Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №2 Course paper Theme: Charles Percy Snow his life and work. "Strangers and Brothers" cycle of novels

6. About the Archive
Each season some novels are touted as literary occasions. The designation generally wears badly. “Last Things,” however, based upon contemporary happenings, both public and personal, which the author could not have im agined when his novel‐cycle was be gun in 1940, is a genuine literary event, for with it C. P. Snow has brought to a conclusion the 11‐novel “Strangers and Brothers” sequence, which has been 30 years in the mak ing and which is likely to remain one of the major literary documents of our time.
Anthony Trollope titled one of his novels “The Way We Live Now.” On one level it might apply to the Snow cycle, but Lord Snow also has had sharper perspectives in mind, most of them drawn together in the cul minating novel. “Last Things” is about strangers and brothers in a va riety of juxtapositions, for a number of the surrogate brothers with whom Snow's fictional alter ego Sir Lewis Eliot has lived and worked reappear, and Eliot's brother Martin returns as well. Where the novel differs from the earlier ones is in its intense focus upon all their children, making “Last Things” not only, as the title sug gests, a somewhat elegiac novel about lives coming to their appointed ends, but a novel which looks ahead toward a future that seems likely to embody few of the aspirations so crucial to Eliot's own generation.
Some of those aspirations are time less enough to cross the generation gap. Early in “Time of Hope,” Eliot, young and poor, is asked about his goals. “Of course,” he says, “I want a better world.” As for himself, “I want success.... I don't mean to spend my life unknown.... And if I fail, I shan't make any excuses. I shall say that it is my own fault.” Pressed further, he hesitates, then adds, “I think I want love.” It might be a scene out of “Last Things,” when Eliot's only child, Charles, goes out on his own. His ambitions are the same as his father's, but the methods are not those his father would have chosen for him. He wants to go far ther—and above all, faster.
“You made it happen,” a friend observes unrelentingly to Eliot. “You made him want to outshine you.” And Charles disappears into the air line terminal, “rucksack lurching and bobbing, among the crowd, which was jostling with the random purposeful ness of a Brownian movement, faces of as many different anthropological shapes and colours as on the Day of Judgment or on an American campus at mid‐day.” The metaphors from sci ence are typical of the cycle, and the leave‐taking gives away no urgent story element; for what the novel and the cycle are about are larger issues than plot, although “Last Things” is a somewhat untidy com plex of plots, Snow hurrying to knot as many loose threads as he can in the culminating book.

The young, eager men of the ear liest titles are either dead—or at least their dreams are—or they have found worldly as well as private fulfillment. Older, and in a few cases wiser, often weary and to a younger generation stuffy, their success, ironically, ex erts cruel pressure on their children and grandchildren, and in the reac tion of the younger generation is the bitter aftertaste of success and pow er; for whatever authority one wields in the councils of men, one ultimately has no power over one's progeny. The pain and disappointment old men en counter in their children is inevitable.
In its careful psychology and closed politics, in the spaciousness so sym bolized by the elaborate, dry chapter headings, and the way in which ma jor characters in some novels move on the edges in others, the series is reminiscent of Victorian and Ed wardian forebears. This does not belie the contemporaneity Snow has al ways blended with tradition. The first —and titular—novel, “Strangers and Brothers” (1940), as it focuses upon a precursor to the hippie cults and communes, here an isolated farm on the edge of the Midlands town in which Lewis Eliot grows to maturity, is as modem as tomorrow. Presided over by the pathetic George Passant, dedicated to an intellectual and social freedom for which society is unready and which may be too morally obtuse for any time, the weekend utopia leads to predictable disaster. Here as in all the novels, Lewis Eliot tells the increasingly convoluted story of his family and friends as well as his own; and in “Last Things” it is fitting that some of them — like George Passant — have their obsequies tolled.
In Snow's design each novel was to have its own particular resonance as well as a theme which penetrated to the core of its time‐period. The Proustian and personal “The Con science of the Rich” (1958), for ex ample, develops the thirties themes of social guilt and political conscience in a world moving ominously to the Right. In “The Conscience of the Rich,” too, is evidence of Snow's long‐range planning: the first chapter had appeared in an obscure and short‐lived English journal, The Wind mill, in 1945. Snow has also rejected that planning when necessary, having a remarkable ability to incorporate events which could not have been part of his original pattern, in one case even discarding a novel already written — “The Devoted” — because events made a stronger link in the cycle possible.
