Eliot’s newly acquired humility, his tolerance of himself as well as other people, when he says of the four last things: ‘I hope you show as much mercy to yourself as we shall all need in the end’. It is no more than Eliot had said, from his secular position, to Martin during the trial in The Sleep of Reason. Martin had advanced the view that human beings are dangerous wild animals, ‘more dangerous than any other animals on earth.’ Lewis replied that he didn’t disagree, ‘But I added that perhaps there


were vestigial possibilities of grace. You have to give us the benefit of the doubt. We need that, a lot of us, to get along’. Lewis Eliot’s ability to give himself the benefit of the doubt is the culmination of his moral progress. As such it sits easily with such earlier examples of achieved self acceptance in the English novel as Dorothea Brooke’s view through the window at Lowick in Middlemarch, or Isabel Archer’s return to Osmond at the end of The Portrait of a Lady. This is to go some way towards identifying the English tradition of the humanist novel to which, on one of its levels, Strangers and Brothers belongs. But there is a puzzling complication, to which I must now turn.

The complication discloses itself most plainly in that same conversation between Lewis and his brother. Martin, we are told, began his adult life with the same innocent hopes that George Passant had encouraged his ‘disciples’ to espouse in the earlier novels. He had believed it would not be difficult to improve the social condition in which men live, and in so doing to improve the human condition itself. There would be an intrinsic and absolute improvement in human nature. But Martin had not heard Herbert Getliffe’s oddly emotional summing up for the defence at the end of George Passant’s trial, right at the beginning of the sequence. Getliffe had warned that ‘it’s fatal to build better worlds until you know what human beings are like and what you’re like yourself. If you don’t, you’re liable to build, not a better world, but a worse one; in fact you’re liable to build a world for one purpose and one only, that is just to suit your own private weaknesses’. He makes much of the decline of absolute moral standards that has accom- panied the decline of religious observance after the First World War. George and his friends have nothing to fall back on but their own moral integrity ; and moral integrity, without a background of impersonal sanctions, without extra-personal agencies of reward and punishment, is a brittle and fragile thing. Even George’s strenuous integrity is not able to withstand the temptation put in its way by subtle forms of psychological duplicity, unrealistic hopes, even quite open and obvious frailties of the senses. Gradually, over the whole span of Strangers and Brothers, we see him wading further and further into muddle. In the end his life has come to nothing. He dies obscurely in Viborg, having reached his apogee in the Civil Service during the War, then having returned to his unspectacular job as a provincial solicitor’s clerk. George’s ideals have been perverted and misunderstood both in his own life and in others. Ultimately, he has been responsible, in a way, for the murder of a small boy by two girls in their twenties, one af whom was for a time on the fringes of his circle. The girl, Kitty Pateman, had taken away with her a corrupt and incomplete version of his ideas about personal freedom. As a result (of this, and of the disposition she has inherited from her


parents) she had ended up as a female Raskolnikov, needing the support of another, weaker girl to undertake the murder, not of a landlady on this occasion, but of an eight year old boy. It is this murder which is responsible for Martin’s explanation of his new view of life.

Martin had lost his optimism many years ago. He no longer believes in the perfectibility of man, however gradual. He still wants a ‘radical world’ but recognizes that it must be built, if it can be built at all, on ‘minimum illusions’. And so ‘to Martin individual life was tragic: a man wa!i ineluctably alone, and it was a short way to the grave. But believing that with stoical acceptance, Martin saw no reason why social life should also be tragic: social life lay within one’s power, as human loneliness and death did not, and it was the most contemptible of the false-profound to confuse the two’. That is Martin’s view. Lewis’s would appear to be very similar, though it has been reached by a different route. For Lewis has never shared George’s or Martin’s Utopian hopes. He never believed in the perfectibility of man. ‘Without possessing religious faith’, he says, ‘I nevertheless . . . . couldn’t help believing in something like original sin’. For both brothers, then, personal life is tragic. To reconcile oneself to this fact is the only way, unless one is very lucky or very stupid, of mitigating the tragedy. But one should not confuse the personal life and the social and apply the same insight to both. Social life, the transactions we make with all those who are not us, is not of its nature: tragic. With effort and insight, it can be improved. Lewis Eliot’s own involvement in affairs, both personal and political, shows that it can be improved-sometimes, and if you don’t expect too much. Often :it is difficult to believe so. If it were not, we would not sense the uncertainty I have already mentioned, about the real effectiveness of personal involvement in politics and government. This too emerges forcefully in Eliot’s speculations about the murder:

Who had free choice? Did any of us? We felt certain that we did. We had to live as if we did. It was an experiential category of our psychic existence. . . We had to believe that we could choose. Life was ridiculous unless we believed that. Otherwise there was no dignity left-or even no meaning. And yet--we felt certain we could choose, were we just throwing out our chests against the indifferent dark? We had to act as if it were true. As if. Als.lo6. That was an old answer. Perhaps it was the best we could find.

