The Masters, by CP Snow

First published in 1951, this is the fourth of Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” novels, which chart the life of lawyer and scholar Lewis Eliot (the series that originated the phrase “corridors of power”. This one, spanning 1937, begins with Eliot, now based at an unnamed Cambridge college, informed that the beloved master there is dying of cancer — but doesn’t know it himself. The master’s wife, out of love, wants to let him enjoy what life remains.

While Eliot and his colleagues debate the ethics of this, they also discuss which of them will succeed the master — or whether the unthinkable might happen, with someone brought in from outside. Yet when two candidates put themselves forward, the electors are split seven to six. Eliot favours a man called Jago, but others think him too ordinary, his wife too presumptuous and over-bearing. Before the old master is dead, the campaigning starts to get nasty…

There didn’t seem much substance to this not-quite-comedy of manners,

at least to begin with. But as the months pass and word comes through of things seen and heard on the Continent, the petty squabbles, egos and viciousness of this small college become an analogy for something greater — politics and honour and relationships and values in the shadow of looming war. 

It’s also peppered with strange, sad details. There’s a particularly haunting moment relatively late on, when Lady Muriel finally tells her husband the truth, that he will not recover from his cancer. Until this moment, the lie about his condition has been a burden for Lady Muriel and the others in the college, but telling him offers little solace. Though ill and getting ever thinner, the Master had been ploughing on with a book. Now that abruptly halts, because, “It’s hard to think without a future,” he says.

Then there’s what the news does to his relationship with wife:

“But the hardest blow for her was that in looking towards his death, he seemed to have forgotten her.”

Indeed, a close friend, Roy Calvert, reveals to Eliot that the master and his wife have long had problems.

“Theirs had not been a joyous marriage. The Master might have brought happiness to many women, Roy said, but somehow he had never set her free.” (p. 126)

It’s all quietly devastating, but I’m also really struck by that conception of what a good marriage should be — liberating and empowering.

The campaign against Jago is horrible, and reminded me of the villainous Mrs Gamart in The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, whose malicious campaign is just as destructive. It’s also horribly misogynist, and there’s a lot here about a little world of men, petty and jealous and vain, who are — for all some of them have the potential to be brilliant — are little men. 

I thought one younger member of the group might be different, a scientist called Luke. But then he has some success in puzzling out a new theory, and goes full on Swiss Tony:

“It’s wonderful … when you’ve got a problem that is really coming out. It’s like making love — suddenly you unconscious takes control. And nothing can stop you. You know that you’re making old Mother Nature sit up and beg. And you say to her, ‘I’ve got you, you old bitch.’ You’ve got her just where you want her. Then to show there’s no ill-feeling, you give her an affectionate pinch on the bottom.” (p. 268)

The story ends with with some last-minute shenanigans over who will vote for whom, and the result of the election and the loser being brave. One wonders how agreeably things might continue given the way people have behaved. But the sense from Eliot is that some kind of order had been restored — though, as readers, we know they’re all now under the cloud of war. That’s explored in the next novel in the sequence, The New Man (1954).

Snow then provides a 12-page appendix with the history of his fictional college. A bit to my surprise, I found this compelling. He charts how an informal gathering of locals seeking advantage in trade abroad, which meant learning some Latin and maths, slowly gained structure and architecture. While the colleges and university — the two are apparently distinct — have existed for a thousand years, we’re told that most of its traditions are just a few generations old. The implication is that it’s history is fiction, but it’s an invented place anyway, based on fact.