People who wouldn’t dream of having anything so trashy as Grazia on the coffee table, who claim not to be the slightest bit interested in the state of Brad and Angelina’s marriage, are often gripped by the seamy, rowdy lives of our poets and writers. They’re a source of glamour and gossip for more high-minded readers. Little wonder then that the gay and confessional poet Carol Ann Duffy said that she thought ‘long and hard’ about stepping on to this crowded stage of literary Brangelinas. Little wonder also that in a deeply shaming incident for Oxford University, the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, 79, this week withdrew from the elections to become its Professor of Poetry, which take place on Saturday, after being the victim of what he termed ‘a low and degrading attempt at character assassination’.
The nomination of Walcott — who in his native St Lucia is so adored that there’s even a square was named after him — was the idea of his friend, Professor Hermione Lee, who labelled him the ‘Professor of cool’. The campaign began with jovial assertions of ‘yes we can’. Walcott is known to be a favourite poet of Obama and would have been the first black poet to hold the Oxonian role. His rival, Ruth Padel, whose election is now almost certainly assured (unless Saturday’s voting is postponed in the wake of the scandal), would be the first woman.
Padel swiftly won the support of Melvyn Bragg and Boris Johnson, as well as legions of scientists keen to promote the connection between science and poetry. (Her book Darwin: A Life of Poems is an impressive biography in poems of her great-great-grandfather.) Walcott, however, beyond being ‘cool’, is a towering figure in post-colonial literature and was the star name who most excited the English faculty.
Despite Walcott’s illustrious list of backers, from Alan Hollinghurst to John Carey, the election swiftly became ‘presidential’ for all the wrong reasons — dirty, personal and with one rogue faction of Padel supporters gleefully brandishing the smoking gun of the 1990 tome The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus by two American academics, Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner. (Fans of the book might also enjoy the even more ludicrously titled Abusing the Ivory Power.)
With just a week to go before the elections, in which any Oxford don or graduate can vote, 200 academics received an anonymous dossier detailing an incident of alleged sexual harassment in 1982 when Walcott taught at Harvard. This week, Lee hit back at what she termed ‘gutter tactics’. Padel too, distressed by the turn of events, spoke of the way in which ‘the chance for a debate about poetry and about the kind of Professor the university wants’ had instead become something ‘dreadful’. ‘What we all should have been talking about all this time was — and is — poetry.’
Rarely has there been a more galling reminder that poetry is most often of general interest, though, than when it’s dragging mild scandal or tragedy in its wake. Our appetite is insatiable. Keats and Fanny Brawne are the subject of the Jane Campion treatment in the forthcoming film Bright Star. It takes its cue from Keats dying in Rome, wishing that he could fall asleep on his lover for one last time: ‘Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,/ To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,/ Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,/ Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,/ And so live ever — or else swoon to death.’
Keats and Brawne’s 20th-century heirs are Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who even now are presented as performers in the greatest morality play of our era. Hughes wrote that he felt he’d been ‘auditioned’ to be ‘the male lead in your drama’. Sex and death, the poet Craig Raine once quipped, are the ‘big safe themes’ — but when it comes to highbrow entertainment, sex and death and writers are even better.
Walcott said that he was ‘disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election’ and that he had no wish ‘to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role or to myself... What happened 20 years ago I have never commented upon and I have never given my side of what happened. That will continue to be the case.’
Walcott is 79. Is it ‘young-ist’ and politically incorrect to wonder if beyond a certain age anything you have or haven’t done ceases to matter? One of the great poems of making peace with yourself is by him, (‘Love after Love’) where he counsels: ‘Give back your heart/ to itself, to the stranger who has loved you// all your life, whom you ignored/ for another, who knows you by heart./ Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,// the photographs, the desperate notes,/ peel your own image from the mirror./ Sit. Feast on your life.’
It’s perhaps worth noting that creative writing tutors, whose courses tend to attract the self-obsessed and sometimes just obsessed, could have car stickers: ‘Honk if you haven’t been done for sexual harassment.’
Before Walcott called a dignified halt, Professor Lee might have been running a campaign for Byron (who slept with his half-sister) himself or Yeats (who proposed to Maud Gonne’s daughter) when she boldly asked: ‘Should great poets who behave badly be locked away from social interaction? We are acting as purveyors of poetry not of chastity.’
Sylvia Plath’s model for her own carnivorous use of her experiences for her art was her sometime creative writing tutor, the eminently badly behaved Robert Lowell. He wrote one of the greatest love poems of the 1960s about campus shenanigans: ‘All life’s grandeur/ Is something with a girl in summer...’ The ‘something’ today would probably be termed a case for Ms Wright Dziech and Ms Weiner.
But Plath and Lowell didn’t create interest in the private lives of writers, they took it as a given. And it’s not a 20th-century fixation either: Shelley’s elegy for Keats, ‘Adonais’, is written with all of the savvy romanticism of a modern-day picture editor. What they share is the knowledge that the death of someone young, beautiful and broken-hearted has a potency all of its own.
Beyond sex and death, the other big safe literary themes are divorce and dentistry: there’s never more interest in a multiple Booker winner than when his marriage is on the rocks or his teeth are falling out. Whereas Kate Moss, Madonna and Jennifer Aniston make the world of gossip magazines go round, for the ‘serious’ media the favoured literary leads are: Martin Amis (his father; Tina Brown; his teeth; his connection to Fred West and/or how he exploited it), Salman Rushdie (his wives; whether or not he was ‘worth’ the bill to protect him and/or is he grateful) and Ian McEwan (his lost adopted brother and/or the time his ex-wife ran off for 48 hours with his kids, therefore inspiring all evil in his novels).
And every so often a bright shiny new character, say a literary version of Lindsay Lohan or Lady Gaga, is added to the firmament — preferably with an eating disorder, or an addiction, or a weakness for unsuitable objects of affection. This election has dragged poets even further into the gutter. In a culture that mindlessly confuses talent with celebrity, perhaps we need to be reminded that stars of the literary variety deserve better than this.