"Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP" saw more than Philip Larkin remembered: the Cuban missile crisis, Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives, an epic Lord's Test and the "Two Cultures" controversy. For a 16 year old of vaguely intellectual interests in 1962, the row between CP Snow and FR Leavis was as exciting as the television debate over the second world war between AJP Taylor and HR Trevor-Roper just before. Maybe schoolboys had more elevated concerns then. Maybe "public intellectuals" were more impressive.
Or maybe not. To revisit that debate is to be reminded how foolish and vulgar both contestants could be. Their names seem to ring few bells with anyone under 40, but both were then genuinely famous, which shows how transitory a certain kind of fame can be. Sir Charles Snow-he had been knighted in 1957 and was to become Lord Snow in 1964, when Harold Wilson made him the junior minister in a new ministry of technology-had made his way from modest origins in Leicester to become a research scientist of some distinction in Cambridge before the war. He moved to public administration and then began writing novels. Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence enjoyed considerable success in the 1940s and 1950s and introduced a phrase to the language: "the corridors of power."
When he gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959, Snow revived and popularised another phrase: "the Two Cultures." A huge rift had emerged between science and the humanities, he said, made worse by an education system which divided children into two groups at 15, the twain never to meet thereafter. Even in universities there was mutual incomprehension. How many historians or linguists knew the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Why were so many literary intellectuals reactionaries or even fascists? Wasn't the effect of many famous 20th-century writers to "bring Auschwitz that much nearer"? Snow, as a man of science and letters, had a foot in both camps, but his sympathies were with the scientists, who "had the future in their bones."
Lurking nearby in Cambridge was Leavis, the angry rebel and heresiarch of an English faculty which he had haunted since the 1920s; begetter and editor of the critical magazine Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s; prophet of "felt life" and literature-as-religion; expounder of the great tradition of the English novel culminating in DH Lawrence; dictator of an eccentric and often narrow literary canon in which Milton and Dickens were dismissed and Ronald Bottrall was one of the great poets of the age. Everything about Snow's career and writing seemed a personal affront to Leavis (although as Lionel Trilling said, the two had a great deal in common in terms of background, and both were at odds with English ruling-class culture). Leavis claimed, implausibly, that he had tried to ignore Snow before finding that he was now widely accepted "as an intellect and a sage" whose ideas were rehashed in essays by sixth-formers.
In the 1962 Richmond Lecture, also in Cambridge, Leavis addressed "The Significance of CP Snow." With the same tones of feigned reluctance, he kept "representatives of the press" out of his lecture, was then annoyed by garbled reports of what he had said and set the record straight by publishing it in the Spectator. He denounced Snow with a leaden sarcasm and a bitter loathing which seemed to many to betray resentment and envy. Contemptuous of Snow's fame, Leavis angrily rejected his attacks on the Luddite literary intellectuals. If that meant Lawrence and TS Eliot, it meant Leavis as well, and understandably he did not want to take personal responsibility for Auschwitz.
Not that Leavis was entirely wrong about Snow, whose reputation was then as large as it was largely undeserved. Much of what he wrote has not stood the test of time, including his novels, even if they are still interesting documents of their age. "It's very good of its kind," the man in the New Yorker cartoon said, "but God damn its kind." Snow's novels aren't very good of their kind, but their kind is valuable in a way Leavis could never understand, responsible as he was for promoting a peculiarly bleak view of literature in which books had a high moral purpose or they were nothing. Partly under his influence, and since the division between everyday novels and literary fiction, we have lost sight of one perfectly proper purpose of the novel-which is to leave a record of how life was lived in a particular society. To write about the world of work-in Snow's case universities, scientific research and the civil service-was an honourable aim. Unfortunately he wrote about it with wooden characterisation and dialogue which would only with difficulty have issued from human lips.
But Leavis's attack was so violent that it said more about him than Snow. To a degree I hadn't quite remembered, his attack was astoundingly venomous. Snow was "intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be... As a novelist he doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is." This verbal violence shocked many who might otherwise have taken Leavis's side, but his "Leavisite" disciples lapped it up. The extraordinary thrall Leavis once exerted now seems harder to understand than Snow's reputation, unless one thinks of it in group-psychological not intellectual terms. As Charles II said about the ranting preacher and his flock: "His nonsense suits their nonsense."
