Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  20. Arthur Quiller-Couch

  During the Great Depression an eighteen-year old girl found a book in a Philadelphia public library that changed her life.

  Years later, in 1971, Helene Hanff had a startling success with 84 Charing Cross Road, a bestseller that became a play and then a film. Based on a cache of lively and warm-hearted letters to a London bookseller she never met, it made her suddenly celebrated; later, in a memoir called Q’s Legacy (1985), she told in intimate detail how it had all happened. Her parents could only afford her a year in college, and at the end of the year, eager to write, she went to the public library and was shown a section where books on literature were alphabetically arranged. After a time she came to the letter Q. There was only one author there, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, known simply as Q, and a book promisingly called On the Art of Writing published long ago in 1916.

  The preface inspired confidence. He was King Edward VII professor of English at the University of Cambridge, it said, the dust jacket adding that he was an Oxford graduate; and she had always been told that Oxford and Cambridge were the best with a capital B. The first chapter was his inaugural lecture of January 1913; the second was ‘The Practice of Writing,’ which she found she could understand. Then she read the fifth chapter on jargon, though she did not know the word, and suddenly felt there was a misprint. Q had juxtaposed two illustrative sentences:

  He was conveyed to his place of residence in an intoxicated condition,

  and

  He was carried home drunk.

  The first sentence was jargon, said Q, the second good English.

  The teenager stared in disbelief. Surely a ‘not’ had been left out? ‘I liked fancy words – I thought they were literary.’ She felt that ‘carried home drunk’ was lower-class. But at least Q wrote what she could understand, and she had toiled through most of the alphabet to find him. Besides, he had a sense of humour; and, most of all, he was Oxford and Cambridge. So she took On the Art of Writing home, along with another volume of his lectures, and renewed them both after four weeks. By then she was hooked. Q’s quotations from Izaak Walton, Cardinal Newman and Milton had fascinated her, and by the end of her summer job at a bookshop, which paid ten dollars a week, she had saved enough to buy his other lectures. So when her job ended in September she gave her waking hours to reading: two hours to Q, two to Milton and two to Shakespeare.

  Then her parents made her learn shorthand and typing. With money earned from office jobs she bought other volumes of Q’s and found a place with the Theatre Guild of New York, which after years of flops had a success in 1943 with Oklahoma.

  ____

  The story is heartening in diverse ways. Literary criticism can be discovered if you seek it out, it does not have to be new to be fascinating, and it can change your life. Like a time-bomb it can lie unnoticed for years and decades before it explodes. My own life, as it happens, was changed shortly after that incident in a library as a schoolboy in wartime Australia, though I have no dramatic recollection of how I found Q. Certainly I never dreamed, at that childish age, that some twenty years later I would be teaching in the school of English he had helped to found at Cambridge in 1917. Nor, I imagine, did Q ever dream of such readers or such successors. In fact he habitually began a lecture with the word Gentlemen, a form of address unlikely to include a teenage girl in Pennsylvania or a boy on a subtropical farm in the southern hemisphere. Authorship is like that. When you write you have no idea who will read; when you lecture, no idea who might be listening. A Norwegian professor on the point of retirement recently told me, nearly half a century after The Literary Critics appeared in 1962, that the book had made him give up thoughts of medical school to teach literature, though the reduction of medical staff in Scandinavia was the last thing I had in mind when I wrote it. What Q, a prolific novelist in his fiftieth year, started in a draughty lecture-hall in Cambridge in January 1913 must have been beyond his wildest hopes and grandest dreams.

  As a lecturer in literary criticism Q had been narrowly anticipated in Cambridge. A.E. Housman, famous above all for A Shropshire Lad (1896), had delivered an inaugural lecture there as a professor of Latin a little more than a year earlier, in May 1911, to a large audience in a crowded Senate House. Q was not yet in Cambridge. Moreover a mishap over a lost detail concerning a Shelley poem caused Housman to withhold publication, and the lecture was still unpublished when he died in 1936. He left directions his papers should be burned, which they were. So for twenty years and more the lecture was deemed lost, till his brother Laurence died, and a copy was providentially found among his papers. ‘The Confines of Criticism’ finally appeared in TLS in May 1968, well over half a century late, to reappear as a slim volume in the next year.

  Of Housman’s acquaintance with Q there is little to be said, but their careers as friends, contemporaries and colleagues were teasingly alike. Born in 1859, Housman was the older man by four years, and both were provincial Englishmen with professional parents: Housman’s father a lawyer, Q’s a doctor. Both studied classics at Oxford, where they failed to achieve first-class degrees; both took posts outside academe – Housman in the patent office in London, Q with a London publisher as an overworked reader and writer of fiction. When Q left London in 1892, a married man not yet thirty, it was in order to live a less hectic life in his native Cornwall, at Fowey, contemplating no academic career and busying himself with local government and school reform. He was knighted in 1910 for his public services. English was scarcely an academic subject, in any case, and the opening that appeared in 1912 was unexpectedly created by the death of the first professor of English at Cambridge, A. W. Verrall, an eminent classicist, after less than a year in office.

