Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     Husbands and wives have been known to hold strong views about many things, and marriage provides no guarantee that those views will be congruent. Although popular fiction and cinema have attempted to present as intrinsically interesting the variances between husband's and wife's assessments of the same facts and events, there is perhaps in general no more reason to collect opinions in the "his" and "hers" versions than the towels, sleeping ensembles or other commodities that are customarily marketed in the same manner. When the husband and wife in question are novelists as distinguished as C.P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson, however, and the object of their views is one of the most disturbing murder trials of our day, the Moors Murder Trial, a comparison of their individual attitudes may illustrate the possibility of highly personal intellectual and emotional responses by two thinkers bound by marriage, and at the same time assist the continuing assessment and development of public views on a matter of human and social concern.
     Pamela Hansford Johnson's reflections on the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the so-called Moors Murder Trial, were published in her essay On Iniquity: Some Personal Reflections Arising Out of the Moors Murder Trial (1967). C.P. Snow used the Moors Trial as the basis for the next-to-last novel in the Strangers and Brothers cycle, The Sleep of Reason (1968). Despite the fact that the Strangers and Brothers series is rooted in actual events of modern history, it can, of course, be misleading to take The Sleep of Reason to be a literal retelling of the Moors Trial. Just as its immediate predecessor, The Corridors of Power, carries strong overtones of the Profumo affair, while stirring fainter reminiscences of the Dilke scandal, so The Sleep of Reason reminds us not only of Brady and Hindley, but also of the trial of the girls Parker and Hulme in New Zealand, and ultimately of the Loeb and Leopold case.
     C.P. Snow's treatment of crime in The Sleep of Reason takes on added interest in light of the relatively recent paperback publication of his early detective novel, Death Under Sail, which first appeared in 1932. Although Snow now dismisses Death Under Sail as "a stylised, artificial detective story very much in the manner of the day," it has sufficient formal and thematic links with his mature work to warrant our noting, although with a light hand, the continuity of certain of Snow's thoughts about murder and crime. Even the most superficial glance at Death Under Sail immediately renews our acquaintance with

the formal signposts marking the mature novels: the short, provocative chapter headings, and the habit of ending a chapter with one character addressing an intriguing question or Delphic pronouncement to an unprepared companion. The narrative raw materials also bear a family resemblance to those of the later works. We see in the early Snow who-dunit the prominent use of a theme that was to run through many of the Strangers and Brothers books -- the significance of integrity in scientific research as a touchstone of character and reaction in crisis.
     A shared assumption underlies On Iniquity and The Sleep of Reason: that a crime or criminal trial may merit the close scrutiny of an intelligent person not professionally concerned with law or criminology. The question of why this should be so, although not capable of definitive answer, is a fascinating one and has received a good deal of attention in the literature of crime. Many of the alternative views are recorded by Patricia Pitman and Colin Wilson in their respective introductions to their joint work, Encyclopedia of Murder (1962). Colin Wilson, in his preface, entitled "The Study of Murder," accounts for his interest in murder by relating the subject to his "outsider" thesis. He conceives the possibility of viewing an encyclopedia of murder as a series of exhibits in a lecture on the meaning of existentialism, in which one can ask each murderer his estimate of the value of life, "and get from him the answer in quite precise physical terms: ten pounds, a snub, my wife's infidelity, a broken engagement, etc."
     In A Casebook of Murder (1969), Wilson elaborated the basis of his interest in crime, which he characterized as "philosophical." To him, the interesting thing about the Moors murderers, Brady and Hindley, "is that they were responding to certain social pressures with freedom of choice." He makes more specific his identification of the murderer with the "outsider," in a manner that is surprisingly flattering to the murdering classes. He finds that society produces a substratum of five percent consisting of alienated men of often considerable imagination who feel resentment toward society and who are faced with obstacles, the over-coming of which may lead to art and creativity or to crime. The theoretical roots of this view are weakened a bit by Wilson's candid revelation that he regards abstract artists and atonal composers as little more than criminals whom society permits to run at large.
     In asserting that philosophy is the proper ground for an interest in crime, Wilson expressly rejects the "aesthetic" approach to crime writing that derived from Thomas De Quincey and was adopted by those modern masters among British and American crime writers William Roughead and Edmund Pearson. This school of writing, by ironic reference to standards determining the "beauty" of great crimes and by telling of murder in a predominantly humorous style, makes itself an easy target

