Arthur Quiller-CouchRezensionen

"Q" opens the collection with a story called "The Roll-Call of the Reef". Then follow stories entitled: The Monkey Flower, The Czarina's Violet, Old Aeson, A Pair of Hands, Onca Aboard the Lugger, The Bridals of Ysselmonde, The Conspiracy aboard the "Midas", The Paupers, Our Lady of Gwithian, Phoebus on Halzaphron, Pipes in Arcady, John and the Ghosts, The Two Householders, The Small People, Psyche, The Magic Shadow, and Oceanus. All of the stories have a hint of the supernatural in their subject matter. At the back of the book is a list of the first 169 issues of the Kings Treasuries Series.

The story is a retelling of the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and is actually written by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and only finished by Daphne du Maurier after his death. It has none of her flair or style and is positively boring in places. I found the end both expected and unmoving. In fact, none of the characters interested me in the least. By three-quarters through I was fighting the urge to just lay it aside.

Arthur Quiller-Couch's retelling is absolutely perfect, but the illustrations by Angel Dominguez struck the wrong note. Beauty is a very modern girl, lipsticked and eyelined for the natural-and-utterly-innocent look. She'd be perfect for the cover of a sultry 21st century romance or mystery, not so much for a classic fairy tale. I couldn't bear to look at the illustrations again, despite the gorgeous costumes, so I gave the book away.

I really enjoyed this yarn. But then it's a of a genre intended to keep teenage boys entertained in the early 20th Century and I have always enjoyed those stories by authors such as, Strang, Henty, Kingston and Ballantyne - even though I am and old dude now. What the storyline is doesn't matter much. This one visits Cornwall, Corsica and Genoa in the 1700s and it does include a couple of love interests; good, meaty, standard stuff for me.
My copy is an abridgement presented in one of the nice little Kings Treasuries of Literature books.½

Highest rating; an essential literary reference and bona fide classic. Rewards repeated consultation. A fantastic bedside table book.

I decided to read these century-old lectures because I was curious to check out the source of the dictum “murder your darlings,” made famous by Stephen King. The lectures contained some interesting insights mixed with stretches of what struck me as benign babbling.
Most jarring is Quiller-Couch’s invariable address to his listeners as “gentlemen.” A stark reminder that, although Cambridge had begun to permit women to attend lectures a decade or two previously, they were not allowed to sit for exams or take a degree. So they are not among Quiller-Couch’s addressees. No, he speaks to elite males in the making, whom Quiller-Couch will form by exposure to the “masculine, objective writers” he admires.
Not that I have much to quibble about with the authors he holds up for admiration and emulation, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Thomas Wyatt (which Quiller-Couch spells with one “t”). There are others he admires less, for example, Samuel Johnson and Wordsworth, but Jane Austen rates no mention and George Eliot but one, a passing mention not as an author but as a responsive reader.
Equally risible is his survey, spread over two lectures, of the lineage of English literature. He is as allergic to the notion that Chaucer owed anything to Beowulf or other Anglo-Saxon poetry (other than the language, no small matter!) as he is to the suggestion that Great Britain should be reckoned among the Teutonic nations. Context, I remind myself. He gave these lectures in 1913, when the sound of saber-rattling filled the air. And he is reacting to the equally suspect Romantic Nationalism of the generation before him.
Nevertheless, it strikes me as nothing less than cranky that he devotes a lengthy portion of one of twelve lectures to speculation that some Romans who settled in Britain may still have descendants. The fact that newest DNA evidence confirms this suspicion doesn’t change Quiller-Couch’s lack of demonstration that this has anything to do with the influence of the Greek-Roman tradition on English literature.
Balanced against these oddities are other things I did like. These include Quiller-Couch's instinctive mistrust of the “-isms” often used to lump writers into categories and his emphasis that language is living, ever-changing, and that therefore good style can’t be reduced to rules. On the other hand, it is a bit of a letdown to hear in the final lecture that good style is merely a matter of politeness toward your reader.
From the outset, he declares that he will aim to have students read great literature “absolutely,” by which he means the texts themselves in preference to commentary and other secondary literature. He does allow that, with certain highly allusive writers such as Milton, notes on the references might be necessary for beginning students.
Quiller-Couch seems confident that in this “absolute” encounter with the texts it will be possible to discern authorial intent. A century on, we are less sure, but he also seems to recognize the role of what is now called reader-response: “the success of [literature] depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author’s skill to give as on ours to receive.”
Quiller-Couch’s aim is not only that his students will learn to appreciate great literature, but that they will become, if not great, at least good writers. Although chary of rules, he does set out four hallmarks of good writing. Aim to write, he urges, with accuracy, perspicuity, persuasion, and appropriateness. He might have helped his case had he said “lucidity” or “clarity” instead of perspicuity. Perhaps he thought his formula would be more memorable if two words began with the prefix “per-” alongside two that began with “a.”
I also liked his suggestion that the key to the Dark Ages was the suppression of literature. This was not done because the church had something against it as literature, nor—at first—because it was voluptuous, but because it was imbued with the polytheistic religion of the Greeks and Romans, something the church had only recently and narrowly overcome.
His fifth lecture, on jargon, is lamentably as relevant now as it was then. He decries it not because it is ugly, but because it is “a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is wickedness in human speech, sometimes. You will detect it all the better for having ruled out all that it naughty.”
One of the things I liked most about these lectures: although Quiller-Couch has his favorites, as well as writers he doesn’t admire, he is charitable toward all. It is not easy to write, he stresses, and all struggled to express themselves in language. This earns his respect and merits ours. In spite of my criticisms of parts of this book, this respect is something I’m glad to accord Quiller-Couch as well.
He seems to bristle that Chesterton, in a review of one of Quiller-Couch’s books, calls his tone “avuncular.” I smiled when I read this since that’s an adjective that already crossed my mind before I reached that point. But that’s not all bad. I think I would have enjoyed an evening and a sherry with him. These lectures, however, because of their unevenness, can be passed over in favor of other good books on writing. It’s not a bad book—I enjoyed much of it—but it’s not essential.