  Housman’s experience of lecture-platforms was somewhat greater. He had secured a chair of Latin in London, in spite of his Oxford pass degree, by writing learned articles on textual matters and editing Roman poets, and his poems are likely to have counted with the electors for as little as Q’s novels. On the other hand Q had already collected some early essays as Adventures in Criticism (1896) and edited the Oxford Book of English Verse, which appeared in 1900, in the last months of Queen Victoria’s reign. It is said to have sold nearly half a million copies by 1939, the first of a sequence of Oxford Books that now looks unending, and in 1925 Q followed it with the Oxford Book of English Prose, which is the best book I know for anyone who haunts small hotels in remote places and travels light.

  They were both professors who could write, which is no common thing. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad is said to have maintained a long and steady sale during his lifetime and beyond, though his lectures were studiously dry and deliberately unappealing to all but the hardiest. The grand exception, apart from the inaugural he never published, was ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ – an attack on the Modernist school of poets that had emerged by the early 1930s under the leadership of T. S. Eliot. It was delivered in the Senate House in May 1933 with unashamed polemical intent, and it enraged the avant-garde, as it was meant to do – an old man’s dying protest against the modern age.

  The spectacle of two Oxford classicists who left their first university without distinction and found undying fame in another might be a matter for a saga or even an epic, but it would have to be largely imaginary. Their letters suggest cheerful acquaintance rather than intimacy. Contrasts too abound. Housman was a sad, unsociable being, a recluse who refused to greet acquaintances in the street and never, until his valedictory lecture in 1933, stooped to unburden his heart. Biographers have been picking over the furtive details by now for half a century, and his poems have been meticulously decoded for any intimate knowledge they may shed. Some poems, out of prudence, were never published in his lifetime at all, like the touching four-liner his brother included in More Poems after his death:

  He, standing hushed, a pace or two apart,

  Among the bluebells of the listless plain,

  Thinks, and remembers ho
w he cleansed his heart

  And washed his hands in innocence in vain.

  That is a cry from the heart, but it finds no echo in Q, a happily married man whose passions were as innocent as his pleasures.

  Stories once abounded in Cambridge about Housman’s lonely life, during which his solitude was often felt to be strenuously self-induced. He never allowed talk about his poems. Once, in the early 1930s, there was a New Year’s Eve party in Trinity College to see the old year out; and when they parted after midnight, warmed by wine and good company, Housman remarked to a young colleague how much he had enjoyed it. ‘Let’s do it again next year,’ the young man replied. Housman looked infinitely sad. ‘No, it will never happen again – God hates me.’ He once told a colleague he would like his epitaph to read ‘Here lies the only member of the English middle class who did not think himself a gentleman.’ His last words were enigmatic. Andrew Gow, a younger classical scholar with whom he discussed textual problems, once told me that on his hospital death-bed Housman in a delirium had suddenly announced with devastating clarity: ‘It has nothing whatever to do with the Bangorian controversy.’ Those who interest themselves in ecclesiastical history may know that in 1717 a bishop of Bangor preached non-resistance to George I, the Hanoverian king, implying that his claim to the crown was perhaps less than constitutionally correct, and the king prorogued Convocation to avoid the embarrassment of a debate. It is a good remark in the sense that it could be said of almost anything – a comic summary of a tragic life.

  ____

  The life of Q, though scarred in 1919 by the sudden death by illness of an only son who had survived the Western Front, is a sharply contrasting case. An infinitely convivial being, he was adored in Cambridge, where for thirty years he lectured to large audiences, usually at noon, and sometimes gave a class after dinner. He would arrive in an elated condition, having dined well, and loved above all, unless constrained, to talk about the Poetics of Aristotle. His enthusiasms were Mediterranean. No Beowulf for him, a ‘blown-out bag of bookishness.’ Cambridge English, he announced unequivocally in his inaugural, began with Chaucer, a poet deeply inspired by a French-speaking court and by Petrarch, whom Chaucer may have met on a visit to Italy. Fowey, on the south Cornish coast, of which Q became mayor, epitomised a sun-loving existence within sight and smell of the ocean; and he was notorious in Cambridge for arriving late for term and leaving early, always by train. Even his journeys were ceremonious. The Cambridge station-master would accompany him along the platform to a first-class compartment where two porters had stacked his luggage; it was usually found unsuitable, and another had to be selected for him before the train could leave –a ritual repeated in London when he changed for Cornwall. If Housman was a recluse, Q through his long life was a personality and a personage.