for Wilson's charge that such writers take unfeeling pleasure in human tragedy. In Snow's Inspector Birrell in Death Under Sail we have a good-natured caricature of the crime aesthetician, with his flatulent insistence that murder, like any other art, is determined by its "tempo." The classic crime writers, however, may be understood as claiming quite simply that crime is significant as drama, independent of philosophical or sociological implications. And if we include in this concept of drama the light that crimes may shed on social milieus and living patterns, we may list among the adherents of the "murder for aesthetics" school rejected by Wilson some very improbable literary aficionados of "true crime." One such enthusiast was Henry James, who, in encouraging Roughead to return from witch stories to crime writing, wrote him that he should "go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home."
     It is possible to understand Wilson's distaste for the traditional crime writers in terms quite different from the dichotomy he offers between the "philosophical" and "aesthetic" approaches to a horrifying subject. Underlying his sense of a relationship between the criminal and the creative "outsider" appears to be a belief that the ideal crime writer should identify himself to a high degree with the criminal. Patricia Pitman, in her preface to her joint work with Wilson, takes a diametrically opposed view. She notes that the view that we are all murderers under the skin is "certainly a fashionable view." It is Miss Pitman's opinion, however, fortified by her reading of the very writers whom Wilson rejects, that: "We are fascinated by murderers not because they are so like the rest of us but because they are so utterly different. I believe that most people are born with an instinct against cold-blooded killing and that murderers lack this instinct."
     C.P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson in their treatments of the Moors Trial obviously share the assumption made by both Wilson and Pitman that the conduct of the criminal has a significant relationship with the observer's view of his own conduct and choices. But both Snow and Johnson appear to emphasize, as does Pitman, the observer's differentiation of himself from the criminal rather than the identification that appears inherent in Wilson's "philosophical" approach. And unlike Wilson, who sees murderers as related to creative outsiders, Snow and Johnson are concerned with the impact of crime upon the normal life of a community of observers.
     The reference to the disreputable concept of the normal life may be forgiven in this context. For it appears clear that to both C.P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson the phenomenon of crime has significance not only in itself, but also as a surrogate for the larger disasters that befall mankind. When one turns one's attention from war or genocide to the

study of a criminal case, even one as brutal as the Moors murders, there is perhaps some unconfessed comfort in the scaling down of the losses, and the consideration in retrospect of what might have been done to avert the tragedy.
     In this sense there is substance in the enthusiasm that the study of murder inspires in Inspector Birrell, the humorous crime buff in Death Under Sail. With the experience of World War II still lying ahead, Birrell refers to the investigation of crime as "one of the greatest romances in the world" and "a sign of all the good in our modern world." He rejoices that detective stories have replaced "ballads about war and brute force and lust."
     In Snow's The Sleep of Reason, Lewis Eliot's thoughts about the murder trial evoke memories of films of Auschwitz. Lewis Eliot admits to feeling a "shameful and disgusting pleasure" while watching the films -- a fascination "because men could do these things to other men." But the crucial point is that this fascination with Auschwitz, with the cruelty of man to man, does not overbear in either Snow's work or Johnson's the faith in the "normal" life, nor does it relieve or limit the responsibilities of that life. It is clear that neither writer is afflicted by what might be called the "Auschwitz syndrome," or the "Hiroshima syndrome": the tendency of many contemporary writers to excuse individual failures of morality or responsibility by setting them against a backdrop of the cruelties of modern history. American literature and drama since World War II have given us no more illuminating example of the Auschwitz syndrome than Arthur Miller's play After the Fall, which opens its action against the silhouetted towers of a German concentration camp and proceeds to justify Quentin's failures in his relationships with his wife, Maggie, and others with the question: "Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls?"
     Neither Snow nor Johnson returns from the view of crime or disaster with such a palliative for private standards of conduct. In The Sleep of Reason, Martin Eliot has little use for the easy switching on of the Auschwitz syndrome. He has contempt for a journalist whose articles on the trial will likely take the "all men are murderers" tack: "Great throbbing pieces about how we're all guilty. So really no one is guilty. So really everything is as well as could be expected in an admittedly imperfect world." Miss Johnson's view is put even more directly: "The murder of one single child is made negligible by nothing, not even by Hiroshima."
     Pamela Hansford Johnson was asked by the Sunday Telegraph "to spend a day or so at the Moors Trial and write of [her] impressions." But the effect of the trial was so strong that she wrote her book On Iniquity to discuss at length the "social implications" of the case.

