SIR,—Sir Charles Snow's popularity in the United States, which craves
a literature of assent, has been such as to make Dr. Leavis's characteristically inde- pendent comments in your pages most timely.
In Commonweal for October 12, 1956, I published a similar protest against the utilitarian Newspeak of Snow's fiction and later, in The Critic (April/May, 1960), rather bemusedly wondered whether self- parody wasn't Snow's form of experiment within the novel. However, New Left Review carried a parody id their September/October, 1960, issue (C. P. Sleet —PART NINE: THE PLAN MATURES; Chapter 46; Oder Of A Cigarette, etc.); still, the hosannas obediently continued on this side of the Atlantic, both from the Barzun-Trilling syndrome and the Book-of-the-Month Club, the worst of both worlds, as it were. Dr. Leavis's lecture was needed, indeed.
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