This book collects a second set of lectures Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gave at Cambridge University to defend the decision to create a chair there for the study of English Literature. Thus it is a companion to his first series of lectures, Notes on the Art of Writing, given soon after he became the second to hold the professorship. There is some repetition of points he raised in the earlier set, such as the need to read great literature “absolutely,” by which he means tackling the text itself rather than merely reading secondary works that describe or explain the greats. The reader also won’t be surprised at Quiller-Couch’s gallery of greats, with Shakespeare, Milton, and the Authorized Version (“King James”) of the Bible occupying pride of place.
It might surprise some that a translation of a body of writings from ancient Hebrew and Greek, produced by a committee, should appear alongside Shakespeare, but Quiller-Couch maintains its eminence as the first great achievement of English prose. It’s clear, though, that even in his time, the place of the Bible in the study of English literature was controversial. He devotes three of the ten lectures here to the topic. In the third of them, he uses the Book of Job as an example of greatness.
In the first lecture, Quiller-Couch introduces a distinction to which he will return throughout the book, one that Browning makes in his “A Death in the Desert” between what does, what knows, and what is, with the last being the highest. In one sense, it seems to mean knowing one’s soul, or the transcendent. Quiller-Couch also claims, though, that the reader’s identification with the protagonist of a work of literature—becoming, say, Hamlet, for the moment—is also a form of knowing “what is,” a surprising extension of what Browning might have meant by it. At any rate, Quiller-Couch maintains that literature is the pre-eminent means of this highest form of knowledge. He even maintains its superiority in this over philosophy. Here is the conclusion to his second lecture: “Literature understands man and of what he is capable. Philosophy, on the other hand, may not be ‘harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,’ but the trouble with most of its practitioners is that they try to comprehend the Universe. Now the man who could comprehend the Universe would ipso facto comprehend God, and be ipso facto a Super-God, able to dethrone him, and in the arrogance of his intellectual conceit full ready to make the attempt.”
A third controversial position staked out here is that no child is too young to be exposed to the greats. Homer and the Tempest are his illustrations for this.
I enjoyed this series of lectures a bit more than the first set. He still comes across at times as “Uncle Q” and one can hear the strains of “Rule Britannia” wafting in the background as he argues for the generally civilizing influence of great (English) writing. Nonetheless, I can easily imagine that those who had the privilege to read Paradise Lost or King Lear with him had their lives deepened by the experience.

