Books Do Furnish A Room

Diffugere nives

A terrible pun to start off – “the snows are all fled away” from Horace’s famous ode, merely to mark the end of my reading of C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, eleven full length novels spanning British life and politics from just before the 1914-18 war  until the 1970s.  I have written about all the individual novels over the past few months – see the C P Snow tab under “categories” – and I do not propose to reprise them now.

 

But I did want to attempt some overall evaluation.  The first point is that re-reading these novels – for perhaps the third or fourth time – was in no sense drudgery or a burden, even though there must be over 3,500 pages or so.  This may have been because I spread them out over several months, always allowing a fortnight or so to elapse between novels, which gave me a chance to read something else, and to tune into a different locale and a different chronology.  They were a delight, and I recommend them warmly; they can easily be read as independent novels (especially, I judge, The Masters and The New Men), but they gain immeasurably in richness by being read as a sequence.

 

They are warm, disconcertingly honest, and very knowledgeable and wise; they occupy a different social milieu to Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, a more robustly workaday one, more concerned with the tasks and enterprise of power and the struggle to form and manage relationships, and less with Powell’s interest in the emotional and psychological drama of power and love.  Both are acute social and personal observers, though Powell is clearly the finer writer and the more easily applicable to different periods and different personalities – though Snow has his strengths here too.  Powell’s style is quite different, as well – more light and allusive, while Snow is normally a more “straightforward” writer, both in terms of plot construction and prose, though anyone who thinks this is an easy matter of “writing down what happens” has clearly not tried it!

 

Finally, a word about Snow’s other books.  There are other novels, few of which I have read – but there are two crime novels, too, both well worth reading.  Early in manner – a writing finding his feet – is Death Under Sail, an enjoyable mystery on a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads; it is slightly old fashioned, and has a few lively characters who perhaps veer too close to caricature.  But A Coat of Varnish is much more assured, a formidable novel about a brutal murder in an affluent but declining square in west London; the violence breaks through the thin coat of varnish which is all that civilisation is, covering and hiding our animal natures.  Soon, you know who the murderer is – but can the police prove it?  And what does this sudden irruption of violence mean for the serenity and security of the people who live in the square? – a fine murder thriller, worthy of the top shelf.

Strangers and Brothers: Last Things

The final Strangers and Brothers novel, the eleventh, is Last Things.  It does not represent an end, except the gradually slowing down and relaxing of Eliot’s active life – though he is still happy and amused, and very active, right at the very end – but a whole series of new beginnings, as later generations take over, and his and his wife’s sons leave home, both in ways which challenge their parents’ love and understanding.  But Last Things does deal with the eponymous eschatologies (illustrated in the four corner roundels in Bosch's wonderful picture) - for example, Lewis loses friends to death, and comes very close himself when his heart stops under anaesthetic, an event which leads to a conversation between Eliot, a robust unbeliever, and Wilfred, a local priest.  After they have been discussing death for some time, Eliot steadily saying he remembers nothing of his ‘death’, he asks Wilfred about the other three items in the list of four last things;  the priest replies:

Lewis.  I expect you'd prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn't you?  I'm not sure that would be an improvement, you know.  But if you like I'll say that you've made your own heaven and hell in your life.  And as for judgement, well, you're capable of delivering that upon yourself.  I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.

Often in Strangers and Brothers, the action has been centred on other people than Eliot; like Nick in A Dance To The Music of Time, he is an observer and commentator.  But unlike Nick, he is always somewhere in the action, and often at the very centre.  But in The Sleep of Reason, he becomes largely an observer, and in Last Things, he is almost completely passive, watching the efforts of the younger generations (in the mid 1960s) to break free of their parents’ legacy and enter political debate on meaningful, sometimes violent terms, and suffering his own medical problems.  He and Margaret, his wife, are caught up in the matrimonial and employment difficulties of their children and their friends’ children, they lose their own friends to death – out of reach abroad in two cases – and can do nothing except love and support each other with a wry commentary on events and personalities.

