Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

26

CRACKS IN THE CANON

In November 1948 the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to T. S. Eliot. For him it was a year of awards – the previous January he had been given the Order of Merit by King George VI. Interviewed by a reporter in Princeton after the announcement from Stockholm, Eliot was asked for what the Nobel had been awarded. He said he assumed it was ‘for the entire corpus.’ ‘When did you publish that?’ replied the reporter.¹

Between The Waste Land and the prize, Eliot had built an unequalled reputation for his hard, clear poetic voice, with its bleak vision of the emptiness and banality running through modern life. He had also written a number of carefully crafted and well-received plays peopled with mainly pessimistic characters, who had lost their way in a world that was exhausted. By 1948 Eliot was extremely conscious of the fact that his own work was, as his biographer Peter Ackroyd put it, ‘one of the more brightly chiselled achievements of a culture that was dying,’ and that partly explains why, in the same month that he travelled to Stockholm to meet the Swedish king and receive his prize, he also published his last substantial prose book.² Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is not his best book, but it interests us here because of its timing and the fact that it was the first of a small number of works on both sides of the Atlantic that, in the aftermath of war, formed the last attempt to define and preserve the traditional ‘high’ culture, which Eliot and others felt to be mortally threatened.³

As we saw in chapter 11, The Waste Land, besides its grim vision of the post-World War I landscape, had been constructed in a form that was frankly high culture – fiercely elitist and deliberately difficult, with elaborate references to the classics of the past. In the post-World War II environment, Eliot clearly felt that a somewhat different form of attack, or defence, was needed – in effect, a balder statement of his views, plain speaking that did not risk being misunderstood or overlooked. Notes begins by sketching out various meanings of the term ‘culture’ – as in its anthropological sense (‘primitive culture’), its biological sense (bacterial culture, agriculture), and in its more usual sense of referring to someone who is learned, civil, familiar with the arts, who has an easy ability to manipulate abstract ideas.⁴ He discusses the overlap between these ideas before concentrating on his preferred subject, by which he means that, to him, culture is a way of life. Here he advances the paragraph that was to become famous: ‘The term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.’⁵

But if this list seems ecumenical, Eliot soon makes it clear that he distinguishes many levels in such a culture. He is not blind to the fact that producers of culture – artists, say – need not necessarily have high intellectual gifts themselves.⁶ But for him, culture can only thrive with an elite, a cultural elite, and cannot exist without religion, his point being that religion brings with it a shared set of beliefs to hold a way of life together – Eliot is convinced therefore that democracy and egalitarianism invariably threaten culture. Although he often refers to ‘mass society,’ his main target is the breakdown of the family and family life. For it is through the family, he says, that culture is transmitted.⁷ He ends by discussing the unity of European culture and the relation of culture to politics.⁸ The overall unity of European culture, he argues, is important because – like religion – it offers a shared context, a way for the individual cultures within Europe to keep themselves alive, taking in what is new and recognising what is familiar. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead from Science and the Modern World (1925): ‘Men require from their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.’⁹ But perhaps the most important point of culture, Eliot says, lies in its impact on politics. The power elite needs a cultural elite, he argues, because the cultural elite is the best antidote, provides the best critics for the power brokers in any society, and that criticism pushes the culture forward, prevents it stagnating and decaying.¹⁰ He therefore thinks that there are bound to be classes in society, that class is a good thing, though he wants there to be plenty of movement between classes, and he recognises that the chief barrier to the ideal situation is the family, which quite naturally tries to buy privilege for its offspring. He views it as obvious that cultures have evolved, that some cultures are higher than others, but does not see this as cause for concern or, be it said, as an excuse for racism (though he himself was later to be accused of anti-Semitism).¹¹ For Eliot, within any one culture, the higher, more evolved levels positively influence the lower levels by their greater knowledge of, and use of, scepticism. For Eliot, that is what knowledge is for, and its chief contribution to happiness and the common good.

In Britain Eliot was joined by F. R. Leavis. Much influenced by Eliot, Leavis, it will be recalled from chapter 18, was born and educated in Cambridge. Being a conscientious objector, he spent World War I as a stretcher bearer. Afterward he returned to Cambridge as an academic. On his arrival he found no separate English faculty, but he, his wife Queenie, and a small number of critics (rather than novelists or poets or dramatists) set about transforming English studies into what Leavis was later to call ‘the centre of human consciousness. ‘All his life Leavis evinced a high moral seriousness because he believed, quite simply, that that was the best way to realise ‘the possibilities of life.’ He thought that writers – poets especially but novelists too – were ‘more alive’ than anyone else, and that it was the responsibility of the university teacher and critic to show why some writers were greater than others. ‘English was the route to other disciplines.’¹²

Early in his career, in the 1930s, Leavis extended the English syllabus to include assessments of advertisements, journalism, and commercial fiction, ‘in order to help people resist conditioning by what we now call the “media.” ‘However, in 1948 he published The Great Tradition and in 1952 The Common Pursuit.¹³ Note the words ‘Tradition’ and ‘Common,’ meaning shared. Leavis believed passionately that there is a common human nature but that we each have to discover it for ourselves – as had the authors he concentrated on in his two books: Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. No less important, he felt that in judging serious literature there was the golden – the transcendent – opportunity to exercise judgement ‘which is both “personal” and yet more than personal.¹⁴ This transcendental experience was what literature, and criticism, were for, and why literature is the central point of human consciousness, the poet ‘the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.’ Leavis’s literary criticism was the most visible example of Eliot’s high-level scepticism at work.¹⁵

