Cash and Curry

By Melvin Maddocks

IN THEIR WISDOM by C.P.SNOW 345 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

C.P. Snow continues to operate as the self-assigned recording secretary of the last gentleman's club on earth. There he sits, at 69, in his cracking leather chair in the corner, this son of a shoe-factory clerk from Leicester, watching the Old Parties of British aristocracy come and go, fretting over the State of the World, then settling down to a civilized meal as if it were their last: "Decanters on tables, lights beaming off cutlery and peach-fed cheeks."

Past privilege, present crisis: here is the theme of In Their Wisdom. The dwindling heritage of the British Empire seems to be symbolized by the legacy of -L-400,000 (more or less), perversely left by a crotchety octogenarian to the ne'er-do-well son of his nurse-secretary-companion Julian Underwood. The dead man's daughter, Jenny Rastall, contests the will. Like a La Ronde involving money instead of sex, Snow's plot circles in an ever widening spiral until the whole of '70s English society seems ensnarled in the litigation.

The obvious comparison is Bleak House, which so sharply used law courts as a metaphor for 19th century England. But Snow is closer to Trollope (whose biography he is now writing) than to Dickens. For he is finally interested in showing how the system works, rather than in asking why or making a fuss about it. His wariness makes for low-level emotions. What Critic V.S. Pritchett said of Trollope could be said of Snow: "Reading him is like walking down endless corridors of carpet."

The outcome of Jenny Rastall's suit merely confirms what Snow readers were told a dozen novels ago: power and justice are two different things. Despite his cool eye, Snow cannot really be hard on those who are, after all, his fellow clubmen. An overachiever--physicist and parliamentary secretary as well as prolific novelist--Lord Snow cracked the Establishment at about the time the Establishment cracked. More softy than satirist, the clerk's son makes a case for the not-so-happy few even as he chronicles their ineptitude, their folly in a world they never made. These are men, Snow seems to say, curiously out of touch, not only with their times but with their wives and their children and finally with themselves. Yet as he records the patrician drone of the House of Lords or the fatuousness of a garden party (with electric heaters), Snow notes other factors too: "Endurance, good sense, realism, a kind of courage."

Like the characters of In Their Wisdom, circling their pot of gold, Snow still twitches with what he calls the "tic of hope." He concludes with a phrase that a dozen years ago would have brought cries of "Banal old fogy!" from all the Angry Young Men. "The worst doesn't always happen," he writes. Today, in a world that will settle for less, the words mean more--even ring with a certain Colonel Blimp gallantry. How Snow readers have changed! How Snow has stayed the same! .Melvin Maddocks

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