Two Cultures in the Corridors

On the mantelpiece of the highceilinged drawing room in London stood a bronze minotaur by Sculptor-Painter Michael Ayrton. On the walls hung two early canvases by Sidney Nolan. Novelist C. P. Snow leaned forward on the edge of a sofa, planted his elbows on his knees and lit a Senior Service.

"It was late Friday when it became clear that Labor could form the government," he said. "My wife and I were speculating, rather sardonically, on the numbers of people there must be sitting beside their telephones at that moment, hoping for a call from Downing Street. On Sunday afternoon I went for a long walk, ruminating on the same subject. That the telephone might ring never entered my mind for a moment, but almost the minute I finished my walk the phone went. Could I present myself at Downing Street in an hour, and please to come in by the back door? I went round."

Harold Wilson gave Snow a Scotch and asked him how he'd feel about "being No. 2 to Frank Cousins in the Ministry of Technology. Of course I said yes. After all, one has talked so much about it one would feel a bit of a stinker not to have a go at it."

Life Imitates Art. Thus did Snow, 59, sometime physicist, Cambridge don, civil servant, business executive and portrayer-in-fiction of Britain's rulers, begin a new career: Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Technology in Wilson's new government, which has raided labs and lecture halls for academic talent to fill key posts in education, defense, science, economics.

For Snow, an apostle of science who made his reputation by deploring the "two cultures" communications gap between scientists and humanists, it will be an opportunity to apply new technology to Britain's aging industry, medical research and nature conservation --and make notes for his next novel. To become Her Majesty's spokesman in the House of Lords, where Laborite Snow makes his debut this week, he exchanged the knightly title of "Sir" for a life peerage as Lord Snow of Leicester, the industrial town where he was raised.

"Charmingly Square." Like Civil Servant Lewis Eliot, fictional hero of his series of novels, Snow was born "shabby genteel, really, just a cut above the working class." Their careers have run parallel for two decades, and Snow's newest book, Corridors of Power, makes the coincidence even closer.

The novel, already published in the U.S. (TIME, Sept. 18), is just out in England. With Snow's consent. Publisher and former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delayed publication until after the election because the leading character, an ambitious young Tory minister named Roger Quaife, is speeded to ruin over an adulterous affair that voters could have taken for the Profumo scandal. Quaife's adviser is none other than Lewis Eliot, and Snow will similarly be chief counselor to a Cabinet member (where the parallel ends: Union Leader Cousins is not known to be involved in any scandal). "Fantastic," says Snow, "that I should step so nearly into the shoes of my character."

Conservative politicians gleefully roasted the novel. Former Education Minister Sir Edward Boyle sniffed that Snow's fictional Prime Minister was "pretty incredible." Frontbencher Iain Macleod said that "as a portrait of Tory politics half a dozen years ago, it is charmingly square." Quintin Hogg mused. "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Literary critics were kinder, except for Cambridge Don F. R. Leavis, whose 1962 onslaught on Snow as "portentously ignorant" remains a bloody monument in the history of British literary warfare. Leavis acidly remarked: "Snow is in his heaven, the House of Lords." Snow urbanely shrugged off the critics. That's what Lewis Eliot would have done.

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