The race has been run, the baton passed, and a wonderful series of under-regarded novels has come to an end.  These eleven novels are not the most sophisticated or modern novels you can find in English, but they are real, honest, and unflinching in dealing with some of the major issues that worried man and women over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and the other issues which – quondam and futurus – will never go away as long as men and women draw breath.  Read them if you can, they are well worth the effort, and as a bonus you see into the mind of one of the unsung heroes of Britain in the last century.

Strangers and Brothers: The Sleep of Reason

After the reality of the Second World War, and the struggle of nuclear weapons, as well as the more personal tragedies of Roy Calvert and Lewis Eliot’s first wife, Sheila, it’s perhaps hard to imagine that there are darker moods to come in Eliot’s journey through life.  But C P Snow’s penultimate Strangers and Brothers novel, The Sleep of Reason, is dark indeed: dark in fact – he is threatened with blindness – and dark in metaphor – as he is drawn into a horrific child killing.  But, as always, one of the great messages is that life goes on, creating warmth and joy with the same indiscriminate abandon as the horror, and often at the same time.  (The title of the book comes from the Goya etching, "The Sleep of reason Produces Monsters").

Eliot is retired and happy (“call no man happy until he is dead”), but embroiled in the myriad complexities of a full life – worrying over how will his children manage as they move from school to university, the death of his saint-like father, and dealing with his ill and acerbic father in law, observing the emotional affairs of the generation (or two) behind him, and trying to steer a reactionary colleague away from some disciplinary stupidities at the university in his home town in the Midlands.  There are many, many strands to this book, as to all the others, but two stand out.

First, he wakes one morning to find a dark curtain over one of his eyes, a physical threat and an clear allegory for the difficulties in understanding the motivations of others.  He has an operation for detached retina, and is confined to the dark while he recovers – a physical stillness and a sensory deprivation which he finds frightening, intolerable, and which proves useless, as the operation fails. He is fortunate, and gets some valuable sight back, but the threat of being cut off, and the warning of old age and death is upon him.  But the real darkness is one of understanding – he has the reputation, and the pride, of being able to see further through a millstone than most – and he is then precipitated into a ghastly story.

Two women, lesbians clearly, and one of them his teenage friend George Passant’s niece Cora, are suspected of carefully plotting to abduct, torture and then kill a young schoolboy.  This is a modern theme, perhaps, but the novel was published in 1968 and was set in 1963 – and Hindley committed her crimes in 1963-65 (though her lover, also guilty of complicity in her crimes, was a man).  (As with Powell, the gap between setting and writing has necessarily to diminish as each seeks a complete chronicle of his times).  He can do nothing, he has no role in the events, but he agrees to meet Cora before and after the trial, and to attend the trial itself to accompany and support Passant.  In the end, Passant cannot take it, and absents himself, and Lewis bears the burden almost alone, although various family members and friends ensure he is never completely by himself. 

In spite of the horror, the horror, the book contrives to move with an easy and assured grace, and finds ways of going on and going forward even in the darkest moments.  Throughout, the teasing and sceptical love of his wife and son Charles keep open another vision of the world – a world which is seriously flawed, and in which one must play a remedial and possibly radical role – but also a world in which no one man has to shoulder the burdens of all mankind.  Reason sleeps, but will wake again.

Strangers and Brothers: Corridors of Power

C P Snow, in his preface to this book, somewhat ruefully presumes he has the right to use his own cliche, since the phrase "corridors of power" is undoubtedly his invention.  It's a happy one, too, with its suggestion of power directed and yet trammelled, and an undeniably appropriate one for those of us who work in Whitehall or in Washington, since a feature of all bureaucratic buildings of any age seems to be the corridor.  It takes you in a direction over which you have little control, it suggests secrets off to the right and the left, it imposes itself on you, it un-mans you.

