THE TWO CULTURES SIR,—I did not wish to continue the
correspondence about Dr. Leavis and C. P. Snow. But I cannot take Mr. Remington Rose's insolent assertion that my 'fastidious self-assurance' is based on ignorance of the critical and academic reputations of Eliot and Lawrence, as well as of Dr. Leavis's article on Keynes, Lawrence and Cambridge. As he is an American, he probably doesn't know very much about it all.
I knew Lawrence. He hated Cambridge, and everyone in it; and, given his temperament and character, I do not blame him. On, April 19, 1915, he wrote to David Garnett: 'Never bring Birrell to see me any more. . . . He is horrible and unclean. I feel 1 should go mad when I think of your set, Duncan Grant and Keynes and Birrell. It makes me dream of beetles. In Cam- bridge I had a similar dream. I had felt it slightly before in the Stracheys. But it came full upon me in Keynes and in Duncan Grant. And yesterday I knew it again. . . . You must leave these friends, these beetles; Birrell and Duncan Grant are "done forever." Keynes I am not sure [Lawrence knew nothing about economics]; but when I saw him that morning in Cambridge it was one of the crises of my life. It sent me mad with misery and hostility and rage.
Keynes himself subsequently wrote—in Septem- ber, 1938:
'I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skim- ming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath. And if I imagine us as coming under the observation of Lawrence's ignorant, jealous, irritable, hostile eyes, what a com- bination of qualities we offered to arouse his pas- sionate distaste; this thin rationalism skipping on the crust of lava, ignoring both the reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined to libertin- ism and comprehensive irreverence; too clever by half. . . . All this was very' unfair to poor, silly, well-meaning us. But that is why I say that there may have been just a grain of truth when Lawrence said, in 1914, that we were "done for."'
There arc plenty of beetles in Cambridge today. But, without doubt, Dr. Leavis has now qualified for the post of Chief Beetle.
BOOTHBY House of Lords, SW 1
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