From New York Eliot and Leavis found kindred spirits in Lionel Trilling and Henry Commager. In The Liberal Imagination Trilling, a Jewish professor at Columbia University, was concerned, like Eliot, with the ‘atomising’ effects of mass society, or with what David Riesman was to call ‘The Lonely Crowd.¹⁶ But Trilling’s main point was to warn against a new danger to intellectual life that he perceived. In the preface to his book he concentrated on ‘liberalism’ which, he said, was not just the dominant intellectual tradition in the postwar world but, in effect, the only one: ‘For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.’ Leaving aside whether this particular claim was true (and Eliot, for one, would have disagreed), Trilling’s main interest was the effect of this new situation on literature. In particular, he foresaw a coarsening of experience. This came about, he said, because in liberal democracies certain dominant ideas spring up, find popular approval, and in consequence put ideas about human nature into a series of straitjackets. He drew his readers’ attention to some of these straitjackets – Freudian psychoanalysis was one, sociology another, and Sartrean philosophy a third.¹⁷ He wasn’t against these ideas – in fact, he was very positive about Freud and psychoanalysis in general. But he insisted that it was – and is – the job of great literature to go beyond any one vision, to point up the shortcomings of each attempt to provide an all-enveloping account of human experience, and he clearly thought that in an atomised, democratised mass society, this view of literature is apt to get lost. As mass society moves toward consensus and conformity (as was happening at that time, especially in America with the McCarthy hearings), it is the job of literature, Trilling wrote, to be something else entirely. He dwelt in particular on the fact that some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century – he quoted Pound, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, and Gide – were far from being liberal democrats, that their very strength was drawn from being in the opposing camp. That, for Trilling, was at the root of the matter. For him, the job of the critic was to identify the consensus in order that artists might know what to kick against.¹⁸

Henry Steele Commager’s American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s was also published in 1950, the same year as Trilling’s book.¹⁹ Ostensibly, Commager took a different line, in that he tried to pin down what it was that separated American thought from its European counterpart. The organisation of Commager’s book was itself a guide to his thinking. It concentrated neither on the ‘great men’ of the period, in the sense of monarchs (which of course America did not have), nor on politicians (politics occupy chapters 15 and 16 out of a total of 20), nor on the vast mass of people and their lives (the Lynds’ Middletown is mentioned, but their statistical approach is eschewed entirely). Instead, Commager concentrated his fire on the great individuals who had shone during the period – in philosophy, religion, literature, history, law, and what he saw as the new sciences of economics and sociology.²⁰ Running through his entire argument, however, and clarifying his approach, was an account of how Darwin and the theory of evolution had affected American intellectual life. After the more literal applications of the late nineteenth century, as exercised through the influence of Herbert Spencer (and discussed in chapter 3 of this book), Commager thought Darwinism had been taken on board by the American mind in the form of a pragmatic individualism. Americans, he implied, accepted that society moved forward through the achievements of outstanding individuals, that recognition of these individuals and their achievements was the responsibility of historians such as himself, that it was the role of literature to make the case both for tradition and for change, to help the debate along, and that it was also the writer’s, or the academic’s, job to recognise that individualism had its pathological side, which had to be kept in check and recognised for what it was.²¹ He thought, for instance, that a number of writers (Jack London and Theodore Dreiser are discussed) took Darwinian determinism too far, and that the proliferation of religious sects in America was in some senses a pathological turning away from individualism (Reinhold Niebuhr was to make much the same point), as was the more general ‘cult of the irrational,’ which he saw as a revolt against scientific determinism. For him, the greatest success in America was the pragmatic evolution of the law, which recognised that society was not, and could not be, a static system but should change, and be made to change.²² In other words, whereas Eliot saw the scepticism of the higher cultural elite as the chief antidote to the would-be excesses of politicians, Commager thought that the American legal system was the most considerable achievement of a post-Darwinian pragmatic society.

These four views shared a belief in reason, in the idea of progress, and in the role of serious literature to help cultures explain themselves to themselves. They even agreed, broadly, on what serious literature – high culture – was.

Barely was the ink dry on the pages of these books, however, than they were challenged. Challenged is perhaps too weak a word, for the view they represented was in fact assaulted and attacked and bombarded from all sides at once. The attack came from anthropology, from history, and from other literatures; the bombardment was mounted by sociology, science, music, and television; the assault was launched even from inside Leavis’s own English department at Cambridge. The campaign is still going on and forms one of the main intellectual arteries of the last half of the twentieth century. It is one of the background factors that helps account for the rise of the individual. The initial and underlying motor for this change was powered by the advent of mass society, in particularly the psychological and sociological changes foreseen and described by David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Bell. But a motor provides energy, not direction. Although Riesman and the others helped to explain the way people were changing in general, as a result of mass society, specific direction for that change still had to be provided. The rest of this chapter introduces the main figures responsible for change, beginning with the neatest example.

