The Columbia History of the British Novel

credo of the new men, and was also at the root of Snow's literary outlook: for him, it seemed unthinkable that artistic considerations should take precedence over one's obligation to society. Hence any literature that seemed to be promoting social alienation had to be rejected. -907-

Snow's Strangers and Brothers series has as a central theme a chronicling of the development of the new meritocracy. Lewis Eliot, the central figure in the series, is, as Snow himself was, one of the new men (indeed, Snow used the phrase for the title of a novel in the series). Snow's social realism is well suited to its subject; together with his celebration of the rise of the new class, it makes his fiction somewhat similar to that of the Marxist social realists.

Like the Marxist writers, Snow held that artists must put social concerns ahead of aesthetic considerations. Related to this art-versus-society question is a congruent issue, that of the place of morality in art. For many of the critics who were Snow's contemporaries-F. R. Leavis is perhaps the best-known example-the greatest novels were those with a strong ethical element. Such works were deemed superior to any that focused on aesthetic concerns; thus the decadence of fin-de-siècle art was attributed to a divestiture of moral concern brought on by an overly aesthetic approach. Leavis himself was not very receptive to modernist writing, and Joyce was pointedly omitted from his list of those who had maintained the great tradition in novel writing.

If Snow had harbored hopes that this apparent consonance of views would win him Leavis's admiration, he was very much mistaken. Leavis saw Snow as a member of a resented Oxbridge-London literary establishment; and in a 1961 farewell speech at Downing College, Cambridge, he launched a notably caustic attack on Snow. Snow, Leavis told his audience, 'can't be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions… I am trying to remember where I heard it (can I have dreamed it?) that they are composed for him by an electronic brain called Charlie, into which the instructions are fed in the form of the chapter headings.' Even if Snow's writing is often uninspired, such invective can hardly be justified. (Interestingly, another of Leavis's immoderate attacks was directed at Amis: he once raised the fantastic charge that Amis was a pornographer.) Another reason for Leavis's sharpness was Snow's 'two cultures' argument; in describing an apparent rift between scientists and humanists, Snow sided with the scientists. Leavis, of course, would have numbered himself among the humanists being chided about their ignorance of scientific matters.

Snow often wrote sympathetically about science, in his fiction as well as in his essays. In 1933 he published (anonymously) New Lives for Old, a work that provides a Wellsian glimpse of life in a more technological-908- ly advanced society. In Snow's first successful novel, The Search (1934), the central figure is a scientist who, like Snow himself, eventually decides to give up his scientific career.

In 1940 Snow published Strangers and Brothers, the first book in the eleven-novel Strangers and Brothers series (in order to avoid confusion Snow later changed this novel's name to George Passant). Told in the first person, the Strangers and Brothers novels deal with the observations and experiences of Lewis Eliot, a lawyer, academic, and government committee member; the action follows his progress from youth to old age. Snow's characters are often men of power and influence; many hold prestigious university affiliations or important government posts. The series is both a roman-fleuve and a roman U+00EO clef, and in interviews with the critic John Halperin, Snow took the trouble to identify many of the living counterparts to his characters. In the same way, Lewis Eliot is very much like C. P. Snow, a similarity which the author himself has acknowledged.

While Lewis Eliot is the narrator of the Strangers and Brothers novels, the characters at center stage in most of these works are his friends and acquaintances. The eponymous hero of the 1940 novel George Passant is an idealistic lawyer and teacher of law whose passion is helping young people; Passant befriends Lewis Eliot and a number of his friends, some of whom will reappear in Snow's later novels. George Passant ends with a trial: Eliot's his old benefactor has been accused of fraud, and Eliot-now a practicing lawyer-serves on Passant's defense team.

The Light and the Dark (1946) is set in Cambridge before and during World War II. Its protagonist, Roy Calvert, is a young Orientalist; and the drama in the novel evolves out of its descriptions of academic politics. Calvert is brilliant, witty, and dashing, but suffers from depression; eventually, realizing that he will never escape from his mental illness, he volunteers for dangerous war duty and dies in action.