This is a particularly compelling volume.  Lewis Eliot is now a senior mandarin, and becomes closely connected with Roger Quaife, a young minister determined to break the orthodoxy of British great power thinking and (eventually) get rid of the nuclear deterrent.  It is a fascinating point in British political history - the Suez adventure splits British society, not absolutely on the expected lines, and Britain is painfully coming to terms with the notion that it is no longer a great power - an adjustment that many would say is not yet complete.  An American academic is forced, reluctantly, to point out that against American power, nothing Britain can do matters a hill of beans.  And it is clear, "among all sensible men", that if if the deterrent is not abandoned now (1956), it will be soon, a view which has proved astonishingly deceptive.

The novel has plenty of points of interest: there is much grey politics, the careful manoeuverings of politicians and civil servants; there is a clash of loyalties, across family and patriotism; there is the old, grand tradition of politics in fierce contact with the new, raw mood of modern times; there is the shock of hearing that Quaife is risking his political career, his chance of delivering the policy in which he passionately believes, and his adored wife, all for "a young woman" who loves him - a woman without a political instinct in her body, but who loves him; there is the play of scientist and civil servant.  And there is Lewis Eliot himself, moving easily between the politicians and the scientists, between the new men and the old guard, making friends with whom he disagrees and respecting though not liking some of those with whom he works most closely.

This is a novel - I give nothing away, since Snow is always very realistic and we all know the history of the anti-deterrent movement - about failure.  But it is a failure touched with nobility, and with greatness - and, as always, it is a failure not of policies or institutions, but of people.  "We talked as though the future was easy and secure, and as though [our children's] lives would bring us joy".  But you cannot help feeling richer for it; you cannot help feeling that Snow has taken the back off the Whitehall clock and - for just one minute on one issue - you really understood how it all worked.  A wonderfully convincing and compelling read. 

Strangers and Brothers: The Affair

Like Homecomings, this novel is on the small scale, and Lewis Eliot is personally closely involved, though he is not the main focus of events.  The Affair returns to the small Cambridge college of The Light and The Dark and The Masters, but has no sexual subject: the word “affair” is a reference to the Dreyfus affair, of which this  is a modern reinterpretation on a modest scale.

An unattractive personality, morose and paranoid, Howard is a junior Fellow of the college thrown out for scientific fraud in his research.  Doubts arise about the evidence, and life in college becomes very tense for all, especially as there is another Mastership election in the offing.  Political division deepens between those who believe there has been a miscarriage, and those who feel the whole matter has been looked at thoroughly and should now be allowed to rest – and while the reader’s sympathies in a judicial sense are likely to be with Howard, his ingratitude to those helping, and his general grumpiness and sense of persecution, make this hard to maintain.

Much of the interest centres around the personalities of Howard and his wife Laura, good looking and utterly committed to proving his innocence.  In their pursuit of justice, they are blind to the best way forward, and reluctant to take advice.  They leave Eliot feeling useless and unwanted, exactly at the time he has the ability to really make a difference to their cause: “No one likes to be treated as a vacuum inhabited solely by himself”.

Strangers and Brothers: Homecomings

After the making of the atomic bomb, the Strangers and Brothers series returns to the more intimate focus in Homecomings, in which Lewis Eliot is the central character (something Nick Jenkins in the Powell sequence never is).  This starts well before the war, and goes on after it has ended – covering several years, then, which have already been the subject of The Light and The Dark and The New Men, but concentrating on a completely different subject, though often touching on key moments in those books.

Lewis Eliot has married out of despair, a beautiful woman he has loved desperately, but whose illnesses and lack of love for him are ruining both their lives.  He tries to leave, but fails.  He sacrifices his career for her, and his spirit is nearly broken.  Eventually, while he is enjoying a cheerful night out with colleagues, she commits suicide.  He is thrown into a form of despair, but there is also much relief mingled in it.  He reduces his life to essentials, work, work, and more work, keeping up a basic social life and living in unattractive digs with a lazy and over-inquisitive landlady.

