Snow Job

There is, it appears, no business like Snow business: specifically, C. P. Snow and the discovery by theater nobs on both sides of the Atlantic that his panoramic cycle of novels on twentieth-century Britain might fit nicely between the proscenium arches. So far this season, London has enthusiastically greeted The New Men (about scientists and the bomb), while New York has more tepidly received The Affair (academic scandal in a Cambridge college) ; in the works for next season is a dramatization of The Masters (that same Cambridge college again, this time involved in an election of a new master) . All three books have been adapted by veteran British playwright Ronald Millar (“veteran” is one of those delightfully pejorative theatrical adjectives used to describe a personage with a long list of credits and a short supply of talent) and it looks as if he’ll never run out of material. Snow has already completed eight novels in the series, and more are on the way. So—as Wollcott Gibbs once said about another matter— where it will all end knows God.

But on the face of it, putting Snow on stage is not a bad idea. Edmund Wilson recently said that his only objection to Snow’s novels was that they were almost completely unreadable. To call Snow’s prose pedestrian is high praise indeed. His books are humorless and plodding, lacking in both imagination and emotional involvement. Exasperating as his style is, however, his books do generate a certain amount of fascination. At a time when the novel is obsessively concerned with little people and small problems, Snow is trying to weave a tapestry of twentieth-century British society, using as fabric his firsthand knowledge of government and the scientific and academic communities. This takes a large amount of chutzpah, but (at the risk of sounding defensive) who else is doing it? Admittedly Lewis Eliot, narrator of all the books in the cycle, is a bore, and his private life, which at times inundates us, is corrosively uninteresting.

JD

About the Author

John Gregory Dunne

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There is, it appears, no business like Snow business: specifically, C. P. Snow and the discovery by theater nobs on both sides of the Atlantic that his panoramic cycle of novels on twentieth-century Britain might fit nicely between the proscenium arches. So far this season, London has enthusiastically greeted The New Men (about scientists and the bomb), while New York has more tepidly received The Affair (academic scandal in a Cambridge college) ; in the works for next season is a dramatization of The Masters (that same Cambridge college again, this time involved in an election of a new master) . All three books have been adapted by veteran British playwright Ronald Millar (“veteran” is one of those delightfully pejorative theatrical adjectives used to describe a personage with a long list of credits and a short supply of talent) and it looks as if he’ll never run out of material. Snow has already completed eight novels in the series, and more are on the way. So—as Wollcott Gibbs once said about another matter— where it will all end knows God.

But on the face of it, putting Snow on stage is not a bad idea. Edmund Wilson recently said that his only objection to Snow’s novels was that they were almost completely unreadable. To call Snow’s prose pedestrian is high praise indeed. His books are humorless and plodding, lacking in both imagination and emotional involvement. Exasperating as his style is, however, his books do generate a certain amount of fascination. At a time when the novel is obsessively concerned with little people and small problems, Snow is trying to weave a tapestry of twentieth-century British society, using as fabric his firsthand knowledge of government and the scientific and academic communities. This takes a large amount of chutzpah, but (at the risk of sounding defensive) who else is doing it? Admittedly Lewis Eliot, narrator of all the books in the cycle, is a bore, and his private life, which at times inundates us, is corrosively uninteresting.