Forced to choose between the two antagonists of 40 years ago, it would be hard to take Leavis's side. Snow had little influence and few disciples. Leavis himself had a kind of mad grandeur, but the Leavisites were pitiful, epigonoi of an epigonos. It's hard for anyone much under 50 to grasp the enormity of Leavis, his "ites" and his "ism." In its heyday, from the 1930s to the 1960s, it was not so much a conspiracy as a cult-an intellectually respectable version of Moral Rearmament.
Early in the 20th century, when the idea of an English school at Cambridge was first mooted, some academics wondered whether English was a scholarly discipline at all, or a suitable subject for undergraduates. Much that has happened since suggests that they had a point. Aesthetics is a true branch of philosophy (much neglected in English-speaking countries) and criticism is a true branch of literature. Its great practitioners from Johnson to Coleridge to Arnold never "read English," while two of their finest 20th-century successors, Orwell and Pritchett, hadn't been to university at all. Even now, there are good critics like John Carey and John Sutherland who happen to be professors, but they don't write any better because of their academic status.
What was dubious about Eng Lit in general was true to a peculiar degree of Dr Leavis. He was, incidentally, one of the first dons in England to use that absurdly pompous title after merely compiling a three-year dissertation of a kind any competent journalist could write. Even a generation ago, it was still considered bad form for anyone apart from a physician to "doctor" himself. Now every don is a Dr, which is one more small step towards the creation of the esoteric academic career cut off from life outside. In Leavis's case it was a way of trying to show that "English" was something you needed to be taught and qualified to practice-and, like everything else about his career, it was an attack on our common culture, by trying to appropriate literature as a discrete mystery understood only by initiates. Worse was to come, as "English" branched into the gruesome byways of cultural studies and critical theory: the one glorified journalism, the other the reduction of creative genius to jejune abstraction. It is, of course, the least secure disciplines which require the most elaborate supply of pseudo-scholarship and arcane jargon.
What Snow and Leavis were arguing about- the relationship between humane culture and the material world, the impact of industrialism- was certainly important, and had been discussed more even-temperedly and more fruitfully in the 1880s by TH Huxley and Matthew Arnold. As it was, Snow and Leavis both missed the point-the real problem is not that we have two cultures but that we have 200. In the age of Goethe, and as he exemplified, a great writer could have a brilliant grasp of science and even the ordinary educated man could take an informed interest in all that was newest in letters, music, art, science and philosophy. Since then, and to some extent inevitably, a broad humane culture which didn't distinguish between arts and science has fragmented into innumerable mutually incomprehending groups talking to themselves in esoteric jargon; not the least of Leavis's crimes was his excruciatingly convoluted prose which taught by example that if your heart is in the right place it doesn't matter how badly you write. We have academic history written for academic historians, we have what Gore Vidal calls the novel written to be taught rather than read, we have music composed only for other composers.
And yet there is another side to it. In the terms that Snow once addressed it, the gulf between science and literature has been narrowed by the vogue for popular science writing. Popular science may fill a vacuum left by the decline of political ideology, but in any case it wouldn't have been possible without the emergence of a generation of scientists who could write as well as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. And science has been embraced by "the humanities" in a way that would have startled both Snow and Leavis, from Melvyn Bragg's broadcasting to recent plays by Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard and the scientific obsessions of novelists like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.
Time has brought other unlikely revenges these 40 years. Snow later said that he should have called his lecture "The Rich and the Poor," and there is still something in his criticism of a reactionary literary elite, scorning the masses and material progress-although, as someone notoriously susceptible to Soviet flattery he was not the person to say this. He has been rebuked by the collapse of communism and, as Stefan Collini has said, his banal self-confidence about "modernisation" is now harder to share. But nor is it easy to sympathise with Leavis's rage, especially when expressed in such strangulated prose and in the name of such arcane doctrine. The absorption of science into our broader culture once more, reclaiming it from the exclusive possession of the scientists, is one of the most cheering signs of our age. Now it is time for an even more important task-to reclaim literature from the academic critics.