      The facts of the Moors case are so horrifying that it is a relief to be able to present them very briefly on the ground of their general notoriety. Ian Brady, aged twenty-seven, and his mistress, Myra Hindley, aged twenty-three, were charged with the murder of a seventeen-year-old youth, Edward Evans, and of two preadolescent children, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. (More specifically, Brady was charged with the murder of all three victims. Hindley was charged with the murder of Evans and Downey and of harboring Brady in connection with his murder of Kilbride.) The trial derived its sobriquet from the fact that the victims' bodies were discovered buried on the moors near Manchester. All the murders were brutal and preceded by sexual assault or by torture. The interest of the murderers in de Sade, torture and Nazism was documented by Brady's collection of books, which he bundled into suitcases and checked at a parcel room at Manchester Central Station prior to the last murder. The sufferings of little Lesley Downey and her pleas for mercy were recorded by the murderers on a tape stored with their pornography collection, and they had also recorded their questioning of a friend of Lesley's with respect to the missing girl.
     Early in the case, Brady admitted the murder of Evans, and the line of defense on this charge appeared to be an attempt to prove lack of premeditation so as to mitigate punishment. On all other charges Brady and Hindley pleaded not guilty. Because of the defenses taken, the sanity of the defendants was not in issue, and the trial, with a total absence of psychiatric testimony, frustrated the desire of observers for some professional insights into the murderers' characters. It is observed in John Deane Potter's The Monsters of the Moors (1966) that the discovery of the crimes occurred about the same time as the passing of the 1965 No Hanging Bill. Mr. Potter speculates that if the crimes had remained capital, the introduction of psychiatric evidence in support of a plea of insanity would have been much more likely.
     The accused were found guilty on all counts, and were sentenced to life imprisonment.
     There is no doubt that Pamela Hansford Johnson's attendance at the Moors Trial drew heavily on her emotional reserves. It may not be fanciful to find a reflection of C.P. Snow's concern over the profound effect of the trial on his wife in Lewis Eliot's comments on his wife Margaret's reaction to the trial of the young murderesses in The Sleep of Reason. He says that Margaret "had believed that she would be stronger than I was," but was "appalled" by her first day in court. Without doubting in the slightest the reality of the experiences Miss Johnson recounts, the reader of On Iniquity must be promptly struck by the degree to which, even prior to her first attendance at the Moors Trial, Miss Johnson found the town of Chester, where the trial was held, to be permeated by

the evil that she was to find emanating from the case. She recalls her shock at noting that a couple of lovers, when breaking off their embrace in a public place, revealed themselves to be two males. She goes on to tell us how her walk through the town was ruined by her observation that she was being followed by an elderly man -- ruined despite a feminine calculation that the old fellow was quite harmless. At the trial a silent relationship appeared to establish itself between her and the accused murderess -- Myra Hindley seemed to look at her with hatred.
     Although these impressions of pervasive evil are subjective in the extreme, they serve to dramatize Miss Johnson's thesis that there are evil people whose actions cannot be explained away as "sickness," and that Brady and Hindley were evil. It is significant that a writer as sophisticated as Miss Johnson shares with the popular journalists the feeling that the two murderers are most aptly described as monsters.
     Regarding the murderers as evil, Miss Johnson then faces the problem of relating the criminals' natures to her conception of her own. She refuses to manufacture a false empathy with Hindley, although she recognizes a general element of violence in the pleasure derived by many adults (including herself) in disciplining unruly children. (It is interesting to note that in The Sleep of Reason one of the murderesses, in her confession, recreated the dynamics of the crime in terms of the pretended parental discipline of the child victim.) Miss Johnson, however, does not believe that she could have committed the Moors crime; she says that her "instincts do not lie in the direction of Hindley's."
     Finding iniquity in the Moors murderers, Miss Johnson devotes the bulk of her study to an inquiry into whether society has contributed to the breakdown of the murderers' inhibitions and the release of their wickedness into action. She answers this question in the affirmative, placing the blame on an all-permissive society that has given the masses freedom to indulge in violence and pornography, has encouraged the desire for instant self-gratification, and has given rise to a blunting of the sensibilities, which Miss Johnson likes to call affectlessness.
     In view of the quite literal involvement of the murderers' minds in Nazism, it may be too easy to cite Miss Johnson's essay in support of the thesis that the study of crime has a logical and psychological tie with concern for the larger human cruelties and disasters. Nevertheless, it is striking how often the case in Miss Johnson's eyes summons up visions of Nazi Germany. She can visualize Myra Hindley as an affectless concentration camp guard. And as the trial in The Sleep of Reason had reminded Lewis Eliot of a film of Auschwitz he had seen, so Miss Johnson is reminded of a viewing of films of the overrunning of Belsen.
     The attack on the affectless society in On Iniquity, however, turns out to be the prelude to what appears to be a primary concern with