By chance, two years after Sheila’s death, he meets and gradually falls in love with Margaret, rather younger than him, but intelligent, amusing, and attractive.  The affair develops rapidly, but he is unable to fully enter the relationship, preferring to deal with difficulty – Sheila’s suicide, the death of his friend Roy Calvert – alone, without sharing.  Eventually, she leaves him, marries another man and has a child.  He is cast down once again, the more desperately for having come so close to real happiness – but they meet again, a couple of years later.  The second half of the novel tells how they deal with their reignited love, tempted by infidelity, thinking of a new start, burdened by loyalty to her husband Geoffrey and their son.  It also tells of Lewis’ emotional maturing, and how he copes with the realisation that he cannot always cope alone.

Snow is full of pithy observation, especially about how human beings behave and how they explain and justify their behaviours, but I particularly liked this remark of Margaret’s father, the left wing art critic, Austin Davidson:  “All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part”.

Strangers and Brothers: The New Men

I warned you at the end of The Masters that the scale was about to change, and in The New Men we are back to the large canvas of the novel before The Masters, The Light and the Dark.  But whereas that dealt with the fate of one man, painted against the approach of war and the early years of conflict, with political division at home and horrors abroad, The New Men deals with a new class of frightfulness – the realisation by good, decent scientists that a bomb of unimaginable power could be created.  This is about the dawn of the atomic age, and the pressures on men to make something utterly horrible for what they hoped were good reasons, and the pain and guilt and anger they felt when the bomb was used.  In addition, there are several enthralling human stories, and a significant espionage sub-plot.  All in all, The New Men is a very modern book in terms of content, though its reserved style, and the rawness of war and excitement of scientific discovery, make it old fashioned in feel.

Lewis Eliot, at the beginning of war, is transferred to the Civil Service (as was Snow himself), the highest of all possible callings.  He became a private secretary to a Minister close to scientific research, and was involved very soon with the realisation that making an atomic bomb was possible.  Such efforts were made by most scientists, because they – and only because – they feared Germany would get it first.  Gradually, the truth dawned that Britain, however brilliant, was playing second fiddle to the Americans with their vastly superior resources.  Gradually, it also became clear, to the scientists’ horror, that the bomb might actually be used – The New Men looks at the personal struggles of the scientists, each eager for advancement and fame, and their struggles with their consciences, and their efforts – futile as we all know – to stop it.

As ever, Snow is fascinated by the personalities and the emotions, and the way these men deal with failure, with a spy in their midst, and with the competition for honours – not to mention the danger of radiation sickness when something goes wrong.  In The New Men, they have success, but they come a frustrating second, and they see their genius used in a way which we can all understand all too well.  Later in life, he wrote a very readable popular account of some of the great men in twentieth century physics (he was a physicist himself), called simply The Physicists.  In spite of the horror of the bomb, this was the supreme age of physics, the period when physics became the queen of the sciences, and when it really looked, briefly, as if we might understand everything, even to uttermost depths.  That, of course, was an illusion, but Snow’s scientists in this book are only too well aware of the fragility of their technical and human knowledge.

Strangers and Brothers: The Masters

"I hereby announce to you a vacancy in the office of Master."

The fourth novel in C P Snow’s magisterial sequence, The Light and the Dark, painted on a broad canvas, and while it dealt principally with one man, set him against the turbulence of the 1930s and the prosecution of war over some eight years.  The fifth, The Masters, is quite different: it covers a span of just a few months in 1937, and is set within the closed community of a small Cambridge college.  It might not have such wide appeal, but it is an endearing study of a small group of human beings trying to reconcile their differences over the simple matter of electing a new Master for the college when the previous one is struck down by cancer.  The passions, motivations and weaknesses of these dozen or so men may come from a small, select and exclusive society, but they mirror those you will find in any club, charity, or parish council, they are even the same as you find in Westminster or on Capitol Hill.

The human passions are laid delicately bare, and the mix of personality and politics is revealing; Snow – like Hullah, of whom I have written recently! – sees far into men's minds and their real motives, and is uncompromisingly honest, though never brutal (indeed, often sympathetic and understanding), about what he finds.  All sorts of other themes impinge on this story, and on its main characters, and the small and closed world is representative of the larger one.  Lewis Eliot is mainly observer in this novel, rather than protagonist, and Snow uses him to see around an issue and a man.

