Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (93 page)

Several things follow from this (oversimplified) account of Williams’s arguments. One is that there is no one criterion by which to judge an artist, or a work of art. Elites, as viewed by Eliot or Leavis, are merely one segment of the population with their own special interests. Instead, Williams advises us to trust our own experience as to whether an artist or his work is relevant, the point being that all viewpoints may be equally relevant or valid. In this sense, though Williams himself was steeped in what most people would recognise as high
culture, he was attacking that very tradition. Williams’s theories also imply that, in developing new ideas, artists are breaking new ground not only aesthetically but politically as well. It was this conjoining of art and politics that would lead in time to what is sometimes known as the Cultural Left.

Two final assaults on the Eliot-Leavis-Trilling-Commager canon came from history and from science. The historical challenge was led first by the French
Annales
school, and second by the British school of Marxist historians. The achievements of their approach will be discussed more fully in chapter 31, but for now it is enough to say that these historians drew attention to the fact that ‘history’ happens to ‘ordinary’ people as well as to kings and generals and prime ministers, that such history as that pertaining to entire peasant villages, as reconstructed from, say, birth, marriage, and death records, can be just as gripping and important as the chronicles of major battles and treaties, that life moves forward and acquires meaning by other ways than war or politics. In so doing, history joined other disciplines in drawing attention to the world of the ‘lower orders,’ revealing how rich their lives could be. What Hoggart had done for the working class of twentieth-century Britain, the
Annales
school did, for example, for the peasants of fifteenth-century Languedoc or Montaillou. The British Marxist historians – Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson among others – also concentrated on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people: peasants, the lower ranks of the clergy, and in Thompson’s classic work, the English working classes. The thrust of all these studies was that the lower orders were an important element in history and that they knew they were, acting rationally in their own interests, not mere fodder for their social superiors.

History, anthropology, archaeology, even the discipline of English itself in Williams’s hands and, quite separately, in Achebe’s, Baldwin’s, Ginsberg’s, Hoggart’s, and Osborne’s works, all conspired in the mid-to late 1950s to pull the rug out from under the traditional ideas of what high culture was. New writing, new discoveries, were everywhere. The idea that a limited number of ‘great books’ could provide the backbone, the core, of a civilisation seemed increasingly untenable, remote from reality. In material terms, America was now vastly more prosperous than Europe; why should its people look to European authors? Former colonies were exalted by their newfound histories; what need did they have of any other? There were answers to these questions – good answers – but for a time no one seemed interested. And then came an unexpected blow from a quite different direction.

The most frontal attack on Eliot-Leavis
et alia
may be precisely dated and located. The setting was Cambridge, England, and the time a little after five o’clock on the afternoon of 7 May 1959. That was when a ‘bulky, shambling figure approached the lectern at the western end of the Senate House,’ a white stone building in the centre of the city.
⁸⁵
The room, in an ornately plastered neoclassical building, was packed with senior academics, students, and a number of distinguished guests, assembled for one of Cambridge’s ‘showpiece public occasions,’ the annual Rede lecture. That year the speaker was Sir Charles
Snow, later to be Lord Snow but universally known by his initials, as C. P. Snow. ‘By the time he sat down over an hour later,’ as Stefan Collini tells the story, ‘Snow had done at least three things: he had launched a phrase, perhaps even a concept, on an unstoppably successful international career; he had formulated a question … which any reflective observer of modern societies needs to address; and he had started a controversy which was to be remarkable for its scope, its duration, and, at least at times, its intensity.’
⁸⁶
The tide of Snow’s lecture was ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,’ and the two cultures he identified were those of ‘the literary intellectuals’ and of the natural scientists, ‘between whom he claimed to find a profound mutual suspicion and incomprehension, which in turn, he said, had damaging consequences for the prospects of applying technology to the world’s problems.’
⁸⁷

Snow had chosen his moment. Cambridge was Britain’s foremost scientific institution, but it was also the home of F. R. Leavis (and Raymond Williams), as we have seen, one of the country’s foremost advocates of traditional literary culture. And Snow was himself a Cambridge man, who had worked in the Cavendish Laboratory under Ernest Rutherford (though he was an undergraduate at Leicester). His scientific career had suffered a setback in 1932 when, after announcing that he had discovered how to produce vitamin A by artificial methods, he was forced to recant because his calculations proved faulty.
⁸⁸
He never did scientific research again after that but instead became a government scientific adviser and a novelist, with a multivolume series, ‘Strangers and Brothers’, about the decision-making processes in a series of closed communities (such as professional societies or Cambridge colleges). These were much derided by advocates of ‘high’ literature who found, or affected to find, his style stilted and pompous. Snow thus both bridged – and yet did not bridge – the two cultures about which he had such strong views.

Snow’s central point applied across the world, he said, and the reaction to his lecture certainly justified that claim. But it was also true that it applied more than anywhere in Britain, where it was thrown into its starkest contrast. Literary intellectuals, said Snow, controlled the reins of power both in government and in the higher social circles, which meant that only people with, say, a knowledge of the classics, history, and/or English literature were felt to be educated. Such people did not know much – or often any – science; they rarely thought it important or interesting and as often as not left it out of the equation when discussing policy in government, or regarded it as boring socially. He thought this form of ignorance was disgraceful, dangerous, and when applied to government, that it failed the country. At the same time, he thought scientists culpable in often being ill-educated in the humanities, apt to dismiss literature as invalid subjectivism with nothing to teach
them.

