CP Snow
CP Snow is best remembered for coining the phrase ‘two cultures’ to describe the seemingly unbridgeable gulf in understanding between those engaged in science on the one hand and humanities on the other. Trained as a scientist, he himself crossed that divide by also being a writer of fiction, his works including a sequence of 11 novels following the life of a somewhat semi-autobiographical scientist and administrator.
In the 10th of those novels, the central character suffers a detached retina, which has ramifications in the final volume of the cycle. These events followed closely those of the author, making his literary description of his character’s experiences of particular interest for eye care professionals.
Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester in 1905, the second of four children of a lowly shoe factory clerk. He excelled academically at school and, despite already being quite myopic, did well at football and cricket. After school he studied science, supplementing his knowledge and his pocket by working as a lab assistant while also finding time to follow an interest in literature, working his way through the great European canon.
He emerged with a first-class degree and an MSc from Leicester then, on the back of winning a prestigious research grant, he joined the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, earning his PhD for a dissertation on The infra-red spectra of simple diatomic molecules.
He also became a fellow of Christ’s College, in 1930, but his interest began to turn to writing.
The idea for a long novel cycle based around a fictionalised version of himself began to take shape in 1935 but the Second World War intervened just as he was getting going; the first novel, Strangers and Brothers, was published in 1940. This title was to become the overall name for the series, that first novel later being retitled George Passant.
Professionally, he moved into university administration and then, during the war, became a government scientific adviser tasked with mobilising scientific talent to work on urgent military technology projects such as radar and the atomic bomb. Snow remained in a similar civil service role post-war. Having been knighted in 1957, he was made a life peer on joining Harold Wilson’s government in 1964, becoming Baron Snow of Leicester.
Snow became alarmed about the prevailing ignorance of science, particularly in those in government and the civil service responsible for running the country, who generally held arts degrees. He contended that understanding of scientific developments was vital for good decision-making; and this exact argument has been illustrated recently and graphically in the official Covid inquiry, where scientific advisers have claimed that members of the government were unable to properly grasp the information they were trying to impart.
Snow set out these arguments in a series of lectures entitled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which were published in 1959. He also saw the other side of the coin where, in another series of lectures, he cautioned against scientific advisers with political agendas of their own, who can manipulate scientifically ignorant politicians, thereby accruing undue power.
Meanwhile, Snow was continuing with what was to be the 11-novel Strangers and Brothers cycle, which he saw as one serial work. The central protagonist, Snow’s semi-autobiographical character, Lewis Eliot, is the thread that binds the novels. But care is taken to make the settings realistic too: ‘All the societal backgrounds are authentic,’ he told his brother.
‘I have lived in most of them myself; and one or two I have not lived in I know at very close second-hand.’ So, when it comes to the description and experience of Eliot’s detached retina, we can be pretty sure that it is an accurate portrayal of Snow’s own ocular trauma.
By the time of the 10th novel, Sleep of Reason, published in 1968, Lewis Eliot is a successful and relatively wealthy man.
One morning he wakes up and looks towards a gap in the curtains: ‘As I looked at the gap, I noticed – no, I didn’t notice – it hit me like a jolt in a jet plane 30,000 feet up, the passage up to that instant purring with calm – a veil over the corner of my left eye. A black veil, sharp-edged. I blinked. The veil disappeared: I felt a flood of reassurance. I looked again. The veil was there, covering perhaps a quarter of the eye, not more.’
Lewis gets up and, looking out at the autumn mist: ‘On my left side, the black edge cut out the haze. I blinked. I went on testing one eye, then the other. It was like pressing on a tooth to make sure it is still aching. The veil remained. Now that I was looking out into the full light, there was a penumbra, orange-brown, along its edge, through which I had some sort of swirling half-vision, as through blurred smoked glass. The veil itself was impenetrable. No pain.’
As well as the physical description it is interesting to see illustrated the psychological effect of this sudden phenomenon: ‘I tiptoed out to the bathroom and looked at myself in the glass. A familiar eye looked back. There wasn’t a mark on it, the iris was bright, the white wasn’t bloodshot… I went back to bed trying to steady myself.
I was more frightened, or not so much frightened as nervously exposed, than I liked being.’ Then there is the psychological effect on his wife of being told of ‘my symptom, for there was only the one,’ and their shared emotions: ‘“What can it be?” said Margaret. I was asking her the same thing. For a moment we looked at each other, each suspecting that the other had some guess or secret knowledge. Then we knew that we were equally lost.’
Eliot goes to see a Harley Street specialist who diagnoses a detached retina. ‘“As a matter of fact,” he said coolly, “I could have diagnosed it over the telephone.”’ (Much as you or I might have done from the initial description above.) The surgeon, Mansel, estimates a decent chance of a successful outcome but, because it is already a few days since the detachment occurred, he might only get back peripheral vision.
After the operation Eliot has to lie on his back for several days with his eyes bandaged. Eventually an examination by Mansel reveals that the operation has failed and that, without further intervention, ‘the eye will gradually die on you,’ Mansel says. Four days later, back at home, Eliot gets up and, by habit, lifts the patch over his left eye and finds that the black veil has gone.
‘I squinted past the patch, where the black edge had gone to. Just for the moment, the eye appeared to be behaving something as Mansel had promised me it would, if the operation worked. I could see the shape of the room, Margaret’s face, I could make out the letters in the masthead of The Times, nothing else. Above all, there was no blackness pressing in.’
To Mansel’s surprise: ‘The retina has got itself back somehow.’ He admits that: ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like this. By all the rules that retina ought to be floating about. But there’s a great deal we don’t understand in this business. We’re really only at the beginning. It’s a great deal more hit-and-miss than it ought to be. I hope it will be a bit more scientific before I’ve finished.’ The correlation with real events is illustrated succinctly by two headlines that appeared in The New York Times a few months apart: ‘Surgery on CP Snow fails to save left eye’ followed by, ‘CP Snow’s eye saved’.
In the final novel of the series, Last Things, published in 1970, Snow describes a dramatic episode that his alter ego, Eliot, undergoes that, again, matches very closely his own experience. Eliot has a recurrence of his detached retina and, while on the operating table having it repaired, suffers a cardiac arrest.
His chest is opened and manual massage gets his heart going again – but only after Eliot has been technically dead for ‘between three-and-a-half and three-and-three-quarters minutes,’ according to his surgeon. Bearing in mind Snow’s atheism, Eliot’s sardonic riposte, ‘I bring you no news from the other world,’ could be straight from Snow’s own mouth.
Snow’s (and Eliot’s) cardiac arrest occurred in 1965, but he lived on until 1980. He is best remembered for his ‘two cultures’ argument and his novel cycle but he has also provided perhaps the most graphic description of the experience of retinal detachment in
literature.
- David Baker is an independent optometrist.