As I have already indicated, Snow’s own physique was massive. He was also physically inept to a degree I have never seen equaled. He was incapable of doing up, or even undoing, a parcel. It was no surprise to learn that in one set of examinations—I think in chemistry—he had obtained the highest marks in theory and the lowest marks in the practical which had ever been recorded. I cannot think that he could ever have been a successful experimental scientist. His hands and arms resembled flippers, rather than human appendages. In addition, he often suffered from lumbago, which made his gait shambling and at times totally disabled him. I am sure that his physical awkwardness was, in early life, something which made him self-conscious and uncertain of himself, especially with the opposite sex. He was intensely sensitive about his personal appearance. I remember lunching with him during the war at a little restaurant near St. James’s Park Underground station. The question of his physical appearance cropped up, and one of us, I think Harry Hoff, suggested “senatorial” as an appropriate adjective, which Snow accepted. Then I put my foot in it by saying that I couldn’t imagine him in a toga, and laughing. I realized instantly that I’d hurt his feelings, and suffered agonies of embarrassment myself. I think it was his own experience of feeling ill at ease which made Snow so tolerant of, and sympathetic to, that uneasy mixture of arrogance and diffidence which is so characteristic of clever undergraduates.
Snow dealt with his physical maladroitness by getting others to do for him anything which might require the minimum of physical skill. He became expert at finding helpers; and when, during the war, he left Cambridge for London, he always ensured that someone, secretary or girlfriend, would minister to his needs and do up his parcels. I don’t know if his physical ineptitude was in any way connected with his fear of air raids. Right through the war, it was a torment to Snow to endure the bombing, far more of a torment than it was for most of us. I have always considered myself to be a physical coward, and was so when playing games at school. But when the air raids started, I found them exhilarating rather than frightening. Snow was just the opposite; and we used sometimes to discuss the oddity and irrationality of human fear. Both of us realized that praise or blame didn’t come into the matter. That sort of fear, or lack of it, has nothing to do with moral excellence; and I admired Snow for stoically enduring something which I was lucky enough not particularly to mind.
A good many of the people whom Snow portrays in his novels were known to me. Not all his characters were taken direct from life, but, when they were, they were painted with wonderful accuracy. Many years after I first read The Search, I took part in a weekend conference at which J. D. Bernal was one of the speakers. I had never met him before, but, after listening to him for a while, I recognized him. “You,” I said to myself, “are Constantine in The Search.” Indeed, he was; and I’m told wasn’t best pleased with the portrait. I wonder how many people have recognized a person in real life from first encountering them in a novel?
Snow was, perhaps, too much tied to the actual ever to scale the heights of art. Art is both life and something more; something which transcends the mundane and may transmute the mundane into the eternal. Snow, I believe, distrusted fantasy; and without fantasy it is difficult to capture the imagination of the reader in the way that the greatest novelists are able to do. Snow’s prose style has sometimes been described as pedestrian. In fact, it was a serviceable instrument which aptly fulfilled his sober purposes. It may be relevant that Snow had little ear for music. I recall that a friend once persuaded him to listen to a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Snow said he was able to recognize that this work possessed a certain majesty; but music meant virtually nothing to him, and I doubt if he ever considered how any sentence he wrote would actually sound.
Snow’s portraits of actual people are, I think, the best work he did. Although Snow was an unusually compassionate man, there were others besides J. D. Bernal who were hurt by Snow’s descriptions of them; but he himself always maintained that most of those he knew would rather appear in one of his novels than be disregarded, even if this meant including “warts and all.” One example where possible hurt was avoided was The Conscience of the Rich, that masterly portrayal of possessive paternal love in an upper-class Jewish family. The original of Charles March told Snow that his portrait of his father would desperately upset the old man, and asked him not to publish it until his father had died. With great reluctance Snow agreed, although it threw out his whole plan for the Strangers and Brothers sequence. The Conscience of the Rich should have come second. In fact, it did not appear until six of the series were already in print. I think that a remarkable instance of Snow’s generosity.
