The Surf Guru (30 page)

Professor of botany at Mulholland University and director of Kingslee Memorial Herbarium, Ventura, Calif.

Hart, to his (few) friends.

I am not convinced that my father ever took him seriously enough to return his intense dislike.

Not surprisingly, my mother sought to keep her collegial relationship with Quilcock a closely guarded secret. For one thing, she was married to my father—a towering, imperial presence—but she was also a woman in a male-dominated field and could not afford to be seen as having anything less than a complete commitment to the academic orthodoxy and social pecking order of the day. It was a time, she lamented more than once, when even the most brilliant scientific work would be ignored if it was known that a woman had done it.

If you were a student of his, you surely will remember the difficulty of facing him in such moments!

The dispute as to where his collection would be kept was one of Quilcock's last and greatest battles. See profile of Fitzgilbert,
infra
.

The Complete Field Journals of Aeneas Scottwell-Scott
, edited by P. St. J. Kingslee (Boston: Stamen Publishing, 1924), p. 141.

These include his magnum opus, the three-volume
Scottwell-Scott Manual: Higher Plants of the American Southwest
(1901). A review of both men's field notes proves that Quilcock's contributions were significant, although Scottwell-Scott did not highlight this fact in the publication itself.

Scottwell-Scott wore white—all white, always—and his clothing usually bore the stains of his earthy trade. “His only concession to sartorial splendor,” Quilcock wrote, “was the monogram he had stitched in blue onto every shirt he owned. Sadly, though not surprisingly, this monogram was a source of great amusement to his rivals and their callow students. In tribute, I have had many articles of clothing stitched with my own initials, also in blue.” Of course, this, too, produced snickers in the hallways at Mulholland; indeed, I recall my father delighting in the use of the epithet “hack” on the rare occasions H. A. Quilcock was mentioned in our home.

Consider, for example: Quilcock long assumed that he would be the obvious choice to serve as Scottwell-Scott's official biographer. Instead, the elder botanist chose my father, whom Quilcock had always seen as an interloper as well as a rival for Scottwell-Scott's approval and respect. Quilcock thought a grave injustice had been done to him, although he contrived a variety of rationalizations to place the blame for this upon my father and not upon their mentor. By this time, it should be noted, my father had already published his Willis Gray Patterson Prize-winning
Endemic Plants of the Sky-Islands of the San Umberto Archipelago
(1912), and Quilcock's own reputation was falling to tatters in the wake of the Cates incident (see profile of Slade Cates,
infra
) and my father's devastating review in
Stamen
of his rushed, poorly organized
Flora of Coahuila
(1913). Quilcock, for his part, insisted that his manuscript had been “butchered and bowdlerized” by an overzealous editor who surely had been paid off by one of his nemeses.

A bit of explanation
in re
taxonomical matters may be in order for lay readers. Taxonomists in any field generally fall into one of two categories: “splitters” and “lumpers.” In botanical scholarship, acrimonious debates rage over whether physical differences between two individual (though similar) plants are significant enough that the current definition of the species must be
split
(i.e., that the two plants should
not
be treated as identical in a taxonomical sense) or if these differences merely illustrate an acceptable amount of individual variation within a species whose current definition remains valid (i.e., that the two plants should be
lumped
together taxonomically). Scottwell-Scott and Quilcock generally preferred
not
to split species absent overwhelming evidence of difference, and they were suspicious of their colleagues who continually racked up publications defining “new” species and bestowing them with names of their own choosing. As you will see in the profiles, Quilcock detested “knee-jerk splitting”; he saw in this practice evidence of not just shoddy scholarship but arrogance, self-indulgence, even hubris. “To name an organism,” he wrote in a letter to my mother, “is to arrogate to oneself the power of a deity, to attempt to stamp the natural world indelibly with one's mark. Splitters are vile, irredeemable self-servers and pretenders to the divine. The thought of how greatly they outnumber the sensible people in our field often causes me great anxiety, which then produces grievous dysfunction of the bowels (specifically mine).” Letter to Anna Sophia Parker, October 22, 1927.

Note to prospective publishers: the full manuscript of Quilcock's profiles and my commentary will be made available upon my receipt of appropriate remuneration.

I had hoped that this compendium would be accepted for publication in
Stamen
, which has, for better or worse, been the journal of record for botanical scholarship for the last century. I thought it would be fitting, as the journal had never recognized Quilcock during his own lifetime. The only mention of him in its pages? The briefest of obituaries—two paragraphs that fairly dripped with the schadenfreude that plagues academia in general and botany in particular. My hopes for Quilcock's redemption in
Stamen
went for naught, though, as its editorial board appears to be populated with the ignorant, complacent descendants of the insufferable fools against whom Quilcock so justifiably railed.

Quilcock appears to have written this piece within days of his mentor's death on August 4, 1916.

One doubts he would have fared any better in the academic environment of the present, considering the institutional hostility to my Quilcock Project. If certain ultimata from certain deans are to be taken seriously, today's academic may not choose to pursue innovative scholarly writing if there is to be any cost to his “traditional publishing record,” “commitment to undergraduate instruction,” “grooming,” or “maintenance of regular office hours.”