A beautifully illustrated adaptation of the classic fairy tale.

As a child I remember my maternal grandfather had a reasonably well stocked library and in it included most of the works of Arthur Quiller-Couch (Q). So it was with some interest that I discovered that this book had been started by Q and finished by du Maurier at the behest of Q's daughter so was intrigued as to how this collaboration would work.

Firstly let me say that it appears seamless and it is hard to see which author wrote what (good or bad depending on your taste) although there did seem a noticeable quickening in the pace towards the end.

A chance meeting between Linnette LeWarne,a pretty but haughty young woman recently married to a much older man but still with dreams of romance, and a Bretton onion seller Amyot leads to an unlikely romance when Amyot rescues Linnette and her husband from a run-away coach accident with predictably disastrous results. This is interspersed with some good old Arthurian legends of a similar love affair between Tristan and Iseult.

The prose was generally excellent,the Cornish scenery was wonderfully portrayed particularly as the mist descends for the final curtain call as was the evocative easy going way of life therein. Although being Cornish myself may have some reflection on my opinion here. But that said at times it was fairly pedestrian almost scholarly in pace at times. Also there did seem an over reliance of an interest and knowledge of the Tristan Iseult affair which held back the overall feel of the novel IMHO.

On the whole I found this was an interesting collaboration if nor overly gripping one.

This most congenial introduction and summary to writing English Verse and Prose is replete with hard won insights, presented like gifts. Among the insights, for example, are the following: the connection of Verse to Music, --its nature of the tonal (in literature "tonal" means attitude of the author and/or his/her subject), rhythm ( accentual word, phrase, verse), and metrical/non-metrical line), as well as issues of narrative in poems and prose. Thereʻs an engaging old world charm in the presentation of this often felt stolid grind of a subject. Quiller-Couchʻs quiet, personable reasoning tone causes one to forget the presentation is in lecture form. "The Practice of Writing" (Lecture 2), "On the Difference between Verse and Prose" (Lecture 3), "On the Capital Difficulty of Verse," (Lecture 4), "On the Capital Difficulty of Prose," (Lecture 6), "On the Lineage of English Literature, I, II," (Lectures 8, 9), "On Style," (Lecture 12) are superb distillations of his life long experiences with the English language and its forms. He is courtly from long years of intimate concourse. The effect is a talk, not lecture, delivered out of a deceptively simple, quiet life, taken from the cold stones of the best of Oxfordian scholarship and set in warm sunlight for reflection. It welcomes neophytes and the seasoned. Itʻs an experience. Almost of an age long gone yet delivered as fresh, true --the findings are inspirited, yet concrete, mellow, yet abiding. Like old, fine wine. The questions asked remain pertinent today. Except for the late Modern and the Post-Modern in English literature. This is a scholarly work, originally published in l916 (Cambridge), re-published in 2006 (Dover). An old voice, strong. A style, elegant. An Unforgettable discourse.

Found here at Gutenberg. 15 short stories by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (and if you can say that name five times fast I have a drinking game for you).

After reading the first two stories I had started to worry that this was going to be one of those books written in the 1800s that always had to bring Christianity into a story - but happily that's not the case. Instead it's a glut of Heavy Symbolism that's involved, not Christianity (though there's Christian symbolism scattered about too). Some of the stories seem to be better written than others; in some there's a slightly dream-like tone that sometimes doesn't work as well. The more dreamy ones seem to be going for a symbolism (psychological?) that is often unclear yet at the same time hits the reader in the face as a "This Means Something" moment - which all just seems awkward. The Room of Mirrors is the best example. There are a lot of shipwrecks in these stories - it's the one theme that continues throughout the book.

However! I don't dislike the book - I just had the impression that a few of the stories didn't quite seem as good as the rest. Many of the stories I did like, and would read again - the author does have the ability to make his stories seem like old folktales (not a surprise, given his biography).

At this point it's best just to give you a plot blurb on each and then a few quotes as examples of the author's writing style.


