Snow, Sayers and The Search
Must the personal always compete with the professional?
This post contains spoilers for Gaudy Night, The Search, and Middlemarch.
Earlier this month, Alan Jacobs wrote an intriguing post about C. P. Snow’s novel The Search and its role in Dorothy L. Sayers’ masterpiece of a mystery novel, Gaudy Night. Jacobs is writing a book on Sayers, which I look forward to reading. As part of this, he is, naturally, reading books that influenced Sayers, of which The Search is surely one. Indeed, Jacobs suggests that the role that The Search plays in Gaudy Night does not quite make perfect sense, from a plot perspective, and hence that Sayers must have particularly wanted to include it.
There is certainly thematic overlap between the two books. The Search is about a scientist named Arthur Miles who finds that his human, interpersonal feelings win out over the demands of the scientific, and thus that he cannot be a scientist after all. Gaudy Night is about a novelist who wrestles with the fear that any romantic relationship would be incompatible with her professional dedications.
Jacobs concludes his post with something of a cliffhanger:
The human wins out over the scientific. Maybe, Arthur thinks, it always does. But Gaudy Night shows that sometimes the scientific — in the sense of a strict commitment to the sacredness of honest research — can sometimes have its own victories. And Gaudy Night also suggests that the choices might not be as stark as Snow’s story suggests. More on that in another post.
Another post has not yet been forthcoming. My own thoughts on the matter started filling the gap almost as soon as I saw the post, and have now reached the point where I might as well write them down. If Jacobs ever does continue his line of thought, I will be interested to see how much it overlaps with mine.
The search for The Search
I have my own history with The Search. My mother used to leave her philosophy texts lying around the house, as I was growing up. Sometimes I would pick them up and read them — particularly those of the “collected readings” variety, which often contained some very readable and thought-provoking excerpts.
I can remember very few of the details of these readings, but I remembered The Search for the sheer blasphemy of it. The excerpt I read was one in which Arthur Miles perceives that another scientist has lied about his results, and decides not to correct the deliberate error.
When I read this as a teenager, I could hardly believe it possible to even imagine such a thing. To falsify a scientific result: monstrous and disturbing in itself. Yet to think of seeing it done by another and letting it slide! How could anyone?
Naturally, as I grew older and wiser, I wished to revisit the whole book. I was sure it was by C. P. Snow, of The Two Cultures fame, and yet when I looked for it I could not find it. The Search, it turns out, is not one of Snow’s best-known works, and the article I looked at when trying to find the book simply neglected to mention it. Yet here it was, in Gaudy Night, all along, and I didn’t even notice until Jacobs pointed it out.
The risks of marriage and family
Gaudy Night sets up its consideration of the potential conflict between the personal and the professional by beginning at an alumni event at mystery novelist Harriet Vane’s old (fictional) Oxford college. This gives us a view of Harriet’s scope of possibilities. There are the unmarried women, some with passionate concerns of their own (breeding dogs, or selling books, or of course the academics who teach at the college) and others who seem less enthusiastic about their lives (teaching school, for example, which was very much the default path for an unmarried female graduate). Then there are the married women. Mary, an old friend, no longer seems to have anything in common with Harriet, absorbed entirely in her husband and children. Phoebe, a historian married to an archaeologist, is easier for Harriet to talk to: she travels with her husband on digs, writes papers with him, and mostly leaves her children in the care of their grandparents, who are happy to help out.
Then there is the woman who married a farmer:
Worth it? said Mrs Bendick. Oh, yes, it was certainly worth it. The job was worth doing. One was serving the land. And that, she managed to convey, was a service harsh and austere indeed, but a finer thing than spinning words on paper.
“I’m quite prepared to admit that,” said Harriet. “A ploughshare is a nobler object than a razor. But if your natural talent is for barbering, wouldn’t it be better to be a barber, and a good barber, and use the profits (if you like) to speed the plough? However grand the job may be, is it your job?”
