Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (94 page)

If any civilisation is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

If there were an award for the most influential bad novelist in literary history, Ayn Rand would be a contender. A woman of ferocious competitive instinct, she would be furious if she did not also win that award. Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born, Russian Jewish, in St Petersburg in 1905. Her father ran a pharmacy business. The Rosenbaums were relaxed about religion but 1905, the year of Alisa’s birth, was a bad year to be Jewish as pogroms raged across Russia. The year 1917 was an even worse time to be bourgeois. The Bolsheviks seized their pharmacy and the Rosenbaums were forced to flee to the Crimea. With the success of the Revolution they returned to Leningrad, as it now was, where Alisa studied philosophy at university. She came to loathe Communism and was developing a lifelong interest in Nietzsche – not a favourite of the party.

Granted a lucky visa to visit relatives in the US, she fled the USSR for ever in 1926. An astonishingly enterprising woman, she settled in Hollywood to become a screenwriter – in a language not her own, and a society of which she knew very little, and a medium which had only just discovered ‘talkies’. She changed her name to Ayn Rand, married (a pliant young actor, Frank O’Connor, of no talent whatsoever), became a US citizen in 1931, and made a living for herself in films, a business never easy to thrive in. It helped that she was – if not filmstar-beautiful – strikingly handsome and unafraid to use her body in pursuit of higher things. Her career took its definitive turn in 1932 with the anti-Soviet screenplay,
Red Pawn
, for Josef von Sternberg. The film was never produced but got her noticed. Hereafter her writing was ferociously free-enterprise. She was, it was later said, a ‘hob-nailed Reagan’. Gordon (‘greed is good’) Gecko was a Pinko alongside Ayn Rand. She wrote an autobiographical novel about the horrors of the Soviet Union,
We the Living
(1936), and a Huxley-style dystopia,
Anthem
(1938). The dystopia is better, but neither is good. Both are pure Ayn.

She was politically active during the war years and brought out her first bestselling work of fiction,
The Fountainhead
, with its architect hero (based on Frank Lloyd Wright), Howard Roark, in 1943. He embodied her fanatic belief in individual heroism. A film, starring Gary Cooper, was made in 1949. Inevitably she was called as a friendly witness in the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into ‘Red’ infiltration into Hollywood. Now well off with the royalties from
The Fountainhead
, Rand was formulating her views into a sub-Nietzschean philosophy she called ‘Objectivism’, founded on a belief in ‘Rational Selfishness’.

She propagated her views in her massive sermon to the world,
Atlas Shrugged
, published in 1957. The novel revolves around the idea of the wealth-creators (i.e. moguls, magnates and millionaires) of the US following the corrupt example of their workers – trade unionising and going on strike. The capitalistic Atlas shrugs off the burden of making himself rich, and the mass of the population (‘grabbers’) descend into the dystopian chaos they have brought on themselves with their irrational demand that the state look after them. The moral, as one disaffected blogger puts it, is that ‘Poor People Are Lazy Assholes.’ Close on 1,200 pages long (200 of which were an appended politico-philosophical manifesto),
Atlas Shrugged
was not your ordinary popular novel and reviews were scathing. Robert Kirsch declared in the
Los Angeles Times
that ‘It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.’ But the charismatic Rand had access to the new medium of TV talk shows and used the exposure to popularise her novel and its message. She lectured indefatigably on its Objectivist themes. The first 100,000 copies, published on 10 October 1957, gradually cleared. Then cleared again and again. American sales of 5 million were clocked up by 1984.

Rand’s Objectivism took the philosopher-hero John Galt’s oath (‘I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine’) and his iconic ‘sign of the dollar’ as its prime articles of faith. Rand herself affected personal jewellery emblazoned with the same sacred $. As Rand’s ideas percolated into orthodox republicanism, the coherence of her group broke up. Her younger disciple, and designated heir, Nathaniel Branden, had been her lover for many years. He committed the treachery of falling in love with a younger, more beautiful, someone else. His disgrace and public ejection from her inner council was shattering to the movement as a whole.

In later years, Rand became ever more strident in the expression of her Objectivist doctrines and died of a heart attack, having survived lung cancer (she was a chain smoker), aged seventy-seven. She was buried in the Kensico cemetery, Valhalla, New York: alongside the casket was a six-foot-tall floral display in the shape of the sacred dollar.

Snow thinks of himself as a novelist.
F. R. Leavis

Viewed from one angle C. P. Snow ranks as the most honoured author of his age. The reverse shot sees him as the most overblown. He went to his grave loaded with lifetime awards; a CBE (‘a fairly high one’), 1943; a knight, 1957; a life peer, 1964; but, for all the gongs and ermine, any reputation as a novelist worthy of posterity’s attention has gone to the grave with him. Two phrases he put into circulation survive him: ‘the corridors of power’ and ‘the two cultures’. Snow was the second of four sons of a clerk in a Leicester shoe factory – a passionate church organist, serial adulterer, and a weak man. Charles’s background was, in his phrase, ‘petty bourgeois-cum-proletarian’. His subsequent career, he resolved, should be anything but petty. Snow’s first twenty years are a parable of Smilesian self-improvement: he was a ‘flier’. The clever boy in a backstreet family, he won a grammar school scholarship; he left at sixteen, but studied by night for entrance to university. At London University he got ‘a good first’ and an MSc in chemistry, followed by a studentship at the Cavendish, Cambridge, a laboratory ‘stiff with Nobel Prize winners’.

