Readers' Review: "The Masters" by C.P. Snow
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-03-23/readers-review-masters-cp-snow
The English novelist and physicist Charles Percy Snow wrote eleven books as part of his "Strangers and Brothers" series. They all concern the pursuit of ambition and exercise of power in mid-20th century Britain. The fourth takes place within the closed walls of a college in Cambridge two years before England entered World War II. Several dons are in the process of electing a new Master to lead the college. In this month's Readers' Review, we discuss "The Masters" and its depiction of personal and academic politics.
Guests
Frances Stead Sellers
editor for health, science and the environmental coverage at The Washington Post.
Milton Greenberg
professor emeritus of government at American University, where he served as provost and interim president.
Philip Terzian
literary editor, The Weekly Standard
Comments
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A few corrections*** and some background. The title "The Masters" refers to just two (or possibly three) persons in the novel: (i) the Master (definitely NOT "headmaster" as in your original brief characterizations) of the Cambridge University college whose impending death sets in motion the ultimately bitter battle between the supporters of (ii) the other two potential Masters --- the two leading candidates for the succeeding Mastership.
It's worth knowing something about the organization of such colleges. The remaining Fellows (neither "professors" nor "masters") of the college would mostly, but not necessarily, be Lecturers etc. in various Cambridge university-wide disciplinary departments or faculties. Professor M. H. L. Gay is sometimes so called in the college (as no one else is) out of respect for the fact that though he is now retired and a bit doddery (to put it mildly), he HAD been a Professor which, at the time the novel was written in England, meant that he had been previously recognized as the distinguished head of his particular faculty. That university-wide faculty might otherwise contain a Reader (an English title denoting distinction in research, probably destined to be the next Professor, and NOT just someone who grades students' papers as in the U.S.!), and in addition one or two Senior Lecturers and perhaps 8 - 12 other Lecturers, Assistant Lecturers, etc. Larger faculty groups would have proportionately more Professors and/or Readers.
(I write as a former Fellow of a Cambridge college, who also witnessed a "Masters"-like struggle in my own college firsthand in the late 1960s. Snow's beautifully observed novel, which I had read four or five years earlier while still a graduate student, presaged the cut and thrust I personally witnessed a few years later among my college's fellowship.)
*** I now note that you have corrected the problems with the original descriptions of the various roles people have in the novel.
The woman who carries no insurance would be in trouble if she experienced getting a staph infection in her blood stream. That happened to me and the docs were never able to locate the source of the infection but I almost died and was hospitalized for 12 days My insurance company paid $30k for my hospital stay. What would you so if that happened to you?
To what extent does Amis' "Lucky Jim" exist as an answer or homage to "The Masters"?
I read the novel back in early 1990, when I was an assistant professor of math. The Masters is dedicated to G.H. Hardy, my "mathematical great-grand uncle", and my mathematical family tree was almost entirely at Cambridge University. (Hardy's mathematical partner was J.E. Littlewood, Harold Davenport was Littlewood's student, Hugh Montgomery was Davenport's student, and I was Montgomery's student.)
I have two notes that may be of interest.
First, the systems at Cambridge and Oxford were governed by explicit and ancient rules that were not easily changed (many were provisions of wills). For instance, only the only people in Great Britain legally permitted to eat swans were the dons of St John's College of Cambridge University. More to the point, most members of the "faculty" were required by explicit rules to be unmarried men. A member of a college would have to resign to get married. The practical result in the time of the novel was that many, many of the members were secretly married. The day that the holidays began, they would all disappear from campus, and one never, ever, asked them what they had done over the holidays. It was a radically different environment from what most Americans would imagine, and it was not entirely the result of attitudes and prejudices in 1937.
Second, I was told in the summer of 1990 by a R.C. Vaughan, Montgomery's research partner, who had also been at Trinity College, that The Masters was a roman à clef. He said that there were still people at Cambridge who could say on whom each of the characters were based.
A caller from Chapel Hill noted that the novel teaches a great deal about the political process. Aside from the political landscape at the time, I think that it is a "masterful" (sorry!) exploration of the use of influence in any political context. Slowly, carefully, the players meet and meet again in varying combinations to realize their goals...just as they do in halls of power across the world today.
I read "The Masters" on Diane's recommendation (if she'd suggested reading the Brooklyn phone directory, I would've done it) and very much enjoyed the novel. It was the first C.P. Snow book I'd read.
It's said that when three people gather around an office water cooler it can be called a 'political' situation and - to me - "The Masters" embodied that way of thinking. I had initially thought the book would be along the line of Hughes' "Tom Brown's Schooldays" but immediately discovered that it was actually a study of interaction on an insular stage.
Thanks - again - to Diane Rehm for allowing listeners to participate (albeit at third-hand) in her sine qua non program. Up here in New Hampshire's 'north country', she has a huge fan base; I'm one of many appreciative (and devoted) listeners.
MrGrammarpants, a little familiarity is a dangerous thing.
Certainly bequests etc. come with legal conditions that must be followed. It was ever thus. However, Cambridge colleges are governed by their Statutes, generally requiring the Sovereign's assent, and all having the force of law. (They are not some strange English quirk, changeable at will, as implied by one panelist.)
The university's religious tests for appointments were abolished, by an Act of Parliament, in 1871. Marriage (or, more accurately, the dropping of the celibacy requirement) was permitted by another Act of Parliament, which allowed colleges to alter their statutes to this effect in the late 1850s. Trinity Hall was the first college to then change its statutes to permit its fellows to marry, in 1859. Other colleges slowly followed suit, many, including my own, only doing so as late as 1882.
Nevertheless, these changes were thus accomplished more than half a century before the events described in The Masters. Had the restrictions you describe still have been in force in 1937, neither the Master's wife Lady Muriel, nor Jago's wife, could have filled their important roles in the novel, roles noted for their significance by both Diane Rehm herself and by the one English panelist, Frances Stead Sellers. (The two American panelists seemed quite unable to relate to the norms and expectations of English society in this period.)