I'm going to have to discard the editorial "we" here: it just sounds so silly sometimes.
I recently found at the Strand a copy of C.P. Snow's novel The Affair. Snow isn't someone that most Americans are familiar with: no longer current, he also hasn't made it into the small group of midcentury British novelists taught in literature programs. One of the humbling lessons for anyone contemplating a career in writing is to encounter someone like Snow: he had three careers, as a working scientist, as an administrator running research programs, and as a writer who produced what was at the time a highly regarded series of novels, collectively known as Strangers and Brothers. He also famously wrote on the academic split between science and the humanities, and managed a study of Trollope in the bargain.
Point being that despite a rather formidable record of accomplishment, his fame has faded such that I only discovered him through an oblique reference -- the mention of his novel The Search by characters in a Dorothy Sayers novel. It didn't provoke me to go out and find the novel, but years later I picked up an old paperback copy of The Masters at a bookseller's table, because I spotted the unmistakeable Edward Gorey cover art. Although some of these Gorey paperbacks go on the shelf and never get opened (I confess that while I mean to read Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?, I keep putting it off in favor of comics and reruns of E.R.), something about The Masters prompted me to open it up in the subway back to Brooklyn, and I was hooked.
In his quiet way, Snow is a master storyteller. The Strangers and Brothers books trace the life of Lewis Eliot, an academic and successful barrister, but their particular focus is the culture of an Oxbridge college in the thirties, forties, and fifties: specifically, the masculine, almost clerical culture of Fellows, the faculty who, within the boundaries of their college walls, ran a quasi-autonomous society. Snow's ability is to take the placid and antiquated rituals and practices of a nineteenth-century holdout culture and make it a stage on which the emotions, intellectual and political ambitions, and idiosyncracies of a group of compelling individuals are subtly played out. The result is that issues which wouldn't seem to many people to be sufficient to command interest -- Who will be elected Master of the College? Will a disgraced fellow be reinstated? -- become surprisingly engrossing, and Snow makes no attempt to convince you that these "stand for" anything else. His is a straightforward interest in human beings, what motivates them, and particularly how, in a small society, they pursue or reject or fail at power. And that fascination is contagious.
I finished The Affair late at night, in that kind of quiet moment when a book or a letter resonates more powerfully than at other, more mentally cluttered times. There had been no exciting plot twists, no dazzling flights of prose. But I could feel the presences of these powerful and powerless, single-minded and yet complex men. And I felt that I had learned something: if not about Cambridge, or about human psychology then about what it means to take a real pleasure in reading.
It's time for a new American edition of Strangers and Brothers.
Posted by B T at February 05, 2002 02:01 PM