Scenes from Married Life: A novel by a physicist about a physicist
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010224
I’ve just finished reading two novels by William Cooper, the pen name of Harry Hoff. Born in Northern England in 1910, Cooper studied physics at Cambridge University, where his academic adviser was physicist, novelist, and bureaucrat C. P. Snow .
Cooper’s first job after earning his bachelor’s degree was as a high school physics teacher in Leicester, a modestly sized city in England’s East Midlands. His 1950 novel Scenes from Provincial Life is set in such a city just before World War II and follows the life of Joe Lunn, a physics teacher who aspires to be a successful novelist.
Although it’s not well known, Scenes from Provincial Life was the first of several novels of the 1950s whose protagonists’ ordinary lives illuminated with wry humor the smug, dreary conventions of contemporary Britain. John Wain’s Hurry On Down (1953), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959) were among the novel’s progeny.
Cooper doesn’t name the city in which Scenes from Provincial Life takes place, but his description of an ornate clock tower strongly suggests Leicester, the city where he taught physics in the 1930s.
Cooper’s novel attracted me not just because of its literary importance. I was also intrigued to see if his background as a physicist was manifest in the novel’s characters, plot, or themes. It wasn’t. Besides one brief episode in which Lunn tells his senior class to look for Newton’s rings, little of physics or physicists makes an appearance. Lunn, perhaps like Cooper himself, was more preoccupied with writing and sex.
The edition I bought paired Scenes from Provincial Life with one of its sequels, Scenes from Married Life. Set in London in 1950 and published in 1961, the novel continues to follow Lunn, who still writes novels, but who is now a civil servant tasked with ensuring that Britain’s research enterprise has the scientific staff it needs to flourish.
Cooper’s mentor, Snow, appears in the novel as Lunn’s boss, Robert (we never learn his surname). Together, the two physicists engage in office politics and pursue their respective literary careers. They also each meet and marry teachers.
As in the earlier novel, physics remains in the background. But there are at least two episodes in which Cooper’s inner physicist speaks out. The first is rather brief. Shopping for rings with Robert, Lunn is shocked to discover that wedding rings are much cheaper than engagement rings. “I had no idea the wedding rings were to be had for units of pounds,” he writes as any physicist might.
The second episode is longer and launches one of the novel’s subplots. Lunn is assigned to interview organic chemists for temporary jobs at one of Britain’s explosives research establishments. Evidently, Lunn (and presumably his creator too) held a low opinion of organic chemists, as you can tell from the following extract:
Organic chemists had come to be my bêtes noires—they seemed to me to be characterized by a peculiar combination of narrowness and complacency, having changed neither their techniques nor their opinion of themselves since the days of World War I. Organic chemistry had seen some truly glorious days at the beginning of the century, and the 1914–18 war, with everybody thinking mostly about explosives and poison gas, had been a chemists’ war. But after that had come the glorious days of atomic physics; and World War II, with everybody thinking about first radar and then atomic bombs, was a physicists’ war. To the sort of young men I had to see the point had not gone home. On they went, sticking together parts of molecules, by their crossword-puzzley techniques, to make big molecules: then, by more crossword-puzzley techniques, they verified that they had made what they thought they had made: and then started all over again.
When asked if they used techniques nowadays invented and used by physicists, they said to me rebukefully:
“I rely on classical methods.”
And when invited to discuss the way their parts of molecules behaved in terms of electronic structure, they said very rebukefully indeed:
“I’m afraid I’m not a theoretician.”
Some of them, it seemed to me when I got particularly desperate, might never have heard the electron had been discovered.
(In fairness I have to say that since then—I am writing about 1951 and it is now 1960—my opinion has changed. Young organic chemists have changed, to the extent of whipping at least one “modern technique,” nuclear magnetic resonance, smartly out of the hands of physicists.)
Parenthetical caveat aside, the typical—even stereotypical—haughtiness of physicists with regard to the practitioners of other sciences shines out of the extract. In the novel, Lunn’s attitude to one organic chemist in particular leads to an incident that almost ends his career. I won’t say more, lest you want to read the novel for yourself.
As for Cooper, managing scientific workforces became his specialty. He worked at the UK Atomic Energy Authority to stem Britain’s brain drain and served as a personnel consultant to the European Commission. Like Lunn, he continued to publish books, although only Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married Life remain in print today.
Cooper died in 2002 .