Taken with Martin’s insistence, which Lewis and Snow seem to share, that individual life is tragic, in its essential loneliness and inevitable extinctlion, this is a dark view indeed of human existence. At its core, it is rnore reminiscent of Conrad’s outlook than that of any other English novelist. For Conrad also ‘Life was ridiculous unless we believed that’, and much of his work represents an incorporation of the absurdity of human existence in the illusory


orders of art. But Snow does not have the faith in art that Conrad has. For him the illusion is apparent. It gets in the way of the order which, for Conrad (most of the time) comes first. Snow will not allow art to sustain him. He is therefore a prey to absurdity, ‘the indifferent dark‘, unless he can hold fast to that ‘experiential category’ which validates choice, which makes choice mean something. Then he makes a workman-like job of representing the act of choice, in Eliot’s experience and in that of others with whom Eliot comes in contact. But often, behind the ‘workman-like job’, there hovers Snow’s uncertainty, his dissatisfaction with the basis of his approach to life. He is an intelligent man and he knows that you cannot ‘choose’ ‘experiential categories’. They themselves provoke choices. And his own experience does not confirm the certainties about free will and effective consequences that he stumbles into at the end of The Sleep of Reason: ‘We had to act as if it were true’. Again like many of Conrad’s heroes- Lord Jim, or Victor Haldin perhaps. Or does it go beyond them, to Dostoievsky’s characters, whose actions are ultimately made significant by a Christian faith Snow has deliberately and responsibly discarded? Either way, acting ‘as if’ imposes as great a strain on a character in a novel as was imposed on George Passant, who tried to act ‘because these are the real moral properties of the situation’. It imposes strain on the novelist too. A tragic, absurd, and humanist novel ought to be, and probably is, a contradiction in terms.

I think this contradiction lies at the back of what I wrote earlier about the peculiar non-relationship between plot and ‘form’ in Snow’s novels.

I wrote that ‘what happens to you’, as Snow himself puts it, is frequently, usually, unplotted, but that Snow’s most characteristic virtue as a novelist is the control he exercises over his plots. He wants to represent ‘what happens to you’ in two different senses. But in each case the manner of representation is to be the same. In other words, though we live on two levels, mimetically these are conflated so as to produce a single, homogeneous, fictional whole. On the one hand, ‘what happens to you’ is that you walk down a street, look up at the lighted windows of the rooms above, feel the cold, think of the warmth inside. You also manoeuvre rivals into awkward moral positions whilst their trousers are drying in front of the fire; you sense the loss of a friend when you come across one of his scattered possessions, or of a wife when you glimpse the smooth bedcover she has not ruffled because she is dead and will no longer sleep in that room. In fact you do all sorts of things, important and unimportant, and in a way they add up to a life. They also add up to a novel, if you force them into some pattern, as you do (up to a point) anyway in living the life that is to be represented. On the other hand, there is another life you live, another ‘what happens to you’, that is quite different. As Lewis Eliot says in Last Things, ‘ . . , we made ends and shapes and patterns in our minds but . . . we didn’t

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live our lives like that. We couldn’t do so, because the force inherent in our lives was stronger and more untidy than anything we could tell ourselves about it’. This is a life that touches the other life at many points. Or, more accurately, events in that other life of lighted windows, steaming trousers and smooth bedcovers, release intimations of the untidy, inherent force that courses beneath it. But there appears to be little evident, causal, connection between the two. ‘Whether one 1ik.ed it or not’, Eliot says, ‘one was propelled by a process of renewal, or hope, or will, that wasn’t in the strictest sense one’s own . . . my guess was that this particular repository of self, this “I” which felt and spoke for each of us, lived in a dimension of its own’.

We appear to have made a U-turn from Conrad to Lawrence in this last confession. In his conversation with Martin, Lewis Eliot discovered a core: of existence, of personal life, which he associated with loneliness and death, which was disorganized, absurd, tragic. Now he discovers a secret life, what he calls a force of ‘continuous creation’, that replenishes the self from sources beyond consciousness. Perhaps his ‘death’ (for a little less than four minutes, under an anaesthetic) has precipitated this new formulation of what, really, has been a permanent feature of his outlook on life. What I find interesting is that in both cases, the tragic and the ‘continuous creative’, the depressing or exhilarating, the deep current seems to have very little to do with that other life on the surface.

This ought to have a considerable effect on Snow’s strategy as a novelist. There is a life of the surface, which one can deal with in one or other of the traditional ways-I have tried to show the scope and limitations of the methods Snow uses. But there is another life, tragic or mysterilously renewing, which is the ‘particular repository of self’ and which lives in ‘a dimension of its own’. How do you represent that ‘sealed off’ dimension in fiction? And how do you associate it with the other dimensions we are usually familiar with? This, I think, is a problem Snow has failed to address himself to. Certainly he has failed to solve it.

