Life & Letters | 13 December 2008

Flying to Athens on one of his last visits to Greece, Simon Gray started reading a novel by C. P. Snow, one of those old orange Penguins. After 50 pages he ‘still had no idea what the story was about’. It seemed foggy, ‘but an odd sort of fog, everything described so clearly, and yet everything obscured … he describes his world without seeing it, almost as if he thinks adjectives are in themselves full of detail and content.’ As for the narrator, Lewis Eliot (‘I suppose he’s a front for old C. P. himself’ — which he undoubtedly was), Simon remarked on his ‘trick of having himself complimented’ by other characters. This is certainly irritating.

The curious thing is that Simon wrote about this novel as if he had never read Snow previously. Yet surely he must have. Few under the age of, say, 40 may have read him, but back in the Fifties and Sixties I would be surprised if undergraduates who read novels had missed out on him.