C.P. Snow

Jack London wrote novels about rugged outdoor men tramping behind dog-sleds and drinking around rickety tables in desolate cabins in the Arctic. C. P. Snow writes nothing of the sort, but as writers he and London have one thing in common: both sell well in the Soviet countries. Snow writes of men in committees, Cambridge dons drinking port around gleaming mahogany tables, contemporary Britons struggling with love and over power. And these novels of his Strangers and Brothers series appear in Moscow and Warsaw with the same success as in London and Washington.

Snow spent last summer in Russia, and he tells with a smile of amused remembrance how he was paid for his writing: "You might write a magazine article, the sort of thing one would get two hundred dollars for here, and a few days later a young woman would come over--they use women more over there--with a package wrapped in brown paper about this big." Here he chopped with his hands, cutting off a piece of air the size of a large loaf of bread. He continued, "You'd unwrap it, and there would be a stack of ruble notes. You would both look at it for a moment or so and then wrap it up again and march off to a bank and deposit it."

Snow's novels have done well in Russia, and he has concerned himself with many of the problems that Soviet society shares with Western ones, but there is another connection with Russia, a physical one that suddenly and disconcertingly crosses the mind as one talks with him. There is a strange half-resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev that appears only momentarily and from certain angles. The same line slopes from between the shoulder blades up to the top of the skull, with few contours at the rear of the head; the same roll and a half of flesh lies under the chin. But in mouth, nose, eyes, and forehead Snow differs from Khrushchev, and one thinks more of a character from his own novels than of the Russian.

It is Lewis Eliot, protagonist of the Strangers and Brothers series, with whom Snow is most often compared, for Snow admits that Eliot had his base in autobiography, even though much of him is invented. But it is not Eliot of whom I thought, talking with Snow, but rather Arthur Brown: "Jago might indulge his emotions, act with a fervour that Brown thought excessive and in bad taste, . . . show nothing like the solid rational decorums which was Brown's face to the world. Brown's affection did not budge. In the depth of his heart he loved Jago's wilder outbursts, and wished that he could have gone that way himself. Had he sacrificed too much in reaching his own robust harmony? Had he become too dull a dog? For Brown's harmony had not arrived in a minute. People saw that fat contented man, rested on his steady strength, and thought he had never known their conflicts. They were blind. He was utterly tolerant, just because he had known the frets that drove men off the rails, in particular the frets of sensual love. It was in his nature to live them down, to imbed them deep, not to let them lead him away from his future as a college worthy, from his amiable wife and son. But he was too realistic, too humble, too genuine a man to forget them. 'Uncle Arthur loves odd fish,' said Roy Calvert, whom he had helped through more than one folly. In middle age 'Uncle Arthur' was four square in himself, without a crack or flaw, rooted in his solid, warm, wise, and cautious nature. But he loved odd fish, for he knew, better than anyone, the odd desires, that he had left behind."

No one who has read Snow's novels could think him a dull dog, or a man who has not known conflict. But in the presence of the physical man, the "four square" appearance of a "solid, warm, wise, and cautious nature," the "solid, rational decorum," the interrogative "Mnunmm . . ." turning into a clearing of the throat, that knowledge wavers. Yet finally something comes from the man, more I think from the eyes than else-where, which restores conviction, and one knows again that accretions of fame and power have not calcified his curiosity or entombed his human sympathies.

Snow's renown did not come from his novels originally, but through science and government, the subject of his Godkin Lectures. He was born in 1905 in Leicester, a provincial city in England. His family was not well off, and Snow made his way by his brains. He studied at University College in Leicester, working in chemistry and graduating with First Class Honors. His work was brilliant and soon took him on to Cambridge where he continued his research in infra-red spectroscopy and was elected in 1930 a Fellow of Christ's College. At this time, while publishing scientific papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, he began his career as a novelist. Snow says that he had known since eighteen that he wanted eventually to be a writer, but it was not until 1932, when he was twenty-seven, that his first book was published. Death Under Sail was a detective story and it was followed in 1933 by a science-fiction book, New Lives for Old.

His reputation as a scientist grew, but about 1935 he gave up research and threw his energies into writing. The Search appeared in 1934, and the next year he had the idea for the series which has occupied him since. Strangers and Brothers, the first and title novel, came out in 1940, but Snow was already engaged in government work which had grown to full time and delayed the next volume until after the War.

He worked for the Ministry of Labour as Director of Technical Personnel and had principal responsibility for the best possible utilization of scientific manpower in the war effort. He received a C.B.E. in 1943 for his work, and, continuing after the War as a Civil Service Commissioner, he was knighted in 1957. This last honor has brought some confusion, for it makes him Sir Charles Snow. "If I had known," he says, "I probably would have written as Charles Snow. But I started as C.P. Snow, and it becomes something of a brand name, so I stick with it."

The honor and reputation he has acquired for his work in science and government have given his writing other troubles. Last year he gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, and of Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution he remarks "It's turned into a major industry." He thinks that the lecture attracted a great deal of attention because it expressed what everyone was thinking: "Nothing that's snapped up as rapidly as that can be original." But, whatever the reason, the subject has taken much of his time and with this year's Godkin Lectures to worry about also, he has done little writing.

The present series of three lectures will be the end of punditry, Snow is determined. "No more talk," he asserts. It's back to a desk and writing the novels which readers in his Cambridge and our Cambridge, his London and their Moscow, know under the brand name of C.P. Snow.