Although all the novels have auto biographical elements — Snow's own surgery for a detached retina fig ures in “Last Things,” for example—the most autobiographical of all may be “Time of Hope” (1949), a young man‐from‐the‐provinces book in which Lewis Eliot learns about life and love, and — unlike the young Snow —sacrifices ambition to marriage, mak ing the worst of both.
Like Snow, his protagonist (via law rather than physics) makes the pas sage from boy in Leicester to don at Cambridge; however, in one of Snow's more infuriating mannerisms neither the fictional city nor the in vented Cambridge college is ever named, resulting in elongated dashes or awkward circumlocutions in all 11 novels.
The first of the Cambridge group, “The Light and the Dark” (1947), explores, through the talented and tormented Roy Calvert, Snow's sole tragic hero in the sequence, the search for a way out of despair through religion, through politics, through love, with the doomed ro mantic figure seen against a back ground of approaching war. Calvert's ghost returns to loom over “Last Things.”
“The Masters,” written second but not published until 1951, examines only one year—1937—of the eight covered by “The Light and the Dark,” and restricts itself to the closed world of the venerable college in which both Eliot and Calvert are Fellows, while 13 men savor the power of choosing one of themselves to replace the dying Master. As one critic has written, what Trollope thought useful only for a chapter (“Who Will Be the Next Bishop?”) becomes an entire novel for Snow. The remark is no denigration. “The Masters” not only portrays a power structure in microcosm but is tanta lizingly told— perhaps the most en grossing academic novel in English.
“The Affair” (1960) examines the College nearly 20 years later. The Cold War has replaced the Spanish Civil War as background, and an arrogantly Communist don has ap pealed his dismissal for publishing re search based upon apparent scien tific fraud. Again the closed personal politics of small groups operates, and justice is done, with Eliot, fair to a fault in defending a man he dislikes, reinforcing—as Snow does with each novel—the “Strangers and Brothers” collective title. “The New Men” (1954), covers the earlier war and postwar years, and the atomic bomb project in which Snow himself was indirectly involved as wartime chief of sci entific personnel for the Min istry of Labour.
“Homecoming” (1956) takes up Eliot's story at a point not long after it is dropped in “Time of Hope.” The scenes now alternate between White hall (as Eliot is now a civil servant) and Eliot's private life, primarily the renewal of his conflict between love and am bition. In “Corridors of Power” (1946), a phrase which because of Snow was in circulation long before the book (it had ap peared in “Homecoming”), am bition wins out, although not its proponent, an adventurer among ministers.
“The first thing,” he had told Eliot, “is to get power. The next — is to do something with it.” Since one can do nothing without it, what counts is to find the secret of power; and although Snow never pre pares formulas for its solution, he does, through the cycle and into “Last Things,” trace the decline, but not the demise, of the old ruling class in England, still attractive to outsiders and kept alive by its assimilations from the new managerial élite.
With the technocrat having replaced the aristocrat, the mo bile and meritocratic power base Snow celebrates is located more in academe and industry than in Whitehall and weekend country houses. The old school tie and the old family name still have their usefulness, but while self‐made industrialists, civil servants and scientists be gin to feel at home in the House of Lords, their children, in an ironic turnabout examined in “Last Things,” grow up alien ated by the contrasts they see between the good life they have been born into and the inequal ities they see around them, over which their parents have triumphed. It is on this somber note that the cycle ends.
Having “lived inside the gov ernment apparatus,” Eliot is skeptical of the effect that any one man can have; but even in “Last Things” he is con vinced that the tidal flow in which one lived was no reason for not acting. Thus the smug rationalization of the retired high‐echelon bureau crat who on a visit to Italy has come upon a tombstone in scription he translates imagin atively as GAIUS AUFIDIUS RUFUS. HE WAS A GOOD CIVIL SERVANT, fails to satis fy Eliot. “Don't you think that is remarkably adequate?” Hec tor Rose asks. “Who could pos sibly want a more perfect epi taph than that?”