Although most of Snow’s portraits of actual people occur in his novels, he also wrote Variety of Men, a collection of essays on some of the eminent people he had encountered, including H. G. Wells, Einstein, and Lloyd George. I don’t think anyone who has read it could ever forget his picture of the mathematician G. H. Hardy, whose book A Mathematician’s Apology has become a classic. Hardy was one of Snow’s heroes. He was also notably eccentric; and Snow’s account combines humor, insight, and intense sympathy with this lonely man who, not long before his death from natural causes, became so depressed that he tried to kill himself.
Variety of Men is an apt title; for no one can have known, and known intimately, a wider variety. Snow came from the lower middle-class and ended up in the House of Lords. Although he gave up science himself, he kept in close touch with science and scientists. He was fascinated by politics, and, although his sympathies remained with the left, he made friends on both sides of the House. For instance, I can remember one of his parties including both Harold Wilson and Lord Hailsham; and Snow became intimate with Harold Macmillan, who not only shared his enthusiasm for Trollope, but also made a masterly speech at the party which launched Snow’s book on the novelist. In spite of moving in high society, Snow was not a social snob. Unlike many of those who rise in the world, Snow never disowned his origins. He was proud of having achieved so much without the advantages of birth or inherited wealth. I cannot imagine that this generous and tolerant man would ever have disowned a friend. Snow was sometimes imposed upon, cheated, or stabbed in the back by former acquaintances who were envious of him; but he continued to be magnanimous even toward those who treated him badly. Indeed, he had a peculiar sympathy with tricky characters of doubtful honesty.
He could, of course, show resentment; and did so, quite properly, when subjected to a venomous attack by F. R. Leavis, although he did not himself reply to it until years afterward. At the time, it was left to his friends to object, which they did in, among other places, the Spectator of March 16, 1962. I was glad to be among them. There was one other attack which deeply disturbed him. At one time, he had to go into Moorfields Hospital to have an operation on his eye. His sight was threatened; and Private Eye chose to make a cruel joke about the country of the blind in which the one-eyed man is king. That he found hard to forgive.
Snow liked to think of himself as a realist; and when he wrote a book about novelists whom he admired, he gave it the title The Realists. Some might think that it was stretching the category to include within it Dickens and Dostoyevsky. However, Snow prided himself on possessing an earthy, somber view of the human condition. Human beings were fallible, limited, incapable of much foresight or much self-sacrifice. Western lack of concern for the Third World was ample evidence of that. Moreover, human beings often possessed what he called a “sadic” streak (he meant “sadistic”) which inclined them toward cruelty and which decent men had to fight against in themselves. The motives of men were invariably mixed, and there was a dark side to what appeared to be the most disinterested actions. It was part of human nature to pursue one’s own interest, and men deceived themselves if they believed they could do otherwise. The quest for “goodness” was real enough; but others were likely to be harmed in its pursuit. Snow was very tolerant of, and compassionate toward, the compulsions of the flesh. Hi
s own early experience of love had been desperately unhappy, and he was in his forty-fifth year when he finally found contentment in marriage.
I think that he was much more of a romantic than he acknowledged. The pursuit of success remained for him a romantic quest. He enjoyed the honors which came his way. I remember the first he was awarded, during the war. He put on a show of modesty. “My friends tell me I should accept it,” he said, but neither of us was deceived by this disclaimer. He enjoyed being a successful novelist, a member of the House of Lords, and a resident of Eaton Terrace, and I don’t think these trappings ever lost their charm for him. I believe that his early uncertainty about himself meant that he never took these manifestations of success for granted. He remained delighted and surprised that he had got so far, and, because of this, never became disenchanted. He also greatly enjoyed any success which his friends attained. His geese habitually turned into swans, and, at a party, he once clasped both my hands and called me “The most successful of my pupils,” a title which I certainly did not deserve. It was, I believe, this romantic streak which made his presence life-enhancing. Snow might take a pessimistic view of human beings in general, but about his friends he was warmly, irrationally optimistic. As J. H. Plumb wrote of him in an obituary which appeared in the Christ’s College magazine, “He possessed that great quality of making all whom he met feel larger than life, better scientists, better writers, better historians; indeed, better men.”
