Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Yes, you’re right.’

So he was, though very few people would have thought so.

I was thinking, when he was looking after his friends, or even me, he could show much sympathy. When he was chasing one of his own desires, he was so intense that he could be cruel. That wasn’t simply one of the contradictions of his age. I expected that he would have to live with it. That evening, though, he was at his kindest.

‘So I should have guessed that you’d plunge in this time,’ he said, with a cheerful sarcastic flick. ‘And you didn’t. Still capable of surprising us, aren’t you?’

‘That wasn’t really the chief reason,’ I played the sarcasm back.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ he cried, by way of applause. ‘Anyway, not many people ever have the chance to say no. I’m going to stand you a drink on it.’

We went out of the college and slipped up Petty Cury towards the Red Lion, just as before the war – especially in that autumn when the election of the Master was coming close and we didn’t want to be traceable in our rooms – Roy Calvert and I used to do. Neither Charles, nor undergraduates whom he called to in the street, were wearing gowns, as once they would have been obliged to after dusk: but they were wearing a uniform of their own, corduroy jackets and jeans, the lineal descendants of Hector Rose’s morning attire, that reminder of his youth.

While I sat in the long hall of the pub, Charles rejoined me, carrying two tankards of beer. He stretched out his legs on one side of our table, and said: ‘Well, here’s to your abdication.’

I was feeling celebratory, expansive and at the same time (which didn’t often happen in Cambridge) not unpleasantly nostalgic. It was a long time since I had had a drink inside that place. It seemed strange to be there with this other young man, not so elegant as Roy Calvert, nothing like so manic, and yet with wits which weren’t so unlike: with this young man, who, by a curious fluke, had that year become some kind of intimate – in a relation, as well as a circle, mysterious to me – of Roy Calvert’s daughter.

After a swallow of beer, Charles, also expansive, though he had nothing to be nostalgic about, said: ‘Daddy’ (when had he last called me that?), ‘I take it this is the end of one line for you, it must be.’

‘Yes, of course it must.’

‘It never was a very central line, though, was it?’

I was trying to be detached. Living in our time, I said, you couldn’t help being concerned with politics – unless you were less sentient than a human being could reasonably be. In the thirties people such as Francis Getliffe and I had been involved as one might have been in one’s own illness: and from then on we had picked up bits of knowledge, bits of responsibility, which we couldn’t easily shrug off.

But that wasn’t quite the whole story, at least for me. It wasn’t as free from self. I had always had something more than an interest, less than a passion, in politics. I had been less addicted than Charles himself, I said straight to the attentive face. And yet, one’s life isn’t all a chance, there’s often a secret planner putting one where one has, even without admitting it, a slightly shamefaced inclination to be. So I had found myself, as it were absent-mindedly, somewhere near – sometimes on the fringe, sometimes closer in – a good deal of politics.

When had it all started? This was the end of a line all right. Perhaps one could name a beginning, the night I clinched a gamble, totally unjustified, and decided to read for the Bar. That gave me my chance to live among various kinds of political men – industrial politicians, from my observer’s position beside Paul Lufkin, academic politicians in the college (as in that election year 1937, fresh in my mind tonight), and finally the administrators and the national politicians, those who seemed to others, and sometimes to themselves, to possess what men thought of as power.

Charles knew all that. He thought, if he had had the same experience, he would have gone through it with as much interest. But he didn’t want to discuss that theme in my biography, now being dismissed for good and all. He was occupied, as I went to fetch two more pints, with what lessons he could learn. We had talked about it often, just as on the night he returned home in the summer. Not as father and son, but as colleagues, fellow students, or perhaps people who shared a taste in common. Many of our tastes were different, but here we were, and had been since he grew up, very near together.

Closed politics. Open politics. That was a distinction we had spoken of before, and stretched out in gawky relaxation Charles came back to it that night. Closed politics. The politics of small groups, where person acted upon person. You saw it in any place where people were in action, committees of sports clubs, cabinets, colleges, the White House, boards of companies, dramatic societies. You saw it perhaps at something like its purest (just because the society answered to no one but itself, lived like an island) in the college in my time. But it must be much the same in somewhat more prepotent groups, such as the Vatican or the Politburo.

‘I fancy’, said Charles, ‘you’ve known as much about it as anyone will need to know.’

That was said very simply, as a compliment. He was right, I thought, in judging that the subject wasn’t infinite: the permutations of people acting in closed societies were quite limited, and there wasn’t all that much to discover. But I also thought that he might be wrong, if he guessed that closed politics were becoming less significant. I might have guessed the same thing at his age – that wasn’t patronising, some of his insights were sharper than mine – but it would have been flat wrong. For some reason about which none of us was clear, partly perhaps because all social processes had become, not only larger, but much more articulated, closed politics in my lifetime had become, not less influential, but much more so. And this had passed into the climate of the day. Many more people had become half-interested in, half-apprehensive about, power groups, secret decisions. There were more attempts to understand them than in my youth. It was only by a quirk of temperament, and a lot of chance, that I had spent some time upon them, I told Charles: but, just for once, he could take me as a kind of weathervane.

Yes, he granted me that: and where did we go from there?

As we left the Lion, and walked through the market place, he began to speak freely, the words not edged or chosen, but coming out with passion. The real hope was open politics. It must be. If any of his generation – anywhere – could make open politics real again.

Yes, the machinery mattered, of course it mattered, only a fool ignored it – but there was everything to do. It just wasn’t enough to ward off nuclear war or even to feed the hungry world. That was necessary but not sufficient. People in the West were crying out for something more.

Although it was after ten when we reached Trinity, the gate stood open (Charles, unlike me, had not seen it closed at that time of night) and two girls were entering in front of us. The Great Court spread out splendid in the high moonlight: as we passed the sundial, its shadow was black-etched on the turf: Charles was oblivious to the brilliant night or to any other vista. Hadn’t one of my old friends, he was asking, once said that literature, to be any good, had to give some intimation of a desirable life? Well, so had politics. Far more imperatively. That was what the advanced world, the industrialised world, the whole of the West was waiting for. Someone had to try. Someone who understood the industrialised world: that was there for keeps. Someone who started there. A Lenin of the affluent society. Someone who could make its life seem worth while.