Lord of Limbo

By Melvin Maddocks

LAST THINGS by C.P. Snow. 435 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

With this, the eleventh novel in his Strangers and Brothers series, C.P. Snow at 64 has finally, after 30 years and 135,000 words, pronounced finis, leaving the world of marathon-dance fiction to Fellow Briton Anthony Powell.*The last installment, Snow promised, would be a book about "death, judgment, heaven and hell." Last Things is considerably less than that. Its major shortcomings and minor but honest pleasures pretty well sum up what has been right and wrong with Strangers and Brothers from the start.

To be sure, Last Things is technically about death. Snow's alter ego, Sir Lewis Eliot, reaches his 60s. A number of old friends die, as old friends will. And on Nov. 28, 1965, Eliot's heart stops for 3 1/2 minutes during an operation for floating retina. Many medical details and a hint of geriatrics, though, do not add up to a philosophical treatment of death. In the end, Last Things is less an ode to mortality than a lip reading through the obituary column.

Heaven and Hell. As for judgment --to Eliot, alas, that mostly means deciding whether to take a last fling at government service. After pages and pages of squinting at the traps behind the enticements, Eliot turns down the offer to be a minister of state. For readers who know their prudent, prudent Eliot, the suspense is less than killing.

The only other real action in Last Things concerns Charles, Eliot's son, who also serves as Eliot's (and Snow's) surrogate confronter of the contemporary scene. Young Charles goes to Cambridge and gets involved in politics, 1960s radical style. He also has an affair with his cousin's estranged wife, a girl as frustrating as she is attractive, perhaps as close as Snow comes to touching on his promised heaven and hell.

As usual when dealing with the impetuous and the headstrong, Eliot and Snow maintain a judicious tolerance toward Charles and his friends. Only the plot betrays an unspoken elders' bias: it is you people who make the messes that we people have to tidy up. Young Charles sees that there are other, better ways to effect change and takes off to the Middle East to acquire influence-on-the-quick. Another bright learner in the old Snow power game? Snow is ambiguous, and the ending is about as inconclusive as Snow's ten earlier endings.

Stacked up against the chatter about "death, judgment, heaven and hell," Last Things unfairly seems a disappointment, more of the same old mumble-and-mud-dle-through. From the very beginning, however, Snow has always had a positive genius for making the wrong promises. He presented himself as a bridge builder between "two cultures," though readers can get more science from Ray Bradbury than from Snow. And just how would one build a bridge from 20th century science to the 19th century novel?--which, after all, is what Snow has been writing.

In another misguided extra-literary self-estimate, Snow has encouraged comparisons with Proust. But interior drama is precisely Snow's weakness. Motives scare him. In The Light and the Dark (1947), the second volume in the series, Snow began to exhaust his taste for the tragic in facing up to the morbid life and violent death of Eliot's best friend. The next novel, rather significantly, was titled Time of Hope. Snow has tended to keep mad ness and despair at arm's length ever since.

Disasters still fascinate him even in Last Things: the broken marriage, the career smashed by drink, the unexpected illness. But Snow long ago made a well-modulated commitment to optimism. Disaster is seldom allowed off limits; it is firmly kept in its place. Kindly but patronizing toward the young and the out-of-office -- the alien -- Snow finds considerable safety in measuring life as a man of the world. He has developed a kind of technique for talking away the unspeakable by those gruffly comforting monologues that pass in a Snow novel for introspection.

Through eleven volumes he has been clearing his throat for a revelation that has never quite come. At the crucial moment, he always ducks into another subplot. Sometimes he seems to keep subplots handy to that purpose. On other occasions he answers his most basic questions with another question, rhetorically: "Did any of us know how policies were really made, in particular the persons who believed they made them?"

Victories and Defeats. What a pity that Snow has misled his readers by advertising profundity. The consequence has been that Snow's real and substantial gifts have gone largely unacknowledged by him and by those who attack him for what he has claimed to be. If his disinclination to explore why men act -- or more often don't act -- places him outside the contemporary novel, no contemporary has written more knowledgeably about how men act. The guises and disguises of ambition, the glint of fever in the eye when a man is going for the Big Apple, the way a New Man on the make can use the old steppingstones (Cambridge common room, St. James's club) -- all this Snow knows with firsthand certainty. For Snow, after all, is one of those who made it: the son of a shoe-factory clerk who became a Cambridge don and a Parliamentary Secretary. Sir Charles Percy Snow. A baron! Snow's heroes are the deserving successes: the realists. How could it be otherwise? They are the illusionless men who sit in committee around conference tables and work out agreements that satisfy no one but at least keep the machinery turning.

Snow may yearn to be apocalyptic, like everybody else. But he really has very little to do with heaven and hell. Limbo is his territory, the area of half-victories and temporary defeats.

In the Age of Aquarius it is not particularly prestigious to be a gray eminence. But that is Snow's destiny. He has written the record of middling men and their middling ways in an often middling time.

Another Remembrance of Things Past? Never. Another Forsyte Saga? Perhaps. As with Galsworthy, Snow's respectable achievement has been to make honest drama out of the undramatic stuff of compromise.

qed-Melvin Maddocks

-With The Military Philosophers (1969), Powell arrived at the ninth volume in his Music of Time series, with no end in sight.

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