No one could have predicted that when he stood up to recite his poem Howl in San Francisco in October 1955, Allen Ginsberg would spark an entire alternative ‘Beat’ culture, but on a closer reading of the man himself, some signs were there. Ginsberg had studied English literature at Columbia University under Lionel Trilling, whose defence of American liberalism he had found both ‘inspiring and off-putting.’ And while he composed Howl, Ginsberg worked as a freelance market researcher – and therefore knew as well as anyone what conventional attitudes and behaviour patterns were. If he could be sure what the norm was, he knew how to be different.²³

Also, Ginsberg had for some time been moving in a world very different from Trilling’s. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a poet and teacher, in the 1940s he had met both William Burroughs Jr. and Jack Kerouac in a New York apartment where they were all ‘sitting out’ World War II.²⁴ Burroughs Jr, much older, came from a wealthy Protestant Saint Louis family and had studied literature at Harvard and medicine in Vienna before falling among thieves – literally – around Times Square in Midtown Manhattan and the bohemian community of Greenwich Village. These two aspects of Burroughs, educated snob and lowlife deviant, fascinated Ginsberg. Like the older man, Ginsberg suffered from the feeling that he was outside the main drift of American society, a feeling that was intensified when he studied under Triding.²⁵ Disliking the formalism of Trilling, Ginsberg was one of those who developed an alternative form of writing, the main characteristics of which were spontaneity and self-expression.²⁶ Ginsberg’s style verged on the primitive, and was aimed at subverting what he felt was an almost official culture based on middle-class notions of propriety and success, an aspect of society now more visible than ever thanks to the commercials on the new television. Still, the evening when Howl received its first performance was hardly propitious. When Ginsberg got to his feet in that upstairs room in San Francisco, about a hundred other people present could see that he was nervous and that he had drunk a good deal.²⁷ He had, according to one who was there, a ‘small, intense voice, but the alcohol and the emotional intensity of the poem quickly took over, and he was soon swaying to its powerful rhythm, chanting like a Jewish cantor, sustaining his long breath length, savouring the outrageous language.’²⁸ Among the others present was his old New York companion, Jean-Louis – Jack – Kerouac, who cheered at the end of each line, yelling ‘Go! Go!’ Soon others joined in. The chorus swelled as Ginsberg lathered himself into a trancelike state. The words Ginsberg opened with that night were to become famous, as did the occasion itself:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for ancient heavenly connection to the

starry dynamo in the machinery o f night

Kenneth Rexroth, a critic and key figure in what was to become known as the San Francisco poetry renaissance, said later that Howl made Ginsberg famous ‘from bridge to bridge,’ meaning from the Triboro in New York to the Golden Gate.²⁹ But this overlooks the real significance of Ginsberg’s poem. What mattered most was its form and the mode of delivery. Howl was primitive not just in its title and the metaphors it employed but in the fact that it referred back to ‘pre-modern oral traditions,’ in which performance counted as much as any specific meaning to the words. In doing this, Ginsberg was helping to ‘shift the meaning of culture from its civilising and rationalising connotations to the more communal notion of collective experience’.³⁰ This was a deliberate move by Ginsberg. From the first, he actively sought out the mass media – Time, Life, and other magazines – to promote his ideas, rather than the intellectual reviews; he was a market researcher, after all. He also popularised his work through the expanded paperback book trade – the publisher of Howl was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States.³¹ (In those days, paperbacks were still seen as an alternative, potentially radical form of information distribution.) And it was after Howl was picked up by the mass media that the Beat culture was transformed into an alternative way of life. The Beat culture would come to have three important ingredients: an alternative view of what culture was, an alternative view of experience (mediated through drugs), and its own frontier mentality, as epitomised by the road culture. Ironically, these were all intended to convey greater individualism and in that sense were slap in the middle of the American tradition. But the Beats saw themselves as radicals. The most evocative example of the road culture, and the other defining icon of the Beats, was Jack Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road.

Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, on 12 March 1922, did not have a background propitious for a writer. His parents were French-speaking immigrants from Quebec in Canada, so that English was not his first language. In 1939 he entered Columbia University, but on a football scholarship.³² It was his meeting with Ginsberg and Burroughs that made him want to be a writer, but even so he was thirty-five before his most famous book (his second) was published.³³ The reception of Kerouac’s book was partly helped by the fact that, two weeks before, Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems had been the subject of a celebrated obscenity trial in San Francisco that had not yet been decided (the judge eventually concluded that the poems had ‘redeeming social importance’). So ‘Beat’ was on everyone’s lips. Kerouac explained to countless interviewers who wanted to know what Beat meant that it was partly inspired by a Times Square hustler ‘to describe a state of exalted exhaustion’ and was partly linked in Kerouac’s mind to a Catholic beatific vision.³⁴ In the course of these interviews it was revealed that Kerouac had written the book in one frenzied three-week spell, using typing paper stuck together in a continuous ribbon so as to prevent the need to stop work in the middle of a thought. Though many critics found this technique absorbing, even charming, Truman Capote was moved to remark, ‘That isn’t writing; it’s typing.’³⁵

Like everything else Kerouac wrote, On the Road was strongly autobiographical. He liked to say he had spent seven years on the road, researching the book, moving with a vague restlessness from town to town and drug to drug in search of experience.³⁶ It also included the characters and experiences of his friends, especially Neal Cassady – called Dean Moriarty in the book – who wrote wild, exuberant letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg detailing his ‘sexual and chemical exploits.’³⁷ It was this sense of rootless, chaotic, yet essentially sympathetic energy of the ‘courage-teachers’ that Kerouac sought to re-create in his book, it being his deliberate aim to do for the 1950s what the F. Scott Fitzgerald novels had done for the 1920s and the Hemingway books for the 1930s and 1940s. (He was not keen on their writing styles but was anxious to emulate their experience as observers of a key sensibility.) In a flat, deliberately casual prose, the book did all the stock things people say about radical ventures – it challenged ‘the complacency of a prosperous America’ and brought out clearly, for example, the role of pop music (bebop and jazz) for the young.³⁸ But most of all it gave us the road book, which would lead to the road movie. ‘The road’ became the symbol of an alternative way of life, rootless but not aimless, mobile but with a sense of place, materially poor but generous and spiritually abundant, intellectually and morally adventurous rather than physically so. With Kerouac, travel became part of the new culture.³⁹

The Beat culture’s turning away from Trilling, Commager, and the others was every bit as deliberate as Eliot’s highbrow imagery in his poetry. The highly original use of a vernacular shared by the drug, biker, and Greyhound bus subculture, the ‘strategic avoidance’ of anything complex or difficult, and the transfer into an ‘alternative’ consciousness as mediated by chemicals were in all respects assiduously subversive.⁴⁰ But not all the alternatives to traditional high culture in the 1950s were as self-conscious. That certainly applied to one of the most powerful: pop music.

