A Man of Two Cultures

C.P. Snow: 1905-1980 "I'm a fairly clever chap and can put my hand to things," C.P. Snow liked to say. The self-appraisal was a classic of good British understatement. Snow put his hand to a stunning variety of things. He was a novelist, essayist, biographer, physicist, playwright, civil servant, company director, government official. Member of Parliament, teacher and public lecturer. His death last week at age 74 brought to an end not one life but many.

Snow's distinguished careers began in modest circumstances; he championed ambition and meritocracy because he was the successful product of both. He was born in the industrial city of Leicester, the son of a clerk in a shoe factory. His family, as he often remarked later, was "shabby genteel, not working class but no money to spare." The boy gave signs early on that lower-middle-class neighborhoods would not hold him long. He showed an aptitude for science, a field he took up because his grammar school offered no arts courses. He won a scholarship to Leicester University College, took first-class honors in chemistry and was asked to stay on for research. After earning a master's degree in physics, he ascended from his red brick university to the intellectual heights of Cambridge.

Judged one of the promising young men in British science, Snow knew that he lacked the scientist's "singleminded devotion" and that he really wanted to write novels. He published his first, a mystery, in 1932 and continued writing fiction throughout the decade. He also branched into administrative work. The Royal Society asked him to help organize and mobilize scientists for the coming war; when the Ministry of Labor assumed this task. Snow became a civil servant. After World War II he was named a civil service commissioner and charged with evaluating the best and the brightest young graduates applying for admission. Such power not only exhilarated him, it amplified the major theme of his fiction.

"Strangers and Brothers," a sequence of eleven novels that appeared between 1940 and 1970, is a massive portrait of the men who make things work in England. Its protagonist, Lewis Eliot, follows a path very similar to Snow's; he rises from humble origins to prominence in the fields of science, education and government. He is both a participant in important decisions and a careful observer of those who wield and seek influence. Snow's abiding interest in such industrious achievers left him well behind modernism; he wrote about men in public roles at a time when most serious fiction was burrowing ever deeper down the rabbit hole of self. Critics complained, irrelevantly, that Snow was not Proust and, accurately, that his prose was often pedestrian and awkward. While he never pretended to be an elegant stylist. Snow had an ear for the telling phrase; two of the titles he corned for the "Strangers and Brothers" series, The New Men and Corridors of Power, quickly became common currency.

So, dramatically, did "The Two Cultures," the title of a 1959 Cambridge lecture. Snow decried the willful ignorance of humanists about science and the chasm between arts and technology. The speech drew worldwide attention, including a scathing ad hominem attack by Cambridge Don F.R. Leavis. Snow's argument no longer seems controversial because it has been so generally accepted: it is important for humanists and everyone else to know what scientists are doing.

Polemics did not ruffle Snow. Tall, portly and bald, he remained a genial, accessible figure in London's streets and clubs. He lived quietly with Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, whom he married in 1950, and openly relished the honors that rained down on him. He was made a life peer by the Labor government of Harold Wilson in 1964. Although the practice was uncommon in such circumstances, Lord Snow took out a coat of arms. The design bridged the two cultures, showing two quill pens crossed over a telescope. It also included two Siamese cats, his favorite breed, and a Latin motto that can stand as his epitaph: Aut inveniam viam aut faciam--I shall either find a way or make one.

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