Contents:

I. OCEANUS.
Written as a letter to a family member, a brother struggles with his brother's death. He sees his brother again - or is it a dream/vision?
II. THE SEVENTH MAN.
Ship-wrecked survivors in the arctic. Suddenly there's one more in a head-count of the crew.
III. THE ROOM OF MIRRORS.
A man hunts down his enemy, but they are perhaps dependent on each other for existence in a supernatural way.
IV. A PAIR OF HANDS.
A quiet little ghost, and a rather sweet story. (I really liked this one.)
V. THE LADY OF THE SHIP.
A lady involved in a shipwreck is saved by a lord who then must deal with a case of...demonic possession? Or servitude to a demon? (I was somewhat fuzzy on that part, but so was the narrator.) Written by a servant trying to clear his master's name. (I also liked this story - good atmosphere.)
VI. FROZEN MARGIT.
Story told by one twin about the women saved from a shipwreck that he and his brother fell in love with. She chooses one of them, eventually they end up on a sea voyage that ends in...weirdness. (I didn't like the character of Margit, and don't think I'm supposed to - she's wildly unlikable. The story's ending was ...odd. As are all of Margit's choices.)
VII. THE SINGULAR ADVENTURE OF A SMALL FREE-TRADER.
A child from a family of smugglers gets separated from the crew of his vessel/smuggling group and ends up meeting a strange older lady.
VIII. THE MYSTERY OF JOSEPH LAQUEDEM.
Letter written by the minister to a friend, story of a Jewish business man who, while visiting the minister, meets a girl who the locals know to be "an imbecile." However he believes that he and the girl have a past bond. Romance with supernatural twist.
IX. PRISONERS OF WAR.
Two men who have known each other all their lives become enemies after becoming prisoners of war. "Humorous" ending.
X. A TOWN'S MEMORY.
Man returns to a town he hasn't seen since youth and tries to find someone that remembers him.
XI. THE LADY OF THE RED ADMIRALS.
Girl who lives with elderly guardians allows a passing stranger in on the secret of her fiance.
XII. THE PENANCE OF JOHN EMMET.
The parson has his pupil (our narrator) help him with a task he must perform for a dead man, and then tells his pupil the story behind it. (I liked this one.)
XIII. ELISHA.
Myth/fairytale-like story of the Biblical Elisha, the blind prophet, who returns to an area he'd visited before and finds out what happened in the life of Miriam since then.
XIV. "ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER".
A small town gets a new minister and the local girls gossip about who will marry him. (This did not go where I thought it would or the way it would. Which I kind of like for surprising me. Then again, this depends on where you think the writer will go with things at this point.)
XV. WHICH?
A man and women meet who used to know each other, and reminisce about their sad past.





Quotes:

From The Singular Adventure of A Small Free-Trader:

...But she interrupted me. Setting down her work-basket, which was heaped high with reels and parti-coloured rags of silk, she pushed a small table over to the big bed and loaded it with candlesticks. There were three candles already alight in the room, but she lit others and set them in line—brass candlesticks, plated candlesticks, candlesticks of chinaware—fourteen candlesticks in all, and fresh candles in each. Laying a finger on her lip, she stepped to the big bed and unfastened the corking-pins which held the green curtains together. As she pushed the curtains back I lifted myself on an elbow.

It was into a real theatre that I looked. She had transformed the whole level of the bed into a miniature stage, with buildings of cardboard, cleverly painted, and gardens cut out of silk and velvet and laid down, and rose-trees gummed on little sticks, and a fish-pond and brook of looking-glass, with embroidered flowers stuck along their edges, and along the paths (of real sand) a score of little dolls walking, all dressed in the uniform of the Grey Nuns. I declare it was so real, you could almost hear the fountain playing, with its jet d'eau of transparent beads strung on an invisible wire.

"But how pretty, mademoiselle!" I cried.

She clasped her hands nervously. "But is it like, Yann? It is so long ago that I may have forgotten. Tell me if it is like; or if there is anything wrong. I promise not to be offended."

"It is exactly like, mademoiselle."

"See, here is the Mother Superior; and this is Soeur Gabrielle. I have to make the dresses full and stiff, or they wouldn't stand up. And that, with the blue eyes, is Soeur Hyacinthe. She walks with me— this is I—as she always did. And what do you think? With the fifteen dolls that you have brought I am going to have a real Pardon, and townspeople and fisher people to stand and worship at the altar of the Virgin, there in the corner. I made it of wax, and stamped the face with a seal that Charles gave me. He was to have been my husband when I left the school."

"Indeed, mademoiselle?"

