Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
Who Murdered Lady Ashbrooke?
By Russell Davies
A Coat of Varnish
by C.P. Snow
Scribner's, 328 pp., $10.95
If honors, age, and output added up to reputation, Lord Snow ought by now to be the Grand Old Man of the British novel. But he is not—not in Britain anyway. The old 'Two Cultures' feud with F.R. Leavis—over Snow's proposition that the gulf between scientists and nonscientists threatened to be unbridgeable—seemed to do Snow little professional harm at first, but it has had some destructive effects in later years. For one thing, Leavis was abominably rude to Snow, who accepted this with a kind of stolid disgust ('A few, a very few, of the criticisms have been loaded with personal abuse to an abnormal extent…'); and the result has been that ever since, many British critics and less-than-critics have been able to disparage Snow freely, happy in the knowledge that he has suffered worse. ('He is,' said Leavis, 'intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.')
Review, 2576 words
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