No matter how far back in time we can date popular music, its expression was always constrained by the technology available for its dissemination. In the days of sheet music, live bands, and dance halls, and then of radio, its impact was relatively limited. There was an elite, an in-group who decided what music was printed, which bands were invited to perform, either in the dance halls or on radio. It was only with the invention of the long-playing record, by the Columbia Record Company in 1948, and the first ‘single,’ introduced by RCA a year later, that the music world as we know it took off. After that, anyone with a gramophone in their home could play the music of their choice whenever they pleased. Listening to music was transformed. At the same time, the new generation of ‘other-directed’ youth arrived on the scene perfectly primed to take advantage of this new cultural form.

It is usually agreed that pop music emerged in 1954 or 1955 when black R & B (rhythm and blues) music broke out of its commercial ghetto (it was known before World War II as ‘race music’). Not only did black singers enjoy a success among white audiences, but many white musicians copied the black styles. Much has been written about the actual beginnings, but the one generally agreed upon has Leo Mintz, a Cleveland record store owner, approaching Alan Freed, a disc jockey at the WJW station in Cleveland, Ohio, and telling him that suddenly white teenagers were ‘eagerly buying up all the black R & B records they could get.’ Freed paid a visit to Mintz’s store and later described what he saw: ‘I heard the tenor saxophones of Red Prysock and Big Al Sears. I heard the blues-singing, piano-playing Ivory Joe Hunter. I wondered. I wondered for about a week. Then I went to the station manager and talked him into permitting me to follow my classical program with a rock ‘n’ roll party.’⁴¹ Freed always claimed that he invented the term rock ’n’ roll, though insiders say it was around in black music well before 1954, black slang for sexual intercourse.⁴² But whether he discovered R & B, or rock ‘n’ roll, Freed was certainly the first to push it on air; he shouted at the records, rather like Kerouac yelling ‘Go!’ at Ginsberg’s first performance of Howl.⁴³

Freed’s renaming of R & B was shrewd. Repackaged, it was no longer race music, and white stations could play it. Record companies soon caught on, one response being to issue white (and usually sanitised) versions of black songs. For instance, some regard ‘Sh-Boom,’ by the Chords, as the very first rock ‘n’ roll number.⁴⁴ No sooner had it hit the airwaves, however, than Mercury Records released the Crew Cuts’ sanitised ‘cover’ version, which entered the Top Ten in a week. Soon, white performers like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley were imitating black music and outdoing them in terms of commercial success.⁴⁵ Films like The Blackboard Jungle and TV programs like American Bandstand further popularised the music, which above all provided a cohesive and instantly recognisable force for teenagers everywhere.⁴⁶ For the sociologically minded, early pop/rock songs reflected Riesman’s theories very neatly – for example, Paul Anka’s ‘Lonely Boy’ (1959), the Videls’ ‘Mr Lonely’ (1960), Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’ (1960), and Brenda Lee’s ‘All Alone Am I’ (1962), although loneliness, one assumes, had existed before sociology. A crucial aspect of the rock business, incidentally, and often overlooked, was the hit chart. In the new transient conformist communities that W. H. Whyte had poked fun at, statistics were important, to show people what others were doing, and to allow them to do the same.⁴⁷ But the most significant thing about the advent of rock/pop was that it was yet another nail in the coffin of high culture. The words that went with the music – fashion, the ‘altered consciousness’ induced by drugs, love, and above all sex – became the anthems of the generation. The sounds of rock drowned out everything else, and the culture of young people would never be the same again.

It was no accident that pop developed as a result of the white middle classes adopting black music, or a version of it. As the 1950s wore on, black self-consciousness was rising. American blacks had fought in the war, shared the risks equally with whites. Quite naturally they wanted their fair share of the prosperity that followed, and as it became clear in the 1950s that that wasn’t happening, especially in the South, where segregation was still humiliatingly obvious, the black temper began to simmer. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on 17 May 1954 that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, thereby repudiating the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that had prevailed until then, it was only a matter of time (in fact, eighteen months) until Rosa Parks, a black American, was arrested for sitting at the front of the bus in a section reserved for whites, in Montgomery, Alabama. The civil rights movement, which was to tear America apart, may be said to have begun that day. Internationally, there were parallel developments, as former colonies that had also fought in World War II negotiated their independence and with it a rising self-consciousness. (India achieved independence in 1947, Libya in 1951, Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960.) The result was that black writing flourished in the 1950s.

In the United States we have already seen what the Harlem Renaissance had accomplished in the 1920s. The career of Richard Wright spanned the war, his two most important books appearing at either end of the conflict, Native Son in 1940, and Black Boy in 1945. Beautifully written, Wright’s books agonisingly describe what was then a slowly changing world. A protégé of Wright’s found this even harder to take.

