C P Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture provoked a savage response from fellow critic F R Leavis. What was at the heart of it all?

Illustration by Patrick Morgan

is an editor at Aeon. He lives in New York.

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

When Charles Percy Snow rose to deliver the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, he had good reason to be satisfied with himself. By sensible tenacity he had reached an upper station of English society, an unlikely terminus for one raised by a lower-middle-class family from a suburb of Leicester. He had grown up surrounded by artisans and labourers, a distant but kindly father, three beloved brothers, and a smothering mother. But by his 55th year, around the time he presented his Cambridge lecture, one could find Snow living in the only red-brick building on Eaton Terrace in one of London’s prestigious neighbourhoods, issuing calmly authoritative opinions on books and politics and science. He was, to his happiness, considered a serious man, with opinions worth hearing.

Of the many opinions he expounded at formidable length over his lifetime, only the phrase he introduced in his Cambridge lecture remains relevant: the ‘two cultures’. Within a few years, his term passed into common speech, and it is still quoted, a lifetime later, by people who have never read a word of Snow. But after more than half a century of overuse, it’s largely been wrung of its original meaning so that today the two cultures refer rather blandly to distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, calling attention to two apparently incommensurable ways of going about understanding the world.

But this is a thin, surface reading of what Snow actually said. His real opinion of the two cultures differed dramatically from what is now remembered. It incited a chorus of commentary; many praised his pithy articulation of how we enquire into the world. But it struck one man as so obtuse, so grossly symptomatic of the times, that it warranted a violent public response. That man was the Cambridge English scholar F R Leavis. Three years after Snow’s lecture, he delivered an improbably savage rebuttal in which he called Snow, among other things, a ‘preposterous and menacing absurdity’. This confrontation between Snow and Leavis – two dramatically different thinkers, representing traditions long in tension – gets at something more fundamental than the worn phrase that survived it: our deepest and conflicting temperaments towards life.

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According to the English novelist Anthony Powell, C P Snow was affable, and rather humourless, the sort of man who gladly recognised a joke in conversation but wouldn’t be caught telling one himself. He could almost be compared to a computer, given his literal cast of mind and extraordinary capacity for work. With his large bald head, surfeit of chins and thick glasses that magnified big, bemused eyes, Snow’s visage was ripe material for caricaturists. Private Eye magazine even ran an unkind poll asking its readers if ‘C P Snurd’ was not the ugliest public figure of the day (Snow promptly sued for libel, and won; the results of the poll, alas, were never released).

But mockery is the price of fame, and a price well worth paying for the class-conscious and title-titillated Snow (his name had recently been ornamented with a knighthood by the young Queen). In 1959, he was most of the way through writing his semi-autobiographical cycle of novels, Strangers and Brothers. He had published seven of an eventual 11, tracking the life of his shadow, Lewis Eliot, who spent much of his time dealing with lengthy bureaucratic squabbles, sometimes in government, sometimes in university (Snow coined the term ‘corridors of power’). The eighth instalment of the series, called The Affair, was just finished when Snow gave his lecture. It contains in its closing an immortal line of literature, which captures better than anything else the tenor of Snow: ‘sensible men,’ a character grimly announces, ‘usually reach sensible conclusions.’

When he approached the lectern on 7 May 1959, Snow set out to make an eminently sensible point to the attendees of the Rede Lecture, crowded into the august Senate House at Cambridge. He titled his lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ (having discarded his original title, ‘The Rich and the Poor’). Despite the prestige of the event, Snow had little reason to expect much of a reaction to his lecture. More than two years earlier, he had published much the same thesis in New Statesman magazine without making a ripple. But now the idea had found its time, and Snow, to his own surprise, conjured a tempest that blew his name across the continents.

The content of the talk itself was explosive, even if delivered in a tone of invincible modesty

Snow told the crowd that, though he was no longer a practising scientist (he trained as a physicist in the 1930s), he still closely followed scientific developments. But his vocation, he noted with delighted self-curiosity, was that of a working and acclaimed novelist. (Sometimes over-acclaimed: George Steiner once said that Strangers and Brothers made Snow a peer of Proust.) Snow claimed that this uncommon duality of a life spent in science and in literature gave him a rare vantage on the ‘intellectual society’ of the West. He would, he explained, go from spending the day in the company of scientists to dining in the evening with their counterparts, whom he termed ‘literary intellectuals’, or simply ‘intellectuals’.

From Snow’s experience with these scientists and literary men – all men – he discerned a deep cultural cleft. The scientists read literature, but not seriously (Charles Dickens comes to them as someone ‘extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding’). Meanwhile, the intellectuals have a shy respect for science, but couldn’t tell you quite what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is – which Snow decides is the scientific equivalent of not having read a single work of Shakespeare. And the two cultures are drifting further apart:

Thirty years ago the cultures had long ceased to speak to each other: but at least they managed a kind of frozen smile across the gulf. Now the politeness has gone, and they just make faces.

This divergence disquiets Snow, and one would think from how his diagnosis is remembered that the purpose of the lecture was to call for a rapprochement between the cultures. In fact, Snow considered the lecture – and much of his work – to be an honest effort at mediation. But the content of the talk itself was explosive, even if delivered in a tone of invincible modesty. ‘The Two Cultures’ is incendiary, made more provocative by the pose he initially assumes as a disinterested diplomat ready to scurry between the two camps. He is, in fact, a highly motivated and partisan agent of the scientists.

Snow locates the origin of difference between the scientists and the intellectuals in their varying attitudes toward humankind’s existential situation. He intones that:

the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

Life is brief and brutal – and, confronted with this stark fact, how is one to respond? For Snow there are two options: supine submission to fate, or heroic struggle against the inevitable. ‘There is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle,’ he says. That is: one could be a scientist, striving to make the world a better place to live in, or one could be an intellectual, ‘complacent in one’s unique tragedy, and let the others go without a meal.’

Caring about bettering this life sets the two apart: the scientists do, and the intellectuals don’t. Snow’s argument then ratchets up rather abruptly when he intimates that the literary folks should be blamed, in part, for Auschwitz, though fortunately this isn’t a line of thought he follows. What he does say, however, is that the complacency of intellectuals makes them yearn for a yesterday that never was and yet also wish ‘the future did not exist’. In support of this, Snow looks to the Industrial Revolution, which ‘the traditional culture didn’t notice: or when it did notice, didn’t like what it saw.’ Intellectuals may be content contemplating an invented past, when things were supposedly seamless and simple, but in the face........

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