  His lectures, too, were inspiring, and performed to packed halls. Wearing morning dress or bright-checked tweeds and sporting a coloured bow tie he made an engaging presence, and at his evening class interruptions were usually encouraged. But not always. On one occasion an Indian student raised a hand to ask what phallic meant. There was a shocked silence; then Q spoke. ‘Look it up in the dictionary,’ he said, ‘under P.’ Early departure before the end of term sometimes made life difficult for his colleagues, and a signature on adhesive paper sent from Cornwall for a final examiners’ meeting he could not attend was deplored by the administration, which issued a reminder that all examiners must be present at the final meeting to sign in person. He was notoriously tardy, too, in proof correction, and spoken of with awe by the university publisher for his delay in returning proofs of the Shakespeare comedies he edited in the 1920s. Industrious as he was, and prodigiously fertile, he was less devoted to routine than to innovation, and saw the Ancients and the English Renaissance as exemplars of endless vitality and hidden life. It made him a lifelong radical as well as a fervent patriot, which perhaps sounds odd, though to him the association was natural. ‘I have a love of the past,’ he said in one of his lectures, ‘which because it goes to the roots has sometimes been called Radicalism.’ The past began with the Ancients. On the Art of Writing begins with Plato; On The Art of Reading with Aristotle. Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets were passionately alive. In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, he lectured on Thomas Traherne, an English Platonist who like Milton had died in 1674 but whose writings had lain forgotten in manuscript till 1903. A remark from Traherne’s prose sums up the Q credo of literature: ‘Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.’ Literature is one kingdom. Creation is itself a critical act, as Coleridge had known, and criticism is above all creative when it reanimates what is old.

  ____

  The notion is exhilarating, and not far from what T. S. Eliot would write soon after in his magisterial essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). He was a young American recently settled in London who, like Ezra Pound, had seen the radical potentialities of a distant and exotic past. The conjunction with Q only sounds implausible because of what has since become the familiar opposition of traditionalist and avant-garde, Left and Right, and now that such terms are fading it might sensibly be revived. You look forward by looking back, Q and Eliot both believed; and neither would have understood the mood of denial which under the empty title of Grand Theory arrogantly denies knowledge itself. To theorise is as natural as breathing to anyone who uses language at all, and to many who do not. ‘God hath made it easy to convert our souls into a thought containing heaven and earth,’ as Traherne put it in his Centuries, ‘not that it should be contemptible because it is easy, but done because it is divine.’ To theorise, with or without words, is an essential element in ‘a perpetual influx of life’; it makes no claim to rigour and needs none. Like Coleridge, whom Q followed into Jesus College after a century, he was an enemy to barriers between the critical and the creative life. Even the most practical theorise. As Coleridge put it in October 1809, in The Friend, ‘the meanest of men has his theory, and to think at all is to theorise.’

  To be a classicist in the age of Matthew Arnold and Benjamin Jowett was to be a humanist, but Housman’s pessimism was too pervasive to allow more than an occasional acknowledgement of the humanist case. Q was different. He was an active, campaigning Liberal deeply saddened by the dismissal of Asquith as prime minister in December 1916 and horrified by the rise of dictators in his later years. In a late book, The Poet as Citizen (1934), in which he considered Eliot’s University of Virginia lectures After Strange Gods, he attacked a remark about ‘a society worm-eaten with Liberalism,’ and his retort was thunderous. It is difficult to be sure, Q protested, what Eliot means by the word. But it seems to imply anything that presumes to question dogma – ‘the priestly utterance of a particular offset of a particular branch of a historically fissiparous Church.’ Eliot had publicly disgraced his calling as a poet-critic by defending tyranny – a tyranny based on brute force. ‘Look around Europe today,’ wrote Q in the first months of Hitler’s power, ‘and consider under what masks dogma is not . . . openly shaking his weapon to cow the minds of free men; and ask yourselves if it be not the inherited duty of our race to vindicate the tradition of that Liberty which was the ark within the citadel of our fathers’ souls.’

  An anti-modernist revolt was forming, and it was patriotic. Q and Housman were soon joined by a younger generation, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and then by still younger partisans like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. ‘The great enemy,’ Robert Graves used to say, ‘is this Franco-American thing.’ Its battle-lines, however, had already been drawn by a pair of middle-aged Cambridge professors before the first world war. In his 1911 inaugural, once lost and now found, Housman had already nailed his colours to the mast. ‘The laws of criticism,’ he pronounced defiantly, ‘are nothing but a string of generalisations, necessarily inaccurate, which have been framed by the benevolent for the guidance, the support and t
he constraint of three classes of persons,’ namely infants, cripples and maniacs – ‘leading strings for infants,…crutches for cripples and… strait waistcoats for maniacs’ – and those who choose never to violate them have abandoned all critical sense. We do not know literature because we can define it. We define it, if at all, because we know it.

  Q probably never heard Housman make that declaration. He would have cheered if he had. In his own inaugural in January 1913 he was no less adamant that great literature needs no definition. The Grand Style, he insisted, is known by encountering it. ‘Why worry me with a definition,’ he asked, ‘when here and here, and again here…I recognise and feel the thing?’

  ____

  Theory, in any case, when it claims dominance, is not only fallacious but dull. No doubt there are those who hope to be improved by dullness. There are far more who can profit from delight. When Q spoke in 1913 he could hardly have known how many there were, or how diverse. The hall overflowed, it is said – seats, steps and window-sills. He was addressing for the first time an ancient university of which he had just become a member, a man mature in years who in younger days had consorted in London with Oscar Wilde and J. M. Barrie, and the lecture-hall was not his home. But he made it his home, in his fiftieth year, and kept it.