group:
There are a dozen or more promising novelists in England-Doris Lessing, William Cooper, Emyr Humphreys, Francis King, Kingsley Amis, J. D. Scott, Brigid Brophy, John Wyllie are some of the best. Not one of these, in his practice, shows any interest in the sensibility novel or the avant garde of ten or twenty years ago. Several of them have explicitly and roughly savaged it. None of them wants to shrink away from society; their attitude to their art is much tougher than their immediate predecessors; some of them are going to be heard of.
Like Amis, Snow at times wrote mysteries; in fact, his career as a novelist began with a detective novel,
Is Joyce's writing little more than the by-product of a repressed culture? Snow often complained about sexually explicit writing (as in his comment about Joyce's 'onanistic reveries') — is it really Joyce who is the prudish one? And again: can Woolf and Forster really be considered «cold-hearted» or 'lacking in real introspective candor'? Snow's dismissals often seem to be ill-considered or biased.
In different places Snow expressed a number of objections to modernist fiction: that it was unreadable; that it alienated ordinary readers; that it was causing the death of the novel; that it provided unsuitable models for younger writers; that it was hostile to science; that it was politically reactionary; that it was mindless; that it was arcane; that it -904- was old-fashioned; that it was not truly experimental; and that it was too much like abstract painting. Some of these charges can be found in a New York Times Book Review essay he published in 1955:
The coroners of literature gathered hopefully around. The novels which were receiving the serious attention were the mindless and unreadable novels of sensibility. The coroners said that the novel was dead. The gap between this specialized art and any reading public was getting wider and wider. Plenty of novels, some good, some bad were reaching the reading public; but they were not the novels literary persons were writing about. Many intelligent readers were just plain baffled. They did not have the patience to follow the course of this esthetic war; but when asked to venerate-or above all, read-wodges of moment-by-moment sensation, they passively went on strike.
If modernist writing was on the verge of killing off the novel, how would this aesthetic homicide be accomplished? If large numbers of readers, reacting to Woolf's or Joyce's or Forster's novels, 'passively went on strike,' Snow gives no proof beyond anecdotal evidence. And if some modernist novels are challenging, there seems to be little evidence that 'intelligent readers' en masse have been repelled by modernist writing generally-by such works as Mrs. Dalloway or A Passage to India or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Once again, Snow's charges cannot stand up to very much scrutiny.
Another of Snow's allegations had to do with the modernists' political views. Like Amis and Wilson, Snow was nettled by the middleclass conservatism of the Bloomsbury Group, but his allegations often went further than theirs. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Snow attacked the modernists for their reactionary politics:
This syndrome is seen at its most complete in writers like T. E. Hulme, Joyce, or Pound. It has been visible in a considerable sector of advanced literature all through the first half of the century. It is a social and psychological phenomenon of some interest, and I hope to deal with it a little more fully some time, in particular to explore the connection which seems to be close, though not in individual practitioners inevitable, between this sector of advanced literature and extreme social reaction-not conservatism, but extreme social reaction. This is a connection which is now dear, though, through a curious deficiency in social insight, we were slow to see it.
Whatever one might say about Hulme or Pound, Joyce-Snow's real target-was no social reactionary; nor does Snow ever submit evidence that he was. Snow's approach is based on guilt by association: if Hulme -905- and Pound were both reactionaries and modernists, Joyce must also have been both. Interestingly, Snow has little to say about Hulme or Pound in his literary discussions; their names mainly come up in discussions of the modernists' political views.
Snow presents a similar argument in
Can it truly be argued that 'nine out often of those who have dominated literary sensibility in our time… most of the famous twentieth century writers' contributed enough to Nazi ideology to 'bring Auschwitz that much nearer'? Snow somehow manages to forget that Joyce and Woolf-the novelists whose names recur in his literary attacks- were neither pro-Nazi nor anti-Semitic. Could Snow have been unaware that Joyce was, if anything, philo-Semitic, or that Woolf married a Jew? Here again Snow is imprecise in representing that which he instinctively dislikes.
The central idea in Snow's attack on the modernists is that the work of an anti-Semite or reactionary must ipso facto be condemned. But when he finds it convenient, Snow can relinquish this principle. In
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are among Snow's favorite authors. Writing in the Review of English Literature he said that he considered them-along with Proust, Balzac, and Dickens-the five best novelists of all time. In his 1978 critical study The Realists, Snow included chapters on these writers as well as Stendhal, Henry James, and the nineteenthcentury Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. Trollope, George Eliot, and Wells are among the other English novelists Snow admired. In general Snow praises those nineteenth-century novelists who give real-906- istic portrayals of contemporary social issues: elements that are no less important in Snow's own novels.
One of the reasons Snow is so opposed to modernist writing is its emphasis on individuals, particularly on socially alienated individuals. For him, 'the novel only breathes freely when it has its roots in society.' In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus takes a distinctly contrary view: art that is primarily driven by social or moral concerns becomes too much like propaganda; and Joyce tried to keep his own writing from being subverted by social or political influences.
This provides another explanation for Snow's antagonism toward Joyce. Snow, an establishment figure, exemplified the very converse of the alienated individual; he believed in working from within the system. With the end of Churchill's dominance came a period when the Labour Party introduced reforms that would put talent ahead of heredity in determining social and political advancement. Snow-a scientist, science writer, academic, novelist, critic, and government administrator-was himself a good example of the kind of talented person who could rise in such an environment, and he was often invited to do government work. In the late 1930s he served on a committee whose mission was to recruit scientists for the British war effort; he subsequently became director of technical personnel for the British Ministry of Labor. After World War II he was put in charge of scientific personnel for the English Electric Company; later, he joined its board of directors. From 1945 to 1960, he served in the government as civil service commissioner; in 1964 he became parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Technology.
Snow referred to those who were achieving positions of leadership in postwar Britain as 'the new men' (women were apparently not perceived as a part of the meritocracy). Researchers, administrators, academics, civil servants, members of the professions: the best would rise to the top regardless of origins. In a transformed society those who had inherited titles, wealth, or influence would be replaced by the new men, who would in turn take on the task of building a better society. This combination of privilege and responsibility was an integral part of the
