Snow had no trouble extrapolating from this small but clearly objective sample (under the assumption of perfect mixing) to an entire civilization bounded from below by the brothels of the West End of London, and from above by the officialdom of 10 Downing Street.
It is unlikely that anyone would have paid much attention to his essays were it not that, shortly afterwards, F. R. Leavis, another academic wig, relieved himself of much effulgent blast om the subject of Snow's hypothesis, (at some other High Table somewhere else in the same system) . It appears that Leavis' scholastic assault was directed not so much towards Snow's ideas, as to his personal failings. Snow had little difficulty in defending himself, merely pointing out that the only recourse for someone subject to an attack of this sort is in silence.
However, it occurred to me that Snow's Two Cultures hypothesis might help me to understand my otherwise incomprehensible behavior as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, (and displaced person in a number of other academic institutions). My personalized version of the dilemma is the following: Why, starting in about 1962, did this author end up spending most of his free hours on the Penn campus hanging out in its Music Department, musical performance being the slenderest of his various talents, while assiduously avoiding the English and Mathematics Departments, the normal incubators for what have proven to be his strongest abilities?
An interpretation in the light of Snow's Two Cultures Dilemma has been of great help to me in understanding this situation. Simply stated :
(1) University English departments hate writers.
(2) University Mathematics departments are filled with lunatics.
These observations are, once again, limited to what one might call "university culture", although I have the strong feeling that they can be extended far beyond the range of a questionnaire addressed to the Cambridge U. High Table. From what I can see, the two cultures divide stems from the particular vices inherent in each of these cultures. Their positive accomplishments place no obstacles in the way of communication between them.
Obviously I don't think that all English scholars are writer-haters. Some very good writers have held down university positions for longer or shorter periods. Looking in the mirror leads me to conclude that not all mathematicians are crazy. Some of my sanest friends are mathematicians!
Taking each of these statements in turn: the strongest evidence for a pervasive tendency in English departments to regard "creative" writers with hostility, wouldn't come from me. I'm an outsider accustomed to rebuffs from their inner circles. The best evidence comes from the academically embedded writers themselves. Suggest to any decent writer in some academic English department, that it is safe for him to speak frankly about his relations to his colleagues. You should expect to be stunned by a long diatribe, beginning with the monoxic, well-nigh impenetrable chill that descends on the corridors of his workplace as he makes his daily entrances and exits. I know of instances in which he or she is snubbed entirely, rarely invited to social events, unlikely ever to have anyone from the same apartment stopping by for a visit. Evidence that the animosity goes both ways can be found in the numerous savage fictional accounts of university life, by authors who've done their teaching stint then moved on: Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, John Barth's End of the Road , among others . Let me add to this list my own novel Getting That Meal Ticket, which can be read on Ferment Magazine at Getting That Meal Ticket.
The other side of the coin, (actually the same phenomenon in a different guise) may be seen in the unctuous hero-worship awaiting the "distinguished writer" invited by the English Department to lecture, give readings, or have his toes licked. A classic of this phenomenon can be read at
Jorge Luis Borges at MIT
It took me a few years at Penn to recognize that students who were serious about the practice of letters as an art form (akin to music, painting, or dance) were, if not exactly rejected, coolly received in a university English department. (I was never able to pay a visit to Black Mountain College where, I gather, there was a total inversion of the customary inverse snobbery.) Either one was expected to prepare for a career (i.e. make money), or sublimate one's infantile yearnings into the serious business of scholarship, or go into teaching. All of the really serious young poets and writers that I knew at Penn in those years, found that they had to avoid the English department in order to get their work done. That's what happened to me: around 1958 I simply went into the smoking area of the Furness Library, and WROTE for 4 to 6 hours a day! That's the only way to do it. (This in no way intends to denigrate the value of many warm and sympathetic conversations with Morse Peckham, Arthur Scouten, Jerre Mangione, MacEdward Leach ...)
Turning to Mathematics: Most people on a university campus try to avoid spending more time than they have to in its Math department. It's not only that non-mathematicians run out of things to say because they haven't got the vocabulary, it's that - well, the atmosphere is decidedly weird.You can engage in conversation for some time with a friendly individual in the department lounge, before you suddenly realize that the two of you haven't at any point been on the same wavelength. Suspicion, fear and indifference towards the outside world combine strangely with an intense and lurid curiosity towards questions that one can't imagine any sensible person worrying about, an obsessive activity that can go on for hours, days, months, years! Granted that what is one man's obsession may be another man's passion -that's what sex is all about - but there is a certain free-floating mentality deriving from the notion that misunderstandings are almost always the fault of the listener, (who, perhaps, simply doesn't have enough gray matter between his ears to follow the arguments....)
They are lonely up there, and I was always more than welcome at Penn Mathematics, provided only that I was willing to vegetate within the prevailing ambience. I must hasten to qualify my remarks by explaining that the many symptoms and syndromes of borderline behavior one is likely to encounter in a Mathematics department are almost always of a gentle, harmless or comical nature. One finds little in the way of real malevolence in the normal attitudes of working mathematicians. There will always be the violent sorts, a Streletski, a Kaczynski, Wolfowitz or Chalabi; the suicidal Turing or Ramanujan; the deeply alienated Godel or Grothendieck. John Nash was not a particularly nice person, though I don't imagine him throwing bombs or clubbing his thesis advisor to death.
It is not so much in the behavior of individuals (which has a wide standard deviation) as in the presence of a malaise that clings like wet moss to the walls of so many mathematics departments, rendering them strangely intractable to normal human communication.It should be clear by now that the customary vices of English departments, pretention, fatuousness , "hermeneutic" dogmatism, fear of innovation, defensiveness, are not going to schmooz well with the customary vices of Mathematics departments, introversion, arrogance, over-specialization, a well-nigh compulsive eccentricity that , in the worse cases, can and does spill over into dangerous forms of rambunctious sociopathy, even murder.
In the long run it was easier for me simply to hang out in the department of a discipline , Music, in which I had but few if any credentials, only a certain aptitude, for a period of about 3 years, from 1962 to 1964. Over the years I have even managed to make some small contribution to my "default" vocation, in the form of compositions, performance, theoretical studies, criticism and history.
Evidence for the claims of this editorial may be found in many places among the files on Ferment Magazine. (Another view of the Two Cultures Dilemma can be perused at: The Delusion of I.Y. Snew)