pornography and the portrayal of violence in literary and dramatic form, and a plea for the continuation of censorship. This aspect of the essay appears to reflect highly personal views of the author, which may have been strongly held prior to the Moors Trial although they were reinforced by what Miss Johnson saw there. There is, for example, that English prejudice, which appeared in the trial of Lady Chatterley, against permitting pornography to come into the hands of the lower classes. I call it a prejudice, because even if it be assumed that pornography may incite to crime, the study of criminal history will not show that multiple lust killings are the peculiar preserve of the lower classes. In any event, Miss Johnson is candid in recalling in her essay that she had a little earlier stirred controversy by suggesting that Krafft-Ebing's work should not be made available in a paperback edition.
     Another personal aspect of Miss Johnson's assault on pornography is a failure to distinguish between eroticism and the display of violence. One gets the impression that the archvillains of permissiveness are to her the people who freed Lady Chatterley for mass adoration, and she notes as an immediate consequence of the Lady Chatterley trial that young people felt compelled to use four-letter words on the street.
     The focus of Miss Johnson's analysis on the single element of pornography is surprising in the light of her rejection as simplistic of an explanation of Brady's criminal development on the sole ground of his illegitimacy. Moreover, even if the principal object of Miss Johnson's attack be taken to be the portrayal of violence, the facts of the Moors Trial will not bear her out. Miss Johnson cannot very well argue that Brady was initially corrupted by his reading, since in his childhood he engaged in the sadistic killing of animals. Can his proclivities have been aggravated by his reading? Although Brady's library included many works on torture, who is to say that he was more aroused and influenced by them than by his reading of Mein Kampf and his other books on Nazism? Even if we could rally our forces against literary violence, who will answer the call if we seek to repeal the violence of recent history? Miss Johnson herself marshals against her own argument the possibility that one of the most fiendish touches of the murderers' torture of the Downey girl, the playing of Christmas music as background for the recording of her screams, may have been influenced by a scene in the serious war movie The Victors, where an execution was performed against a background of Christmas music. (It may also be noted that the cult of Charles Manson drew its ideological sustenance from such disparate sources as Robert Heinlein's science fiction work Stranger in a Strange Land, a Beatles song, "Helter Skelter," and the Book of Revelation in the Bible.)

      The affectlessness of Brady and Hindley is no doubt the keynote of the case. But in Miss Johnson's concentration on pornography and its role in the crimes, she may have neglected evidence of other methods of destruction of the murderers' inhibitions that have "social implications." For example, it is reported by John Deane Potter that Brady brought himself to the proper pitch for criminal activity by taking "pep" pills. But the role of drugs in the case is not mentioned by Miss Johnson. Moreover, one cannot help but be struck by the role of technological recording media in the case -- the recording of torture on tape, the pornographic photographs of the Downey girl under constraint, and the photographs of Hindley taken at the site of the graves on the moors. There is a suggestion in the case that the murderers had such a weak sense of their own reality and the reality of their horrible actions that only the use of recording media could provide them with sufficient evidence of who they were and what they had accomplished. The supplanting of individual perception and feeling by the images of the media has, of course, been the subject of some of our most interesting contemporary films and plays, including Blow-Up, Medium Cool, We Bombed in New Haven and the charming musical The Last Sweet Days of Isaac.
     The preoccupation of Brady and Hindley with recording themselves becomes the focal point of a black-comedy variation on the Moors case theme, David Halliwell's play K.D. Dufford hears K.D. Dufford ask K.D. Dufford how K.D. Dufford'll make K.D. Dufford (1970). In Dufford, the murderer, there is a high degree of suspicion, of worry about the impression he is making on others, but no sense of his own reality. His prime concern is for his "image," and as Mrs. Shamefoot's ambition in Ronald Firbank's Vainglory was to become a stained-glass window, so Dufford's dream is to become, through his self-photographed murder, an image on film and, he hopes, a lead article in a newspaper. The play provides many versions of the murder scene, and the most successful captures the recording fantasies of the Moors murderers by having the child victim photographing her bumbling attackers. Dufford achieves his ambitions to an extent beyond his wildest expectations. The crime inspires a spate of commentaries in all the media. The last is a book (distressingly by an American) that enthusiastically reflects Dufford's concern for recording and propagating his criminal acts by its title, "DUFFORD A Study of Murder as Public Relations." Ironically, Dufford himself does not recognize his kinship with the photophiliac Brady. Reading of the Moors case, Dufford remarks, "probably just sex."
     Dufford is at the end destined to become a popular song, a song that, in doggerel, neatly sidesteps the issue of whether the public identifies with murderers or differentiates itself from them:

     And yet Keith Dufford was a man
      Who walked on two legs, had no tail,
      Who must have seen the sun and felt the rain.
      Oh how was he different, how was he different,
      and how am I the same?