“It’s got to be my job now,” said Mrs Bendick. “One can’t go back to things. One gets out of touch and one’s brain gets rusty.”
. . .
“Look here! I admire you like hell, but I believe you’re all wrong. I’m sure one should do one’s own job, however trivial, and not persuade one’s self into doing somebody else’s, however noble.”
. . .
“That’s all very well,” replied Mrs Bendick, “but one’s rather apt to marry into somebody else’s job.”
Mrs Bendick serves as an illustration for one of Harriet’s deepest fears, namely, that marrying a man is likely to involve giving up her own vocation.
Into this conundrum, we introduce The Search. In so doing, we may find that the question of how to integrate the personal with the professional is not solely a female concern. To be sure, Arthur Miles does not need to worry that a wife will expect him to give up his career as a scientist. He does, however, come to a point where he no longer has the kind of devotion to science that would prevent him from allowing personal concerns to trump scientific ones. His final break from science is at least partly influenced by his remaining feelings for an old flame, married to the scientist who has falsified a result for professional gain. Miles’ concern for the effects of professional ruin on the scientist’s wife and family is appalling to some of the female academics of Gaudy Night, one of whom scoffs, “These wives and families!”
Regarding The Search within Gaudy Night, I am reminded of George Eliot’s Middlemarch — but in a different way to the way in which Alan Jacobs brings up that great book in his own post. For Middlemarch, too, concerns itself with the ways in which marriage can frustrate a person’s calling, and Middlemarch makes it fully clear that this risk within marriage does not just apply to women. Dorothea Brooke finds that she ought not to have tried to marry into Casaubon’s researches, because they are not actually worth her time. Thomas Lydgate finds that he cannot expect that Rosamond Vincy will share his concern for medicine just because she is a sweet young woman who has married him. Dorothea eventually finds her way into the kind of meaningful activity that can satisfy her ideals. Lydgate, by contrast, is severely compromised by his social connections — amongst which his marriage is central — and loses much of his integrity of conscience in the process.
The benefits of marriage and family
Should we then, just to be safe, prescribe either celibacy or mere extramarital connections for all who wish to possess true devotion to a calling?
Here’s a countervailing argument from
, right here on substack, writing that becoming a Dad made him a better writer. Why? Because — paradoxically — it meant that being a writer was no longer the most important thing. Being a Dad was. And that gave Boryga the freedom to stop worrying about what the people on Twitter would think and just write what he wanted to write:
I have read Boryga’s debut novel Victim, and it lives up to the promise of Boryga’s post. It’s funny, and daring. The satire is somehow both vicious and deeply humane; it’s written with a sharp mind and a full heart. It is, indeed, not the kind of book that you write when you are looking for approval. It is the kind of book that you write because there are things you want to say.
So, yes, marriage and family can draw a person away from higher concerns. But they can also, as in Boryga’s case, draw a person away from lower concerns, opening up the path for better work in the process.
In fact, this possibility already appears in The Search, in the form of a road not taken. Long before Arthur Miles gives up on science because he doesn’t want to deal with the loss of prestige after making a mistake, and still longer before he makes his final decision to abandon scientific principles entirely, there comes an earlier point of compromise — so small, at the time, that it hardly seems to matter.
Miles is a chemist who makes his name discovering the structures of various families of molecules. But the discovery of quantum mechanics puts a wrench in his planned career path. Suddenly, he doesn’t have the right background for the problems he wants to work on. He has a choice: move into a different kind of chemistry, or take the long road of trying to master enough of the new physics.
I wanted to change over, use the quantum mechanics myself. But it was not so easy as that.
I could taste the new explanations. But I could not devise them. I could see the way physics and chemistry were falling into shape but I could not help. At least not in the way I should have liked. For, as I have said, these new conceptions were brought about by a set of mathematical techniques, and to take part in them one needed a kind of training I had never had.
. . .
