The Un-elated Conscience
WILEY, PAUL
The Un-elated Conscience by PAUL WILEY Many young Englishmen went off to World War II carrying Trol-lope novels in their pockets, finding the stable world of Barsetshire a relief from existing...
...45 cents) Evolution in Action, by Julian Huxley (Mentor...
...50 cents) The Authentic New Testament, edited and translated from the Greek by Hugh J. Schonfield (Mentor...
...3.95) is Snow's seventh addition to the sequence...
...Of their cousin, Alfred March Hart, the balletomane who helped sponsor Diaghi-leff's first season in London: who as an old man, hearing someone at a Friday night during the war hope for a Lansdowne peace, rose to his feet and began: 'I am a very old man: and I hope the war will continue for many years after my death.*" When the novel opens, however, on the verge of the glummer 1930's, the vitality of the tradition has declined...
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...and like its forerunners it has that civilized quality dear to those conscious of the comparative rarity of this particular note in American writing, where, so often, the novelist drops restraint to let off steam...
...Merely for historical interest Snow's material is as fascinating as Sargent's paintings of the Wertheimers, from whom the Marches differ not so much perhaps in being richer as in having more past...
...Unabridged...
...and this trait gives him a great part of his personal warmth...
...The Marches have largely ceased to figure in public life, and inherited pride and dignity want nourishment from action...
...Occasionally one has to remind himself that all of this is supposed to be happening in the 1930's, the period of causes and struggles...
...how he regretted all his life his slowness in repartee, and after each Friday night used to wake his wife in bed so that she should jot down answers which had just occurred to him...
...But when political scandal threatens the family, Charles, refusing to act through fear of cruelty, must permit injury to occur, so that the novel ends in a curious moral dilemma...
...Of Uncle Henry March, who owned race-horses and was a friend of the Prince of Wales...
...After the stridency of so much of our fiction, Snow's lowered pitch may cause the reader to strain after nuances easier to spot than interpret...
...Although the book is notable for clean structure and intelligent obserThe Un-elated Conscience by PAUL WILEY vation, what may at times bear heavily on some readers is the enduring impression of passivity or irresolution, in which Snow reveals most obviously his link with Trollope...
...Settled in England before 1730, distinguished in financial and public affairs in the Nineteenth Century, the Marches move into the comfortable years before 1914 with a proper Edwardian swagger: "A whole set of stories collected round them, most of which originated when Mr...
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...The Un-elated Conscience by PAUL WILEY Many young Englishmen went off to World War II carrying Trol-lope novels in their pockets, finding the stable world of Barsetshire a relief from existing chaos...
...Foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...When the speaker adds, "They're too aristocratic for the likes of us," the reader may readily agree...
...Or his brother Justin, who, to celebrate a Harrow victory, rode to his house on one of the horses that drew the heavy roller at Lord's...
...Where, then, were the Snows of yesteryear...
...342 pp...
...Defense (Doubleday...
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...Almost obsessed by a desire for goodness and social usefulness, Charles wishes to obtain these things without hurting his father or his Leftist wife...
...In the wake of that literature of strife it seems to have remained for Snow to suggest that the rich might have fallen through an excess of conscience...
...And Charles, in spite of his intellectual brilliance, is weaker than the father whom he resembles fundamentally, though it is precisely to this weakness that he owes his tender conscience, his endeavor to pursue the good without harming others which at least half fails in Snow's ingeniously arranged showdown...
...For like Trollope, Snow examines weakness rather than force in character...
...Conventionally speaking, Leonard March is a weak man, one who retired early from the competition for which he felt himself too shy and anxious...
...Translated by Constance Garnett (Bantam...
...and around this tension between the father, loyal to the family, and the son, seeking to escape its domination, the central issue of the story develops...
...Through his steady vision, the Marches appear withdrawn but not singular...
...The effect, however, departs from Jamesian sinuosity partly because of Snow's more forthright style, partly because his narrator, Lewis Eliot, carried over from the earlier Strangers and Brothers tales, is a trustworthy observer...
...35 cents) ish upper deck...
...Ballantine...
...As a consequence the elderly Leonard March of Bryanston Square, a retired banker, nags affectionately but steadily at his son, Charles, to make some mark in the world...
...50 cents) Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky...
...In its seemingly negative way, the study of Charles March—with his self-deceptions, flashes of cruelty, sensitivity, and affection—is as arresting as that of Leonard, at first sight the more vivid of the two...
...One source of complication lies in the fact that Snow is dealing with a world within a world, or with what one of the people calls "the real JewH. Huxley, edited by Alburey Castell (Appleton-Century-Crofts...
...and who, when only nine people attended one of his Friday nights, took hold of the tablecloth and pulled the whole dinner service to the ground...
...for in portraying the Marches, a great and exclusive Anglo-Jewish family, Snow is a long way removed not only from what is generally familiar in American writing but also from Trollope's view of Jewish character in The Way We Live Now...
...Since then a taste for Trollope's keyed down style has lingered in one wing of English fiction, of which C. P. (now Sir Charles) Snow in his novel series, Strangers and Brothers, is a main representative...
...March was a young man...
...For like so many English books in the civilized mode, this one has tricky places, largely because of the social air in which the characters breathe...
...The Conscience of the Rich (Scribners...
...and whereas this produces some odd but valid insights into individual psychology, the attitude is not widely familiar, even though it will be recognized as closer to one bent in the English temper at present than one might suppose from reading, say, Room at the Top...
...More significant than the historical or social milieu is Snow's subtle treatment of the problem of conscience in Charles, which, as the sympathetic family friend, Lewis Eliot, observes, is essentially a matter of sick conscience in one of the rich...
Vol. 22 • May 1958 • No. 5
