In dark times, I turn back to books that I first read decades ago and have re-read since, often more than once. It’s an eclectic lot: fiction by Robertson Davies, Penelope Fitzgerald, Olivia Manning, John O’Hara, and Dorothy Sayers; non-fiction by Tracy Kidder, Ved Mehta, Goronwy Rees, and Rebecca West; cartoons by Posy Simmonds, and more. I read to enjoy their styles and their skill at telling stores: but also to revisit the worlds they created, to renew my familiarity with them and remind myself of what I have forgotten.
Rather like the legendary couple of whom someone, struggling to understand their mutual attraction, cracked, “Well, they are both carbon-based life forms,” these books seem pretty disparate. But all of them help me find calm at night, particularly now, when the shadows gather and the future looks even darker than the present. And all of them offer something more: something that might be called wisdom — or prudence.
None of my personal classics has given me more rewards than an unfashionable series by an unfashionable writer: 11 books in C. P. Snow’s series Strangers and Brothers, a chronicle of one man’s experience of twentieth-century English history that appeared between 1940 and 1970. They were designed, in scale and in ambition, to rival Balzac and Trollope, and though they don’t reach that high standard of social and historical insight, they do things that matter to me. Like Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, or Michael Holroyd’s brick-sized biographies of Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, they help me learn in satisfyingly rich detail about parts of the past that I don’t study as a historian — and, I would argue, about myself.
A word about Snow. In his day, he was both a successful, prolific writer and a prominent public figure. His first career, as a scientist, took him to Cambridge. When he realized that he would not become a star, he transformed his failure and change of plans into a novel, The Search (1934). Soon he was writing articles for Nature and the Spectator. During and after the war, he worked successfully in the civil service. Then and later he conceived and executed Strangers and Brothers, and wrote and spoke endlessly on literature, science, and politics. He was a celebrity.
But he is out of fashion, and the society he captured in these novels seems almost quaint. More important, he is best remembered for an intellectual battle that almost everyone thinks he lost. Generations of critics have savaged the theory about “the two cultures,” scientific and literary, that he set out in his 1959 Rede Lecture. The historian Guy Ortolano showed, in a fine study of the ensuing controversy that Snow’s most pertinacious — even vicious — assailant, the literary critic F. R. Leavis, had more sympathy for scientific education than Snow did for the study of literature, and argued powerfully that Snow, who cast himself as the prophet of modernity, had a highly blinkered version of his own time.
Yet Snow — who as a civil servant recruited scientists for military and government work, and eventually served in Harold Wilson’s first Labour government — understood something important about the way that otherwise well-educated, but scientifically under-informed, people, tried to understand the technical and technological changes of the twentieth century. Lisa Jardine, a literary scholar and historian who did important work in medical policy, argued in a 2009 anniversary celebration of the Rede lecture, that Snow worried about the future because he knew so much about the recent past. During World War II, as a civil servant, Snow had seen Churchill and other leaders, men with little knowledge of science, faced with decisions that hinged on scientific arguments. They could not judge the data presented to them, and they did not understand its implications.
As a result, their decisions were hit or miss at best. Radar, which won official backing, played a vital role in the air defense of England. So did code breaking, a story still secret when Snow spoke in 1959. But there were also terrible errors. England’s air campaign against Germany, whose proponents had won support for it with dubious statistical arguments, cost 160,000 of Britain’s finest warriors, killed hundreds of thousands of working-class Germans, and destroyed historic cities and archives, to little or no strategic effect. More broadly, the false memory of air power’s strategic effect in World War II would be as durable as the statue of the main proponent of the British bombing campaign, Arthur Travers Harris, which still stands outside the RAF church in London. It not only shaped U.S. prosecution of the war in Vietnam, but shapes military policy to this day, in the form of selective strikes and drone warfare.
In the future, Snow believed, it would be even more vital for the decision makers to understand technical issues and make decisions based on scientific evidence. As we have seen this year, he wasn’t wrong. Boris Johnson, one of the world leaders to have fumbled the COVID-19 response, held a classical scholarship at Oxford. Most members of his Cabinet studied “the humanities (57%) and social sciences (30%), with seemingly only one minister having studied a STEM subject,” as a think tank noted in 2019. Is it an accident that Angela Merkel, trained as a physicist, dealt so much more successfully than they did with the pandemic? Probably not.
Whatever his powers as a prophet, Snow had a varied and fascinating personal history, and he reflected on it endlessly as he transformed it into fiction. He also reflected endlessly about the history of English society, from the General Strike to Austerity Britain and beyond, into the Swinging London of the sixties. The over 3,000 pages of his series of novels about English life were the work of a lifetime, much rethought and revised. A memoir by Snow’s brother Philip, Stranger and Brother, traces the frequent changes in his authorial plans.
