SIR,--According to Dr. Leavis, Snow 'isn't a novelist at all.'
This involves the redefinition of a novel as 'a novel approved by Dr. Leavis'—and that makes a pretty restricted class. But novelist or not, Snow has written a number of prose fictions which handle experience and events of life-and-death importance for the next generation which few other writers deal with at all: for example, the scientist's responsibility for atomic warfare in The New Men and the perse- cution of intellectuals for their political views in The Affair. Dr. Leavis, at retiring age, may not feel the Physical survival of the human race to be an important theme (as he says, 'individual lives cannot be aggregated or dealt with quantitatively in any way,' though they were surely 'dealt with quantita- tively' at Hiroshima). But Snow, like Bertrand Russell (another Leavis bete noire), does feel its importance; and this is one more reason why many sixth-formers treat his fictions with respect.
Finally. I would like to put it on record that even twenty-five years ago plenty of students, of whom I was one, read and responded to Lawrence as a great writer without any prior knowledge that Leavis had 'backed' him as such. If Leavis is to assert his superiority over Snow, let it be on the basis of his Own works; he has no exclusive patent rights in those of Lawrence. who, though often perverse and wrong- headed (did he not speak of 'the mean Jane Austen'?) was an imaginative writer on a rather different level.
MARGOT C. HEINEMANN
30 Southwood Lane, N6
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