     It has been justly observed that Emlyn Williams's Beyond Belief (1967), which fleshes out a factual account of the Moors case with the author's fictional "surmises," shares with Miss Johnson's work an emphasis on the murderers' readings in sadism and the prevalence of portrayed violence. The place of cinematic violence in the atmosphere in which Brady and Hindley grew up is marked by continual quotations of lurid titles from movie marquees. But Williams, to a greater extent than Miss; Johnson, is concerned about the impact of the pornography of historic violence. In fact, he theorizes that the murder of John Kilbride may have been suggested by the murder of President Kennedy the day before. Beyond this reference to the aura of violence, Williams portrays the crime, in rather traditional terms, as growing from the roots of childhood experiences and from the poor quality of urban life. Ultimately, however, he pauses before the "mysteries of identity . . . the spells which are woven after birth, the subtle processes working from day to day in the darkness of the young head, as it grows from childhood to adolescence and maturity."
     It should not surprise us that Miss Johnson, who is, after all, a novelist by trade, should, despite the social message of On Iniquity, stand in awe before the mystery of the personal relationship between Brady and Hindley. She finds the case to be "a touchstone of what can go hideously wrong with two people." In dealing with their development into criminals, she has recourse to the psychiatric concept that is a favorite of amateur criminologists, folie a deux. In the hands of the amateurs this concept becomes a notion that two individuals who separately might have stayed within the bounds of conduct that society tolerates may, by interaction with each other's personalities and fantasies, drive themselves into the abyss of criminality.
     Although the state of folie a deux is recognized by professional psychiatrists, it appears that the amateurs of crime have a more romantic theorem than the good doctors would accept -- that the combination of fantasies of partners locked in folie a deux is so unusual that neither partner would have been likely to find another partnership with the same lethal consequences. It may therefore be that the amateur concept of folie a deux is the infernal parallel of the belief that marriages are made in heaven.

      Miss Johnson is tempted to determine that one of the murderers was the dominant partner in the psychological deterioration of the couple, and she eventually fixes upon Brady. "He read, he led, she followed," Miss Johnson writes. The accuracy of labeling either party as fully dominant, however, is put in question by Miss Johnson's feeling early in the trial that Myra Hindley was the motive force behind her lover. No one-sided view of the relationship appears satisfying after a review of the evidence. A striking point is that Hindley, whom Miss Johnson finally tabs as subservient, did all the driving in the pair's criminal expeditions and that Brady apparently never obtained a driver's license. It may be that Miss Johnson, misled by her emphasis on pornography, formed the impression that Brady, who seemed to have the deeper interest in pornography and had a long involvement in sadism, was therefore more "abnormal" than Hindley. Miss Johnson, however, ignores the suggestions of abnormality in Hindley. Myra Hindley posed for pornographic photographs with her dog, and her most violent display of emotion in the entire case was upon being informed of the death of her dog in the course of police laboratory tests to determine his age.
     Miss Johnson also displays the penchant of crime writers since F. Tennyson Jesse for classifying crimes, much in the manner that Polonius classified plays in Hamlet. She places the Moors crimes in the category of "the corporate murder, by two or more people of two or more people." On the basis of the number of victims, she distinguishes the case from that of Loeb and Leopold and suggests a similarity to the activities of medieval covens. The number of victims, however, is a very unsatisfactory way of categorizing crimes, and a student of the Loeb-Leopold case might be content to attribute the nonrepetition of the murder to quick detective work (or to the loss of Leopold's glasses, if one prefers) rather than to a fulfillment of the criminal impulse. If the subclassification "corporate murder" is helpful, I would prefer a distinction based on the choice of victim: was he selected at random or was he the subject of special hostility on the part of one or more of the murdering group? It is the pure chance of selection of the victim that places the Moors case closer to Loeb-Leopold than to such cases as that of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, who murdered Pauline's mother because she was attempting to end their relationship, or those of the traditional corporate murderers of the unwanted husband, such as Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, and the like. The comparison of the corporate murders of multiple victims to medieval witcheries may be comforting by the distance that the allusion lends, and Miss Johnson states that they are rare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such crimes, however, are unfortunately very much a part of the modern scene. We may recall as an example the murderous

automobile journey of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend. And Miss Johnson's description of the role of the charismatic leader in corporate murders reads chillingly like a prescient vision of the Manson cult.
     At the end of the essay Miss Johnson returns again to her quarrel with pornography, which she expands to cosmic scope. In raising the question of whether the Moors case would not justify a restriction of literary freedom, she stands Dostoevsky on his head. Ivan Karamazov, because of the suffering of children and the "other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre," is anxious to return to God his entrance ticket to life. He declares that the "higher harmony" in which the religious Alyosha believes is "not worth the tears of one tortured child." Miss Johnson writes that she is unwilling to return her ticket, even after having seen the film of Belsen and even after the Moors case. Instead she suggests, without deciding, that broad restriction of literary freedom may be worthwhile if it can prevent the suffering of a single child. She cannot accept the notion that evil and cruelty are a necessary imperfection of humanity. Instead of finding the tears of a single child the basis for rejecting a religious concept of life, she would consider altering the living and cultural patterns of millions if the possible result may be to spare that child. Of such emotional and intellectual stuff are both generous spirits and extremists born.
     In determining to insert a crime resembling the Moors case into his roman fleuve, C.P. Snow was able to select from a number of alternative methods of relating the trial to the lives of the principal characters: the use of the trial as a public event in which the characters would express and develop views purely in the roles of citizens (a fictional parallel of Pamela Hansford Johnson's work); the introduction of a character into the processes of the trial in a professional capacity; or the establishment of a personal relationship between the principal characters and the participants in the crime. Snow elected to make one of the accused murderesses, Cora Ross, a niece of Lewis Eliot's childhood friend George Passant. She and Kitty Pateman, with whom she is having a love affair, are accused of torturing and murdering an eight-year-old child. Snow's decision to establish a personal tie with one of the murderesses does not appear to have been made for technical considerations alone. The close relation between the observers and the trial is very much in keeping with the point of view from which events are generally seen in Snow's fiction. Despite the fact that C.P. Snow, the novelist, is also Lord Snow, the scientist and public servant, he is primarily concerned in his fiction with personal and social relations within relatively small groups, and the impact of the outside world and of contemporary history is recorded in reactions and interreactions of the group members. Snow's early