These novels were also the history of a life lived during England’s great social transformation from a society of landed and industrial elites and working masses to the more open, more white-collar world that took shape after the war: that of Snow himself, represented by Lewis Eliot, the narrator. Like Snow, Eliot comes from a family at the border between the upper working- and lower middle-classes. Like Snow, he uses his skills at exam-taking to climb the greasy pole, rising from a civil service job and courses at a provincial college to the Inns of Court, through teaching law at Cambridge and civil service work in World War II and after to success and prosperity as a novelist.
And like Snow, Eliot remains committed to the people he chances upon. He devotes as much space and attention as a narrator to the unknown friends who set him on his way in his native town (based on Snow’s Leicester) as to the brilliant and baroquely eccentric folk he met later in Law Courts, London mansions, Cambridge colleges, and Whitehall offices. Following Lewis Eliot through the years, the reader spends as much time in poor cafes and back streets as in the sunlight, paneled rooms where the good and the great assemble.
Yet Snow is rarely mentioned now. When I first read these books, taking each one out in turn from a public library in Islington, they were still much cited and discussed, in American as well as English journalism. One or two of them — especially The Corridors of Power — were major publishing events. In the seventies, Penguin paperbacks of Snow’s novels with evocative covers by David Gentleman were everywhere. Over time, though, partly thanks to a catastrophic BBC television dramatization, they have largely disappeared, except from second-hand book shops.
Why read them then? And why now? Because Snow thought deeply about what it means to be human in a swiftly changing society. What makes his books so compelling to me, even now, is his ability to conjure up, in vivid detail, world after world; to populate these worlds with vivid personalities; and to teach his reader about what it was like to live and work in them. He brings to life Lewis Eliot’s childhood home; the teashops and pubs where he and his friends lived their time of hope in the twenties; the fellows’ rooms and common spaces of Cambridge colleges; the corridors of power in Whitehall. He draws the details, much of the time, from life, but he doesn’t simply reproduce what he saw.
When I asked a fellow of Christ’s College, where Snow spent his years in Cambridge, if the Cambridge novels depicted real people and events, he answered, “He changed some of the names.” But I don’t read Snow hoping to find the reality behind the fiction. What matters to me are his portraits of institutions and people: portraits so detailed and insightful that they have helped me understand the way people deal with one another in my own world a little better. Charles Allberry, a brilliant specialist on Manichean texts who died in World War II, served as the model for Lewis Eliot’s friend Roy Calvert, the mercurial and melancholic protagonist of the unforgettable The Light and the Dark. Friends of Allberry’s have argued that Snow badly misrepresented the original person. But that doesn’t affect my love for the book or the lessons I learn and re-learn from it. I have known many people of high achievement who suffered as Roy Calvert did: Snow taught me much about how to be a friend to them.
From Snow’s galleries of characters, the con artists and the grand ladies, the Polonian old men and the witty cynics, and from his vivid and convincing recreations of many kinds of working and social life, I have gleaned such practical wisdom as I have about how to be a friend and a colleague. His books have taught me that in a crisis, the single most important thing you can do is simply to be present. They have helped me appreciate the particular kind of speech and writing that most administrators produce, whether in universities or in government; “a curious abstract language, of which the main feature was the taking of meaning out of words.”
In our present moment, when institutions are once again under intense scrutiny for their failures, Snow’s books remind me that ancient universities with stone buildings are not necessarily as marvelous as they look. One of his characters remarks that Cambridge dons are not so much distinguished men as men who give one another distinctions. But they have also made me value one vital quality of older British (and American) institutions, which should not be lost with the haughtiness and exclusivity that are now being challenged everywhere: their tolerance for eccentric and difficult, but talented, people. This tolerance rested on the conviction that “men are as they are.” Snow’s language, and his views on gender, were those of his generation, perhaps another reason that his novels have declined in popularity. But his principles, and those of his characters, deserve consideration nonetheless. In this case, his books made me realize that an institution that has no room for difficult people and critics of conventional wisdom will rapidly dwindle into conformity and worse.
Above all, Lewis Eliot himself teaches us that a life well-lived is also, paradoxically, a series of wrong turns and poor choices, often made with sincere good will. Endlessly observant, increasingly experienced, as discreet as he is curious, he is constantly praised for his understanding of human nature.
Yet Eliot consistently makes wrong choices and backs losing horses. Confronted with two candidates for the mastership of his college, he supports the impossible one who is doomed to lose. Offered the chance to work for a government minister who hopes to lessen the risk of nuclear war, he fails to see until too late that his master is involved in an extramarital affair — or, more important, that he has put forward his policy prematurely, and thus doomed it. Struggling to keep the embattled vice-chancellor of a university in office, he manages to postpone the end only because he suddenly needs surgery. Against his advice, his friend resigns.