"Yes, but the soldiers burnt his house. It was but a week after I left the school, and the Chateau Sant-Ervoan lay but a mile from my mother's house. He fled to us, wounded; and we carried him to the coast—there was a price on his head, and we, too, had to flee—and escaped over to England. He died on this bed, Yann. Look—"

She lifted a candle, and there on the bed's ledge I read, in gilt lettering, some words I have never forgotten, though it was not until years after that I got a priest to explain them to me. They were "C. DE. R. COMES ET ECSUL. MDCCXCIII."

While I stared, she set the candle down again and gently drew the curtains round the bed.

"Rise now and dress, dear child, or your supper will be cold and the farmer impatient. You have done me good. Although I have written the farmer's letters for him, it never seemed to me that I wrote to living people: for all I used to know in Brittany, ten years ago, are dead. For the future I shall write to you."

From The Penance of John Emmet:

"'What happened?'

"'Don't be dense, Padre. Why, it—the engagement. The dance was given by some people who live two miles from here—people called Bargrave. Felicia and I drove over. She wore an old Court dress of her grandmother's or great-grand-mother's: I'm no hand at costumes, and can only tell you that she looked particularly jolly in it. I went in uniform—mess uniform, that is. It's one of the minor advantages of the service that on these occasions a man hasn't to put on a cavalier's wig and look like a goat out for a holiday. Well, as I was saying, at this particular dance it happened. It was daybreak when we started to drive home; a perfect midsummer morning, sun shining, dew on the hedges, and the birds singing fit to split themselves. Felicia and I had a lot to say to each other, naturally; and it occurred to us to stop the carriage at the gates and send it on while we walked up to the house together. We took the path leading through the Italian garden, and there—pretty well in the same place where you saw him this afternoon— we came on John Emmet, already out and at work: or rather he was leaning on a hoe and staring after the carriage as it moved up the avenue behind the limes. We came on him from behind, and, I suppose, suddenly. Anyhow, we scared him. I never saw such a face in my life as he turned on us! It went all white in an instant, and then slowly whiter. No doubt our dress was unusual: but I'm not accustomed to be taken for a ghost—'

"'Was it you who frightened him?'

"'Yes, I think so. He kept his eyes on me, anyway: and at first, when Felicia asked him to congratulate her, he didn't seem to hear. After a bit, however, he picked up his speech and muttered something about fate, and wishing her joy—I forget what. Felicia confessed afterwards that his face had fairly frightened her.'

I have to admit, I'm sharing that primarily for "like a goat out for a holiday" which for some reason really amused me.

Castle Dor was the last unfinished work of the critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and finished (at his daughter’s request) by Daphne Du Maurier after his death. The novel is a modern retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth, re-set to Cornwall of the 1840s. Linnet Lewarne is a young woman married to an innkeeper; she strikes up a relationship with a Briton onion seller named Amyot Trestane. Although not written from the first person point of view, the center viewpoint is that of the village doctor, who recognizes how history is repeating itself, literally.

Du Maurier did a fairly good job of finishing the novel—you can’t tell where Quiller-Couch’s writing leaves off and Du Maurier’s begins. She later wrote that she could never hope to imitate Quiller-Couch’s style of writing, but that she tried to adopt his “modd;” still, this wasn’t one of the best books that she’s put her pen to. Because the story is told from an “outside” point of view, we don’t really get that of the main two characters, so it’s hard to assess their motives.

In fact, the main character of the book is Doctor Carfax, who, as Du Maurier put it, serves as a kind of Prospero, helping move the events of the novel along while not really being a part of them. One gets the sense that all of these characters are involved in something much larger than themselves, something much beyond their control, and there’s a fairly wonderful kind of atmosphere to that effect. Although I had some reservations about this novel, it’s interesting to see how two writers—one a critic of literature, the other considered a “romance” novelist—coincide, and how they were able to create one cohesive novel.½

Not, as one might think from the title, a monograph on Berkshire biscuit-tin decoration, but Q's second series of lectures as Cambridge professor of English Literature. They were delivered during what must have been some of the bleakest and most depressing years in the history of the university, a time when many people would have been wondering whether we would ever again have room in our lives for educating young people in the humanities. Despite this, Q is unflaggingly positive in his conviction that it is possible to study "English literature" as an academic discipline (something that was by no means universally accepted in Cambridge in his day). In a fairly random-seeming progression, he sets out his thoughts on how literature should — and should not — be taught; how exams are a necessary evil; why the Latin and Greek heritage matters at least as much as (if not more than) Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse; how we as readers can cope with the sheer number of books that exist; how children's books should be directed at stretching the imagination, not at creating model citizens (two lectures); why the Authorised Version of the Bible should be treated as a key text of English literature (three magnificent lectures, concluding in a virtuoso exposition of Job); and tentatively explores the idea of a canon, first rubbishing the idea of "100 best books" and then accepting that there might be some sort of merit in it.