Death Under Sail, which describes the murder of a host at a boating party and the reactions of the guests while in seclusion at a cottage after the crime, obviously resembles the Agatha Christie "murder at the priory" school, but ironically also looks forward to the group emphasis of Snow's mature novels.
     The application of this method to the contemplation of the crime in The Sleep of Reason does impose some limitation on the scope of Snow's insights. The brutal crime is "domesticated" by bringing its perpetrator within the family group of the novel. As a consequence, the fundamental question with which the novel and many serious crime books must grapple, the significance of a crime to the outside observer, is oversimplified from the start: Lewis Eliot must contemplate the crime and come to grips with it because it involves a relative of his close friend.
     At the same time, the observation of the crime through the eyes of a related group has an organic relation to a basic tenet of the Strangers and Brothers series: that the "flow" of life through the channels of career, marriage, friendship and group relations is the normal source of happiness and satisfaction, and that the disasters of illness, loss of loved ones, war, scandal and crime are diversions of this "flow." These diversions are, one hopes, temporary, but, to quote the Sophoclean dictum of Lewis Eliot in The Sleep of Reason, "Call no man happy until he is dead." The notion of the diversions of the flow of life is referred to by Snow in The Sleep of Reason as "arrests of life." He explicitly pairs as examples of such "arrests" Lewis Eliot's suffering from a detached retina and the impact on him and his friends of the trial of George Passant's niece. Moreover, the relation of crime with war and genocide as disruptions of ordinary life is continually stressed by the characters' recollections of Nazi concentration camps. Snow's vision of Auschwitz, however, does not overbear his confidence in the values and duties of normal life. In fact, Eliot's most striking comparison of the child-murder with Auschwitz is not a view into the horrors of the prison camp but a look cast outward from the camp. He quotes the observation of a former prisoner that at Auschwitz one could not escape a degrading and ironic sense of the relativity of time -- the feeling that "on the same day, at the same moment, people had been sitting down to meals or begetting children while, a few hundred yards away, others had been dying in torture. It had been the same with this boy's death." At the end of the novel Snow asserts the resumption of the normal flow of life in a very unostentations way, by the announcement to Lewis Eliot of his nephew's engagement.
     This is not to say that either Snow or his characters take the torture and murder of a child lightly. But he perhaps is less willing than Miss Johnson to draw detailed "social implications." Lewis Eliot is not

appalled by the sexual revolution. He comments that sexual freedom represents a victory of the ideas that George Passant had preached all his life, and that most people he knew did not regard fornication as an offense. Moreover, Eliot is not convinced that the new generation has fundamentally changed. Strolling across his university campus, he notes that the students, despite new clothing and social and sexual customs, still appear to be worrying about exams.
     Significantly, there appears to be a deliberate discounting of specific influences of ideology or literature on the murder. Eliot is most concerned about the effect of the case on George Passant because he fears that the prosecutors (and the community) will blame Cora Ross's participation in the murder on her having belonged to the group of young people to whom her uncle had preached individual liberty and free love.
     In his opening address to the jury, however, the senior counsel for the prosecution makes only a brief mention of George's group. Matthew Gough, one of the prosecution's psychiatric experts, testifies about the possible effect of the Passant group on Cora Ross. He indulges in a speculation that is surprisingly the reverse of what one often hears from the pro-censorship forces -- that had Cora been less timid or inhibited, the group might have liberated her, but that "it was hurtful to live in a Venusberg without taking part oneself." Martin Eliot wonders, in a conversation with his brother Lewis, whether the crime might never have been committed if it had not been for the "hothouse air" that surrounded George and his group. Lewis Eliot's reply seems to speak for Snow in rejecting the possibility of identifying specific ideological influences as the sources of a criminal act:

Was there ever any single cause of any action, particularly of action such as this? Yes, they must have been affected by the atmosphere around them, yes, they were more likely to go to the extreme in their sexual tastes. Perhaps it made it easier for them to share their fantasies. But between those fantasies, and what they had done, there was still the unimaginable gap. Of course, there were influences in the air. But only people like them, predisposed to commit sadistic horrors, anyway, would have played on to the lethal end. If they had not had these influences, there would have been others.

