Author who strode the ‘Corridors of Power’

Press, 25 May 1984, Page 14

Author who strode the ‘Corridors of Power’

By

KEITH BRACE,

literary editor,

“Birmingham Post”

One traditional glory of British television that is avidly followed and admired in many countries is the serial drawn from a classic novel or sequence of novels. Earlier this year, the late Paul Scott’s quartet of books about the last days of the British in India, “The Jewel in the Crown,” (bought by the N.Z.B.C. but not yet scheduled), received wide critical and audience approval. More quietly, the “Strangers and Brothers” sequence of 11 novels by the late C. P. Snow (no decision yet made by N.Z.B.C. to buy the series) also unfolded its complex picture of the British in power, this time in their own country.

Paul Scott’s novels have proved easier to turn into television. They can be tested against viewers’ own experiences of personal relationships. But there is only Snow’s word for how public men behave behind the closed doors of what he called “the corridors of power.” Snow, having belonged to all three, thought of himself as an ambassador between the scientific world, the world of government, and the literary, humanistic world. He referred to the “two cultures’ (the scientific and the humanist) and publicly regretted that they did not understand each other. For saying this he was savaged by a militant Cambridge literary critic, the late F. R. Leavis - mostly for suggesting that there was such a thing as a scientific culture Snow had special qualifications for writing about these yaned worlds. Born in Leicester in tne English Midlands in 1905, he came from, the lower middle classes, winning his way by scholarship to

grammar school and on to Christ’s College, Cambridge. At Cambridge in the 1920 s he was a young experimental physicist under the great atomic scientist, Rutherford. Gradually, he moved across to fulfil his other ambition, the writing of fiction.

In the Second World War he was a top civil servant, responsible for the recruiting of scientists into war-time scientific work, including the critical early stages of the atom bomb. The moral crises which they later created is the subject of one of Snow’s best novels, “The New Men.”

Snow was knighted in 1957 and in the 1960 s served as a junior minister in Harold Wilson’s Administration. He was made a life peer in 1964. Throughout his political life he was at the same time a prolific novelist, polemicist, and book reviewer.

Snow’s work has been admired in many countries, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union (where it has tended to be read as a picture of the natural corruption of power in the capitalist West); but not in France, to his lasting puzzlement.

He spoke out strongly about the anxieties of his time, addressing a wide audience, high and middlebrow, such as few writers have done since H. G. Wells. In fact, Snow resembled Wells in his breadth of scientific, political, and literary experience.

It was as a novelist that he hoped to be remembered — although his novels are so vividly and journalistically of their time and place that they have already dated. The moral outrage in a late book, “The Sleep of Reason,” stirred by some notorious murders, has already lost some of its dramatic edge. On the other hand, the moral issues of the Bomb in “The New Men” are still dramatically with us.

The books have been particularly attacked for their alleged lack of conviction in portraying relationships between’ men and women, and this is certainly not a strong point in them. Nevertheless, there is a certain wan British realism about the low-powered sexual relationships in the novels, the low sexual impulse of men obsessed by the greater lusts and satisfactions of power and influence. The novels and the television series have also been criticised for their dependence on one narrator, Lewis Eliot, who is a faceless “I” in the books but necessarily a visible character in the television series.

This is undoubtedly a weakness and Snow sometimes regretted having committed himself to it as it involved creating an implausibly complex life for Eliot. Snow, often criticised for stilted dialogue, was in fact a master of the speech of Britain’s Establishment. Here men “utter” instead of

“say” and answer a knock on the door with: “Enter pray.” He understood the verbal jockeying for position at the High Table of a Cambridge college and the strange, oblique dialogue spoken by the senior civil servants to puzzle their less sophisticated political masters. Despite hostile criticism, the novels, and the television versions of them, have a special atmosphere and a kind of muted prose-poetry, which make them outstanding among their contemporaries. Few modem British novels tell much about the workings of power in Britain’s civil service. Few have dared to reveal that many men are far more stimulated by power than they are by sex. Snow has also dared to say, in an age characterised by deep mistrust of those in power, that such men are honest and uncorrupt, loyal to their chiefs, and loyal to the electorate they serve. There is, too, the prose-poet in Snow, the poet of quiet Cambridge courts, of the inarticulate, unfulfilled passions of lonely men and women, the tight-lipped but passionate ambition of the man who narrates the novels.

In one of Snow’s most haunting images, Lewis Eliot as a young man wonders what goes on behind the lighted blinds in Whitehall, the Inns of Court, or the university Master’s Lodge. When he eventually finds himself behind those lighted blinds he is disappointed by what he finds.

Perhaps the moral of this odd, oblique, and compelling series of novels, and their television version, s that power is not enough after all. — London Press Service.

The books of the novelist, C. P. Snow (below), are enjoying a revival in Britain, due mainly to the successful adaptation for television of his “Strangers and Brothers” sequence of novels, which he began writing in 1940. Snow’s work has been admired throughout the world; the man who began his career as a scientist and later became a government minister, will always be remembered for his ability to create and describe the atmosphere of working in Britain’s “corridors of power.” Charles Percy Snow, created Lord Snow in 1964, was 74 when he died in 1980.