Whilst the battles he engages in were mostly won or lost the best part of a century ago, it's still a great pleasure to read his wonderful, clear prose and reflect on how and why we enjoy books. There's even a sort of guilty thrill for those of us brought up on feminist and post-colonial criticism to see that he unashamedly and routinely opens his lectures with "Gentlemen, ...". He does accept that women will be playing a big part in post-war society and will need full access to education, but he undermines this positive comment with a footnote quoting a Victorian young lady's summing up of her educational attainments.

I found myself wondering about what doors more recent ways of teaching literature have opened and closed for us. I'm sure Q would have welcomed the extension of the subject to cover very recent literature (in his day, and until at least the 1950s, Eng. Lit., as far as Oxford and Cambridge were concerned, was held to end in 1835), but I'm not sure that he would have been as happy about the way whole chunks of literary history fell off the syllabus in the process: the courses I took left rather an alarming gap between Shakespeare and Dickens, for instance. He does accept, though, that choices have to be made and no undergraduate can be expected to read through the entire canon from Chaucer to Byron in two years.

It is probably fair to say, as bell7 does in one of the other reviews here, that these lectures are seriously out of date and contain little actual useful advice. Reading them won't necessarily help you to become a better writer. But to condemn them for that is to miss their point seriously. Anyone who can read these lectures without being infected by Q's enthusiasm for the subject is probably immune to the pleasures of English literature. And pace bell7, Miss Hanff's evident pleasure at discovering this little book is a strong indication that you don't have to be an Edwardian undergraduate, or even British, to get something out of it.

Unlike many published sets of lectures, these are really written as lectures, not as essays to be read out. There are jokes in the right places to wake the audience up and plenty of topical references to Cambridge life. When he is illustrating the difference between verse and prose, it is a chunk of exam regulations from the Cambridge handbook that he mischievously converts into iambic pentameters; when he is talking about Romano-British culture, he reminds the audience that they will have passed the archaeological site in question on their way to Newmarket races. And so on. Anyone who's been a student knows that the most entertaining, imaginative lectures you attend are likely to be the least useful in passing exams. Examiners don't give many marks for originality. But those are precisely the lectures you remember decades later, when the finer points of the Greek aorist, Cauchy-Riemann equations, or whatever it was you were studying, have faded completely (after thirty years, I only have the vaguest notion of what a Cauchy-Riemann equation might be, but I remember very clearly that the lecturer on that subject wore galoshes). I'm sure that the undergraduates who attended Q's lectures the year before the outbreak of the Great War must have remembered them with great affection — those who survived, that is.

The pretence that Q is teaching undergraduates "the art of writing" is his little joke against pedantic notions of what the study of English literature should involve. He does issue Fowlerish warnings against some bad habits. As with Fowler, some is sensible and universally applicable, some (e.g. his warnings against mixing elements from different languages, as in "antibody") has been overtaken by the evolution of the English language in the last hundred years. He makes it clear in his final lecture that good writing depends on the writer having something original to say and finding an appropriate, personal style to say it in. Anyone who has listened to him carefully should find it a bit easier to criticise their own writing, but will still have to find something to say first.

Similarly, a modern literary theorist won't find all that much to agree with in Q's analysis of how literature works (some of which is actually just polemic against the academic obsessions of the time, like the excessive focus on philology of the Germanic languages in the Oxford and Cambridge English courses). But the amateur can take a lot of pleasure in his off-the-cuff summings-up of great and not so great writers. And there are lots of interesting little pointers to writers we might not know much about. Many of whom, coincidentally enough, feature in Q's Oxford Book of English Verse....

