DAVID HOCKNEY

Q by William Golding

The top capital Q looks to its left, turning its back on the small q which is more like a weapon than a decent letter. The next Q down is obviously paddling its own canoe. This is a great pleasure to the Qin-the-street which suffers from having always to push a U (rarely ‘an U’) in front of it all the time. It can only get ride of ‘U’ if it takes the desperate step of going into translation from the Arabic and who would want to do that? The Q beneath the paddling one is a sessile kind of Q, rather self-satisfied and wondering whether it is an apple or the hindquarters of a cat. Few things are more self-satisfied than the hindquarters of a cat. It triumphed as I shall explain.

The next Q down is not so much a Q as a Quarrel (a short heavy, square-headed arrow or bolt, OUP 2nd ed.), the shock waves of supersonic flight clearly shown. After that we come back to another version of our left-looking Q but this time bolt upright and a classical Marxist.

All these I can now reveal are but sorry attempts on the part of the young Q to give itself a defined personality. They are its prentice pieces. The young Q had literary ambitions and its true masterpiece was a masquerade (which it kept up for more than eighty years) as a Cornish man of letters, going under the unlikely pseudonym of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in which guise it wrote many books and gave some pleasure to many. Indeed, it acquired such a degree of celebrity that it was at last able to abandon the pseudonym and even the intolerable U and appear on the covers of its books in its naked and self-satisfied purity. This one, the fourth Q, the sessile apple/cat was surely Mr Hockney’s favourite to judge from the tender elegance of its delineation.