Ruth Padel

One of the now-abandoned traditions of the literary magazine, Granta, was that it never, or hardly ever, published poetry. In my dozen years as editor, I think I published three poems — by Michael Ondaatje, Les Murray and Vikram Seth. My predecessor as editor, Bill Buford, had one or two in his early editions and then imposed a complete ban for 15 years, broken only by a poem from Salman Rushdie. I once asked Bill what he had against the form. “I quite like poetry,” he said, “It’s the poets I can’t stand.” I felt I didn’t know enough about either, and proved this to myself in 1997 when I made the mistake of publishing a 13-word poem by Vikram Seth called “Sampati”, about the eponymous character in the Ramayana who, like Icarus, flies too near the sun. We added this information in an epigraph and footnote to the poem, without telling the poet, and Vikram was so furious that he made us publish the poem again in a later edition minus its informative dressing. This took up more space than you might think for a thirteen-word poem, because every word had a line to itself apart from “un-done”, which took up two.

We were only trying to help the ignorant reader, but we were definitely in the wrong. After all, how many footnotes does T.S. Eliot have? (Not enough.) I vowed to steer clear of poetry in future and made the policy plain to every poet, so that when I got to know Ruth Padel a little, I knew that she knew there was no point in her sending me poems. It made friendship easier. Padel is a likeable woman, a classicist as well as a poet, whose great-great grandfather was Charles Darwin and whose brother, Felix, lives as an anthropologist in Orissa. She was once kind enough to dedicate a poem to me, a poem that had arisen out of a conversation we’d had about global warming and included the word, “darling”. The endearment referred to her daughter, but as ambiguity is one of poetry’s inherent qualities, some people reached a different conclusion when the poem appeared in the London Review of Books, and my explanation (“No, no, no — my name’s there because we’d been talking about sea-level rise”) drew sceptical looks.

This isn’t my reason for liking her — far from it. I like her because she’s a passionate evangelist for imperilled causes — mainly poetry, but also tigers — and in these watchful, ironic times much too earnest and voluble for her own good. These are endearing qualities, but a more careful person could have become the Oxford Professor of Poetry, as Ruth Padel has not.

The story has made Indian and American as well as British newspapers, but just in case the words “Oxford” and “poetry” have put you off, here is a brief summary. There has been a Professor of Poetry at Oxford since 1708, with a couple of gaps during the two World Wars. Unusually, the position is elected rather than appointed. The university’s academic staff and all Oxford graduates have the right to vote, but very few exercise it because voting can be done only in person in Oxford; and also, possibly, because not many people care. From an electorate estimated at about 150,000, only a few hundred put their slips in the ballot box. The professorship lasts for five years, does not need to be held by a poet (Christopher Ricks, who retired this year, is an academic), and carries a small stipend of £6,901. All the incumbent is obliged to do for this money is deliver three lectures a year. The distinction of the post rather than any money or influence is what provides its appeal — Seamus Heaney and W.H. Auden have both held it, though so have many lesser names, some now totally obscure.

This year’s candidates were all practising poets: Ruth Padel, the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and Arvind Mehrotra, professor of English at Allahabad. In terms of publicity, it looked tremendously promising. Whatever the election’s outcome, Oxford could boast that it had modernized an ancient institution by electing the first female or the first black or the first Indian Professor of Poetry. Then things began to go wrong. Anonymous emails reminded a hundred, mainly women, academics that in the early 1980s Walcott had faced charges of sexual harassment from a student at Harvard, where he was then teaching. It was long ago, in an age when sexual harassment cases were an American campus fashion, but Walcott withdrew from the Oxford race citing “a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”. That left Padel and Mehrotra. Padel denied any involvement in the anti-Walcott campaign and regretted its outcome, though a suspicion grew that some connection existed; an ex-partner of hers who writes for The Independent was the first journalist to publicize the old stories of sexual harassment. The election went ahead and Padel won by 297 votes to Mehrotra’s 129, only to have her triumph stained and ultimately cancelled by the discovery of an email she’d sent to two journalists only days before The Independent published its story. The email mentioned Walcott’s age (79) and poor health, and invoked a separate charge of sexual harassment at Boston University as well the Harvard case. Padel also suggested that what he “actually” did for students could be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor.

The email didn’t look good. In fact, it looked very bad. Padel had clearly been promoting her own cause by prompting friendly journalists to smear the rival candidate most likely to win. An equally ruthless, but wiser, poet might have secured the same objective by mentioning Walcott’s personal troubles over a drink — in literary circles, the Walcott stories are stale gossip — or simply hoping that the rumours would somehow emerge in print. But in Padel is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm and incontinence can be hard to separate. She forgot (as we all sometimes do) that the first rule of emailing is never to write an email that you’d be unhappy to have forwarded, unless you trust your correspondent utterly. The clamour against Padel grew; some women writers who should know better detected a sexist plot against her. She hung on for a day or two and then resigned late last month from a post she had still to take up, cutting a pitiable and muddled figure at her press conference.

That leaves Mehrotra, whose campaign has been energetically managed by the writer, Amit Chaudhuri. The official position of Oxford University, so far as one can tell, is that it will organize fresh elections later this year. Many Mehrotra supporters are disappointed, arguing that he won a ‘significant’ number of votes and as the only candidate left standing has the right to be declared the winner. This, they argue, would be the usual result in a democratic process. The university looks unlikely to agree, and Mehrotra himself isn’t keen. He would be crazy to touch the post with a bargepole. For ever after, he would be known as the poet who got the job only as the accidental by-product of a smear campaign. Anyway, why would he want it? Everyone connected with the Oxford campaign has stressed how much their candidate would achieve for the promotion and understanding of poetry; what has been achieved instead is a better understanding of the all-too-human frailty of poets. As for the democratic process, ‘democracy’ in this case amounts to the lobbying and petty machination of no more than a few dozen people.

So: small storm in Oxford teacup, two hurt, nobody dead. But the method of choosing Oxford’s Professor of Poetry surely needs a radical rethink. Would you appoint a visiting professor of nuclear physics by totting up votes from a tiny self-selecting sample of graduates? Or of theology, or economics, or French? Of any subject at all? If poetry matters as much as its devotees insist, then the professor in the subject should get the job in the same way as everyone else: through selection panels and the judgment of his or her peers. It isn’t a perfect process, but at least it reduces the risk of public humiliation — and it might save the reputation of one of the world’s oldest and oddest professorships.