Science also retained for him the glamor of a romantic quest. His posthumous book, The Physicists, not only demonstrates his remarkable memory, but also illustrates the fact that understanding the structure of matter, adding to the scientific edifice, remained for him as exciting an endeavor as when he portrayed it so well in his early novel The Search. “Insight” was one of Snow’s favorite words; and he applied it equally to those who exhibited it in science and to those who understood human nature. He himself bridged the “two cultures” which he described better than anyone else I have known.
Of all those who have influenced me, Snow stands out as the man to whom I owe most. His warmth, his generosity, and his belief in me at a time when I had little belief in myself are unforgettable, and I am glad to have this opportunity to pay tribute to his memory.
5
Othello and the Psychology of Sexual Jealousy
JEALOUSY IS a complex feeling which, because it is compounded of more than one emotion, is not easily defined. The Oxford Dictionary illustrates the difficulty when it first states that jealousy is “zeal or vehemence of feeling against some person or thing,” and goes on to say that it is also “zeal or vehemence of feeling in favour of a person or thing.” One can be jealous of someone one hates, and jealous to preserve someone one loves. The Oxford Dictionary continues its definitions with “solicitude or anxiety for the preservation of well-being of something,” and “vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage.” Only after these definitions does the OED proceed to how we more usually think of jealousy: “the state of mind arising from the suspicion, apprehension or knowledge of rivalry,” and “fear of being supplanted in the affections.”
The word “jealousy” is often used as if it were synonymous with envy; but I think the distinction worth preserving. Jealousy is predominantly concerned with the fear of loss of something one possesses, envy with the wish to own something another possesses. Othello suffers from the fear that he has lost Desdemona’s love. Iago suffers from envy of the position held by Cassio, to which he feels entitled.
Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is often tiresomely facetious, but also contains wit and some wisdom. Bierce calls jealousy “the seamy side of love,” and defines the adjective “jealous” as “unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.”1 Jealousy is complex because, like hate, it is so closely related to love. It is only those we love who are capable of arousing our most intense resentment. It is not surprising that murder is overwhelmingly a domestic crime in which murderer and victim are linked emotionally.
Jealousy, like being “in love,” is an emotion which contains a markedly irrational, subjective component. When we are in love, the person who is the object of our infatuation may be objectively admirable and lovable; but this is not what makes him or her the center of our universe. Freud wrote that being in love is “the normal prototype of the psychoses.”2 But jealousy, however objectively justified, is as crazy as being in love, and a more dangerous state of mind. Both the state of being in love and the state of being in hate or being jealous can be so subjective as to be quite unrelated to anything which the object of such emotions does or feels. It is when a person’s beliefs and feelings appear to have no foundation in fact, no relation to reality, that we call them delusional and label the person insane. But, as we shall see, there is really no hard and fast line between sanity and madness where these powerful emotions are concerned.
The extreme irrationality of both jealousy and being in love is probably related to the way that human beings develop from infancy onward. The human infant, if he or she is to grow up happy, confident, and able to make fruitful relationships with others, seems to require the kind of totally irrational adoration with which healthy mothers usually greet their newborn infants. Certainly, evidence is accumulating that children who have not been adored and welcomed in this way suffer emotional difficulties. For example, mothers who are themselves depressed are less able to involve themselves in the lives of their children, and are less capable of communicating with them or showing them affection. The children of depressed mothers are more likely than those of normal mothers to show later emotional problems.
The human infant requires more than being fed, kept warm, and protected from danger. It seems to need a mother who, at any rate for a time, considers it the most important person in the world, the temporary center of her universe. When adults fall mutually in love, this experience of irrational adoration is repeated. It so powerfully ministers to self-esteem that the threat of a partner turning elsewhere is dangerously alarming; and this is still true even when the element of sexual infatuation has long since declined. In reality, few human beings are so important or so unusual that they are not easily replaceable. But that is not how most people feel either about their partners or about themselves. From infancy onward, most of us need intimate ties which minister to our narcissism; which make us feel “special,” even though we may in fact be very ordinary.
