Classics Club #7: C. P. Snow’s The Affair

C. P. Snow’s novel The Masters changed my life 14 years 3 months and 26 days ago.

I read this book while I was emigrating from Ukraine to Canada. It was a long journey. First I had to take a train from Kharkov to Kiev, then fly from Kiev to Shannon, Ireland, then take the connecting flight to Toronto, and finally travel in a car from Toronto to Montreal. On the way, I had time to read the novel twice. As a result of that reading, the purpose of my emigration changed significantly.

When I embarked on the journey, my goal was to become a literary translator from Spanish. As I read The Masters, however, I discovered the fascinating and complex world of academia. Mind you, the novel is in no way a paean to the academic world. The Cambridge dons C. P. Snow describes in the book are petty, mean, flawed, and quite unlikable.

Still, the novel showed me a completely different world. I had no idea anything of the kind even existed. And since the entire reason for my emigration was to move to a different universe, I decided that it would make a lot more sense to explore this unknown world of academia than to make a much less significant change from being a technical translator to translating literary texts.

Since then, I never read anything by C. P. Snow. The experience of reading The Masters had such a profound importance for me that I didn’t want to tarnish it by a later encounter with the author.

Now, however, I decided to read Snow’s novel The Affair that belongs to the same series titled Strangers and Brothers.

I was not disappointed. Of course, no book is going to offer the same kind of experience as you have when you are moving forever to a new continent. Still, The Affair is as delicious as Snow’s other novels. (His Death Under Sail was one of  the very first mystery novels I read as a child.) In The Affair, Snow sets out a dilemma that Cambridge academics have to resolve: recognize that an injustice has been done to a colleague whom everybody hates for his boorish manners and obnoxious politics, or avoid putting your own career at risk for the sake of somebody you despise.

Just imagine that you have a colleague who is an Evangelical on a mission to convert everybody in your department and beyond and who is driving you nuts with his odes to Romney. Every departmental meeting is soured by his passionate recitation of Paul Ryan’s budget. He keeps telling female profs that they should end their careers immediately for the sake of their husbands and children. In short, a guy who is as out of place in academia as anybody can possibly be.

One day, this annoying fellow is caught falsifying data for his most recent article and the administration finally has an excuse to get rid of him. Everybody breathes easy and envisions a happy future without his preaching.

And then you realize he might not have been guilty of falsifying the results of his experiments. Nothing can be known for certain but the doubt is there. Would you risk antagonizing the administration and attracting the Dean’s and the President’s displeasure to defend a colleague you dislike?

Snow’s The Affair was written at a time when most academics were deeply conservative. The obnoxious colleague everybody hates in the novel is a passionate Liberal. That, of course, was as unusual as finding an Evangelical holding a professorial position at any of today’s leading universities. The Cambridge scholars have to ask themselves whether their principles will survive intact when confronted with the unpleasant necessity of defending a wronged colleague of the opposite political persuasion.

This premise seems a little too academic (pun intended) but the book is absolutely riveting. While I was reading it, I was glued to the pages as I walked into class and picked it up immediately after saying to the students, “Have a nice day and I’ll see you on Wednesday.” C. P. Snow is yet to disappoint me.