How can you sum up a life? Lewis Eliot asks himself. It is impos- sible. ‘Could anyone sum that up for himself, or make an integral as an onlooker might?’ The structure of Strangers and Brothers appears to give Snow the best of both worlds. Lewis Eliot records his own experiences and sums up his own life as best he can; and in the process of doing so he becomes an onlooker and ‘makes an integral’ of the lives of others. For the space of a few chapters of Homecomings he even finds himself in the position of being an onlooker on himself. In other novels he makes an integral of innumerable lives, but principally those of the characters who dominate the plots of each: George Passant in the novel of that name, Roy Calvert in The Light and the Dark, Charles March and his father in The Conscience of the Rich, Roger Quaife in Corridors of Power. In The Masters and


The Affair no single character is thrust into the foreground: we have to deal with several members of a single community-the fellows of a Cambridge college. But of course no method can be expected to function as neatly as that. Nor is it desirable that it should. The fact is, though, that the life that is ‘lived in a dimension of its own’ is as little present in those other people Eliot talks about as it is in himself. Of course there are individuals who have little acquaintance with this life. It is completely sealed off from the rest of their personality. Some of them have it forced on their attention when they are close to death-their own or that of others. That may be one of the reasons why death usually brings out the best in Snow. But there are one or two characters in the sequence who live with this buried self, in the full knowledge of it, for a great deal of the time. So far as I can determine, it is usually the black side of it that they see.

They are all men of outstanding gifts, men who Lewis Eliot freely admits are more intelligent, more gifted, than himself. George Passant is one of them. Roy Calvert, Paul Jag0 and (though he receives nothing like so much attention) David Rubin, are others. I submit that in each case (less so in George Passant’s than the rest) the characters who are said to possess this simultaneously creative and depressing psychological and moral quiddity are singularly inert. In spite of all that is claimed for them they are much less interesting than minor figures like Bidwell, the college servant, R. S . Robinson, or Mr. Vesey; or than either of Lewis Eliot’s landladies, Mrs. Beauchamp and Mrs. Read. Attention is lavished on their enigmatic though dynamic personalities-to little effect. Roy Calvert’s alternation of melancholy and creative genius remains a mystery, not only in its causes but in its psychological appearance also. And as for Jago, ‘The silence of infinite spaces’, we are told, ‘did not terrify him. He felt at one with the heavens; it was through them that he knew a sense of the unseen. But he only spoke of what he could observe’. He only spoke of what he could observe. That is all Snow will speak of, too, if by that we are permitted to include Eliot’s observation of his own judgements. And Roy Calvert’s melancholy does not lend itself to that kind of observation. It does not shape itself into actions that can be dramatized and patterned. The same is true of Jago’s creative flair or Rubin’s scientific genius. Snow tries to get round the problem with George Passant by giving him a circle of admirers to draw him out into a sort of drama; but the circle never materializes, and at the heart of his difficulties George is thrust back on his diary-one of the oldest and often least effective of a novelist’s devices. Instead it is the average- intelligent men’s actions that automatically produce plots for them to live in. People like Arthur Brown and Crystal can form committees and caves, Sir Hector Rose has his departmental board, Roger Quaife his circle of advisers. Therefore they can argue, debate, deceive each other, conduct fascinating and complicated intrigues

The World of C. P. Snow 31 1

behind one another’s backs. This brings me back to my starting point. Snow is at his best

where the circumstances of the action he is describing almost automatically produce a plot. They more or less do it for him. Com- mittees, election:;, trials, interviewing panels, all have plots built into them, built into their very structure. Snow excels at touching up plots which are aJmost ‘given’ to him by the procedures inherent in the situations he: has chosen to describe. When there is no pre- existent plot, he usually fails. And this is pre-eminently the case where the lives of the individuals at the centre of his novels conspicuously lack plot. What could be more rambling than the lives of Roy Calvert and George Pasant? What would Jag0 be doing if he weren’t the (usually) passive spectator of the plots other people are building round him? The trouble with these characters is that either they have very little of the “life of the surface’ or, as in the case of Roy Calvert especially, it is so evidently subordinated to the life that is lived in a dimension of its town that it just drifts away into the events (like the election) that other people contrive on its behalf. Then that other life, with its aimless and logic-less movements from one extreme of feeling to the other, has to do all the work, and the character sinks beneath the author’s inadequacy in the face of the challenge he has set himself. He cam find nothing to do with the character, at this level. In the end, all he: is is words.

