Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS C. P Snow's 'Homecoming' Describes Social as Well as Individual Problems By Granville Hicks Three weeks ago, reviewing Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, I had a good deal to...
...Snow takes a path that is in part familiar to the reader, and then lures him into strange byways: Morris challenges the reader from the outset to share with him the perils of an arduous journey of exploration...
...The reappearance of Passant in this volume calls attention to the Proustian qualities of the series...
...With anyone who wants you altogether, you're cruel...
...of being considerate, sometimes kind, but making that cousiderate-ness into a curtain with which to shut off the secret self I could not bear to give away...
...Some of the characters, notably Passant and Charles March, we have seen as young men...
...He did not understand the temptation, so insidious, often so satisfying to men like me, of playing Cod...
...In scene after scene, we are shown how government operates, how decisions are made, how tensions develop and conflicts are resolved...
...Titus, through our understanding of George Passant we come to a better understanding of Lewis Eliot...
...he contrasts himself with Passant for purposes of self-revelation: "George was a human brother...
...One immediate cause of the crisis is Lewis's reaction to the death of his closest friend, Roy Calvert, the principal character in The Light and the Dark...
...Snow in not at all Proustian...
...that is, the movement is straightforward and the author's intentions are always clear...
...He says that sensibility isn't enough, but that doesn't mean that he is without sensibility or that he has learned nothing from the sensibilists...
...We met Mr...
...But his superiors distrust his unconventionality, and the scene in which they decide not to offer him a permanent position is one of the most brilliant in the book...
...In time the series stretches from 1914 to the early 1950s...
...Ceriaiulv there arc large differences, difficult as it is to di-cuss them, but in any case the important thing to say is that both novels are superbly good, each in its own way...
...After Margaret's marriage, Lewis lapses into what he calls the "condition of a spectator...
...With most people you're good, but in the end you'll break the heart of anyone who loves you...
...An industrialist, Paul Lufkin, has considerable prominence in the book, and I think we may expect to meet him again in a later volume of the series...
...He has argued (New York Times Book Review, January 30, 1955) that the "experimental" novel, the novel of sensibility, from Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Carson McCullers, has ended up in an "esthetic cul de sac...
...As I have said, Lewis leads his private life and his public life simultaneously, and in the course of the latter he touches many other lives...
...A character named Lewis Eliot is the narrator in all of the novels, but in some he appears chiefly as an observer while in others he is one of the principal figures...
...But even when she has divorced her husband, married Lewis, and borne him a son, a son to whom he is deeply devoted, the barriers have not quite fallen...
...He has now-published six related novels: Strangers and Brothers, which so far has not appeared in this country, The Light and the Dark, Time of Hope, The Masters, The New Men, and Homecoming...
...Knight, father of Lewis's first wife, when he was a pompous middle-aged clergyman...
...Lewis not only gives us his insights into Passant's character...
...The earlier novel described Lewis's boyhood, the beginnings of his career in the law, his marriage to Sheila Knight, and his recognition that the marriage was a disaster...
...Now, some twenty years later, Passant is brought to London, at Lewis's suggestion, to work in the Ministry of Labor...
...We see much of the Minister, Thomas Bevill, whom we have already encountered in The New Men, and are given great insight into his character and tactics, as well as those of Sir Hector Rose, the Permanent Secretary...
...By all worldly standards a failure, he has lost none of his vitality and self-confidence, and he does an admirable job...
...It has always been clear that Snow, like Proust, was seeking to portray a large segment of society by employing a narrator who has moved freely from one stratum to another...
...of giving so much and no more...
...Of the secondary stories, the most interesting is that of George Passant, who was the central figure in Strangers and Brothers...
...Let no one suppose that Snow merely happens to write as he does, or that he has adopted an earlier fashion because it is easier to handle...
...But meanwhile the war has brought Lewis into an important position in the Government, and throughout the book his public and private lives are juxtaposed...
...We become intimately acquainted with some of the lesser civil servants, especially Gilbert Cooke and George Passant...
...He fought with his brother men, he never wanted to be above the battle...
...Lewis himself marvels at one point that he can put on his public face and walk into his office and engage in his duties, without anyone's suspecting the scenes of ecstasy or despair he has left behind him...
...This flaw in Lewis, to which attention has already been called in Time of Hope and The New Men, leads Margaret to break with him and to marry Geoffrey Hollis, a pediatrician...
...His love affair with Margaret, after beginning well, founders, and they both know that the fault is his...
...How, then, are we to define the differences between the two novels, since sensibility and intelligence are important in both...
