The dominant sense I had reading
The Masters was the authorial underlying motto – 'I may be a scientist but I've got feelings, you know'. He tells us so frequently through the reminiscences of Lewis Elliot looking back from some future time on the election campaign for the mastership of a small Cambridge college. Eliot was a young man then yet his judgments of the fellows of the College, 13 of them, are those of the older man looking back. His assessments, this one is sound, that one is windy and so on seem middle-aged which is legitimate yet the active engagement of a 32 year old is neglected. A great novel has life which may be defined as lived immediacy. Just appending 'my feeling then' to an impossibly mature observation is a little too unreliable narratorish for an empiricist like Snow. Everything is accounted for causally and character really is destiny which leaves no room for the surpassing of the individuals fate by a creative leap whereby the facts of the case fall into a new pattern. As a scientist Snow would be aware –
(I am in the sitting room typing this and my gudewife has come and whispered into my shell like – “I'm doing a zoom at 11”. Sitting Zoom. Later then)
2 comments:
During our first year in Nice my wife befriended a couple she met at the Anglican Church across the street from our apartment. Helena was a Canadian artist; Michael, a retired English physicist and diplomat who'd been instrumental in the formation of the EU. Michael's father had been a London Solicitor and patron of the arts who had represented Stephane Grappelli pro bono in various legal matters. During WWII, as an officer in the British Pacific Fleet, Michael happened to be the officer on duty when the Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy presented him with the sword of surrender. Michael's naval induction officer had been CP Snow. Michael and Helena lived in a penthouse apartment in Antibes, not far from Graham Greene's place by the port. For a time Greene had been patron of the English Library in the basement of the Nice Anglican Church, a gathering place for the sort of Anglophone expatriates who populated Greene's novels. I didn't much care for Michael.
Interesting. Greene of course in comfortable despair.
Snow was also a physicist and I have the feeling was in Intelligence work during the war. He would have been in Cambridge as a fellow during the spy era when the only decent thing to be was on the left.
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