C.P. Snow’s The Masters is not like that. The 1951 book is set in 1930s Cambridge, but its gowns-and-claret mood suggests the medieval guild. (Indeed, Snow — a chemist, novelist, and civil servant — ends the novel with a pedantic appendix, “Reflections on the College Past.”) It’s an earnest book, with none of the McCarthyist sneering. The story — of rival campaigns to win the mastership of an unnamed Cambridge college — includes scenes of satire, but its main mode is psychological realism. More specifically, The Masters is about pride — injuries to pride, clung-to humiliation. The Masters is among the best campus novels because it captures, without malice, the single most important dynamic in faculty life: vanity and its wounds.
The fifth installment in C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, The Masters was well reviewed when it was published, but it no longer enjoys the readers it deserves, owing mainly to its author’s diminished reputation. The main assault on Snow’s reputation came from F.R. Leavis, the Cambridge literary critic. In 1959, Snow delivered a lecture on “The Two Cultures” that bemoaned the gap between science and the humanities (with most of the blame heaped on the latter). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the book based on the lecture, won Snow international fame. Leavis was not a fan. In 1962 he delivered a scathing lecture in reply, which was then published in a London weekly. Leavis: “Snow is, of course, a — no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist.” But “as a novelist,” Leavis piles on, with high Scrutiny disdain, “he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.”
Ouch. The badness of Snow’s fiction is, for Leavis, a way station to his real point, which is that Snow’s authority to pronounce on big questions is not just unearned, but a symptom of a brutish intellectual culture. How else could The Two Cultures, filled with “panoptic pseudocogencies” from a “portentously ignorant” man, win all that readership and acclaim?
The Masters was collateral damage. Though Leavis doesn’t mention the novel (he savages instead its 1960 sequel, The Affair), his lecture gravely wounded Snow’s literary reputation. As Noel Annan observed 30 years later, the run-in with Leavis had “destroyed” not only Snow’s case but also Snow himself. “From that time middlebrow opinion, which had been prepared to endorse Snow’s belief that his novels were a literary landmark, wavered and deserted him,” Annan wrote.
This is too bad, since The Masters is indeed an excellent novel. Granted, the meanness of its counterparts is more fun to read. McCarthy, Jarrell, and Amis were talented satirists with a fat target. Each was a member of the literary-intellectual culture that Snow, in his 1959 lecture, had set unfavorably against the scientific. But they weren’t real academics, and so theirs were the observations of the outsider. Amis was teaching in Wales when he published Lucky Jim, but he was not a scholar. McCarthy and Jarrell had both spent time on campus, in visiting-scholar stints at the dawn of what Mark McGurl would call “the program era” — the period of the creative-writing workshop’s ascendancy.
In other words, the mocking tones of participant-observers like McCarthy, Amis, and Jarrell was lobbed, more or less, from outside the gates. Though his own academic career was cut short, Snow’s is an insider’s account. Snow’s generosity to his characters, his nonjudgmental rendering of their interiorities, flows from his attachment to college life. And the main thing he lingers on is the private pain — the human suffering behind all the petty, grandiose, and cruel maneuvering that make up the scholar’s vocation.
Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle
What Snow captures is the outsize role pride plays in faculty life. We are, nearly all of us, vulnerable like this — a single snub is enough. We live in a hothouse of peer esteem, poised for humiliation, our dignity always in question. Snow shows this — or, rather, he tells it, through paragraphs of psychological portraiture. It’s this tell-not-show realism that struck Leavis as ponderous and cringeworthy. But Leavis is wrong: What’s best about The Masters is its sharply observed phenomenology. This is how the book transcends the cloistered male world of an unnamed Cambridge college in the late 1930s — why it feels fresh, even contemporary.
As academics, we are pretty good at studying ourselves. Scholarship on the history and sociology of academic life tells us a great deal about, say, the macro forces that act on our institutions, such as meddling legislatures or commercial partnerships. We can connect these to inherited conventions, reward systems, and incentive structures that shape how we go about our days. But we’re far less attuned to the subjective side — to what it’s like to be an academic. Snow’s thesis is that insecurity reigns; dignity means everything to us, and it’s in short, fickle supply.
One reason The Masters can get at this so directly is that its world has neither students nor administrators. It’s a closed society of 13 men, each craving the esteem of his peers. Thus the novel frames, in miniature, the agonies of withheld recognition, perceived slights, and humiliation. As these wounds fester, they motivate a large share of campus behavior. The injuries may even lead to labs and papers animated by the prospect of revenge and told-you-so redemption.
These pride dynamics are not, of course, exclusive to faculty life. Vivian Gornick, in a brilliant Harper’s essay in 2021, observed that, while there are many things human beings can live without, “self-respect is not one of them.” Humiliation, she added, “lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.” Modern life is liquid and insecure, period; no one has the refuge of a fixed, solid-feeling role. Still, my hunch is that the force of injured pride is felt with unusual intensity in the faculty lounge. The struggle for recognition, relative to and dependent upon our peers, is at the subjective center of academic life. Marks of distinction are banked jealously, and the whole thing is structured as a contest — not unlike the campaign for the mastership.
I will admit that The Masters is not the best campus novel. That honor goes to The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury’s 1975 satire of a self-satisfied sociologist at a provincial English university. It’s fairly mean and very funny. Speaking of mean, Bradbury had in 1964 published a short parody in Punch, imagining Snow’s Lewis Eliot narrating a Cambridge scene with Amis’s lucky Jim. In his rooms (a “warm fire burned in my grate, its flicker illuminating the book-lined walls”), Eliot intermittently offers a drink (“Sherry? … Port? … Claret? …”), as Jim (“Beer?”) tells him he’s made captain of the local pub’s darts team. “Perhaps,” replies Eliot, ”you’ll allow me to present a bottle this evening, and record the occasion in the wine-book.” It’s good fun, and Snow deserved Bradbury’s send-up. But you can be sure he didn’t find it amusing.
