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So life moved placidly forward, from nonage to nonagenarianism, and boredom was the worst thing that could happen to him. For that he was duly grateful. ‘Critics have sometimes said,’ he remarked in a brief foreword to B. J. Kirkpatrick’s bibliography in 1964,
and sometimes intended it as a compliment, that I have written very little. They must change their tune now. I shall certainly change mine,
sounding surprised to discover he had written so much. The list covers hundreds of pages, and much of it concerns the long years after the ‘arctic summer,’ as he called his short period of fictional inspiration. He viewed it all distantly, by his last years, and allowed others to view it as if the work of another being and another mind. I am grateful to have been allowed, all too briefly, to share it too, and amazed at my own good fortune to have known him at all.
22. C.P. Snow
Heavy of jowl, shambling of gait, ponderous of voice, his manner was still affable. C.P. Snow had a kindly, avuncular air. But the air of an impressive uncle: you felt its weight. By the time I first knew him, when he was in his forties, he had come a long way and seemed intent on going much further, both in life and in letters, which he did. The way, as he believed, was forward.
He was born in a back street in Leicester, where his father worked as a clerk in a shoe factory, and went to the university college there, taking an external degree at London University; then a doctorate in physics at Cambridge in 1930, where he became a Fellow of Christ’s College. For ten years from 1935 he was a college tutor. Some early research on infra-red spectroscopy had been a failure, one gathered, by sheer misfortune, its findings unconfirmed – a disappointment alluded to in his early novel The Search. By 1953, however, when we first met, all that was hearsay. Always ambitious, he decided that if he could not be Einstein he would be Shakespeare, but a Shakespeare of the novel. His first novel had already appeared in 1932, in his late twenties, when he was barely embarked on academic life. Meanwhile he played and watched cricket, for which he had an endless passion, lived the life of an amorous bachelor and administered his college.
Then, in 1939, came war, and G. H. Hardy, a Cambridge mathematician who kept an apartment in London for his pleasure, told him he could use it. There was no pleasure to be had among falling bombs. So Snow settled in London and let an academic career run out. He had always wanted to be where power was, and adored meeting important people. He never lost contact with his college, however, and when I went to see him in London in his last years he seemed to know more about Cambridge life than I did, though I lived there. Above all he knew the top flight and who was about to enter it: the next head of department, the next college master. Life was a power-game, and more than a game. Life was about excelling.
A novel-writing scientist is naturally inclined to think science undervalued among the literary, and that was the governing conviction of his life. Science was remaking the world, and it was high time the literary intelligentsia noticed it and respected it. It was a view shared by many in his age, and earlier still by H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. Science, and still more technology, was the future of mankind, and one of Snow’s favourite phrases was about those who had the future in their bones. He was emphatically and insistently one of them. In fact he had the future in his bones and all over him. His fascination was with the thing about to be, and the past, you often felt – and the present too, for that matter – had better get out of the way.
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In 1939 he joined a group organised by the Royal Society to harness British science to the war effort, and a career in public life began. The next year Strangers and Brothers appeared, and gave its name to a string of novels about the administration of power in contemporary Britain. Some say its hero, an academic lawyer called Lewis Eliot, was an idealised version of the author. At all events a twin-track career in fiction and administration had begun, and it lasted down to his death in 1980.
The twinning was amply reflected in the novels. The Masters, which appeared in 1951, was about the election of the head of a college, and it shocked some readers innocent of academic life with its searing portrait of internecine strife among the learned. Academic readers had no such problem – ‘a pale reflection of the real thing,’ one of them once assured me – but they were mildly alarmed by its close resemblance to events in his own college. Snow was not one to let the dust settle, and he wrote about what he knew.
He had few illusions about the reading habits of the famous. In fiction Winston Churchill, he once told me, read little but C. S. Forester; Harold Macmillan read Trollope; and Harold Wilson read detective stories like Agatha Christie, though he also liked political biographies. Snow wrote novels to teach them more about the world they were in. Literature was his vocation, and his love of technology seems to have been a matter of high principle rather than of practice. Domestic gadgets seldom worked for him, and in a car or plane someone else had to buckle his seat-belt.
Three years later The New Men was about nuclear science; and in 1964 Corridors of Power treated the relations between senior civil servants and politicians. The novels sold, and probably achieved something of their didactic intent, which was to inform the world about how in practice power interacts with personality even among the elite – foibles, private hates and loves. It was a very Trollopian vision of the world, as Snow knew: he was rewriting Trollope’s Palliser novels a century on. The British needed to be told about themselves. They should know that power is about administration as well as celebrities, patronage as well as policies, love and friendship as well as ability, and private deals as well as ideologies and manifestoes. Politics is not all platforms and sound-bites. It is about who, in corridors or behind closed doors, talks to whom; it is about smoke-filled rooms.
