RONALD MILLAR Leavis on Snow is the boomerang of the
year. The splenetic doctor's attempt at professional assassination is so ludicrou,l!, overdone as to be laughable.
The original leak of provocative snippets was full of promise. Leavis should have left it at that. His full text diminishes the attacker, not the attacked, and, incidentally is the final vindication of Snow's portrait of a certain type of don manque.
i Lashing out wildly at Snow's dialogue, Leavis says : `To imagine it spoken is impossible.' But to imagine it spoken is unnecessary. He can, in fact, hear it spoken at one of the London theatres. True, Snow wrote the book on which the play is based, not the play itself. But I think I should know the balance of dialogue between dramatist and novelist. If I put it at roughly fifty-fifty, I am no doubt, like Leavis, doing C. P. Snow a gross injustice.
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