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.
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).
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