...In its public aspects, Homecoming portrays the operation of a department of the Government, the Ministry of Labor...
...With those who don't want much of you, you're unselfish, I grant you that," she tells him...
...There is another difference: Morris is concerned only with the private lives of his characters, whereas Snow's have public as well as private lives, and we see them against a recognizable background...
...When an accident brings him in touch with Margaret again, after she and Dr...
...I might be able to stand it, I might not mind so much, if you weren't doing yourself such harm...
...Only the almost fatal illness of the child teaches him how much he needs Margaret...
...to put it another way...
...But the fact that he can be compared with Proust on any grounds suggests that what he is giving us is not simple, old-fashioned realism...
...he writes, and, "Sensibility is not enough...
...Homecoming carries the story of the marriage to its tragic conclusion, and then immediately takes up the story of Lewis Eliot and Margaret Davidson...
...His inner self is no longer inviolate, and he rejoices...
...in terms of social classes, it reaches from the lower middle class to the aristocracy...
...But now we recognize another Proustian characteristic in Snow's preoccupation with time, which becomes important in this novel because it reaches a later date than any of the others...
...now we see him standing close to death...
...Homecoming is Lewis's story and as such a direct sequel to Time of Hope...
...In the 20th century, he reasons, science came to dominate our intellectual life, and as a consequence many talented novelists withdrew into worlds created by their own sensibilities...
...A one-page chapter, "A Smooth Bedcover," will remind any reader of Proust of "The Heart's Intermissions...
...The novel only breathes freely when it has its roots in society...
...His writing, in its quiet lucidity, approximates the considered speech of a cultivated Englishman, never slovenly, never obtrusive, and the dialogue has a fine verisimilitude...
...Lewis himself has reached his middle forties, and, in his thoughtful way, meditates on what time has done to him...
...Whatever one may think about Snow's theories, he has been remarkably successful in practice...
...But the atom bomb project, which was one of the two principal subjects of The New Men, is merely an incident in this book, and the relationship between Lewis and his brother Martin, the other major theme, is only alluded to...
...As I wrote in reviewing The New Men some time ago (NL, January 17, 1955) : "What he is trying to do, among other things, is to portray 20th-century England in a variety of manifestations...
...The major problems of society vanished from serious fiction, while at the same time large sections of the reading public were alienated by both the difficult techniques and the private preoccupations of the "art" of novelists...
...Snow does not rely principally on sensibility, however: he relies much more on intelligence, on the calm functioning of a disciplined mind profoundly engaged in trying to understand both self and others...
...All the while the drama of Lewis and Margaret is unfolding, and it is one of Snow's strengths that he can pay equal attention to both sides of Lewis's life...
...I know of no novel that gives the reader a keener sense of being on the inside...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS C. P Snow's 'Homecoming' Describes Social as Well as Individual Problems By Granville Hicks Three weeks ago, reviewing Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, I had a good deal to say about the demands the book makes upon its readers...
...Beginning in 1938 and ending a dozen years later, Homecoming includes the whole period of time spanned by The New Men, and naturally many of the same characters appear in both books...
...He tells us that the novel can be saved only if novelists boldly return to what was long regarded as the proper theme of fiction, "the relations of men to their environment...
...It is a role that he has often relished, but now his life seems distressingly empty...
...now the mold has set...
...We saw him there as a brilliant, romantic, egotistical young lawyer, the leader of a group of youthful intellectuals, Lewis Eliot among them, in a provincial city...
...And now I find myself in a predicament, for surely Wright Morris's The Field of Vision is luminous with intelligence...
...Perhaps we can say that Snow is content to stay within the realistic tradition, even though he is constantly trying for deeper insights than most realists are capable of, whereas Morris wants to get completely away from the limitations of realism...
...In many other ways, and particularly in his style...
...He has described London, Cambridge, a provincial city, and has shown us university dons, politicians, civil servants, and aristocrats...
...Hollis have had a child, he knows that he wants to put an end to his detachment...
...Snow is willing to spend much of his time on the surface so long as he can make his sporadic excursions into the depths, hut only the depths interest Morris...
...As the characters come before us, we are fascinated, as Lewis is, as Snow is, to see not only the ways in which they have changed but also the ways in which they have remained fundamentally the same...
...C. P. Snow's Homecoming (Scribner, $3.95), on the other hand, is readable in the sense that most of the great novels of the 19th century are readable...
...Because one never knows when you're going to be secretive, when you're going to withdraw...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 43
