The Corridors of Power

THE AFFAIR (374 pp.)--C. P. Snow--Scribner ($4.50).

Sir C. P. (for Charles Percy) Snow is a Geiger-counter Galsworthy. Himself trained in science (chemistry and physics). Novelist Snow set out two decades ago on a vast and ambitious project: a cycle of eleven novels, titled Strangers and Brothers, intended to probe the broad upper middle class that dominates science, education and much of government in the age of the Scientific Revolution. In his own way, Snow is writing about Organization Man. His hero is the 20th century manager, science-minded, a born administrator and as typical of his era (in the words of one British critic) "as tyrants were of Renaissance Italy or enlightened despots of the 18th century."

Snow is attracting more and more attention in the U.S., and his latest novel--No. 8 in the projected cycle--is a June Book-of-the-Month. Even his fans admit that he is a pedestrian writer, a precise but prosaic documentarian. What makes Snow fascinating to many readers is his subject--the infighting that goes on along "the corridors of power," and the sort of cold, uncivil war that rages between what Snow labels the Two Cultures--traditional and scientific.

Faces of Justice. Like its predecessors, The Affair is intelligent, reflective and genteel. As in The New Men (No. 5 in the series), Snow deals with scientists and their troubled consciences in the Atomic Age. As in The Masters (No. 4), the setting is a university that might be called Oxbridge, whose High Tables have been rocked by a scandal that will not down with the port.

As the book opens, a scientific fraud in the form of a faked photo of an experiment is uncovered, and a court of dons quietly strips the seeming culprit of his rank as a university fellow. Hush-hush becomes buzz-buzz as the ex-fellow, Donald Howard, insists that his renowned old scientific mentor, now dead, framed him. To compound this apparent caddishness, Howard is also a fellow traveler and a boorish personality. His only ally is the conscience of a few of his colleagues who fear justice has miscarried.

As a Howard faction of liberals crystallizes, so does an anti-Howard clique of conservatives, and the short-fused passions of left v. right detonate. Playing Zola to Howard's Dreyfus is a man of good will and strong character, Lewis Eliot, the upper-echelon bureaucrat and first-person narrator who either dominates or "I" witnesses most of the Snow novels. What Eliot gradually collects is not so much the evidence to clear Howard as the ambiguous human motives--sly, cynical, stoic, self-serving, occasionally selfless--that convict all would-be judges of men.

There is social-climbing Dawson-Hill, who dines with dukes and will not let down the class he aspires to. There is icily detached Arthur Brown, who is burning to be the next master of Oxbridge and wants to smother all controversy for fear of irking potential supporters. There is Nightingale, a man with a superb war record but an indifferent academic past who may have suppressed evidence out of gratitude for being made bursar. Justice, as Snow delights in proving, is a lady who wears more than one blindfold.

Faces of Men. The Affair often moves at the maddening pace of a ruminative pipe smoker between puffs. No social pigeon can escape Snow's passion for pigeonholing. However, no one can quite match Cantabrigian Snow at making an old school seem both old and a school. At rare moments, The Affair is even a touch exalted, as when a quavering nonagenarian don suddenly trumpets the underlying theme of the book: "Go now and do justice. If you can temper justice with mercy, do so. But go and do justice."

Above all, The Affair continues Snow's exploration of what the "new men" are really like. In many ways, they are not so unlike the old men. Although there is greater freedom of opportunity in Britain than before--a bright but poor man like Lewis Eliot (or C. P. Snow) can make it on brains alone--there is fully as much snobbery in the corridors of power. The wrong word, the wrong wife, the wrong attitude can be fatal--and there are many failures and near failures loitering in the corridors to prove it. But the successes dominate the scene, and they provide a fascinating contrast with most U.S. novels about organization life: they do not feel guilty about being successful. Power can corrupt, and Snow warns that the new men must guard--and be guarded --against this corruption; but he also knows that someone must exercise power to keep the wheels turning--or to do justice.

Faces of Success. C. P. Snow has observed the new men both from the view point of science and literature, from poverty and power (he has been a top civil servant, and remains something of a tycoon, as Director for the last 13 years of English Electric, Britain's biggest electrical firm). His father was a gentle underling in a shoe concern in Leicester, England. The family was poor, at least "shabby genteel, no money to spare." Young Charles won a scholarship to red-bricked Leicester University, where he copped first class honors in chemistry. He went on to earn a master's degree in physics (1928) and win a research fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge. But, says Snow, "I was never an inspired scientist; it was a way of making a living." His real ambition: literature.

At Cambridge, he dashed off two apprentice novels, and in 1935 Snow first conceived Strangers and Brothers. What fascinated Snow was "how decisions of importance are made," and when World War II came, Snow found out by making some. As a chief of scientific personnel for the Ministry of Labor, he interviewed thousands of scientists, slotted them to top-secret projects.

In 1950, Snow married one of his earliest literary critics, handsome Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, whose books, largely about marriage and the private worlds of modern people, are less ambitious but far better crafted than her husband's; her most recent: The Unspeakable Skipton, a witty, waspish caricature of the famed adventurer, "Baron Corvo." The Snows share a ten-room London flat and a 6 1/2-year-old son. Snow likes to be in the worldly swim and throws parties conspicuously free of fellow novelists. Sir Charles is a shade stuffy about most 20th century authors; of another practicing panoramist, Lawrence Durrell, he says: "A bit like eating a box of soft chocolates." Too many writers, he feels, are munching chocolates instead of facing reality. At heart they fear science, and this keeps aggravating the crisis of the Two Cultures--what he regards as the monstrous gap between the "scientific culture" and the "traditional culture" led by "literary intellectuals." Snow feels that this gap (greater in Britain than in the U.S., where intellectuals tend to believe, sometimes too blindly, in the scientific method) threatens the West with a loss of practical strength and cultural creativity.

Faces of Tragedy. Snow sees ignorance and disdain in both camps, but it is plain that he puts heavier blame on the traditional side. "The scientists have the future in their bones: the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist." The literary intellectuals, particularly, tend to talk about the tragic human condition, and such talk infuriates Snow. The individual's condition may be tragic. Snow admits ("Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone''), but that is no reason why the "social condition" must be tragic, too. For science, after all, promises that no man need die of hunger or disease.

Characters in several Snow novels die from other causes and suffer from other afflictions; several commit suicide or go mad, struck down by some unexplained flaw of character or of fate. The scientific promise of food and health has obviously not been able to save them, and Snow evades that dilemma. The poor boy who found his way through the corridors of power still finds it more pertinent to insist, with old-fashioned and unabashed optimism, that "industrialisation is the only hope of the poor."

That important and frankly materialist hope shaped an era. The Lewis Eliot saga, for all its limitations, reflects the triumphs of the era, as well as its dangers and its crises of the soul.

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