Sunny Snow

Sir Charles Percy Snow is a novelist of one-upmanship in British science and politics. But seldom has Snow's fiction matched his life in the past year or so. His novel, The Affair, became a London stage hit that is Broadway bound; his Harvard lectures, "Science and Government," roused a storm that roiled the Establishment. Last month Critic F. R. Leavis subjected him to a savage literary mugging, and soon after, Snow suffered a detached retina that may cost the sight of his left eye. But last week Sir Charles ignored all trials for a new triumph: his installation as 30th Lord Rector of Scotland's ancient (1411) St. Andrews University. Snow postponed an eye operation for the ceremony. "I can't let the lads down," he said. "The eye was never much good anyway."

The attack by Cambridge Don Leavis has been topic A in London literary circles for weeks. According to Leavis, former Cambridge Don (1930-50) Snow's famed thesis on the misunderstanding between the "two cultures," science and humanities, "exhibits an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style." Leavis labeled Snow as not only "portentously ignorant," but also as a non-novelist who "can't be said to know what a novel is." And worse, Snow is a middlebrow promoter of science who "has become for a vast public on both sides of the Atlantic a mastermind and a sage."

Refusing to answer, Snow found plenty of defenders. Author William Gerhardi called Leavis "the Himmler of Literature," Dame Edith Sitwell suggested that Leavis was jealous of Snow's fame, and Lord Boothby (former rector of St. Andrews) wrote in the Spectator: "There are plenty of beetles in Cambridge. But, without doubt, Dr. Leavis has now qualified for the post of Chief Beetle." Yet, although one critic called Snow's novels "intellectual soap opera," few discussed Leavis' basic concern, the tendency of technology to suffocate humanities.

No one was less bothered by the Leavis barrage than the 2,000 scarlet-robed students of St. Andrews, who have the unusual tradition of electing someone likable and lustrous to represent them on the university's governing council. Hard by the renowned golf course, St. Andrews is known for its equitable violence of yore. Protestant Reformer George Wishart was burned there in 1546, and two months later his nemesis, David Cardinal Beaton, was hanged from the local castle window.

These days, the students simply haul the new rector about the cobbled streets in a handcar, subjecting him to indignities on the way. But last week they relented for ailing Rector Snow, and he responded with an address that might have been aimed at Critic Leavis had not Snow announced its theme months ago. The title: "On Magnanimity." His main theme was that the more advanced nations of the world should show greater understanding and generosity toward the poor countries. But he turned a sharp point toward individual magnanimity, deplored "a very ugly streak of malice" in Britain, and quoted one of his own characters: "I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along."

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