Lost in the Corridors

"The Future in Your Bones: C. P. Snow (1905–80)" by George Watson, in The Hudson Review (Winter 2002), 684 Park Ave., New York, N.Y. 10021.

British scientist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow (1905–80) is still remembered for his division of the intellectual world into "two cultures," the scientific and the literary, and for his phrase "corridors of power," which became a cliché even before his 1964 novel of that title was published. Snow fervently believed that scientists—and he himself— had, in another favorite phrase, "the future in their bones." But he was quite wrong about that, writes Watson, a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge University.

Born in Leicester, in the English Midlands, the son of a clerk in a shoe factory, Snow earned a doctorate in physics at Cambridge in 1930. But his early research on infrared spectroscopy went awry. The failed scientist turned to college administration at Cambridge and to novel writing. In 1939 he began a career in public life, joining a Royal Society group organized to harness British science to the war effort. The next year, his novel Strangers and Brothers appeared, and its title became the name for his long series of novels about the administration of power in contemporary Britain.

"The novels sold," Watson notes, "and probably achieved something of their didactic intention, which was to inform the world about how power interacts with personality, even among the elite—with foibles, private hates and love. It was a very Trollopian vision of the world, as Snow knew: he was rewriting [Anthony] Trollope’s Palliser novels a century on." Like Trollope (and unlike most novelists), Snow wrote about the world of work. But he lacked the great 19th-century novelist’s ear for dialogue, and his prose did not sing.

Snow also "loved to strike" his un-Trollopian note about the future, Watson observes. "Like [H. G.] Wells and Aldous Huxley, he foresaw a brave new world: a planned economy directed by scientists, technicians, and planners, along with those who had learned how to listen to them." Although a kind man himself, says Watson, the novelist saw life as "a power-game" and was "ideologically ruthless." Snow was "a highly conservative Communist," who believed in the necessity of a one-party state to control "the infinite forces of communication and production about to be unleashed by technology. The free market, for Snow, was not even an option. Nor was democracy."

As it turned out, observes Watson, the bones of "Lord Corridor of Power" (as one wag called him when he was made a peer in 1964) held not the future but the past.