Abstract
While Snow gets the correct social setting in his novels, it is for him only the external layer. He has a good documentary eye and sharp sense for any currents afloat in the air, but his main interests are the human being functioning within society and the examination of human characters in search of a meaningful code. A morally examined life is central to most novels by Snow. If F. R. Leavis had not been so outraged by the semiphilistinism he thought Snow stood for and had read at least four or five novels by Snow without prejudgement, he would have found them permeated by moral concern. Leavis, who reproached the Bloomsbury group for not being moral enough, condemned Snow for not being sufficiently aesthetic in his response to life.
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Notes
Helen Gardner, ‘The World of C.P. Snow’, New Statesman, 55 (1958) 410.
C.P. Snow, Time of Hope (London: Penguin, 1962) p. 327.
C.P. Snow, Review of English Literature, 3 (July 1962) 107.
C.P. Snow, The Light and the Dark (New York: Scribner, 1974) p. 145.
D.H. Lawrence’s phrase quoted by Frank Kermode, ‘Beckett, Snow and Pure Poverty’, Encounter, 15 (July 1960) 76.
C.P. Snow, In Their Wisdom (New York: Scribner, 1974) p. 53.
Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Pelican, 1972) p. 168.
E.W. Mandel, ‘C.P. Snow’s Fantasy of Politics’, Queen’s Quarterly, 69 (1962) 24ff.
K. Hamilton, ‘C.P. Snow and Political Man’, Queen’s Quarterly, 69 (1962) 416ff.
C.P. Snow, The Search (London: Penguin, 1965) pp. 262–5.
C.P. Snow, The Conscience of the Rich (London: Penguin, 1966) p. 73.
C.P. Snow, Time of Hope (London: Penguin, 1962) p. 358.
C.P. Snow, Variety of Men (New York: Scribner, 1967) p. 108.
C.P. Snow, Homecomings (London: Penguin, 1966) p. 238.
Rayner Heppenstall, The Fourfold Tradition (London: Barrie, 1961) p. 234.
R. Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel: 1990–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967) p. 164.
C.P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers, now re-titled George Passant (London: Penguin, 1962) p. 115.
C.P. Snow, The New Men (London: Penguin, 1970) p. 151.
C.P. Snow, Corridors of Power (London: Penguin, 1972) p. 334.
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© 1978 Suguna Ramanathan
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Ramanathan, S. (1978). The examined life. In: The Novels of C. P. Snow. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03671-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03671-4_3
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