Academic politics is no less important in The Masters (1951), whose action hinges on the election of a new master for a Cambridge college. Snow is good at describing small-group politics, and in this work he has found his subject. Snow's shrewd insights as the candidates vie for support make this his most interesting book. In another novel, The Affair (1960), Snow describes the furor over a Cambridge college's decision to dismiss a fellow. Once again Snow deals with academic politics; but the theme, by now a familiar one for his readers, is handled less successfully than in the earlier works.

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In The New Men (1954) Snow returns to the world of science, describing events surrounding the development of the atomic bomb; the protagonist is Lewis Eliot's brother Martin, a physicist. In Corridors of Power (1964) political issues are examined on a higher level than in the other novels: that of affairs of state. However, Corridors of Power lacks the immediacy and persuasiveness of Snow's earlier fiction, perhaps in part because his work as a civil servant never quite brought him into the realm he depicts, that of the highest echelons of government.

Other works in Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, like those of the writers Snow admired, center on some important or interesting facet of contemporary society. In The Conscience of the Rich (1964) Snow describes a wealthy Jewish family; and in The Sleep of Reason (1968) he deals with student uprisings and depicts events that resemble the famous Moors Murders trial that had taken place a few years before.

Time of Hope (1949) and Homecomings (1956) deal mainly with events in Lewis Eliot's life. The first tells about Eliot's student years and the second about his marriage to the unstable Sheila-a marriage that ends with her suicide. Last Things (1970), the concluding book of the Strangers and Brothers series, returns to Eliot, who has remarried; the novel also serves as a denouement for the entire series, filling in details about the characters who had earlier appeared in it.

After the publication of Last Things, Snow completed three more novels. The Malcontents (1972) centers on the relationships of parents and children, and is in part based on Snow's own experiences as a father. In Their Wisdom (1974) tells of a serious eye operation like the one experienced by Snow himself and also described in The Sleep of Reason and Last Things. Snow's final novel, A Coat of Varnish (1978) is, like his first, a detective mystery.

As a novelist Snow adheres to the realistic principles of the nineteenth-century writers and avoids symbolism, allegory, and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Even so, the realism in Snow's novels sometimes breaks down. Lewis Eliot, like many first-person narrators, is continually enlisted as a confessor; he is made party to so many secrets that the reader's credulity is strained. Moreover, the characters in Snow's novels continually express their respect and admiration for Eliot; because he is so much like his author one begins to lose faith in the objectivity of the narrative, and another component of the nineteenth-century realistic aesthetic is undermined. -910-

Snow's writing can be lackluster; the situations he describes are often predictable and recounted with little charm or humor. For all his democratic protestations, he sometimes seems snobbish, ready to titillate readers with a glimpse into the lives of the wealthy or powerful. At its best, however, his writing is engaging. Snow describes a period of change marked by technological discoveries, the rise of the welfare state, educational reforms, and altered class structures. He captures the mood of this era, and in doing so provides an understanding of the modus vivendi of the new British elite.

Angus Wilson

Like Amis and Snow, Angus Wilson was active as a critic, and his literary preferences can to some degree be defined by the subjects of his studies: Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels (1952), The World of Charles Dickens (1970), and The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977). In various essays Wilson indicated that Richardson, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Proust, and Dickens were among the writers who had most influenced him. Again like Amis and Snow, Wilson became central in the movement to revive interest in nineteenth-century fiction. As he explained in 1957, 'I've deliberately tried to get back to the Dickens tradition.' A few years later Wilson described his general approach to writing fiction: 'My own novels are essentially traditional in form and my preoccupation is strongly-too strongly for some critics-a social and moral one.'

For Wilson, as for other writers of the period, an emphasis on social concerns was linked to a rejection of