A tragic action, as Aristotle spent most of the Poetics explaining, requires a plot. 13ut the plots C. P. Snow is able to work with are just those plots, those ‘given’ plots, that tragedy must do without. Although Snow has a marked sense of symmetry (Strangers and Brothers opens and closes, for example, with an undispatched letter) he has an equally marked inability to construct his own artificial plots; and this is precisely what is required to bring out the truth of suffering through the quite unrealistic patterns of action such plots produce. The plots of Oedipus Rex, or Hamlet, or PhPdre, or even The Wild Duck are not ‘realistic’. A tragic action seems to require this evident and unrealistic patterning of events. But Snow’s commitment to a realistic picture of people in society prevents him from exercizing the imagination that would free his tragic picture of personal life from the constraints of his, in the best sense, pedestrian respect for fact!;. Even with Roy Calvert’s research into Near Eastern languages he sticks to correct documentation rather than allowing himself a welcome flight of fancy: I was not surprised to discover that Soghdian was a real language and that Roy Calvert’s difficulties were real difficulties that scholars were actually en- countering and solving in the ’30s.

None of this would matter if Snow had stuck to the representation of life that occupies most space in the novels he has written. Here, life is not absurd, nor is it necessarily tragic, because it is lived socially, often profoundly so, with all the variety and interest and

3 12 Critical Quarterly

pain that life lived socially provides. In that social context, intimations of the process of renewal ‘that wasn’t in the strictest sense one’s own’, the ‘repository of self’ that ‘lived in a dimension of its own’, might well present themselves from time to time, then disappear again beneath the varied surfaces of day to day living. Snow talks a great deal about ‘the obstructive desire of the flesh to persist’,‘the thrust of looking for the next moment’. I could wish that he had been more successful in showing us this, rather than having LewisEliot insist on it so frequently. But that again is an obeisance to the Russians, to Tolstoy in particular, and it rarely gets beyond verbal formulation. However, the fact is that Snow does evince particular interest in this unsocial self, this mysterious repository of energy and suffering, of creative power and tragic depression. But it refuses to disclose itself in the plots he has discovered, the plots that suit the other, social self so well.

I disagree with Bernard Bergonzi’s attack on Strangers and Brothers, published in The Situation of the Novel. Much of the detail of that attack seems to me unfair. But I think the most general grounds of his dissatisfaction are not so easily dismissed. He writes that ‘There is a conspicuous gap between those American and continental novelists who assert that the changed nature of our sense of reality in the twentieth century has made the traditional novel of character, narrative and action no longer viable; and Snow’s assertion that it remains perennially valid’. It does not seem to me, though, that Snow’s failure to fulfil his own highest ambitions has much to do with the changed nature of our sense of reality in the twentieth century. I think it has to do with his inability to adapt his skills as a novelist to the recognition that his outlook on life is peculiarly divided. On the one hand his meliorist-not merely scientific, but also humane and humanist-attitude to life has encouraged him to write a long novel of almost epic proportions (if not of epic events) which for much of the time functions satis- factorily as a critique of English society. He has tried to produce the effect of lifelikeness by incorporating devices that I should judge he discovered in the Russian and the Victorian/Edwardian novel. But his clumsiness in using these devices, combined with the resistance that is set up against them by the highly plotted texture of his fiction, has left him with a patchy success at best. On the other hand he has often felt constrained to do something quite different. A powerful apprehension of the essential loneliness of life, of its absurd pre- cariousness and its inevitable end, has forced him to explore levels of personality which fail to connect continuously, in terms of cause and effect, or plot, with that ‘epic’ life of the surface. At one point, at least, Eliot’s scepticism about his own freedom, his own responsibility for his life (shared as it appears to be with his creator) bids fair to make any effort of his, including the effort of writing novels,


quite meaningless. But both Eliot and Snow rally. Eliot goes on working and Snow goes on writing. There are still worthwhile things to do, if you are able to put these appalling intimations to one side. But they will not go away. They keep getting into the centre of the picture again whenever Eliot feels impelled to focus his attention on Passant or Calvert or Jago- even, at times, himself. The fact that they won’t go away, though, doesn’t mean that Snow has evolved a satisfactory technique for representing them. The over-all form within which he is writing prevents him from doing so. He cannot avoid, therefore, being pulled in two directions. His humanism and practical intelligence go some way towards reconciling him to the design of the novel that, ultimately, they are responsible for. His sense ad tragedy, incongruous as it is in this setting, makes him uncornfortable with that design, but, in the absence of any conceivable alternative, allows him to struggle on manfully within it.

The tragic vision remains muddled and blurred. The sense of day to day is intermittent, and often compromised by the demands made on it by those splendidly contrived plots. When an imperturbable Indian enters a committee or a courtroom he immediately acquires a name, an address, a purpose, and a story. He might even become perturbed, and evolve a moral conscience. No wonder there are so few of them in C:. P. Snow’s novels. No wonder the novels seem, with all their intelligence and humanity, a little remote from the lives most of us k;now, and that most of us live.

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The World of C. P. Snow