The two candidates are opposites: conservative and progressive; one from the arts, one a scientist; one a warm and vigorous personality with great insecurities, the other a cold fish with no doubts but a top class academic reputation.  The college is split, with only one or two votes in doubt, and the human passions are laid bare - barer and rawer, perhaps, for being set against the mellow stone and ancient rituals.  However, this is a small and private study of human temptations and sorrows: with the war, the scene is about to become grander, wider, again, as Snow adjusts to the atomic age in the next novel.

 

Strangers and Brothers: The Light and the Dark

C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series reaches an early climax of intensity in this, the fourth novel in the series.  The Light and the Dark has at its centre a number of personal dramas – Lewis Eliot’s unhappiness, for example, or the long and painful illness and death of the Master of a Cambridge college, but the dominant theme is the unhappiness and despair of the talented Roy Calvert.  Eliot and Calvert, who knew each other in early manhood, are both junior fellows of a small Cambridge college, and close friends.  Eliot is unhappily married, but is otherwise a straightforward, solid, sensible citizen, and an anchor for the brilliant but depressive – indeed, occasionally maniacal – Calvert. (The illustration is Paul Hogarth's cover for the Penguin edition of the late 1970s).

Roy Calvert is an attractive character, exceptionally gifted (his particular interest is in deciphering early manuscripts in unknown Middle Eastern languages), and a magnet for women.  But he is broodingly unhappy and occasionally utterly depressed and suicidal, and prone to fits of extreme insomnia, violent and uncontrollable outbursts.  For all his talent, his teasing and lightness of character – he clearly takes full advantage of his relations with women – means he is not popular with the older, crustier members of college, though he can show exceptional and sustained kindness to a colleague in distress – Eliot, the dying Master’s wife, a remote and difficult colleague whose son disappoints him.

The novel runs from the difficult years of pre-war, when left and right were perhaps more bitterly and fundamentally estranged than at any point in recent political history, through to the years of the Battle of Britain.  Roy tries to deal with his unhappiness in several different ways: with love affairs, with friends, with a fruitless search for religious faith.  None works.  Two women in particular love him, but although he eventually marries one of them, you are left in no doubt that the peculiar circumstances of the marriage are dictated not by his love but his compassion.  His search for faith – as perhaps all conscious searches of the sort are – was doomed to failure, and while his friends love him and depend on him, they cannot support and sustain him in the darkest days.

Eventually, his work takes him to Nazi Germany.  This is entirely natural, as Berlin is a great centre for his area of study, but it leads to an attraction to fascism and an immense strain with his left-leaning friends in England.  He tries to convert Eliot, too, in one of the unhappiest passages between them, but fails, although the reader gets an unusual insight into the formidable power of pre-war fascism to attract and subvert a certain class of Englishman.  This leads to a bizarre and dangerous episode later, during the war, when an attempt is apparently made to involve him in spying for Germany, involving a long and complex and dangerous trip into the heart of Europe in the middle of war (in neutral territory only), a wondrous window for Eliot and Calvert on normal, civilised life, with food, lights and theatres.  Once war has broken out, however, Calvert sees that fascism is as false a god as any other, and he serves with distinction in intelligence, later insisting on transferring to the RAF, where he has realised his chances of survival are lowest.  The end is inevitable, tragic, and empty. 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark ...

Two cultures - Snow

As a talk on Radio 3 reminded me recently, it is now just fifty years since C P Snow gave the Rede lecture, The Two Cultures, and a phrase entered the language; more than just a phrase, actually, it is still a powerful meme. I am reading Snow's major novel series at the moment, and it is fascinating to see the physicist and the writer in one image, in one incarnation. Snow's basic argument, which he admitted was not an original one, was that the arts and the sciences had drifted apart to the point where the adherents of the two muses could not communicate with each other, often saw no value in the other, and were unable to cooperate and reinforce each other.  I shall let him explain in his own words, starting with why the issue interested him:

It was a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life. The only credentials I had to ruminate on the subject at all came through those circumstances, through nothing more than a set of chances. Anyone with similar experience would have seen much the same things and I think made very much the same comments about them. It just happened to be an unusual experience. By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.

