Strangers and brothers

I’ve finished reading C.P. Snow’s eleven Strangers and Brothers novels. Here are the grades.

(I also note each book’s position in the three-volume omnibus of 1972.)

GRADE: A

Time of Hope (1st overall; vol. I)

The Masters (5th overall; vol. II)

The Affair (8th overall; vol. II)

GRADE: A-MINUS

The Light and the Dark (4th overall; vol. I)

The Sleep of Reason (10th overall; vol. III)

GRADE: B-PLUS

George Passant (2nd overall; vol. I)

The Conscience of the Rich (3rd overall; vol. I)

GRADE: B

Homecomings (7th overall; vol. II)

GRADE: B-MINUS

The New Men (6th overall; vol. II)

Corridors of Power (9th overall; vol. III)

GRADE: C

Last Things (11th overall; vol. III; dead last, in more ways than one)

The series has so many plot threads and recurring characters, it’s hard to assess each book on its own. You have to read most of the series to adequately judge this or that person.

But perhaps the three worst novels can be safely ignored.

I suppose it’s no accident that four of what I consider to be the best novels are largely concerned with university life. The Masters and The Affair are especially good.

Time of Hope, which is not about university life, is also very good, in a quieter way.

The narrator’s first wife and her father – who appear only in Time of Hope and in Homecomings – are two of the series’s most interesting characters. Hope is arguably Snow’s overarching theme. These two characters have great gifts, yet they are enveloped in despair.

Their effect on the narrator – who, alone among the series’s many strivers, pays heed to them – is to make him aware of a gloomy alternate existence.

The worst four novels are all about “real world” politics and its connections to the domestic sphere. There are lots of tedious pages about dinner parties, galas, etc. – which, I am aware, are essential for the depiction of social striving. The problem is that the narrator himself is too socially adept. He comments judiciously on others’ struggles, but there is too little tension for him in these scenes.

Strangers and Brothers is very long – indeed, it’s the longest unified work I’ve read.

Is there a pithier substitute?

The series has much to say about the role of natural science in human culture, and so the famous piece on “The Two Cultures” might be apposite.

But, in keeping with the idea of studying hope and despair by attending to biographical detail, a better substitute might be Snow’s Foreword to G.H. Hardy’s book (A Mathematician’s Apology).

Whom we like

Susan Wolf, in “Moral Saints”:

When one does finally turn one’s eyes toward lives that are dominated by explicitly moral commitments … one finds oneself relieved at the discovery of idiosyncrasies or eccentricities not quite in line with the picture of moral perfection. One prefers the blunt, tactless Betsy Trotwood to the unfailingly kind and patient Agnes Copperfield; one prefers the mischievousness and sense of irony in Chesterton’s Father Brown to the innocence and undiscriminating love of Saint Francis.

It seems that, as we look in our ideals for people who achieve nonmoral varieties of personal excellence in conjunction with or colored by some version of high moral tone, we look in our paragons of moral excellence for people whose moral achievements occur in conjunction with or colored by some interests or traits that have low moral tone. In other words, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.

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Anne Lamott, in bird by bird:

I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. …” I think he’s right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen. Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention … When you have a friend like this, she can say, “Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma — wanna come along?” and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set.

Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope — if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second — bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision — especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us.

Hope

“Dracula’s Lament.”

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Last week’s sermon was about hope. All it amounted to was: We need to keep on hoping!

I was like: But how?

Here are a few suggestions.

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When he became a father, one of my friends wrote:

It’s amazing how much babies live in the moment. If she’s hungry or her diaper is dirty then her world is ending. She has no perspective that says this will probably be fixed in a little while so I’ll just hang on. I suppose that would be a frightening way to live. If I was hungry and couldn’t conceive of a future where I wasn’t I’d probably cry too.

I don’t remember how I felt when I was a baby. But yes, when I was a young child, I often had the feeling that my friend attributes to his daughter. I wasn’t carefree.

Adults can despair for a similar reason. They, too, can become unable to conceive of a future in which their needs are met. For adults, though, this is because of too much experience.

Failing to have one’s needs met, year after year, makes it more difficult to imagine how they can be met. Experiencing disappointment, again and again, makes it exhausting or painful to continue thinking of possibilities for meeting those needs.

For humans, this is an impediment to hoping, because what we can hope for depends on what seems possible to us.

(Notice that the same point applies to the world’s needs. Your own needs are mere tributaries. Even if you learn to navigate the tributaries – and the rivers they pour into – you must eventually confront the ocean.)

So for adults deterred by hurt, being hopeful often requires having the courage to allow wounds to be reopened. (Here a theological virtue depends upon a cardinal one.) And for adults worn down by disappointment, being hopeful often requires endurance in the midst of exhaustion.

It’s natural to lack courage. It’s natural to lack endurance. If you lack those things, don’t be too hard on yourself. By all means, enjoy some shelter and rest. But don’t stop at that:

(a) Keep in mind that, from the eternal perspective, we are babies. Our experience is not conclusive. There truly are blessings of which we can’t conceive. As far as you’re able (and if this is even coherent), don’t just hope for what’s imaginable to you.

(b) Ask God for courage and endurance to keep trying to imagine what’s imaginable, so that needs can be met even in this life.

(c) Train yourself in courage and in endurance. Training won’t be enough. But it will help, as long as it isn’t taken as a replacement for (a) and (b).

(d) Soothe others’ wounds, bear others’ burdens, protect them from the full destructiveness of exhaustion and hurt. And sometimes, or maybe just once, you will be in a position to give a person what he or she desperately needs. Then that person will be saved from despair. That person will be lucky (or blessed).

It won’t suffice, spiritually, for that person. But it’ll help, as long as it isn’t taken as a replacement for (a) and (b).

All too often, we’re tempted to think that cultivating hopefulness is primarily a matter of willing ourselves to believe that things will turn out all right. But we can do more than this. We can cultivate hopefulness by removing hindrances to the imagination. We can do this for ourselves by becoming braver, stronger. And we can do it for others by helping to ease their weariness and pain.