'Last Things'

     I recently finished C P Snow's novel 'Last Things', the final instalment of his mammoth eleven novel sequence 'Strangers and Brothers'; the story of the narrator, Lewis Eliot, and his rise through the political and cultural strata of British society. It has been adapted for both television and the radio, with mixed success. And here I have to admit that I've started at the wrong end of the sequence, seduced - God damn it! - by the cover of the Penguin paperback, a lovely little pen and ink drawing by the English artist & graphic designer David Gentleman. Not only that, but I've been dipping, in a pretty haphazard manner, into BBC2 adaptation from the early eighties starring Shaughan Seymour, written by Julian Bond, and directed by Jeremy Summers and Ronald Wilson.

     C P Snow(1907-1980) was a scientist, writer, critic and all round public intellectual. He had a long career of public service, and also worked for a time in the private sector. Not the sort of person then that we see that often these days where the culture encourages specialisation to the detriment of character, or the ability to contextualise knowledge. C P is best remembered for the term 'The Two Cultures', the title of a 1959 lecture, in which he described what he saw as the dislocation of science and the humanities. He saw this as a harmful, if no outright destructive, tend in the culture. Although thinking in what may be thought of as a through going materialist and utilitarian manner - Snow argued, for instance, that the British education system, with its emphasis on the humanities, disadvantaged the economic wellbeing of the nation - there is an element of shared feeling with, say, a writer such as Aldous Huxley. Both realised that there was an increasing rift in the culture, an epistemic fracture perhaps, but argued from different perspectives. Both looked for a re-integration on both a societal and, at least for Huxley, personal level. Perhaps Snow, who is sometimes a derided figure these days, should be thought of as attempting the cultural synthesis one finds amongst the early members of the Royal Society such as Wren and Hooke, who were both scientists and architects. Although on feels he may have looked askance at the RS's putative origins in the 'Invisible College'. But I digress.

     Snow was a contemporary of the patrician Anthony Powell the author of another great novel sequence - 'A Dance to the Music of Time' - chronicling upper class British life in the middle years of the 20th century. Both novels are in part autobiographical, both are roman fleuves in the realist tradition of Nineteenth century novelists such as Dickens and Balzac and in particular both are heavily influenced by 'La recherche du Temps Perdu', Proust's gargantuan novel sequence with its patrician detachment and carefully qualified sentences. Of the two I would suggest that 'Strangers and Brothers' is perhaps more comprehensive of the two; the 'Dance' being more concentrated on the world of the English haut monde. To be honest I have to confess that I do find that air of detachment a little bit difficult at times in the work of both authors. I want that bit more 'bite', more sense of urgency (for want of a better word). Immediacy. 

     Still Eliot, successful in worldly terms but flawed and occasionally cruel in his private life, makes for an, at times, interesting narrator, coming to his retirement from public life and assessing his life and career, and facing the prospect of his own mortality. (That literary detachment, then, it could be argued, does well in reflecting the professional caution of a public servant.) Lewis looks askance at the cultural change of Sixties Britain - when there was a return to the irrational, the violent, the occult (in some way Huxley, at least temporarily, had won the argument) - a mere two chapters or so towards the end of the novel, and that perhaps a little too tangentially. Disengagement again. One feels, somehow, that is the work of a 'gross materialist', and that this detachment may reflect an attempt to apply the scientific method to the English Novel, but it does also mark a reluctance to explore anything beyond the material to the detriment of the novel. The effect is flat like stage scenery; characters seem to blend into one another. Conversation, even between members of the same family, are more like a public meeting or a college debating society. Did anyone in real life ever talk like that? Polite distrust permeates the novel. (The BBC2 adaptation is even worse, everybody seems caught up in a sort slow motion argument, but then one American critic did describe the whole adaptation as 'terrible'.) For a man who wrote a book on the nineteenth century novel, 'The Realists', Snow seems oddly reluctant to assimilate what those masters can teach us about writing. That isn't to say that isn't a novel without some merit; it is reflective and intelligent. Sometimes quietly moving. But its real importance, I suspect, lies beyond the literary in the historical, as it offers an insight into the mindset of a generation that helped form post-war Britain.