In what is likely to be one of modern literature’s least memorable scandals, Ruth Padel recently stepped down as Oxford Professor of Poetry after learning that the university was “bitterly divided” over her apparent involvement in a smear campaign against Derek Walcott. Some commentators greeted the news as a vindication of Walcott’s withdrawal from the race, with a grumble that the whole business had degenerated into “a low and degrading attempt at character assassination.” Others waxed philosophical about professorial lechery and poetic genius. Predictably, much has been made of the fact that Padel is a descendant of Charles Darwin, as though that explained or excused her vaulting ambition. Fortunately the affair has also provoked some serious discussion about the value of Walcott’s work.
In a long, occasionally condescending analysis, the Times described Walcott, as someone who had tried to “express the soul and spirit of the Caribbean [which] he sees as a colonial region from which all indigenous influences have been eradicated and which endlessly tries without succeeding to grow into itself.” While accurate, as far as it goes, this hardly suggests that much of the power in Walcott’s poetry comes from his appreciation that these desolate-sounding post-colonials also harbour cultural memories which allow them to straddle more than one tradition. That is an important omission. Throughout Omeros, his epic redescription of the Caribbean, Walcott makes this point brilliantly by mixing literary references drawn from ‘high’ European culture – Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf – into descriptions of St Lucia’s fishermen and taxi drivers. Even more impressive, perhaps, is the growing realization among literary critics that a similarly ambitious scheme lies beneath Walcott’s other formidable long poem, Another Life, published almost twenty years earlier. Rightly understood, the real challenge for Walcott’s Caribbean isn’t the overcoming of emptiness – that’s Naipaul’s territory – so much as it is the reintegration of lost selves; a recovery of what we have been rather than disappointment at what we are not. An ironic theme given the current imbroglio.
After a run of relative unknowns, Oxford’s recent Professors of Poetry have included the distinguished Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon and the seemingly omniscient scholar-poet James Fenton. Although the post remains slightly obscure and spectacularly underpaid, Walcott’s appointment would certainly have provided a gratifying close to his remarkable career. A chance not only to pen a few tributes to a literary tradition to which he has devoted most of his working life, but also a simple way to take his place among a group of poets –. Auden, Graves, Heaney – whose work helped shape his own. That chance has gone. All it took was a few dossiers with embarrassing details about his alleged indiscretions at Boston and Harvard, and a little encouragement to the literary gossip mongers who are a perennial feature of British literary life.
Although all the facts of the smear campaign have yet to emerge, what little has surfaced reflects very badly on Ms Padel. The normally restrained James Fenton found it “disgusting to watch as this hypocritical duo [Padel and a sympathetic literary journalist] kicked a 79-year-old poet in the slats, not because he represented some kind of threat to the weak-willed young women of Oxford (come on!) but because he stood in the way of Padel’s ambitions.” Now, having protested too much at Walcott’s withdrawal, Ms Padel seems to have been hoisted on her own petard. It is not a disgrace she is likely to outlast. In fact she now faces the unenviable fate of being known, among the general non-poetry-reading public, neither as a descendant of Evolution’s great theorist, nor as Oxford’s first female Professor of Poetry, but simply as a good poet who cheated a better one out of his just deserts.