Reading Snow’s lecture, one is struck by the many sharp observations he makes along the way. For example, he finds scientists more optimistic than the literary intellectuals, that they tend to come from poorer homes (both in Britain and ‘probably’ in the United States). He found literary intellectuals vainer than scientists, in effect ‘tone-deaf to the other culture, whereas at least scientists knew what they were ignorant of.
⁸⁹
He also found the literary intellectuals
jealous of their scientific colleagues: ‘No young scientist of any talent would feel that he isn’t wanted or that his work is ridiculous, as did the hero of
Lucky Jim,
and in fact some of the disgruntlement of [Kingsley] Amis and his associates is the disgruntlement of the under-employed arts graduate.’
⁹⁰
Many literary intellectuals, he concluded, were natural Luddites. But it was the description of the two cultures, and the immense gap in between, that was his main point, supported by his argument that the world was then entering a scientific revolution.
⁹¹
This he separated from the industrial revolution in the Following way. The industrial revolution had been about the introduction of machinery, the creation of factories and then cities, which had changed human experience profoundly. The scientific revolution, he said, dated from ‘when atomic particles were first made industrial use of. I believe the industrial society of electronics, atomic energy, automation, is in cardinal respects different in kind from any that has gone before, and will change the world much more.’ He surveyed science education in Britain, the United States, Russia, France, and Scandinavia and found Britain most wanting (he thought the Russians had it about right but was uncertain of what they had produced).
⁹²
He concluded by arguing that the proper administration of science, which could only come about when the literary intellectuals became familiar with these alien disciplines and dropped their prejudices, would help solve the overriding problems of rich and poor countries that bedevilled the planet.
⁹³

Snow’s lecture provoked an immense reaction. It was discussed in many languages Snow could not speak, so he never knew what was being said (in, for example, Hungary, Japan, Poland). Many of the comments agreed with him, more or less, but from two sources came withering – and in one case very personal – criticism. This latter was none other than F. R. Leavis, who published a lecture he had given on Snow as an article in the
Spectator.
Leavis attacked Snow on two grounds. At the more serious level, he argued that the methods of literature related to the individual quite differently from the methods of science, ‘because the language of literature was in some sense the language of the individual – not in an obvious sense but at least in a
more
obvious sense than the language of science.’ ‘For Leavis, neither the physical universe nor the discourse of its notation was possessed by observers in the way in which literature could be possessed by its readers; or by its writers – because he would claim that literature and literary culture was constructed not from words learned but from intercourse.’
⁹⁴
At the same time, however, Leavis also mounted a personal attack on Snow himself. So personal was Leavis’s venom that both the
Spectator
and the publishers Chatto & Windus, who reprinted the article in an anthology, approached Snow to see if he would sue. He did not, but it is difficult to see how he could not have been hurt.
⁹⁵
Leavis began, ‘If confidence in oneself as a master-mind, qualified by capacity, insight, and knowledge to pronounce authoritatively on the frightening problems of our civilisation, is genius, then there can be no doubt about Sir Charles Snow’s. He has no hesitations.’ When Leavis delivered the lecture, a pause followed this sentence. Then he went on: ‘Yet Snow is, in fact, portentously ignorant.’
⁹⁶

Nonetheless, the most cogent criticism came not from Leavis but from Lionel
Trilling in New York. He put down Leavis, both for his bad manners and for being so personal, and because he had come to the defence of modern writers that, hitherto, he had no time for. At the same time, Trilling thought Snow had absurdly overstated his case. It was impossible, he said, to characterise a vast number of writers in what he described as a ‘cavalier’ way. Science might hang together logically or conceptually, but not literature. The activities that comprise ‘literature’ are too varied to be compared with science in so simple a fashion.
⁹⁷
But was that true? Whatever Trilling might say, the ‘two cultures’ debate is still going on in some quarters – Snow’s lecture was reprinted in 1997 with a long introduction by Stefan Collini detailing its many ramifications all over the world, and in 1999 the BBC held a public debate entitled ‘The Two Cultures 40 Years On.’ It is now obvious at least that Snow was right about the importance of the electronic/information revolution. And Snow himself is remembered more for his lecture than for his novels.
⁹⁸
As will be argued in the conclusion, the end of the twentieth century sees us living in what might be termed a ‘crossover culture,’ where popular (but quite difficult) science books sell almost as well as novels and rather better than books of literary criticism. People
are
becoming more scientifically literate. Whether or not one agrees wholeheartedly with Snow, it is difficult not to feel that, like Riesman, he had put his finger on something.

And so, piece by piece, book by book, play by play, song by song, discipline by discipline, the traditional canon began to crumble, or be undermined. For some this change had a liberating effect; for others it was profoundly unsettling, producing a sense of loss. Others, more realistic perhaps, took the changes in their stride. Knowing more science, or being familiar with the works of, say, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, or John Osborne, did not necessarily mean throwing traditional works out of the window. But undoubtedly, from the 1950s on, the sense of a common pursuit, a great tradition shared among people who regarded themselves as well educated and cultured, began to break down. Indeed, the very idea of high culture was regarded in many quarters with suspicion. The words ‘high culture’ themselves were often now written embedded (if not yet embalmed) in quotation marks, as if this were an idea not to be trusted or taken seriously. This attitude was fundamental to the new aesthetic which, in the later decades of the century, would become known as postmodernism.

Despite the viciousness of Leavis’s attack on Snow, there was one especially powerful argument he didn’t use, presumably because he was unaware of it, but which, in the 1950s, would grow increasingly important. Snow had emphasised the success of the scientific approach – empirical, coldly rational, self-modifying. Paradoxically, at the very time Snow and Leavis were trading blows, evidence was accumulating that the ‘culture’ of science was not quite the way Snow portrayed it, that it was actually a far more ‘human’ activity than appeared from a mere reading of what appeared in scientific journals. This new view of science, to which we now turn, would also help shape the so-called postmodern condition.