Among these giants of science, young Snow did research on the ‘infra-red spectra of simple diatomic molecules’, which led, in 1930, to a college fellowship and a stipend of £750 a year. It was an extraordinary achievement, but – in the final analysis – Snow was at best a ‘competent’ (his word) scientist among the best in the world. There was, thankfully, the second culture to fall back on. Snow had from his early years aspired to rank with ‘the great Russian and French writers’: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Balzac. He made his first stabs at fiction with potboilers – detective and SF novels – but ‘genre’ was for second-raters. Snow always aimed at the peaks. Settling into his groove he began his eleven-strong sequence,
Strangers and Brothers
, in 1935. The long life history of Lewis Eliot is patently autobiographical and has easily identifiable characters from public and university life. Its composition would jog along until 1970, keeping company with its author’s rise in the world.

During the early war years, Snow carried a cyanide vial in his pocket. He had two entries on the Gestapo death list, he informed friends, some of whom would have been flattered to have one. He was recruited by ‘Intelligence’ as a scientific adviser – keeping the Cabinet informed about what the boffins in the backroom were doing and where the Nazis had got to with their nuclear research. ‘I think I was pretty effective,’ he records. His best novel,
The Masters
, was begun with the leisure of peacetime and published in 1951. It chronicles a battle for high college office which comes to symbolise a clash between old and new learning. The novel was
widely read at a period when British universities were struggling to redefine themselves. Curricula were duly revised along Snow’s suggested bilateralism: indeed, a whole ‘new’ university, Keele, was set up in his intellectual image.

Snow, despite some early homosexual experiences (candidly confessed to), had conducted affairs, alluded to in his novels. In 1950 he married the recently divorced novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912–81), a lover of some years standing. The marriage was socially high-profile and successful, but he was not faithful. Johnson was either unaware or complaisant. The couple’s only child Philip was born in 1952.

After the war, Snow was smoothly shoe-horned into the upper echelons of industry, as Director of Personnel at GEC. He stayed in the post for fourteen years.
Strangers and Brothers
, meanwhile, pulsed out, tracking, remorselessly, its author’s upward progress. The peaks were in sight, he was now a sage. In 1959 he took the nation to task in his Rede lectures, entitled:
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
(1959). There were, he argued, ‘New Men’ and ‘Old Men’. The one knew Shakespeare but were stumped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the other vice versa. There was, he implied, one man who effortlessly bridged the two – there should be more Snows. The two-culture thesis was influential and adopted as holy writ in the sixth forms of Britain. Congenial as it was with liberal educationists, it provoked ferocious refutation from the leading literary critic of the time, F. R. Leavis. In an answering lecture in 1962, Leavis, much the more effective polemicist, denied any such facile cultural split and mocked the pontifical tone of Snow’s argument which, as he bitingly observed, only genius could justify: but, then, who could imagine genius using such a tone? As for Tolstoyan pretension, ‘Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist … his incapacity as a novelist is … total … as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist … not only is he not a genius … he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.’ Snow’s reputation among the discriminating few, and his
amour propre
, never recovered.

With the public at large his reputation was unaffected, however. A lifelong socialist, Snow was one of the darlings of the 1964 Wilson administration, wedded as it was to the utopian belief that ‘the white heat of technology’ would make Great Britain great again. It was entirely in line with Baron Snow of Leicester’s view of things. It was not, otherwise, a happy decade for the Snows. As the 1960s swung on, they were increasingly preoccupied with the nation’s moral decay – principally the growth of the pornography industry and crimes such as the Moors murders. Evil resurgent is dramatised in Snow’s tenth novel,
The Sleep of Reason
(1968) and Johnson’s
j’accuse, On Iniquity
(1967).

Snow looked prematurely ancient and Yoda-like almost from youth. A sceptical
Pamela Hansford Johnson consulted
Who’s Who
for confirmation when informed that the bald, fat, wrinkled fellow she was falling in love with was as young as he claimed to be. Not that age mattered. ‘I have a certain charm, when I choose to exercise it,’ Snow blandly informed his biographer (luckily male). He smoked and drank immoderately, and was disabled in body and fogged in mind towards the end of his life, when his main writing was ponderous reviews for the
Financial Times
. His own financial affairs were in apple-pie order: he left £300,000 on his death. Johnson died shortly after.

The only modern novelist I like is Kafka

While confessing to arrant Kafkaism, Warner routinely added that his other principal influence was Tobias Smollett – English cheese and Czech chalk. The son of an Anglican parson in Gloucestershire, who encumbered his son with the archetypally Victorian forenames ‘Reginald Ernest’, and a mother whom he candidly hated, Warner attended a minor public school. He shone on the rugger field and in the classroom, winning a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics. That subject was then presided over by the formidable Maurice Bowra – a man whose genitals, one of his hero-worshippers later recorded, resembled the ruins at Delphi. They were frequently on view at Parson’s Pleasure, where dons bathe nude and can exchange donnish pleasantries.

As Anthony Powell recalled, ‘Bowra always talked as if homosexuality was the normal condition of an intelligent man.’ Warner shared Bowra’s philhellenism, but not his sexual proclivities. At Oxford he made a flying start and in the first round of ‘final’ examinations (‘Mods’) he racked up a record number of alphas – more, even, than had Bowra. Score one for heterosexuality. A glittering academic career was in prospect – but never materialised. In his third year, Warner suffered a spectacular nervous breakdown. Bowra, never one to let sympathy interfere with a witticism, recalled: ‘he was said to see the transcendental deduction of the categories lying in solid blocks across the room.’ Warner’s first wife, Frances Grove, diagnosed in her husband an irreconcilable clash between ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’ – Oxford
and the real world; hetero and homo. There was also an infection of fashionable Marxism and incipient alcoholism.