Honours flowed in. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a peer in 1964, when Harold Wilson became prime minister, and was appointed a parliamentary private secretary to Wilson’s new Ministry of Technology. He was never in the cabinet, however, and his brief passage as a junior minister was stormy and inconclusive. A remark in the House of Lords about sending his son to Eton did not endear him to the Labour rank-and-file, and in 1966 he left government, though he often reappeared at the Palace of Westminster, especially in the bar of the Lords. In fact Westminster was his club, and as a club he loved it. But he was no more a politician than he had been a scientist, though he knew what it was to be both, and the public platform meant as little to him as it had meant to Trollope. Nor could you imagine him in a campaigning role, on the stump. When he was ennobled in 1964, someone wittily remarked he should take the title Lord Corridor of Power, and it would have suited him. He was a man made for corridors – still more the comfortable armchair, whiskey in hand. Oratory meant nothing to him.
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Meanwhile, in his mid-forties, he had wed a divorced novelist. In October 1950, after an actively amorous career, he married Pamela Hansford Johnson, and they had a son. The occasion took place in the chapel of Christ’s College, and it would have made a scene in a novel, though not a novel by Snow, who was never a master of high farce. The dean disapproved of the match so gravely that he refused to attend, and the address was given by a junior cleric who favoured marine imagery: ‘…Charles and Pamela, embarking on the great ocean of married life.’ The wife of a colleague whispered loudly to him in the congregation: ‘He makes it sound rather like the Kon-Tiki expedition.’ At the wedding breakfast another colleague congratulated Snow – ‘Very nice, Charles,’ pointing to the bride, who stood radiant across the room. ‘She’s not young, you know,’ said Snow. ‘She has two children.’ ‘Oh really, how old?’ ‘Thirty-eight.’
The marriage was a notable success, and in their last years, as two bestselling novelists, they occupied a large house in London near Eaton Square with a resident housekeeper – the only British housekeeper, Snow would say proudly, in that part of London, where domestics are commonly immigrants. Snow would meet
you affably outside his front door, standing welcomingly on the pavement with a cocktail-shaker and agitating it happily in one hand while he waved with the other. Both enjoyed a drink, but in other respects they were a contrasting couple: he slow of delivery, she lightning quick – and the contrast was reflected in their writing and in their talk. Once in 1953, when we were discussing the recent death of Dylan Thomas, he remarked with infinite gravity: ‘Not a great poet, perhaps, but a considerable poet.’ It was a judgement that sounded as if it were ready to be carved in stone.
A contrast of style ran though their lives. His writing was laborious, as he often confessed, hers brisk and often effortless. It was never in doubt which was the natural writer of the two. Pamela was also learned, in a literary way, a highly intelligent being who had trained her mind above all through reading and rereading Proust. But then you felt she could command any subject, see the point of any book, at a stroke. His own progress had been more painful. ‘I have read every great book written since the Renaissance,’ he once told a friend in his early years, in the 1930s. Both were self-educated in the literary arts. But she had mastered style.
Snow was no stylist, and it would be hard to recall a memorable sentence from his writings. He achieved clarity by revision. Trollope was his master, and I suspect he would have thought Dickens too flashy and Thackeray too wayward. Modernism in the fashion of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf meant little or nothing to him. He wrote because he thought people needed to be told things about the world around them, much as Trollope had done. Most fiction, after all, is about the leisure occupations of leisured people. Trollope and Snow, in their exceptional way, wrote above all about work.
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The difference lay in the futuristic note that Snow loved to strike, most controversially in his Cambridge lecture of 1959 on The Two Cultures, which were science and the arts. F. R. Leavis’ attack three years later was too abusive to damage him, and it certainly did Leavis’s name, in the very year of his retirement, no good at all. The controversy quickly became international – a famous instance of what Americans used to call British intellectual knife-throwing – and it involved some of the great names of American criticism like Lionel Trilling. But the weaknesses of Snow’s argument were not clearly seen at the time. Arts and sciences are not really equivalent cases, and knowing the laws of thermodynamics is not like watching a play by Shakespeare. It is more like being able to define blank verse, and most who watch Shakespeare could not do that and do not need to. A technicality is only worth having if you know what to do with it. The arts, in any case, do not despise the sciences, as Snow assumed. They are more often reverent of the vast and mysterious achievement of the scientific revolution as it unfolds before them. Ignorance can mask respect. The literary mind is better at disguising that anxious sense of inferiority than Snow ever knew.