Freud, in a paper first published in 1922, wrote:
Jealousy is one of those affective states, like grief, that may be described as normal. If anyone appears to be without it, the inference is justified that it has undergone severe repression and consequently plays all the greater part in his unconscious mental life. The instances of abnormally intense jealousy met with in analytic work reveal themselves as constructed of three layers. The three layers or grades of jealousy may be described as (1) competitive or normal, (2) projected, and (3) delusional jealousy.3
Freud thinks that “normal” jealousy is compounded of grief at the thought of losing the loved object combined with pain from the injury to self-esteem: the “narcissistic wound,” as he calls it. The emotion is further complicated by self-criticism (What am I or what have I done to lose him or her?), and by feelings of enmity toward the rival. In Freud’s view, even “normal” jealousy is not wholly rational, “for it is rooted deep in the unconscious, it is a continuation of the earliest stirrings of the child’s affective life, and it originates in the Oedipus or brother-and-sister complex of the first sexual period.”4
For Freud, loss of the loved object is primarily loss of sexual fulfillment. Later theorists, like John Bowlby, have widened this by referring to loss of an “attachment figure,” a concept to which I shall return.
Freud’s second grade of jealousy is based upon the well-known psychological mechanism of projection. Freud writes, “It is a matter of everyday experience that fidelity, especially that degree of it required
in marriage, is only maintained in the face of continual temptations.”5 Those who are unwilling to admit this fundamental truth about themselves repress their own impulses toward infidelity, and are apt to attribute such impulses to their partner: “It isn’t I who wish to be unfaithful, but my spouse.” This mechanism provides relief to the person who employs it, and also a kind of reassurance, in that the spouse is perceived as having the same kind of impulses toward infidelity which the subject finds it so hard to acknowledge. Freud makes the point that social convention makes some allowance for the partial expression of sexual feelings toward persons other than the partner by permitting mild degrees of flirtation, followed by satisfaction in return to faithfulness. He goes on to say, “A jealous person, however, does not recognize this convention of tolerance; he does not believe in any such thing as a halt or turning-back once the path has been trodden, nor that a flirtation may be a safeguard against actual infidelity.”6 In other words, the person who is particularly prone to jealousy is by nature rigid; a creature of absolutes, who allows no latitude to the expression of impulses which he can neither admit in himself nor tolerate in his partner.
When Freud was twelve years old, in 1868, the first of thirty-two sixpenny numbers of an English novel appeared, He Knew He Was Right, by Anthony Trollope. This novel perfectly illustrates the type of character Freud describes in his paper of 1922. We know that Freud read some of the novels of Dickens, Fielding, Thackeray, Disraeli, George Eliot, Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, Kipling, Victoria Sackville-West, and even those of James Hilton and Dorothy Sayers. Whether or not he ever ventured upon Trollope I have been unable to discover. Freud would certainly have recognized Trollope’s portrait of Louis Trevelyan, and paid tribute to its accuracy.
Not everyone who enjoys Trollope is familiar with this novel, which is less well known than it deserves. There are, it is true, a number of subsidiary characters and subplots which do not entirely hold the reader’s interest; but the portrait of Louis Trevelyan, the jealous man who persuades himself that his wife is playing him false, is convincing, subtle, and true to life. James Pope Hennessy, in his book on Trollope, writes: “As in the novels of Balzac, jealousy in all its varied forms plays a great part in Trollope’s works. There seems to have been nothing about jealousy that Trollope did not know, or could not imagine.”7 Trollope was well aware that intense jealousy is closely allied to mental illness. The borderland of madness is a subject which lends wings to Trollope’s sometimes pedestrian pen. Mr. Crawley, in The Last Chronicle of Barset, another rigid, tormented man, is one of the great characters of fiction.
Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind Page 12
