Galsworthy's Ghost

HOMECOMING (400 pp.)--C. P. Snow --Scribner ($3.95).

Two-thirds of the way through Homecoming, two erstwhile lovers meet and lave a chat some time after the girl has married another man:

" T haven't much to tell you,' I said. " 'Tell me what there is.' " 'It could be worse.' " 'You've always been ready to bear it, haven't you?'

" 'No. my life isn't intolerable,' I said. " 'But what?'

" 'There's not much in it,' I replied." The "I" of the dialogue is Lewis Eliot, a middle-aging, upper-echelon British bureaucrat and the grimace-and-bear-it hero of this sixth of Author Snow's projected ten-volume Forsyte-ish saga. C. P. (for Charles Percy) Snow, 50, is a latter-day Galsworthy, precise, ruminative, articulate, but decorously genteel to the point of inaudibility. Critics who for more than a decade have touted him as a new Stendhal are simply chasing the wrong literary genealogy. In the Snow-Galsworthy vision, the middle class can have no Stendhalian tragedies, only troubles. The scent of Homecoming is well-bred but unmistakable: it's Yardley Soap opera.

In the previous novels of the series, Lewis Eliot has lifted himself from the pit of shabby genteel poverty, taking a fling at law and teaching, and played the good Samaritan to a headstrong younger brother. When the present novel opens in 1938. Eliot is trudging home to a wife with a "schizoid chill." He has married her out of the weakest virtue, pity, but since he himself has never surfaced emotionally, he can bring her no love. In nagging misery, she commits suicide.

Eliot seeks true love with Margaret, a bookish blithe spirit who captures his fancy by giving him a copy of the Goncourts' journals. After a two-year love affair, the pair decide that they are not made for each other, but after Margaret marries another man and has a child, they decide that they are. The steps Eliot takes to break up Margaret's marriage and marry her himself might have struck old Galsworthy as slightly caddish.

Perhaps the book's most interesting and significant part concerns what Hero Eliot likes best--his administrative work in a hush-hush atomic-energy project buzzing with top-drawer office politics. The anatomy of power excites Author Snow (himself a sometime physicist and civil servant) in the same way that the very rich fascinated Scott Fitzgerald, and he is at his best in scenes in which two or three top civil servants measure out other men's job futures in judicious mumbles. On this power ladder, Eliot represents the "new men," the non-U's in Nancy Mit-fordese, the men with the wrong school ties around their necks and humble aspidistras in the windows of their pasts. In that sense, Author Snow is the true chronicler of a new class--one of the Gals-worthiest classes in modern life.

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