C.P. Snow: The Affair (1960)

Cherie Lunghi as Margaret Eliot

[Image source: https://www.memorabletv.com/tv/strangers-brothers-bbc-2-1984-shaughan-seymour-cherie-lunghi/ . Shaughan Seymour and Cherie Lunghi starred in the 1984 TV dramatization of Strangers and Brothers. ]

C.P. Snow (1905 - 1980) annoyed F.R. Leavis, who “lost it” in a manner more than slightly suggestive of a Snovian scene. It may be that anyone who reads more than one novel in the Strangers and Brothers sequence will be overcome by the sense of a writer who composes his own clichés, unwittingly parodies himself and has an absurd self-regard. Snow is perhaps not a novelist at all, as Leavis proclaimed. So much the better, I think.

The “Establishment” is such a mysterious and inaccessible world that it’s very gratifying to be permitted to enter it in so much detail, even though the author makes no bones of his admiration. Indeed, he could not write these books without the admiration.

The Affair is a book without sexual adventure or death. And yet not altogether a comedy, though there is something in the book’s procedure that reminds you of comedy. It’s mostly conversation about the business – a doubtful matter that cannot be finally resolved, though I think we are perhaps meant to suppose that Nightingale destroyed the photograph – but, as in real life, there is room for doubt. (It would be more or less certain if you could treat the text of the book itself as evidence in the trial it describes, because what Nightingale says before the hearing doesn’t make sense if his assertions during the trial are entertained; but you can’t give even the most skilful sort of novel that kind of weight within its own fiction). The persistent doubts, the essential vagueness of the technical matters, are there to provoke the complex reactions of the participants.

It would have been hard to tell whether Martin had heard what Skeffington had just said. He was not looking at Skeffington. He gazed steadily at the hearth, in which the electric fire had one small incandescent star, much brighter than the glowing bars, where a contact had worked loose.

I’m quoting this because it reminds us, as other stray sentences do, of everything that this book isn’t about – everything that other books are about. 

A few pages taken from the middle of the book will illustrate what is distinctive in Snow, both for good and ill.

In April I had to go to Cambridge on official business. On business which was, as it happened, at that time top secret...

The mock-modesty of that “as it happened” – one was always dealing with top secret matters – is one reason why you might object to Snow, and remember Buchan ungratefully. Briefly Lewis Eliot looks out of the windows of the conference-room:

it was a piercing blue April afternoon, a sunny afternoon with a wind so cold and pure that it made one catch one’s breath.

The word “pure”, with its strong implication of public-school chastity, is again Buchanesque.

...resentful ... as though once I had been out in the cold free air and known great happiness. And yet, my real memories of days like that in Cambridge were sad ones.

That is comfortably beyond Buchan. Yet we are soon back at the conference-table, and once again his spectre rises.

There was a fair amount of ability in the room, two Nobel Prize winners, five Fellows of the Royal Society. For imagination and sheer mental drive, I would have put Luke before any of them...

(This unacademic psychology, this “shrewd judgment of men” which Snow prided himself on and probably possessed, is a key element in what his books are about.) Everyone here is idealized, Luke in particular, Crawford later. That is also a significant part of Snow’s intention in portraying the decision-makers. Also an element of his style; even the unamiable Howard is somewhat gratuitously supplied with this:

One felt that, change his temperament by an inch, he would have made a good regimental officer.

This is a book about good people.

That conference-room scene is a generous introduction to the splendid succession that follows – the top secret business is an aside to the plot. Now follows the scene in which the bad news of the Seniors’ reconsideration comes through.

He and I sat there in silence, watching Laura gaze with protective love at Howard. He was holding the newspaper low, so as to catch the light from the reading-lamp. The only movement he made, the only movement in the whole room, was that of his eyes as they went down the page.

Then Howard explodes, and Martin (Lewis’s brother) catches some of the flak. Lewis admits:

He [Martin] was no saint. He had none of the self-effacingness of those who, in the presence of another’s disaster, don’t mind some of the sufferings being taken out on themselves...

Naturally this wins our sympathy. Soon we are told to have more:

People often thought that those who ‘handled’ others, ‘managers’ of Martin’s kind, were passionless. They would have been no good at their job if they were.

We don’t take this so easily. Eliot/Snow seems to be bullying us – on the basis of their joint expertise, which of course we little readers can’t remotely compete with.

I forgot to mention a moment in the Howard scene, when he says to his wife:

’You know nothing about it.’

He spoke to her roughly – but there was none of the suspiciousness with which he would have spoken to anyone else that night. Between them there flared up – so ardent as to make it out of place to watch – a bond of sensual warmth, of consolatory warmth.

Snow only mentions love if it’s relevant to power, but he does so persuasively. Marriage is the form of love in which he’s interested, and as it’s an institution and a power he inevitably over-praises it. The Skeffingtons’ marriage is almost a sham, but

With her own kind of clumsy devotion, she was with him whatever he wanted to do. Others might admire him more, other women might long for the chance of admiring him, but she happened to be married to him.

Now follows another great chapter.

We had walked right into the hiss and ice of a quarrel.

Arthur Brown’s imperturbable handling of the atmosphere, and his utter rejection of Tom Orbell’s political advice, strike us like beorhtword, somewhat in the manner of a saga hero. Of all the great and the good, Brown (though on the “wrong” side) is probably the hero that Eliot/Snow adulates most.

[That position I've just expressed, of feeling closer to an opponent than to your own side,  is itself a long-hallowed trope of the Establishment imagination. Richard and Saladin, as it were. It conceals some complicated meanings -- not in Snow's novel particularly, but in its wider meaning. One is about licensing betrayal of principle (sometimes necessary); another about leaving prejudice to the lower orders.] 

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Another vestige of my former website. Written in 2002. 

Jacket of the first edition, strangely prophetic of American Psycho