Period Piece

In many ways, he seemed hardly the man for the job. He was a frail, redheaded Cornishman, known to most Britons simply as "Q." He wrote swashbuckling romances like Dead Man's Rock and The Astonishing History of Troy Town, so cock-a-hoop with adventure that he himself was "amazed ... at my own immoderation." He had been a dandy at Oxford, with a taste for bowler hats of different colors and loud checked suits ("What, another pair of trarsers!" Trinity's president would cry). He was also something of a radical who had denounced the Boer War.

In spite of all this, in 1912 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (pronounced Cootch, "not like a sofa") was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. "I'm in a hideous funk about it," he wrote to a friend. But the funk didn't last long, and in time Q became one of the most popular lecturers the university had. When he died four years ago at 81, he was still lecturing. Last week, in a short, intimate biography (Arthur Quiller-Couch; Macmillan, $3.50), his friend Fred Brittain, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, tried to tell what Q was like.

Queues & Q. Cantabrigians knew him as a stooped and chivalrous gentleman, who walked with mincing little steps, and never appeared on the lecture platform except in morning coat and striped trousers. He always claimed to hate lecturing ("Why do we do it? Why do we do it?") But scarcely had a term begun than students were scrambling for seats in his classroom. "Go down to Q in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time," an undergraduate journal once advised. And when, during World War I, he took over a local pulpit for a few Sundays, his church was so crowded that the Cambridge Review commented:

Ah me! what Habit makes poor women

do--

Queue every weekday, and on Sunday Q.

For students, there would be easy talk, and plenty of wine, after dinner in Q's "Q-bicle." Q scorned teetotalers (he once got through a church luncheon by spiking his lemonade with gin). Later, in his rooms, the talk would last into the night, though Q himself might begin to undress, popping in & out of his bedroom, now shoeless, now trouserless, until he was orating in his underwear.

Beaten to a Rag. At the end of each year, Q would give one final party. A whole crowd of students and fellows would escort him to the station, and there, with great ceremony, bid him goodbye. Then, "beaten to a rag with this term's work," Q would set out for Cornwall--to a plain house, "indeed, very much like a house a child draws on a slate." There he would write his essays, or work on the new edition of the famed Oxford Book of English Verse, or supervise regattas in the uniform of a yacht club commodore, or simply play the country squire.

"I am," Q once admitted, "a period piece." He would never buy a car, had a neurotic fear of cities, disliked much modern poetry ("Has T. S. Eliot ever written three consecutive lines of poetry in his life?"). His own affection lay in the past --the whole past of English literature and all the men & women who had made it. "Literature is, I repeat, memorable speech recording memorable thoughts and deeds . . ." For Q, it was life itself.

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