C. P. Snow

Stefan Collini

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

The Two Cultures

L. J.

Snow's 'literary culture' was chiefly composed of those who met each other at publishers' parties and who discussed the latest reviews of each other's work in the pages of the New Statesman or the Partisan Review. Since then, many of the periodicals of general culture have folded or sharply contracted their coverage of literature, and the modern counterparts to Snow's 'literary intellectuals' are more likely to meet each other at an academic conference or a campus-based 'writers' workshop’.

In reading Snow's text, therefore, we need to remember its origins, and to accept that he was not a systematic thinker nor, in some ways, a particularly exact writer. His preferred ground was that of the Big Idea: he seized it, turned it in a somewhat unconventional direction, illustrated it with a few facts and anecdotes taken from widely differing domains, and reiterated it in accessible, forceful prose. As he became more famous, the idea tended to get bigger, the facts fewer, and the prose more forceful. He aimed, above all, to attract attention to what he had to say. Judged by this criterion, the success of his Rede lecture must be beyond dispute.

…the damning characterisation of ‘literary intellectuals’ offered in that lecture — offered, it must be remembered, by a man who was at the time best known as a novelist. For as one sympathetic observer quizzically remarked of that later performance: “There can be no other interpretation of his lecture than that it takes towards literature a position of extreme antagonism.”

The Two Cultures

Highlights