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PARTISAN REVIEW
loathing, the novel rocks to its close in an engulfing wash of senti–
mentality. Those Gilbert Murray liberal intellectuals, once gingerly de–
fended in
Such Darling Dodos,
have a rough comeuppance.
C. P. Snow's
Homecoming
is the sixth in a long
Bildungsroman
by this gifted bureaucrat-novelist and self-made connoisseur of self-made
men. Snow has little sympathy and not much understanding for intel–
lectuals of the literary sort, but he is no fool. It's a relief, I think, to
find an Englishman approaching Power as a theater for tragic action
instead of sentimentalizing it into a romantic escapade.
Thi~
is H . G.
Wells's world grown ripe and professional. Instead of the manic-depres–
sive exuberances of Wells we have something rather French in feel; a
shrewd, unblinking, original, slightly but not annoyingly sentimental
study of life in the upper echelons of the British civil service. Unfor–
tunately for
Homecoming
(I didn't have time to read the others) , he
has added a sub-plot of sophisticated sexual intrigue. Snow takes after
"sensuality" as solemnly as the editors of
The N ew Statesman
take after
wine in their annual Wine Supplements. I can't now recall whether
or not Lewis Eliot "gets" his sexually viable Margaret in the end. It
is certain that she gives him a very good feeling and pays heavily in
so doing. Lewis Eliot in love is a tinkerer, an anguished sheep-dog;
Lewis in Whitehall is quite another story. In a recent
New Statesman
think-piece, Snow wrote engagingly of passing from a literary party to
a party of scientists
within a single night;
the veritable leaven of the
lump, the man so far inside he finds himself alone. This, perhaps, is
creative innocence and the key to his strength.
Wright Morris, says John W. Aldridge, is "the most important
novelist of the American middle generation" and
The Field of Vision
"brilliantly climaxes his most creative period. It is a work of permanent
significance...." Well, leave us face it, as the TV comics say. It
just ain't so. Morris handles the romantic figures of tabloid legend and
the mythical
Reader's Digest-reading
average man with a star-struck
wonder that's just a wee bit hollow and fake. His real gift, on the
basis of a chapter called "Scanlon," seems to be for action narrative
and hallucinated horror. I don't say he cannot be amiable, nor that he
doesn't deserve to make a comfortable living as a writer. But this par–
ticular "novel" (the only one of his I have read) is all signification and
no significand. A group of middling folks watch a bull-fight in Mexico
(you expected Spain?). Sometime in the past one of them, said to be
as charming and as doomed as Orson Welles, has ripped a pocket off
Ty Cobb's uniform, which talisman is meant to be a comic Golden
Fleece (or something), and has kissed somebody's frigid, blue-eyed wife