Sur l'auteur : http://www.quillercouch.co.uk/

Le rocher du mort
Editions Terre de brumes, 2005
256 p.

La littérature d'aventure, principalement anglo-saxonne, nous a donné l'habitude de nous emmener vers des terres où la vengeance servait de terreau aux actions les plus terribles. C'est le cas avec ce "rocher du mort", roman du célèbre critique britannique Arthur Quiller-Couch, lequel avait été si profondément impressionné par "L'ile au Trésor" de Stevenson qu'il avait décidé à son tour de plonger dans les affres bouillonnante de l'aventure. L'auteur raconte d'ailleurs en postface de cette édition comment il a monté son intrigue en suivant les recettes du maître écossais. Le "Rocher" regroupe un certain nombre d'ingrédients qui sont pérennes dans ce type de littérature écrite au crépuscule du XIXème siècle et que l'on regroupe sous la dénomination de "boy's book" : La côte anglaise battue par les vents, des rochers propres à déchirer n'importe quel navire, un naufrage, un assassinat, une boite contenant un journal, une famille endeuillée, un garçon qui grandit dans l'ombre absente de son père, un mystère à décrypter, une vengeance qui traverse les générations, une rencontre amoureuse, un drame amoureux, un trésor avec un rubis maudit.

Pour autant, même si ce livre est très bien écrit, on a du mal à se sentir entièrement en empathie avec le héros que l'on suit pas à pas. La puissance évocatrice est bien moindre que dans le roman de Stevenson, moindre également que dans "Elle" ou "les mines du roi Salomon", pour ne prendre que les titres Ridder Haggard. Le roman est prenant, bien fichu, mais il manque, en ce qui me concerne, ce petit plus affectif qui rendrait ce livre indispensable.

I fell for this book before I had finished reading the dedication page. It seemed to be written in the most beautiful prose I had ever encountered. I was reminded of the opening line of the prologue to L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". They certainly write differently there. This novel was published in 1888, and its style would be completely out of fashion now, but I found it moving, and I was overwhelmed with an intense sense of regret that beauty for its own sake is no longer valued, not in art, nor in architecture, nor in writing. I wouldn't have cared what the story was about, I simply wished to keep on reading his words. Although I didn't always feel this way, and there were times when I found the richness of his prose a little cloying. Continued

Minor verse by a figure of some importance a century ago now largely, if somewhat undeservedly, forgotten.

Dear Miss Hanff,

First off, let me say that I adore your books. 84, Charing Cross Road is my favorite, but I also enjoyed learning about the origins of your love of Literature in Q's Legacy. You made me want to read the lectures of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - "Q" - and love them as much as you did.

I confess I did not. I read On the Art of Reading first. It was slow going, but I gave him the benefit of 80 plus years' change in the English language for what I didn't understand and liked what I did. Then I came to On the Art of Writing, the lectures you fell in love with.

Miss Hanff, were we reading the same book? In nearly one hundred years, these lectures have not aged well. Q comments about such neologisms as "antibody" - he deplores the word as incorrect - a statement that is reduced to humor now that it has become such an acceptable word in our language. His argument that Beowulf was not the beginning of English Literature, then 30 years out of vogue (as he admits in his lecture), is now 120 years out of date.

He had a tendency to quote Greek, Latin, and myriads of authors. Actually, I freely take the fall for that issue. The scholars of that time undoubtedly had a different mental library from my own, and studied Greek and Latin as a matter of course. I am much more familiar with works that were printed after Q's lectures, such as Death of a Salesman and Beloved than I am with the Iliad.

Finally, he is short on practical advice (though what he advises is practical and practicable, I grant you) yet long-winded. I admire you, Miss Hanff, for having the stamina to go back and read the many works from which he quotes. I certainly could not. Most of the time I was trying so hard to decode his point and how a given quote illustrated it that I neglected to admire the Literature you were so taken with.

Please be assured that this will not diminish my enjoyment of your books; I will, however, refrain from reading any more of Q's lectures.

I hope I can cultivate in my children an appreciation for prose such as this: slow, careful, with humour but very few exclamations, and punctuated with dependent clauses. Prose which is modern but certainly not contemporary, scholarly but never pedantic. If writing style varies with different ways of thinking, as I believe it does, comfort with different prose styles helps individuals gain perspective they might not otherwise have.