Then the standard demonstration of incomprehension:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

And a failure to understand, on the part of the arts men, that the first half of the twentieth century was a unique flowering of science and physics, unique in all recorded history:

Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. ... Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful. They hear Mr T. S. Eliot … the tone, restricted and constrained, with which literary intellectuals are at home: it is the subdued voice of their culture. Then they hear a much louder voice, that of another archetypal figure, Rutherford, trumpeting: 'This is the heroic age of science! This is the Elizabethan age!' Many of us heard that … and we weren't left in any doubt whom Rutherford was casting for the role of Shakespeare. What is hard for the literary intellectuals to understand, imaginatively or intellectually, is that he was absolutely right.

And finally, a comment about the frequent (then, perhaps not now) accusation that scientists are ridiculously optimistic - they can solve the world's problems, they even sometimes think they will have a theory of everything, that there will be nothing more to be discovered.  Snow has a more measured approach, and the novelist in him reminds us of some deep truths:

This is an accusation which has been made so often that it has become a platitude. ... Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

Of course, it is easy to forget that for many people, neither culture is of any significance at all.  But for those of us who care about either Austen or Galileo, either music or relativity, it is always worth trying to care about both.  In reading Snow's essay, I was reminded of Jacob Bronowski's writings.  Bronowski was one of the great bridges across this arts-science divide, and you can read him on computing and physics and painting and music.  In his Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye, he deals with some of the exciting similarities, the need for creativity and imagination in both.  I would speak of his ideas more, but space forbids - but I will return to this subject in another post.

Strangers and Brothers - order, order

There has been some confusion over the C P Snow Strangers and Brothers sequence, as they appear in different orders (only the early ones) in different places.  So, for the record, here is the full list in the order I find most satisfying, with the date of publication in brackets, and the dates of the action following (my estimates, I think, I've taken them from an old notebook (1982) and didn't note a source).  You can see that the first four all overlap to some degree, but that thereafter a number of others overlap slightly. 

Someone has asked me about getting hold of these books.  There should be no problem at all - there are lots in print, and there are literally thousands of Snow's books on Abebooks - and five of the series at 99 pence in my local Oxfam shop! 

Time of Hope (1949)  1914 - 33

George Passant (aka Strangers and Brothers) (1949)  1925 - 33

The Conscience of the Rich (1958)  1927 - 33

The Light and the Dark (1947)  1935 - 43

The Masters (1951)  1937

The New Men (1954)  1939 - 47

Homecomings (1958)  1938 - 51

The Affair (1960)  1953 - 54

Corridors of Power (1964)  1955 - 59

The Sleep of Reason (1968)  1963 - 64

Last Things (1970)  1964 - 68

When I've finished the entire sequence, later in the year, I'll briefly review his entire writings, and suggest some other reading.  I'm taking it slowly, and have only read four so far this year, so the eleventh will probably be somewhere around April, or even May.

Strangers and Brothers: Conscience of the Rich

The Conscience of the Rich is the third book in C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence, and is an illuminating and moving one.  Published in 1958, it looks back at London in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  Lewis Eliot is trying to work out a career in London as a barrister, amid many distractions, including a painful love, severe poverty, and friends in trouble in his home town, Leicester.  He makes friends with Charles March, another young barrister, proud hope of a rich Jewish family with strong traditions.

There are many delightful things in this book, but few can match the dazzling skill with which Snow portrays Charles' father, Leonard March; he is a proud, sometimes irascible man, deeply fond of his two children, but completely out of touch with their aspirations in politics, in careers, and in love.  And he is given to great rambling stories of the family, where non-sequitur is piled upon irrelevance until he triumphantly brings the tale - amongst the laughter of his children and friends - to a glorious conclusion.  And Lewis notices wealth and what it can do - the Marches have a man in to wind the clocks once a week - and starts as a junior figure who, because of his personal qualities and later his professional skill, becomes central to the March family.