Ralph Ellison had wanted to be a musician since he was eight years old, when his mother had bought him a cornet. But he ‘blundered into writing’ after attending Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in 1933 and discovering in the library there T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land.⁴⁸ Inspired jointly by his friendship with Wright and by Hemingway’s reports from the Spanish Civil War in the New York Times, Edison eventually produced Invisible Man in 1952. In this large book, the hero (unnamed) passes through all the stages of modern American black history: ‘a Deep South childhood; a Negro college supported by northern philanthropy; factory work in the North; exposure to the frenzy of sophisticated Negro city life in Harlem; a “back-to-Africa” movement; a Communist-type outfit known as “The Brotherhood”; and even a “hipster” episode.’⁴⁹ Yet each of these regurgitates him: the invisible man fits in nowhere. Edison, despite his earlier criticism of Gunnar Myrdal, had little positive to offer beyond this bleak criticism of all the possibilities that face the black man. And he himself fed strangely silent after this novel, becoming not a little invisible himself. It was left to the third of the American Negro writers to ready get under the skin of the whites, and he only did it when he was thrown by force of circumstance into the fire.

Born in 1924, one of ten children, James Arthur Jones grew up in crushing poverty and never knew his father. He took his stepfather’s name when his mother married David Baldwin some years later. That stepfather was a preacher of ‘incendiary’ sermons, with an ‘ingrained’ hatred of whites, so that by the time he was fourteen James Baldwin had acquired both characteristics.⁵⁰ But his preaching and his moralising had revealed him to have a talent for writing, and he had been introduced to the New Leader (where C. Wright Mills got his break) by Philip Rahv. Because he was homosexual as well as black, Baldwin took a leaf out of Richard Wright’s book and became an exile in Paris, where he wrote his first works. These were firmly in the tradition of American pragmatic realism, influenced by Henry James and John Dos Passos. Baldwin defined his role then as being ‘white America’s inside-eye on the closed families and locked churches of Harlem, the discreet observer of homosexual scenes in Paris, above all the sensitive recorder of the human heart in conflict with itself.’⁵¹ He made a name for himself with Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni’s Room (1956), but it was with the emergence of the civil rights movement in the later 1950s that his life took on new and more urgent dimensions. Returning to the United States from France in July 1957, in September he was commissioned by Harper’s magazine to cover the struggle for integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. On 5 September that year, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had attempted to prevent the admission of black pupils to a school in Little Rock, whereupon President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce integration and protect the children.

The experience changed Baldwin: ‘From being a black writer carving out a career in a white world, Baldwin was becoming black.’⁵² No longer a mere observer, he conquered his fear of the South (as he himself put it) in the pages of Harper’s, his anger and his honesty laid bare for the white readers to accept or reject. The message he conveyed, in painful, raw language, was this: ‘They [the students in the sit-ins and freedom marches] are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them.’⁵³ Two of Baldwin’s essays were reprinted as a book, The Fire Next Time, which attracted a great deal of attention as he eloquently discovered a language for the Negro experience and explained to whites the virulent anger inside blacks. ‘For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language…. I realised what tremendous things were happening and that I did have a role to play. I can’t be happy here, but I can work here.’⁵⁴ The anger of the blacks was out of the bag and could never be put back.

Elsewhere, black writing was also making advances, though in Britain the novels of Colin Maclnnes (Absolute Beginners, 1959, and Mr Love and Mr Justice, 1960) were more astute observations on the way of life of West Indians in London, who had been arriving since 1948 to work in the capital’s transport system, than arguments with any direct social or political point.⁵⁵ In France, the concept of négritude had been coined before World War II but had only entered general usage since 1945. Its main theme was a glorification of the African past, often stressing black emotion and intuition as opposed to Hellenic reason and logic. Its main exponents were Léopold Senghor, president of Senegal, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria, is considered in chapter 30 (page 526). Négritude was a somewhat precious word that made the process it described sound safer than it did in the hands of, say, Baldwin or Edison. But its central message, like theirs, was that black culture, black life, was every bit as rich, as meaningful, and yes, as satisfying as any other, that art that was original, moving, and worth sharing, could be made out of the black experience.

In fact, négritude was a European label for something that was happening in francophone Africa.⁵⁶ And what was happening was much tougher and more profound than the word made it appear. This process – decolonisation – was an inevitable by-product of World War II. Not only were the colonial powers now too enfeebled to maintain their hold on their possessions, having relied on colonial manpower to help them fight their wars, they were under strong moral pressure to relinquish their political hold. These developments were naturally accompanied by parallel intellectual changes.

The first modern realistic novel to be published in West Africa was Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), although it was the publication in 1951 of Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard that made the Western metropolitan countries aware of the new literary developments occurring in Africa.⁵⁷ Above ad, however, Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, was the archetypal African novel. It described a situation – the falling apart of a traditional African society as a result of the arrival of the white man – in vivid terms that contained beautiful English. It was recognisably sophisticated yet set in an unmistakable non-Western landscape – non-Western emotionally and non-Western geographically. And it was all woven into a superb tragedy.⁵⁸

