Snow against the Poets

Extract

To this second edition of his now famous Rede lecture Sir Charles Snow has added fifty pages of further thoughts provoked by the extraordinary amount of attention it received. One can say ‘extraordinary’ without irony, or with little. In itself the lecture was not very remarkable— neither deep, nor subtle, nor closely reasoned, nor witty. But it made its points with force and it was exceedingly topical. Moreover Sir Charles is an interesting and versatile man, and as a writer he has a beguiling knack of combining a certain high seriousness—solemnity even—with the common touch. One feels that he has tried hard not to be spoiled by success—not, in a sense, to be changed by it at all. He brings the whole of himself, his feelings as well as his gifts and experience, into all that he writes. He does so here. Allusions to Rutherford and G. H. Hardy, dropped with a tone at once admiring and affectionate, and to high table conversations, evoke the Cambridge background and the thrill of having been a young research student there at ‘one of the most wonderful creative periods in all physics’. Allusions to the working class origins widen the perspective and humanise it; reference to important tasks well performed in the civil service add the impression—and a perfectly just one— of a man who knows much front the inside about power and the workings of power. Indeed the only ‘inside’ allusion one misses is to the novelist’s art; which is a pity since so much of the lecture, on its more polemical side, and so much of the comment now added to it, amount to an indictment of the ‘literary intellectual’ and, indirectly or by implication, of a good deal of the literature which he either produces or spends much time and energy discussing.