For these are times of turmoil.  A whiff of political scandal touches a connection of the family, and the left, to which Lewis, Charles and his sister and others are passionately devoted, forces a conflict with the family.  And events in Germany mean that being Jewish is suddenly a burden, suddenly it is something that the Marches and families like them have to be measured against, have to take account of; to use a word which would achieve a terrible significance after the war, they cannot be unbelastet or unencumbered any longer.  And both the children, Charles and his sister Katherine, break away from the family in ways which Leonard and his peers find very difficult, difficult even unto the death of the spirit.

The politics of the inter-war period is the scourging, ripping tide of this book, but the young men and women are several boats afloat, swirling wildly, trying to steer a course but not wholly in control - and unable, unwilling to stay in safe harbour - but deeply hurt by the places they end up.  Careers, marriages, politics, personal relationships of all kinds, that is the heady mix of this book.  It's a fine read, although not entirely a comfortable one.  The final words, as Mr March sees off guests from a dinner party in which all the pain of his family problems has been apparent, are as much about the European situation as they are about a lonely and sad old man:

Standing at the corners. I stamped my feet, waiting for a taxi.  Through the bare trees of the garden, I could see a beam of light, as the door of Mr March's house opened, letting out some more of his guests.  Soon the party would be over.  He would test the latches and switch off the lights: then he would be left in his own company.

Strangers and Brothers: George Passant

This novel, George Passant, was originally known as Strangers and Brothers, a title that was later appropriated for the whole series.  And although now regarded as second in the sequence, in many ways it sets the scene for the themes that were to develop over the twelve novels – interpersonal relationships developing in the context of complex social, economic and political developments  - developments which engaged the interest and the passion of the young people in both Leicester and London with a passionate intensity that remains unmatched in modern times, in terms both of its sophistication and energy. 

The novel is set in the period 1925-33, a small period within the wider scope of Time of Hope.  Most young people were, of course, on the left, though this ranged from a mild desire to relax social relations and move towards more distributive economic policies all the way to Communism and the desire for revolution, violent if necessary.  At the same time, people remained as concerned as ever with status, getting on, and finding partners for life and for work.  This is the backdrop to George Passant; the eponymous hero is energetic, committed to social and political change, and working towards it through working with young people to help them, first through education (classes at night school) and then in a looser social grouping which talks and dreams, but which may have a harder core of political toughness – and certainly serves as the recruiting ground to satisfy some of George’s more conventional appetites – sex and money.

The idealism of George and some of the others comes into conflict with the local authorities, and also within the group with the harder headed and more cynical aspirations of men like Jack Cotery.  There is the whiff of scandal, of fraud, and eventually a court case.  Throughout, Lewis Eliot is moving away yet remaining strongly tied to “the group”.  He moves away to London, his career begins to develop, and he is growing physically and emotionally distant; but he owes much early support to George, and to his friends, and cannot break.  He has love troubles of his own, and a growing distaste for the way some people in George’s group are behaving – but he has to support them, a support which is deep in his heart but which is in tension with new loyalties and new demands in London.  Even after all his troubles, George is an inspiration: "He could still warm himself and everyone around him with his own hope."

This is not my favourite novel of the sequence, but it is very good, especially on the stultifying small town dogmatism and closeness of the 1920s, and it paints warm and realistic portraits of men and women on both sides of the debate.  Snow has a warm understanding of what motivates and drives his characters, and is there in their minds.  Here themes are developed which will carry through all the novels, leading up to arguments about the war with Germany, the use of the bomb, and the failure to build a new Jerusalem in the 1950s and 60s – and about people’s continuous attempts  - often futile or thwarted – to be happy or at least at ease with their lives. 

Strangers and Brothers gave Philip Snow the title for his engaging biography of C P Snow, which is called Stranger and Brother, well worth a read if you enjoy the novels.