      The emphatic refusal by Snow in The Sleep of Reason to attribute a baleful influence to literature is in marked contrast to his position in his 1959 Rede Lecture, which was published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. In The Two Cultures, Snow, in support of his preference for the scientific over the literary "culture," quoted with approval the observation of a "scientist of distinction" that the influence of most of the dominant writers before World War II had brought "Auschwitz that much nearer." Strangely enough, it is now Pamela Hansford Johnson who, in On Iniquity, sees a resemblance between the literature in our bookstores and that available in the last days of the Weimar Republic, while Snow, in his novel, discounts the possibility of corruption by literature.
     In Death Under Sail the detective, Finbow, maintains the primacy of psychological evidence over material facts. It appears that Snow found an incompleteness in the Moors Trial because of the absence of psychiatric witnesses. Moreover, to the observer of a crime who seeks to "differentiate" himself from the murderers despite his recognition of his own impulses toward violence and unreason, it is soothing to suggest that the explanation of the criminal act may, after all, be "medical." It surely must have been a relief to Ian Capel and his friends in Death Under Sail to discover, as we learn at the end of that novel, that the murder of their host by a member of their close social circle may have been due to the mental deterioration of the murderer as a result of a terminal disease.
     In any event, considerable space is given in the recounting of the trial in The Sleep of Reason to presentation of evidence on the psychiatric history of the two murderesses. No individual analysis of the girls' personalities and criminal motivation is presented as completely satisfying, and Lewis Eliot is impressed by the moderation shown by all the experts in giving their views. Like Miss Johnson in her essay, Snow's prosecution witness, Dr. Cornford, favors the theory of folie a deux and finds that one of the killers (Cora Ross) played a dominant role in the relationship. Most of the trial observers agree with Cornford. Snow, however, through the opinions of Justice Fane and the observations of Lewis Eliot himself, holds open the possibility that the relation between the two girls may have been structured on the basis of complementary qualities rather than simplistic masculinity and femininity or dominance and submissiveness. Justice Fane is struck by Cora Ross's loyalty to Kitty Pateman. He does not think that Cora was "so much in charge" and suspects that "the little one [Kitty] is a fiend out of hell." During Eliot's visit to Cora in prison after the trial, he is struck by her habit of making all her future plans in terms of her life with Kitty, while he has little doubt that Kitty could remake her life alone. His most profound

impression is that Kitty is the more imaginative of the two, and she seems to him to be a pathological liar.
     Both the crime and its aftermath afford Snow an opportunity to elicit from the varied personages of The Sleep of Reason a full spectrum of responses to the significance of the case and to the larger-scale human cruelties it recalls. The Gearys, a very happily married couple, are capable of regarding the crime as an "accident." To old Justice Fane, the crime provides no reason to lose his confidence in free will. He regards the murderers as responsible for their actions just as he is for his own in deciding whether to order a second gin and tonic. Both Martin Eliot, Lewis's brother, and Lewis's son, Charles, suggest, from different ideological grounds, that the particular case would not have meant as much to Lewis in the absence of his personal connections with the case. Martin's view is that of a pessimistic lifelong radical who must ponder whether a differently ordered society would have kept the murderesses under control, but is not at all sure that it would have been possible. He did not require this child-murder to maintain his conviction that "men are dangerous wild beasts." In the opinions expressed by the young Charles Eliot, we see this crime, and Auschwitz, becoming history. He views his father as claiming false significance for the crime by relating it to Auschwitz, which "happened years before . . .
[Charles] was born." He claims the right for himself and his generation to find out for themselves the "awful things" in the world of the here and now in which they stake their interest.
     Without blaming the murder in The Sleep of Reason on any single factor, and despite the variety of reactions to the crime within Lewis Eliot's circle of friends, Snow nevertheless has clearly founded the novel on a defense of the life of reason against excessive cultivation of instinct. Its title is derived from a title of one of Goya's Caprichos etchings, "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters." In a late chapter, Lewis Eliot observes in a rare sermon directed to the reader:

Reason was very weak as compared with instinct. Instinct was closer to the aboriginal sea out of which we had all climbed. Reason was a precarious structure. But, if we didn't use it to understand instinct, then there was no health in us at all.
     Margaret said she had been brought up among people who believed it was easy to be civilized and rational. She had hated it. It made life too hygienic and too thin. But still, she had come to think even that was better than glorifying unreason.

