Faculty Profile

A cockney "Do come in, do come in, do come in; sit you down, sit you down" and the show is on. Lavish requests to share his Virginia Rounds are poured out, flavored with an extreme East-end accent and strained through a prodigious black moustache. Twinkling eyes and a quick twitch of the heavily-bushed mouth signal that this is nimble-witted company. Immediately one senses that here is a true scholar, soaked with the disciplinary English tradition. He is modest about his life-history, protesting that the academic life is a series of books and lectures. Endowed with no financial advantages, Nock struggled his way through the Portsmouth, England, public schools, gained scholastic renown by studying a path through Trinity College, Cambridge, and cased his mature days travelling, researching, reading and writing. But here is a character whose personality is so diverting that the usual stories of war-experiences, travel tales or tight squeezes have to take a back seat. It is more interesting to know about Arthur Darby Nock's ideas, see him in action, and discover why he was acclaimed the most comical student ever to hit Trinity. Let's take in a lecture on the history of religions at Harvard 5.

A commotion in the doorway has sounded his triumphant arrival and Nock shuffles up the aisle, tipping his cocked hat to admirers and gayly swinging a useless cane. As he hustles to the platform he appears flustered about the coming performance. He dumps out a stack or books and papers on the table and more or less tears of his monotonous black cloaking, revealing another layer of rumpled blackness. The first communication to the audience may be anything from a grin to an inimitable gargle -- one of those special Nock guttural noises denoting pause and hesitancy. Then a stream of words buried from comprehension by three factors: their own weightiness, the accent and the moustache. Gaining confidence before the note-laborers, Nock figures it is time to give them a show. And so he changes his glasses, fumbles for a page in a book, jots down a few notes and in fact carries on research in public, proving he can talk and do anything else at the same time. Soon tiring of the limitations of the desk, Nock will set out on one of his famous peripatetic lectures up and down the narrow stage extending across the room. On this journey he demonstrates his acrobatic agility by paddling the arms through the air. Tradition likes to remember the time over-exuberance ended him up flat on the floor. The wandering begins to assume the likeness of a relay-race; a favorite heating pipe near the window must be tagged before the return to the desk. But the hike may be interrupted by a noisy sneezing attack requiring a five to ten minute clean up job, accompanied by an incoherent lecture muffled by his towel-sized handkerchief. Invariably there is a periodical clothes-adjusting campaign, ranging from shoe lacing to shirt buttoning. The closing five minutes bring a cessation of the vaudeville and a sudden turn to sweeping phrases in Greek, Latin, Arabic and occasionally English, in a vain attempt to tie together the lost lecture.

At thirty-nine, Nock is one of the more aggressive members of the Faculty. He has netted an enviable string of honorary degrees and societies in Europe and America. Among his several books is the well-known "Conversion." In his field of near-eastern ancient history, sociology and religion, he is the respected authority. Nock is an immutable believer in the disciplined education, preferring a mastery over a small ground to a widely spread glib acquaintance. To him the greatest social crime is the easy school. In this he speaks from experience, for, born of humble parentage, it was only his determination which lifted him far above his class. Not yet has he slackened the pace, for the still does all his work from source material taken directly from the archives of Asia Minor, records which demand a speaking knowledge of the world's most difficult tongues. An amazed tutee once caught him translating an original Greek text directly into Sanskrit as fast as writing allowed. His scholarship has carried him from the docks of Portsmouth to friendship with luminaries such as Kittredge, Russell, Gay, and Housman. Favorite recreations besides writing a book include Wodehouse, detective fiction, and travelling--the latter having taken him to every port of Europe save one, all of the Near East and most of North and South America.

Nock absolutely refuses to let erudition exclude humor. A good time is his ideal, whether on the platform at Harvard or in the catacombs of Rome. A messy desk and a baggy suit are the first steps to scholastic success. He prides himself on the library so swelling that it over-flows onto the kitchen stove. Life for him is a succession of research, lectures, writing and travel. He must, in his own words, "walk just fast enough forward so as not to run backwards, Righto!"