Strangers and Brothers: Time of Hope

The first novel in C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is Time of Hope, although it was not the first to be written; it describes the early life of Lewis Eliot, the central figure of the sequence, although he is often observer and reporter as well as main protagonist; he is not the anonymous, almost reclusive observer and analyst that Anthony Powell makes Nick Jenkins, for example.  Eliot is a highly autobiographical figure, though his life diverges significantly from Snow’s on occasion - so they were both born in lower middle class families in Leicester, but Snow became a scientist, but makes his leading figure a barrister.  Published in 1949, it covers an extended period in Eliot’s life, from about 1914, just before the war started, when Eliot is about nine, until he is 28, in 1933 – though we will visit parts of this period again in the sequence.  (The cover design shown here is by David Gentleman).

This is an interesting novel, though I personally find the first half, when the pace is slower and more considered, more interesting than the later passages.  Snow is very good on the small family issues – the pride of the family in being a step or two better off than others, and the consequent shame of bankruptcy; the portrait of a too domineering aunt and a too complaisant father; the exaggerated emotions of childhood – grief at his mother’s death, humiliation in front of other boys; and the sexual and professional frustrations of adolescence.  Snow shared much of this himself – and although he came to make his mark as fellow of a Cambridge college, novelist, member of the House of Lords, and junior member of the Government in the 1960s, he remembers it well.

His approach to a long sequence of novels is quite different to Powell’s.  He is a lesser novelist, of course, but not an inconsiderable one, and certainly a more traditional teller of stories.  But the sequence did not start here, and it is probably easier to read the Snow novels completely independently of each other than it is the Powell.  Indeed, it is not always easy to decide what is the best order to read them in.  I personally, just by chance, started with The Light and the Dark, which is the first of the sequence written, but normally placed fourth in the order.  So this novel has some odd features; the first is that there are at least two themes in it which are surprisingly sketchily developed – George Passant’s career and legal difficulties, and Charles March’s struggle with his family – and you are bound to think, why are these mentioned at all, if we are not to hear more?  The answer is, of course, they are expounded at full length in “later” novels, and not to include them here would have been incomprehensible in the light of what was to follow.

But this is a novel about a young man making good, though with real difficulties – financial, professional, and especially sexual and matrimonial.  And his cup does not run over – he becomes aware that  his career, though perfectly respectable, is slowing, and his private life becomes a cross which he feels unable to bear or to discard:

I had longed for a better world, for fame, for love.  I had longed for a better world; and this was the summer of 1933.  I had longed for fame: and I was a second rate lawyer.  I had longed for love: and I was bound for life to a woman who never had love for me and who had exhausted mine.

It is at times very moving, and it is, I think, a fine portrait of the period.  I would encourage you to read Snow, and I think you’ll enjoy this, but I might suggest that newcomers – if they can bear the thought of not reading the books in sequence – might start elsewhere (recommendations in later posts!).

Reading for 09 - just a start! Sunday Salon

I have really, very little idea what I'll read in 2009 (though it will include a lot of Powell, Austen, Homer, Kipling, Borges and Eliot, as well as heaps of classic mystery fiction), but there are two "starters for ten" as they say.  First, I made an assault on the bookshop, and another on the London Library, just before Christmas, and this was my booty:

 

Second, I have decided not to read Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music Of Time this New Year holiday, as I normally do (though I will doubtless read it later in the year).  Instead, I am going to read C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, an altogether more substantial undertaking - eleven novels of 400 pages or so each.  He isn't a great novelist, but I do think he's underrated, and he offers a fascinating insight into the twentieth century from the viewpoint of a northern lower middle class boy who makes good, a viewpoint with which I have, for family reasons, a great deal of sympathy.  I will start with A Time of Hope - the first in order of the completed sequence, but not the first written. Thereafter, it isn't always easy to keep them in order, as some overlap the others slightly or completely, and they weren't, especially early in the sequence, written in order.   I shall take a long while over this, reading other stuff en route, but I shall keep you informed at every step.