Quiller-Couch's lectures are addressed to Oxford students, practically aimed at answering the question of what use is a canon of British literature, and how to defend that a canon exists. It grew out of political arguments he mounted at Oxford to defend a new curriculum and, indeed, pedagogy -- arguments which, apparently, were successful. For all of that, Quiller-Couch makes for solid liberal arts reading, and I now understand why Helene Hanff wrote so highly of him in her books.

The three lectures on how to read the Bible, from the perspective of a literary accomplishment, are noble and arresting. His defense of Job as a literary triumph helped me see that story in a new light. I am struck by his contention that the Bible uniquely lends itself to translation for the key to Biblical prose lies not in the language but in how ideas are arranged, which translates well in terms of content as well as metre or cadence.

This is a re-issue of his 1913 collection of fairy tales, 'In Powder and Crinoline.' The stories are fun, and the attribution info in the preface is fascinating, but the main attraction for me are the stunning illustrations by Mr. Kay Nielsen in the Beardsley style.

My interest in this is chiefly because Q was one of Helene Hanff's favorite authors (though not for this book).

After reading Helene Hanff's books, particularly _Q's Legacy_, I decided to try one of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's collection of lectures. The lectures brought together in this volume were first given from 1916-1918, all regarding reading English literature, particularly focused on either teaching it or studying it in college. I chose it because, as a former English major and avid reader, it seemed a rather general study that Helene herself may have read.

Quiller-Couch seems to me a very down-to-earth professor, and I like his approach to literature as something living, not academic, and at its best when put to use in life. I sometimes had difficulty following his thought, primarily because I was unfamiliar with much of the literature he quotes and because, ninety years later, his language can be rather hard to follow. Because of this, it was hard for me to say whether or not I agreed with him much of the time. I think I was mostly able to apprehend what he was saying, however, and I would like to read more of his lectures in the future.

"Not in your world.....but in some borderland of buried kings and lovers". Linnette Lewarne, married to a much older man, meets Breton Amyot by pure chance and their fates are forever sealed as they begin to relive a past that has happened time and time again through the centuries - that of Tristan and Iseult. Doctor Carfax watches from the sidelines as he puts the pieces of the puzzle together with that of the legends and ends with a race against time to stop the legend from repeating itself into tragedy once again - all culminating in a on a very foggy Cornwall All Hallows E'en. Is the good Doctor in time or not?

Well you know me, I don't tell. Castle Dor, unfinished at the death of author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), was completed by Du Maurier at the request of his daughter. A bit slow and dry at the start (I've not read anything from "Q" before, nor am I all that familiar with the legends of Tristan and Iseult), but a good finish, albeit not the strongest. If you're big into the legends of T&I I'd go for it, but Du Maurier fans will probably be disappointed - the parts she contributed at the end are minimal and not her usual style.

An interesting book, mainly because of its joint authorship and its retelling of the legend of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde. It was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s last unfinished novel and Daphne Du Maurier took it over at the request of his daughter after his death. It came at a low point in her life and I think she struggled to complete the book. The first part (by Quiller-Couch) has a more mysterious, mystical and dreamlike atmosphere than the latter part which is written in a more straight forward and somewhat chatty style.

Place and time are fluid as events from the past are repeated in the present and the characters are held by something stronger than themselves, linking them inexorably to the past. The land itself, its history and above all the ancient earthworks at Castle Dor are central to the story. Castle Dor, an “ancient cirque, deserted, bramble-grown”, once a bastion “filled with men commanding this whole wilderness now grass mounds, sleeping under a quiet sky.”

There are different versions of the Tristan and Isolde legend and these are explored in the story by Dr Carfax and his patient Mr Tregentil. Set in Cornwall in the 1860s, Dr Carfax recognises the signs that Linnet and Amyot Trestane are unknowingly re-enacting the tragic events that befell Tristan and Isolde. He tries unsuccessfully to keep them apart.

See also my review on my blog.

This is a collection of the lyrics (no sheet music) to a large collection of famous ballads. Many are from Scotland and use Scots words with English annotations (very useful for Scrabble, if you're so inclined). Some entries are: Tam Lin, True Thomas, The Twa Corbies, Scarborough Fair, Mary Hamilton etc. Has a large section of Robin Hood ballads.