Achebe’s mother tongue was Ibo, but he learned English as a boy and in 1953 became one of the first students to graduate, in English literature, from University College, Ibadan. Besides Achebe’s profound sympathy for the imperfections of his characters, the beauty of his approach is his realisation – revealed in his title – that all societies, all civilisations, contain the seeds of their destruction, so that the arrival of the white man in his story is not so much the cause as the catalyst to speed along what was happening anyway. Okonkwo, the hero of the novel, a member of the Igbo culture, is a respected elder of his vidage, a macho man, a successful farmer and wrestler, but at odds with his son, a far gentler soul.⁵⁹ The reader is drawn into the rhythms of the vidage, Umofia, so successfully that even the Western reader accepts that the ‘barbaric’ customs of the society have good reason. Indeed, we are given a crystal-clear picture of a society that is stable, rich, ‘complex, and fundamentally humane’ – that is thought out. When Okonkwo breaks the rules of the vidage, we accept that this must mean seven years in exile. When the hostage he has raised in his family – whose existence and love for Okonkwo we have come to accept – is murdered, and when Okonkwo himself delivers one of the blows, we accept even this, in itself a remarkable achievement of Achebe’s. And when the white man arrives, we too are as baffled by his behaviour as are the villagers of Umofia. But Achebe, much as he loathed colonialism, was not intent on merely white-man-bashing. He drew attention to the shortcomings of Umofia society – its stasis, its inability to change, the ways in which its own outcasts or misfits might well be drawn to Christianity (Okonkwo is himself unchanged, which is part of his tragedy). Things Fall Apart is a profoundly affecting work, beautifully constructed.⁶⁰ In Onkokwo and Umofia, Achebe created a character and a society of universal significance.

A second Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, a poet and playwright, published his first work, The Lion and the Jewel, a year after Achebe’s, in 1958. This was a play in verse, a comedy, also set in an African village, which enjoyed a great success. Soyinka was a more ‘anthropological’ writer than Achebe, using Yoruba myths to great effect (he even made an academic study of them). Anthropology was itself one of several academic disciplines that helped reshape what was regarded as ‘culture,’ and here Claude Lévi-Strauss was the most influential figure, with two works published in 1955. Born in Belgium in 1908, Lévi-Strauss grew up near Versailles and became a student at the University of Paris. After graduating, he did fieldwork in Brazil while he was professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo. Further fieldwork followed, in Cuba, but Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 for military service. In 1941 he arrived as a refugee at the New School for Social Research in New York, and after the war he was French cultural attaché to the United States. Eventually, he would be appointed to the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, in 1959, but by then he had begun his remarkable series of publications. These fell into three kinds. There were his studies in kinship, examining the way familial relationships were understood among many different (but mainly Amerindian) tribes; there were his studies of mythologies, exploring what they reveal about the way people very different on the surface think about things; and third, there was a sort of autobiographical/philosophical/travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955.⁶¹

Lévi-Strauss’s theories were very complex and not helped by his own style, which was far from easy and on more than one occasion defeated his translators. He is, therefore, an author very difficult to do justice to in a book of this kind. Nevertheless we may say that, his studies of kinship apart, Lévi-Strauss’s work has two main elements. In his paper ‘The Structural Study of Myth,’ published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1955, the same year as Tristes Tropiques appeared, and later developed in his four-volume Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss examined hundreds of myths around the world. Though trained in anthropology, he came to this work, he said, with ‘three mistresses’ – geology, Marx, and Freud.⁶² The Freudian element in his work is much more obvious than the Marxian, or the geology, but what he appears to have meant is that, like Marx and Freud, he was seeking to find the universal structures that underlie human experience; like the historians of the Annales school (chapter 31), he saw the broad sweeps of history as more important than more proximate events.⁶³

All mythologies, Lévi-Strauss said, share a universal, inbuilt logic. Any corpus of mythological tales, he observed, contains a recurrent harping on elementary themes – incest, fratricide, patricide, cannibalism. Myth was ‘a kind of collective dream,’ an ‘instrument of darkness’ capable of being decoded.⁶⁴ In all, in what became four volumes, he examined 813 different stories with an extraordinary ingenuity that many, especially his Anglo-Saxon critics such as Edmund Leach, have refused to accept. He observes for instance that across the world, where figures from myth are born of the earth rather than from woman, they are given either very unusual names or some deformity such as a clubfoot to signify the fact.⁶⁵ At other times myths concern themselves with ‘overrated’ kin relationships (incest) or ‘underrated’ relationships (fratricide/parricide). Other myths concern themselves with the preparation of food (cooked/raw), whether there is sound or silence, whether people are dressed or undressed. It was Lévi-Strauss’s claim, essentially, that if myth could be understood, it would explain how early man first came to decipher the world and would therefore represent the fundamental, unconscious structure of the mind. His approach, which came as a revelation for many people, also had one important secondary effect. He himself said explicitly that on the basis of his inquiries, there is really no difference between the ‘primitive’ mind and the ‘developed’ mind, that so-called savages are just as sophisticated in their storytelling, just as removed from the truly primitive, as we are ourselves.⁶⁶

Earlier in the century, as we have seen, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict’s work had been important in showing how different peoples around the world differ in various aspects of their behaviour (such as sex).⁶⁷ Conversely, the thrust of Lévi-Strauss’s work was to show how, at root, myths reveal the essential similarity, the basic concordance, of human nature and beliefs right across the globe. This was an immensely influential view in the second half of the twentieth century, not only helping to undermine the validity of evolved high culture put forward by Eliot, Trilling, et alia, but promoting the idea of ‘local knowledge,’ the notion that cultural expression is valid even though it applies only to specific locations, whose reading of that expression may be much more diverse and complex – richer – than is evident to outsiders. In this, Lévi-Strauss and Chinua Achebe were saying the same thing.