Watching Lewis Eliot learn and fail, learn and fail, has helped me understand how endlessly fallible I am. Old as I am, living in another moment when change moves at a breathtaking pace, this is a lesson I can’t learn too often or too well.
Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University.
Thank you. I found your essay concisely and eloquently written and combined serious analysis with generosity. I first read the novels in my mid 20’s and am re-reading them at the age of 70.
BBC Radio 4 Extra are currently airing this. I had never heard of him before, but I wish I had read these books long ago. They are relevant for those working at even modest levels of authority in British institutions. Thus far I have learned, too late, that the scientific approach of asking questions and wanting to fully understand context is effectively a habit which will end careers.
What a super essay. I enjoyed every word. You are quite right that Snow shows Lewis Eliot as a shrewd man, who nevertheless makes many mistakes. So does Arthur Brown and Eliot’s brother Martin. Yet the impetuous, or moralistic characters are often fundamentally right: think of Skeffington in The Affair, or Charles March. Anyway, as a fellow historian, I thoroughly enjoyed this.
A fellow Liverpudlian gave me The Masters when I took up a minor philosophy post at Cambridge University. At the time the satirists were biting the book and its author like a cloud of midges. Like them I was inclined to irreverence and found it anachronistic and irrelevant. It was half a lifetime later in the covid lockdown that I reached the same book as fifth in the 3-Volume Penguin edition of Strangers and Brothers and saw its normality within the unfamiliar world of the series. Now at the end of Book 8 I’m sorry to have only the 918 pages of Vol III to go. I now have the illusion that I make better sense of things as a result of spending time in the company of Lewis Eliot. Certainly at my age now I find his belief that the bones of character become more prominent as flesh loses its youth remarkably shrewd. I thoroughly endorse Professor Grafton’s admiration of a work which literary critics, it seems to me, misjudge.
Similar to some of the earlier comments on your article, I read the Strangers and Brothers series when I was in my 20s, telling all who would listen to me that they must also read them. I carefully accumulated all of the books in hardback when I was in my 40s and 50s to replace the soft copies I had bought in leaner university years. I’m now in my 80s and once again realize I must reread these books. They had a tremendous influence on me in my youth, and I believe they have more to teach me now. Thank you.
Sadly, I only discovered the eleven-novel series of Strangers and Brothers as I turned sixty. I own them all now, and, at the age of seventy, am now reading the series through for the third time. I gain understanding of myself with each reading and only wish that I had discovered them in my twenties. I might be a different person today if I had done.
What a fantastic essay! Thank you so much.
I first encountered C.P. Snow as an undergraduate chemist in Philadelphia in the late 60s, in the attention given in some forgotten class to his “Two Cultures”. As a science major with illicit dreams of becoming a creative writer, that little book resonated, even though it’s clear to me now that I really didn’t understand it very well at the time.
In John Halperin’s published transcription of taped interviews recorded a few years before his death, Snow presents his early science phase as having been simply a calculated means to an end … a convenient and modestly lucrative way of bootstrapping out of obscurity and poverty, towards the life as a successful, famous novelist he had always set his sights on. However accurate that memory of his might have been, it is ironic to me that it was quite similar to the path I had trod as a young man, but with a quite different motivation and end result. Torn between science and literature, and about to graduate in the middle of the Vietnam conflict, I chose the route of science and set out for graduate studies at U.C. Berkeley. Without ever totally giving up on the possibility of making a go of it as a writer, in fits and starts I successfully got my Ph.D. in chemistry (as well as a good number in the draft) and set out to develop a career in research. Except for one or two low points along the way, I never really regretted leaving behind my dreams of a career as a creative writer. It is now clear to me that I loved words a lot more than I loved people (too many strangers, too few brothers), and I would never have been any good at it.
It was at one of those low points early in my scientific career that I dove into the Strangers and Brothers sequence, and I absolutely loved it. I found it oddly comforting. I’ve not sure it taught me much about how to operate in the workplace or in greater society, but it may have given me a better perspective on people and politics, and a greater tolerance for human foibles. Or, perhaps, it was simply a great comfort to me to briefly hang with Lewis Elliot – and with C.P. Snow, who – like me – had once straddled those two cultures. In the past few months, in one of retirement’s many quiet moments, I’ve reread the series, and if anything enjoyed it more than the first time. It is through this recent re-immersion in Snow that I came upon this wonderful essay on a sadly neglected classic. Thank you again, Prof. Grafton, for writing this, and to the other respondents who have added their own fascinating stories and insights.
I am so grateful to have read this.
I began reading Snow’s novels with The Masters when I was 13 or 14 and then read them all, again and again. He was one of the two or three most important teachers I have had about how humans think and feel, and why they behave as they do.
CP Snow and Olivia Manning mentioned in the same essay…! Unlikely bedfellows, maybe, but sharing a special ability to ‘plaire et instruire”. If people are still reading books in 50 years time please let these special authors be to the fore.