Anthony Powell’s centenary last year was rightly celebrated; not much notice, I think, was taken of C. P. Snow’s. This was hardly surprising. Shares in ‘Snow Preferred’ are, in Wodehouse’s phrase, ‘down in the cellar with no takers’. I would guess that very few under the age of, say, 50 have read the 11 volumes of his Strangers and Brothers sequence, published between 1940 and 1970. Yet he was then regarded as a major English novelist, and the sequence as being as important and ambitious as Powell’s.
Malcolm Bradbury, who had, I suspect, as a young man a greater admiration for Snow’s work than when he came to write The Modern English Novel (1993), described the sequence as
modern history seen from the inside, an account of the intentions and conflicts of the teachers, academics, lawyers, politicians, scientists and bureaucrats who over the troubled and often anarchic march of history hope to make reason, justice and progress prevail in human affairs, and who eventually shape and administer the changes in postwar Britain.
This is a fair enough summary, though it makes the novels seem more arid than they are. But at least it makes it clear that Snow had a real and worthwhile subject matter, something that can’t be said of all admired novelists today. He wrote for grown-ups and he is one of the few English novelists capable of writing seriously and intelligently about public life, about men — rarely women — who get things done.
There’s a passage in Homecomings, one of the best novels in the sequence, which admirably displays his understanding of these matters. His narrator, Lewis Eliot, a lawyer, is a wartime civil servant; the head of his department, Hector Rose, is a man with an ‘aptitude for power’.
Since the war began he had been totally immersed in it, carrying responsibility without a blink. It was a lesson to me, I sometimes thought, about how wrong one can be. For, in the great political divide before the war, it was not only Lufkin’s business associates who were on the opposite side to me. Bevill, the old aristocratic handyman of a politician, had been a Municheer; so had Rose and other up-and- coming civil servants. I had not known Rose then; if I had done I should have distrusted him when it came to a crisis. I should have been dead wrong. Actually when war came Bevill and Rose were as wholehearted as men could be. Compared with my friends on the irregular Left, their nerves were stronger.
That passage shows many of Snow’s strengths: his lucidity, his fairness, his grasp of character, his understanding of both the nature and demands of public life. He is capable of dealing with big subjects: The New Men, for example, is concerned with the moral and political questions arising from the project to develop the atom bomb. He knows the importance of work to his characters. You feel that his businessmen might really be capable of running a business and his civil servants of managing a department.
His weaknesses are equally apparent. His power of invention was poor. Though he sometimes brings off brief and effective snatches of scene-setting, there is no poetry in him and, worse for a novelist, precious little humour. (Powell, recalling a trip to a writers’ conference in Bulgaria, thought he ‘conveyed the impression of having emerged from the pages of one of his own works . . . he did not himself deal in jokes, but had no objection to them). When he attempts a comic character — the aged don M. H. L. Gay in The Masters, for instance — he is not successful. Then his seriousness can drift into solemity, pomposity even. His prose has a machine-made ring. The understanding of character sometimes dwindles into a man-of-affairs knowingness, judgments too easy, glib, unearned. As against that, he is good on frustration, disappointment, envy, resentment.
He doesn’t deserve his present neglect. Certainly the work is dated. He wrote of academics before they were thrust into the market-place, of civil servants confident in their ability to manage the affairs of the nation and not yet beset by the whims and follies of management consultants. The ‘corridors of power’ — title of one of the novels, but already used in an earlier one — ring differently now. In his time he was compared to Trollope, and it may be that his posthumous reputation will be like Trollope’s too: a period of neglect, when his work was despised or disparaged by a more self-conscious generation of novelists and critics, followed by a return to favour, that return being led by the Common Reader.
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