This development in anthropology was aided by a parallel change in its sister discipline, archaeology. In 1959 Basil Davidson published Old Africa Rediscovered, a detailed account of the ‘Dark Continent’s’ distant past. A later year, Oxford University Press released its magisterial History of African Music. Both these works will be properly considered in chapter 31, where we examine new concepts in historical thinking.⁶⁸ But they belong here too, for running through the work of Ellison, Baldwin, Maclnnes, Achebe, Lévi-Strauss, and Basil Davidson was the experience of being black in a non-black world. Responses differed, but what they shared was a growing awareness that the art, history, language, and very experience of being black had been deliberately devalued, or rendered invisible, in the past. That history, that language, that experience, needed to be urgently reclaimed, and given a shape and a voice. It was a different alternative culture to that of the Beats, but it was no less rich, varied, or valid. Here was a common pursuit that had its own great tradition.

Britain in the 1950s did not yet have a large black population. Black immigrants had been arriving since 1948, their lives chronicled now and then by writers such as Colin Maclnnes, as was referred to above. The first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting admission from the ‘New’ Commonwealth (i.e., predominantly black countries), was not passed until 1961. Until that point, then, there was little threat to the traditional British culture from race. Instead, the ‘alternative’ found its strength in an equivalent social divide that for many created almost as much passion: class.

In 1955 a small coterie of like-minded serious souls got behind an idea to establish a theatre in London that would endeavour to do something new: find fresh plays from completely new sources, in an effort to revitalise contemporary drama and search out a new audience. They named the venture the English Stage Company and bought the lease of a small theatre known as the Royal Court in Sloane Square in Chelsea. The theatre turned out to be ideal. Set in the heart of bourgeois London, its program was revolutionary.⁶⁹ The first artistic director was George Devine who had trained in Oxford and in France, and he brought in as his deputy Tony Richardson, twenty-seven, who had been working for the BBC. Devine had experience, Richardson had the flair. In fact, says Oliver Neville in his account of the early days of the ESC, it was the solid Devine who spotted the first piece of flair. While launching the company, he had paid for an all in The Stage, the theatrical weekly, soliciting new plays on contemporary themes, and among the seven hundred manuscripts that arrived ‘almost by return of post’ was one by a playright named John Osborne, which was called Look Back in Anger.⁷⁰ Devine was much taken by the ‘abrasive’ language that he grasped instinctively would play well on stage. He discovered that the writer was an out-of-work actor, a man who was in many ways typical of a certain post-war figure in Britain. The 1944 Education Act (brought in as a result of the Beveridge Report) had raised the school-leaving age and initiated the modern system of primary, secondary and tertiary schools; it had also provided funds to help lower-class students attend acting schools. But in drab post-war England, there were now more students than jobs. Osborne was one of these over-trained types and so was Jimmy Porter, the ‘hero’ of his play.⁷¹

‘Hero’ deserves inverted commas because it was one of the hallmarks of Look Back in Anger that its lower-middle-class protagonist, while attacking everything around him, also attacked himself. Jimmy Porter is, in this sense, a direct cousin of Okonkwo, ‘driven by [a] furious energy directed towards a void.’⁷² The structure of Look Back in Anger has been frequently criticised as falling apart at the end, where Jimmy and his middle-class wife retreated into their private fantasy world of cuddly toys.⁷³ Despite this, the play was a great success and marked the beginning of a time when, as one critic put it, plays ‘would no longer be concerned with middle class heroes, or set in country houses.’⁷⁴ Its title helped give rise to the phrase ‘angry young men,’ which, together with ‘Kitchen Sink Drama,’ described a number of plays and novels that, in the mid-to late-1920s in Great Britain, drew attention to the experiences of working-class men (they were usually men).⁷⁵ So it is in this sense that the trend typified by Osborne fits in with the rest of the reconceptualisation of culture, with which we are concerned. In reality, in Osborne’s play, just as in Bernard Kops’s Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957), John Arden’s Waters of Babylon (1957) and Live Like Pigs (1958), Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1958) and Roots (1959), together with a raft of novels – John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1958), and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) – the main characters were working-class ‘heroes,’ or antiheroes as they came to be called. These antiheroes are all aggressive, all escaping from their lower-class backgrounds because of their educational or other skills, but unsure where they are headed. Although each of these authors could see the shortcomings of lower-class society, no less than other kinds, their work lent a legitimacy to lower-class experience and provided another alternative to traditional cultural forms. In Eliot’s terms, these works were profoundly sceptical.

A somewhat similar change was overtaking poetry. On 1 October 1954 an anonymous article appeared in the Spectator entitled ‘In the Movement.’ This, actually the work of the magazine’s literary editor, J. D. Scott, identified a new grouping in British literature, a covey of novelists and poets who ‘admired Leavis, Empson, Orwell and Graves,’ were ‘bored by the despair of the forties … extremely impatient of poetic sensibility … and … sceptical, robust, ironic.’⁷⁶ The Spectator article identified five authors, but after D.J. Enright had published Poets of the 1950s in 1955, and Robert Conquest’s New Lines had appeared a year later, nine poets and novelists came to be regarded as comprising what was by then known as the Movement: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, Enright himself, Thom Gunn, Christopher Holloway, Elisabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. One anthologist, perhaps going a shade over the top, described the Movement as ‘the greatest rupture in cultural tradition since the eighteenth century.’ Its core texts included Wain’s novel, Hurry On Down (1953), and Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and its prevailing tone was ‘middlebrow scepticism’ and ‘ironical commonsense.’⁷⁷