He was surely right to believe that Western industrial societies need to know more about how decisions are taken. He took a good deal for granted, however, about where the future lay. Like H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley he foresaw a brave new world: a planned economy directed by scientists, technicians and planners, along with those who had learned to listen to them. It would have been surprising, as a man of the 1930s, if he had taken any other view, but in fact the future lay elsewhere. His heresy was about to be exposed. As the world economy grew bigger and ever more complex, planning moved from the difficult to the impossible, and a free market came to look not only superior but inevitable. The future in Snow’s bones had misled him. The world was not moving to Marx. It was moving to Adam Smith. There can be no jobs without investment, it was soon clear, and no investment without freedom.
His mind, for all that, continued to range, and he was forever on the prowl for something new. At our last meeting he told me that he and Pamela were both reading the Spanish novels of Pérez Galdós on life in Madrid in the 1880s and 1890s. His love of Trollope never left him, however, and you can see why. Trollope too was an administrator (at the Post Office) and a failed politician, in the sense of having stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, and Snow’s 1975 biography was the first to put administration at the heart of his life, and above all the intertwining of a private life with a public one. It is a book that sums up an aspiration. Trollope seemed to Snow unattainable in his excellence, and Snow never equalled his ear for dialogue. The truth is he had no ear at all, and could not even carry a tune. With Trollope, by contrast, the printed page tells you unfailingly the music of the voices. His prose sings.
His friends speculated endlessly about his originals: not surprisingly, since Snow sometimes consulted them, as he wrote, to see if he had got them right. You were meant to guess. The original of Jago in The Masters was a medieval historian at Christ’s College called Anthony Steel who, disappointed in not being elected Master only two years before the novel appeared, went to Cardiff to be Principal of its University College. Colleagues often debated the resemblance. They could see little between Steel and Jago, much between their wives. But then Snow never minded stirring debate.
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In politics he was a highly conservative Communist. That will only sound like a contradiction to those who never travelled in the Soviet empire or saw its nomenklatura with its family connections and its ample privileges. Communism was a highly conservative idea, fearful of the social radicalism that competitive capitalism brings in its wake, and there are long passages in Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 that anticipate, in sentiment at least, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: how the wicked bourgeoisie had demolished ancient institutions, threatened the values of family life, debased morality and destroyed the traditional world of hearth and home. Bertolt Brecht, a German Communist, is reported to have said ‘Communism is not radical – capitalism is radical,’ and the Snows would have emphatically agreed. A workers’ revolution was urgently needed to throw on the brakes and return Europe to something like a lost world of hierarchy and order.
Soviet conservatism continued to attract him long after he had given up on Marx, and he continued to visit Moscow in his last years and to revel in its official banquets. The point was seen in Moscow too. On reading The Masters the Soviet ambassador in London once told him: ‘Your academic politics are like our Kremlin politics – except that with us the penalties are tougher.’ The remark amused him. A kindly man, he was ideologically ruthless. ‘Politics is a brutal affair,’ he once remarked, ‘a matter of objective facts,’ and he always expressed contempt for the ‘playboys’ of pre-war Leftism like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, whom he knew only slightly. His admiration for the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 was all of a piece. Politics is about power, and you get what you grab.
A one-party state, he believed, must one day control the infinite forces of communication and production about to be unleashed by technology. The free market was not even an option. Nor was democracy, though he is rumoured to have toyed in later years with the idea that in advanced countries the revolution might, after all, be achieved without bloodshed. In all that the Soviets had shown the way. ‘In the Soviet Union they take writers seriously,’ he would say heavily, meaning that they were quite right to put dissidents into labour camps. There was no pornography, either, in the Soviet Union, and by the 1960s both Charles and Pamela were fighting a bitter war against pornography, not excluding the outrageous plays of a young man called Joe Orton. Marxism was a Victorian dogma, and the Snows were Victorian in more ways than one.
His verdict on the pact of August 1939 is worth recording. When I asked him in the early 1950s what he thought about the Nazi-Soviet pact that had dismembered Poland and the Baltic states and started the second world war, he merely remarked: ‘Two political sophisticates like Hitler and Stalin were always likely to get together.’ From the mouth of a kindly and civilised man, the sentence struck home. But then mass extermination looked to him like the way the world was going, which it was, much as it had looked to H.G. Wells, and Snow always wanted
to face that way. He chose his beliefs, for much of his life, in order to look fashionable, and communism in his younger days had undeniably been a way of looking that.
By his last years whimsy had overtaken utopia, though the strain of joking about past convictions had begun to tell. Pamela used to recall how the red banner she had once paraded through the streets of London had to be held at the slope, since she was too small to hold it up straight. Snow would smile wanly at these recollections of their revolutionary years. By then – by the 1970s – the future had taken an unexpected turn. The Soviet economy was failing, and he was living comfortably in an expensive part of London, a more than familiar figure in the House of Lords. He had probably forgotten he had once called Hitler and Stalin political sophisticates. It was a judgement to forget.
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