C. P. Snow: Fiber and Heart:
GOLD, HERBERT
C. P. Snow: Fiber and Heart The Affair. By C. P. Snow. Scribner’s. 374 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Herbert Gold Author, “The Optimist,” “Love and Like” LATEST IN THE sequence of novels being gathered...
...Vice interests all novelists...
...Departing from the Proustian musical massing of impression, like Proust, Snow is struggling with memory, and toward the massive reconstruction of a society...
...For example, Skeffington’s passion for justice, which initiates the vindication of Howard, is a matter of courageous and honorable self-sacrifice, but at the same time...
...He gives full marks to his weak and trivial people: he ardently displays the weakness and triviality in his strong people...
...Partly for this reason, partly perhaps because of the history carried over from the other books in the series, this story seems less closeted in the university than the story of The Masters...
...To a greater extent than in the earlier book, Snow recognizes in action the high mediating energy of women...
...but as his imagination develops the stories of Lewis Eliot and those around him, it becomes clear that Snow’s work is providing the definitive picture of the English spirit in his portion of the 20th century...
...Again as in The Masters, the story is a slow turning of the meat over the fire—smoky, obscure and simple at the same time, and dense with life...
...Also, with time and confidence, Snow is imposing his characteristic voice— a unique combination of laconic notation and masculine sentiment...
...Like The Masters, perhaps the most effectively knit book in the series next to this one...
...Such a style in America usually indicates the pedestrian mind of a Cameron Hawley...
...The only important thing about style is how it serves...
...We are not used to a deep view of human nature which at the same time can settle a moment of crisis by citing a proverb or a line from the common parlance...
...Snow’s style is an effective instrument to open up an important story about important people...
...The great world is nearby—the scientific and political battles of The New Men, the personal shipwreck and recovery of Homecoming, the ambitions of Strangers and Brothers, Time of Hope, The Conscience of the Rich and the other novels in the series...
...Reviewed by Herbert Gold Author, “The Optimist,” “Love and Like” LATEST IN THE sequence of novels being gathered under the general title of Strangers and Brothers, The Affair is a climactic moment in one of the most impressive imaginative constructions of the century...
...Snow plays out once more his private drama of the joys and perils of virtue in action, of tenderness and strictness toward human beings, of social responsibility and the equal responsibility to self...
...Skeffington has no human warmth for Howard: he acts on his behalf only because of the single-minded standard carried like a self-lubricating part within his own soul...
...Within a constructed social drama...
...Just as in The Masters, the story is a group drama about personal survival in a contest for power...
...Snow knows how to love his people without giving up judgment of them...
...This time it is not the election of a master (although an important election is foreshadowed), but rather the case of an accusation of fraud against a young scientist...
...The aura of sense which surrounds any person who enters Snow’s world is the despair of the butterfly classificatory impulse...
...Questions of conscience and responsibility take on the erotic passion in which Proust’s social yearnings lay drenched...
...The Affair brings a group of university intellectuals together for a tormented decision...
...Patiently there unfolds a history of reluctantly honest, complexly tempted integrity...
...C. P. Snow’s conservative prose manner and radical tenderness toward human beings does not impose itself upon American readers at once...
...This manly, sturdy style, sometimes clumsy and notational, often seeming deliberately to scorn euphony, gradually reveals an easy and deep personal quality: intelligence, confidence and high purpose...
...And he is far from the major actor in the drama...
...Snow has developed a manner of modest certainty, full of such phrases as “in a way I could not define,” followed by exact definition of the way...
...A tenderness toward character is not a passive submission to personality...
...The apology works to gather all the hints and undermeanings to the main point...
...In addition, and to an extent unique in contemporary letters, C. P. Snow has succeeded in making the active pursuit of virtue a matter of magic, suspense and passion...
...Ambition and corruption, justice and love, idealism and selfishness and plain English phlegm all take their toll of the participants...
...The action is perfectly suited to a complex drama involving a range of attitudes toward contemporary politics, possible conceptions of the role of science and the individual, the connections among the demands of institutions and those of an ideal of both justice and mercy...
...Snow’s matter-of-fact prose puzzles those readers accustomed to the ardent hallucination of rhetoric in most of the best contemporary writing...
...His people are there, as present and shifting and undefined and real as one’s own family, friends and enemies...
...But this is not a self-serving trick...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 20
