Inadequate Mirrors

C. P. Snow, whose novels read as if they were the products of a collaboration, over sherry, between Anthony Trollope and a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson, once explained that he writes the way he does because the “wicked, absurd social attitudes” implicit in the way his contemporaries write had helped to bring “Auschwitz that much nearer.” (This hallucination, that novels make things happen, is common among people who write them.) Mr. Snow’s own novels are as far from Auschwitz as they are from Agincourt; they constitute instead the literature of the National Health Service, and celebrate a world of committees, compromise, decisions and revisions, a world in which Civil-Service Hamlets Behave Well in Difficult Situations.

In his soporific, best-selling The Affair (Scribner’s, $4.50), Mr. Snow’s quivering protagonist is again Lewis Eliot, whose monumentally uninteresting socio-emotional anatomy has been probed in more novels than that of Lanny Budd. (Three more are promised.) In The Affair, Eliot aligns himself with the “liberal and speculative” element of Cambridge to defend a Fellow accused of scientific fraud. The accused is an unattractive Fellow; . the accusers have among them the devious, ulterior, and merely lazy motives of the human condition. The intention here is familiar: we are again watching an institution (Justice, this inning) at bat against the frailties of those who serve it—a favorite conflict among those “liberal and speculative” novelists who are perpetually astonished at mortal imperfections, those tender-but-right-minded souls who are forever discovering afresh that an apple is gone from the Tree of Knowledge, and rushing to register a complaint with the proper bureau. Lionel Trilling once defined “the desperate weakness” of Liberalism as an inadequacy of imagination: “Liberalism is always being surprised.” Mr. Snow and his admirers count among the chronically surprised.

JD

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Joan Didion

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C. P. Snow, whose novels read as if they were the products of a collaboration, over sherry, between Anthony Trollope and a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson, once explained that he writes the way he does because the “wicked, absurd social attitudes” implicit in the way his contemporaries write had helped to bring “Auschwitz that much nearer.” (This hallucination, that novels make things happen, is common among people who write them.) Mr. Snow’s own novels are as far from Auschwitz as they are from Agincourt; they constitute instead the literature of the National Health Service, and celebrate a world of committees, compromise, decisions and revisions, a world in which Civil-Service Hamlets Behave Well in Difficult Situations.

In his soporific, best-selling The Affair (Scribner’s, $4.50), Mr. Snow’s quivering protagonist is again Lewis Eliot, whose monumentally uninteresting socio-emotional anatomy has been probed in more novels than that of Lanny Budd. (Three more are promised.) In The Affair, Eliot aligns himself with the “liberal and speculative” element of Cambridge to defend a Fellow accused of scientific fraud. The accused is an unattractive Fellow; . the accusers have among them the devious, ulterior, and merely lazy motives of the human condition. The intention here is familiar: we are again watching an institution (Justice, this inning) at bat against the frailties of those who serve it—a favorite conflict among those “liberal and speculative” novelists who are perpetually astonished at mortal imperfections, those tender-but-right-minded souls who are forever discovering afresh that an apple is gone from the Tree of Knowledge, and rushing to register a complaint with the proper bureau. Lionel Trilling once defined “the desperate weakness” of Liberalism as an inadequacy of imagination: “Liberalism is always being surprised.” Mr. Snow and his admirers count among the chronically surprised.