The Affair and Come On Strong

The Affair was a novel by C. P. Snow about scientific hanky-panky at a mythical Cambridge college. Forget C. P. Snow. His Affair was admittedly only a mediocre book at best--standing in somewhat the same relation to The Masters as Return to Peyton Place does to its predecessor--but it was an honest, intelligent novel, and certainly not a bad one.

Ronald Millar's Affair, on the other hand, is quite a poor play (irritating, too, for it is not nearly so good as it should be), but its shortcomings have nothing to do with any blunders by Sir Charles. Perhaps Millar would have done better to choose some other novel and novelist in the first place: Snow's books are wordy enough, goodness knows, but they're not especially talky; dialogue is usually reserved for the moments of climactic self-revelation hoarded by Lewis Eliot, who then mumbles them over in his tortuous brain, and fills most of the rest of each novel with speculations about just what precisely it was that his friends actually had revealed.

Obviously, Millar had to dispense with Eliot's woollyminded ruminations, and, probably, he had to retain what little dialogue Snow himself wrote in order to claim any connection with the novel; the effect of his dramatization, is to bury Snow's lines and blur whatever impact they may have had in the book.

Millar has also managed to foul up the pace of The Affair. One of the most impressive elements of any Snow novel is its slow, heavy, deliberative--almost inexorable--progress: each move, when it comes, seems inevitable, and there are seldom any false steps. In the play, though, everything happens at once. Tempers flare, men change sides and jump around the Common Room with the speed and effectiveness of Harold Lloyd. Again, of course, the novel's deliberate speed would admittedly have been deathly on the stage, so Millar had to do something; but, again, too, Millar's answer to his problem is as theatrically disastrous.

Finally, Millar has misconstrued most of Snow's characters. Lewis Eliot, whom Millar has, for some reason, knighted, has become some sort of a passive Eric Portman figure, and no longer imposes any recognizable pattern on the various narrative fragments. Arthur Brown, to take only one other example, has suddenly sprouted a Falstaffian beard and manner: in the book, of course, he is the mildest and most sober of men. In fact, only G. H. Winslow, the College's delightfully tart ex-Bursar, and M. H. L. Gay, the Senior Fellow, retain any of their Snow-given characteristics; and their function is minor and wholly comic. The other figures are inadequately drawn and only sketchily donnish.

Come On Strong is a serious play by Garson Kanin about the kind of show biz people that Nichols and May, rightly, think are funny. Carroll Baker is a girl on the way up; Van Johnson is a man of a certain amount of principle who follows along for a certain distance. The dialogue is studded with the kind of cracks that only canned TV audiences find funny. Californians refer to San Francisco as "Frisco." How, one muses, does a show like this ever reach Boston, let alone Broadway?