Homecomings

C.P. Snow is something of a latter-day Trollope. The series is quasi-autobiographical. The author's training was as a physicist. Obiviously his twin interests of politics and psychology have been poured into his STRANGERS AND BROTHERS series. When this book opens it is 1938 and the narrator, Lewis Eliot, is married to Sheila Knight, a person who cannot love. Sheila knows that Lewis has sacrificed the idea of having children and part of his career for her betterment. Lewis cannot accept that in regard to his marriage to Sheila he has become his own prisoner. He is a legal advisor to Paul Lufkin, a tycoon. Sheila is prepared to do a good turn for a sixty year old man, a has-been. She is ready to set him up in publishing. Beautiful and hag-ridden, she has business acumen. Lewis encourages her to support the said Robinson in his plans. Later he learns that Sheila is wrongly rumored to prefer women to her husband. Robinson , it seems, has started the rumor. Additional hurtful gossip is brought to Lewis's attention. Sheila confronts Robinson with spreading slander. At a dinner Lewis is asked if he knows Austin Davidson, an art connoisseur and a member of one of the notable academic dynasties. He discovers that his wife writes in secret in the manner of Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte. She hides her work from him but shows her work to Robinson who gives it praise. Sadly his use of her work is that it serves as an opportunity to spread a yet more hurtful rumor, that she has backed Robinson in order to get published. In her misery, Lewis tries to speak with Sheila of other people's lives also riven with angst. This is to no avail since, in the end, she destroys her creative work. Suicide is accomplished when, in the black-out, Lewis is away from home attending yet another formal dinner. Lewis had tensed for signs of strain and had felt resentment at the distraction of Sheila's moods. This blended with the pity and protective love he felt for Sheila. In 1941, two years later, Lewis runs into Margaret Davidson. Five years later she becomes his second wife and the mother of his son, Charles. Thus, C.P. Snow sets up his characters with problems detailing on man's journey through life in a highly interesting milieu. The point of the exercise is to show the social circumstances from which individuals emerge to play intellectual and emotional roles. The actors engage in jobs in government, academia, law and medicine, and business. Novels in the series continue to seem fresh and pertinent to tasks and events Americans may now confront and/or consider. As time passes, the reader appreciates more than ever the cleverness C.P. Snow uses to array his characters with historical and novelist-made attributes, recognizable in hind-sight. For example, Sheila resembles Vivian Eliot, the first wife of the poet. Austin Davidson, the father of Lewis's second wife, Margaret, calls to mind Anthony Blunt, art connoisseur to Her Majest