But I wanted to do it. I think, if I had been contented within myself, I might have done it. If my private life had been happy, if a rather different Audrey had been living with me, ready to trust me into foolhardiness, I think I might have taken the risk.
Alas, this development comes just as Audrey has recently left him to marry someone else. Without a woman to love him, Miles finds that he needs his status as the brilliant young scientist more than ever. And so, instead of devoting himself to the problems he finds most interesting, he follows the path of short-term success.
Is it any wonder that, when this success hits a roadblock, his devotion to science fails entirely?
The resolution of Gaudy Night
Arthur Miles imagines a fictional woman — a “rather different Audrey” — who would be so devoted to him as a person, and through him to his profession, that he could rely on her to believe in his ability to do something difficult and support him in that task. Contrastingly, in Gaudy Night, Harriet’s historian classmate who married the archaeologist provides an example of the shared vocation, held equally by husband and wife.
Neither possibility is especially encouraging to Harriet. She could never be happy giving up her own concerns in order to devote herself to supporting a man’s purposes in life. Nor could she reasonably expect any man to do this for her. And her writer’s work is solitary. Indeed, she had a previous relationship with another writer and their shared concerns mostly just led to them being jealous of each other’s success. No help there.
Yet Harriet does slowly come to see that there might be other possibilities that she could hope for. A pivotal passage in Gaudy Night is this one, as Harriet responds to a passing suggestion from Peter on how she could make a character’s motivations more convincing:
“But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he’ll throw the book out of balance.”
“You would have to abandon the jig-saw type of story and write a book about human beings for a change.”
“I’m afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.”
“It might be the wisest thing you could do.”
“Write it out and get rid of it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll think about that. It would hurt like hell.”
“What would that matter, if it made a good book?”
She was taken aback, not by what he said, but by his saying it. She had never imagined that he regarded her work very seriously, and she had certainly not expected him to take this ruthless attitude about it. The protective male? He was being about as protective as a can opener.
On the surface, this is not one of the book’s sweetly romantic exchanges. Peter apologises subsequently for being the sort of person who is “always laying down the law with exquisite insolence to somebody.” Yet Harriet notes to herself, immediately afterwards, that she is surprised at her own lack of resentment.
As we have seen in Harriet’s conversation with Mrs Bendick, Harriet cares about writing her novels well, even if they will never be high literature. In pushing Harriet to write better, Peter has gone beyond a desire for Harriet’s happiness and into a desire for what Harriet herself would see as her true, meaningful good, over and above simple pleasure or comfort.
Peter’s interest in the quality of Harriet’s books does not, I think, derive solely from some deep principle that all literature ought to be as good as possible. No, Peter is speaking out of love, the kind of love that holds the true good of the beloved above more shallow concerns.
Such love need not extinguish one’s own interests. Instead, one of the book’s final scenes lays out a vision for marriage that might be able to include more than one person’s passionate dedication to a goal:
“Peter— what did you mean when you said that anybody could have the harmony if they would leave us the counterpoint?”
“Why,” said he, shaking his head, “that I like my music polyphonic. If you think I meant anything else, you know what I meant.”
“Polyphonic music takes a lot of playing. You’ve got to be more than a fiddler. It needs a musician.”
“In this case, two fiddlers—both musicians.”
“I’m not much of a musician, Peter.”
“As they used to say in my youth: ‘All girls should learn a little music—enough to play a simple accompaniment.’ I admit that Bach isn’t a matter of an autocratic virtuoso and a meek accompanist. But do you want to be either?”
The performance they are listening to is of Bach’s concerto for two violins in D minor. The focus passes evenly between two soloists, who each supply counterpoint for the other where appropriate. As a metaphor for a complex, supportive and equal relationship, it is dauntingly beautiful. Yet it is impossible not to see that such a thing could be worth aiming for.
Thank you very much for this nice shout out--and the very kind words about my novel. I enjoyed your piece and I'm glad that my own provided some inspiration.