forces were let loose. We had seen that happen in our own lifetimes. In the world: and close to us."
     Lewis Eliot's reference to Margaret's defense of civilized life despite her reservations about its quality recalls Miss Johnson's preference, in On Iniquity, for so-called bourgeois death over a life or death of violence. As the opinion of Eliot's wife, Margaret, harmonizes with his, so Miss Johnson is at one with her husband in urging that the suppression of instinct may have social value. Reversing William Blake's dictum, she observes, in criticizing a play depicting the murder of a child, that it is "better to nurse unacted desires than to strangle an infant in its cradle."
     Strong support for these views is found in the words of a man often falsely accused of glorifying instinct, Sigmund Freud. Freud wrote, in his Thoughts on War and Death:

[I]f we are to be judged by the wishes in our unconscious, we are like a primitive man, simply a gang of murderers. It is well that all these wishes do not possess the potency which was attributed to them by primitive man; in the crossfire of mutual maledictions mankind would long since have perished, the best and wisest of men and the loveliest and fairest of women with the rest.

itself. She admits to keen disappointment that nobody was able to break Hindley down in the course of the trial. Indeed, Miss Johnson is so dissatisfied with the purgative effects of the trial or the punishment of life imprisonment (with its attendant difficulty of security for the murderers, child-molesters being notoriously difficult to protect from their fellow prisoners) that she is compelled to conclude that it would have been better if Brady and Hindley had been caught red-handed and shot on the spot. In other words, the abolitionist ends by favoring instant capital punishment.
     The confession of conflictive feelings by abolitionists of capital punishment is not new in our literature. We find a striking example in Thackeray. The complex links between Thackeray's attraction to public hanging and his abolitionist sentiments are the subject of my essay, "Why Thackeray Went to See a Man Hanged."
     Thackeray finds in the emotions of the observer of executions a trace of schadenfreude: "There is something agreeable in the misfortunes of others, as the philosopher has told us." Although the reference may be to Lucretius or la Rochefoucauld, the observation is seconded by Finbow in Snow's Death Under Sail: "It is one of life's major consolations . . . the ease with which we bear other people's misfortunes."
     An unusual alternative to capital punishment is proposed by Ian Capel, the protagonist of Snow's Death Under Sail. Shortly after the murder of their host on his boat, Capel proposes "another crime" to the assembled guests -- that the murderer confess so that the guests can cooperatively arrange things to make the murder resemble suicide. Capel announces that he does not believe in "self-righteous revenge," which resembles the crime itself. His proposal, however, is made "on the single condition that whoever did it gets out of our company and our life, and does not come back."
     In The Sleep of Reason many of Lewis Eliot's interlocutors and acquaintances are unhappy over the fact that the young murderesses, under the 1957 Homicide Act applicable to their trial, do not face capital punishment because they did not kill their victim by shooting. In the midst of the trial, Archibald Rose, the junior barrister for the prosecution, holds a party (a little hard to conceive, at least in this country) for all the lawyers in the case, including defense counsel and their juniors, and for others, of course including Lewis Eliot. When the conversation turns to capital punishment, a majority appears to favor its retention, including Mrs. Rose, who has just performed the maternal duties of putting the children to bed, but argues in favor of capital punishment with "a firm young woman's confidence." Paradoxically, it is senior prosecuting counsel who comes out most strongly against capital punishment "even in a case like this."

      Lewis Eliot himself is earlier faced with the capital punishment issue in a conversation with the C.I.D. officer who is in charge of the case. The officer does not believe in "the crap about deterrence," but supports capital punishment because "some people . . . aren't fit to live." Eliot replies: "We're not God, to say that." The officer then proceeds to voice an opinion that rings upon the ear strangely like that of Miss Johnson: "when we had them in and discovered what they'd done, I'd have put a bullet in them both."
     The end of this interview is unspectacular. When Eliot is asked what he would do with the murderers, he "had no answer ready, and gave no answer at all."
     The refusal to give an answer on the issues of crime, its prevention or cure, is perhaps the respect in which Snow's work is most strongly set apart from his wife's essay. But both of them are equally convinced that intelligent people must live with and respond to the crimes and human disasters of their time. Perhaps one of the great civilizing benefits of the abolition of capital punishment will reside precisely in the destruction of the illusion that the violence of the crime has been wiped out by the violence of the execution and that the significance of the facts of the crime for the greater community has thereby been dispersed. No longer will the murderer, as proposed by Capel in Death Under Sail, "get out of our life"; we will be forced to continue to reflect on him and what he has done.

* This article was previously published in 40 American Scholar 708-732 (Autumn 1971) and in Innocence and Arsenic, pp. 1-15.