The most typical poet of the Movement, the man who characterised its approach to life and literature most cleanly, was Larkin (1922–85). He grew up in Coventry, not too far from Auden’s Birmingham, and after Oxford began a career as a university librarian (Leicester, 1946–50; Belfast, 1950–55; Hull, 1955–85) mainly because, as it seems, he needed a regular job. He wrote two early novels, but it was as a poet that he became famous. Larkin liked to say that poetry chose him, rather than the other way around. His poetic voice, as revealed in his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, which appeared in 1955, was ‘sceptical, plain-speaking, unshowy,’ and above all modest, fortified by common sense. It wasn’t angry, like Osborne’s plays, but Larkin’s rejection of old literature, of tradition, lofty ideas, psychoanalysis – the ‘common mythkitty’ as he put it – do echo the down-to-earth qualities of ‘kitchen-sink’ drama, even if the volume control is turned down.⁷⁸ One of his most famous poems was ‘Church Going,’ with the lines

I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence

which immediately convey Larkin’s ‘intimate sincerity,’ not to mention a certain comic awareness. For Larkin, man ‘has a hunger for meaning but for the most part is not quite sure he is up to the task; the world exists without question – there’s nothing philosophical about it; what’s philosophical is that man can’t do anything about that fact – he is a “helpless bystander”; his feelings have no meaning and therefore no place. Why therefore do we have them? That is the struggle.’ He observes

the hail

Of occurrence clobber life out

To a shape no one sees

Larkin verges on the sentimental purposely, in order to draw attention to the very shortcomings of sentimentality, only too aware that that is all many people have. His is a world of disenchantment and defeat (‘two can live as stupidly as one’ is his verdict on marriage), a ‘passive realism whose diminished aim in life is not to feel grand passion but to prevent himself from ever hurting.’ It is the message of someone who is aware of just enough science for it to pain and depress him, but who sees through existentialism, and all the other ‘big’ words, come to that. This is why Larkin’s stature has grown; his view may not be heroic, but it is perfectly tenable. As Blake Morrison has pointed out, Larkin was regarded as a minor poet for decades, but at the end of the century, ‘Larkin now seems to dominate the history of English poetry in the second half of the century much as Eliot dominated the first.’⁷⁹

Overlapping with the angry young men, and the Movement, or at least with the world they attempted to describe, was Richard Hoggart’s highly original Uses of Literacy. Published a year after Look Back in Anger was first staged, in 1957, Hoggart was, with Raymond Williams, Stuart Had, and E. P. Thompson, one of the founders of the school of thought (and now academic discipline) known as cultural studies. Born in Leeds in 1918 and educated at the university there, Hoggart saw action in World War II in North Africa and Italy. Military experience had a marked experience on him, as it did on Williams. After the war Hoggart worked alongside Larkin, in his case as a tutor in literature in the Department of Adult Education at the University of Hull, and while there published his first full-length critical work, Auden. But it was in The Uses of Literacy that all his experience, his working-class background, his army life, his teaching in the adult education department of a provincial university, came together. It was as if he had found a vocabulary for a side of life that, hitherto, had lacked one.⁸⁰

Hoggart was trained in the traditional methods of practical literary criticism as devised by I. A. Richards (see chapter 18), and the ‘Great Tradition’ of F. R. Leavis, but his actual experience led him in a very different direction. He moved against Leavis rather as Ginsberg had moved against Lionel Triding.⁸¹ Instead of Following in the Cambridge tradition, he brought Richards’s methods to bear on the culture he himself knew – from the singing in working men’s clubs to weekly family magazines, from commercial popular songs to the films that ordinary people flocked to time and again. Like an anthropologist he described and analysed the customs he had grown up not even questioning, such as washing the car on a Sunday morning, or scrubbing the front step. His book did two things. It first described in detail the working-class culture, in particular its language – in the books, magazines, songs, and games it employed. In doing so, it showed, second, how rich this culture was, how much more there was to it than its critics alleged. Like Osborne, Hoggart wasn’t blind to its shortcomings, or to the fact that, overall, British society deprived people born into the working class of the chance to escape it. But Hoggart’s aim was more description and analysis than any nakedly political intent. Many responded to Hoggart and Osborne alike. A legitimacy, a voice, was suddenly given to an aspect of affairs that hitherto had been overlooked. Here was another fine tradition.⁸²

Hoggart led naturally to Raymond Williams. Like Hoggart, Williams had served in the war, though most of his life had been spent in the English Department at Cambridge, where he could not help but be aware of Leavis. Williams was more of a theoretician than Hoggart and a less compelling observer, but he was equally convincing in argument. In a series of books, beginning with Culture and Society in 1958, Williams made plain and put into context what had been implicit in the narrow scope of Hoggart’s work.⁸³ This was in effect a new aesthetic. Williams’s basic idea was that a work of art – a painting, a novel, a poem, a film – does not exist without a context. Even a work with wide applicability, ‘a universal icon,’ has an intellectual, social, and above all a political background. This was Williams’s main argument, that the imagination cannot avoid a relation with power, that the form art takes and our attitudes toward it are themselves a form of politics. Not necessarily party politics but the acknowledgement of this relationship – culture and power – is the ultimate form of self-awareness. In Culture and Society, having first considered Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, all as authors who consider ‘culture’ as having different levels and where only an educated minority can really benefit from and contribute toward the highest level, Williams proceeds to a chapter headed ‘Marxism and Culture.’ In Marxist theory, Williams reminds us, the determining fact of life is the means of production and distribution, and so the progress of culture, like everything else, is dependent upon the material conditions for the production of that culture. Culture therefore cannot help but reflect the social makeup of society, and on such an analysis it is only natural that those at the top should not want change. On this view, then, Eliot and Leavis are merely reflecting the social circumstances of their time, and in so doing are exhibiting a conspicuous lack of self-awareness.⁸⁴

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.