Poetic License
From the New York Times, May 12:
LONDON — This month dozens of academics at Oxford University received anonymous packages. Each contained photocopied pages from a book describing decades-old allegations of sexual harassment against Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet.
It is still unclear who sent the material, but on Tuesday it had what was probably its intended effect. Mr. Walcott, a candidate to become the next Oxford professor of poetry in an election on Saturday, withdrew from the race.
[...]
Mr. Walcott’s withdrawal leaves two other poets — Ruth Padel, a Briton, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, an Indian — still in the race for the professorship. Ms. Padel, 63, is the better known of the two and seems almost certain to win.
[...]
Ms. Padel, a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin who is interested in the relationship between poetry and science, said on Tuesday that she was “shattered” that Mr. Walcott had withdrawn from the election and that she had not known about the anonymous letters until a reporter informed her late last week. She said she regularly used his poems and criticism in her classes and had been looking forward to using the race as a vehicle for a debate about the meaning of poetry at Oxford.
“I just feel scooped out inside,” she said in an interview. “He’s my colleague, and he’s a poet, and I don’t want poets to be humiliated. Of course we should take harassment seriously, but there are other issues here, too, and it seems horrible, this anonymous campaign.”
CAMBRIDGE, England — A historic month for women in British poetry turned sour on Monday when the first woman in 301 years elected to Oxford University’s prestigious chair in poetry [Ruth Padel] resigned and admitted what she had previously denied — that she had played a part in a covert effort to taint her main rival for the post with old allegations of sexual impropriety.
Wow, that is a shocking development. Quite a coincidence as well, as I was just reading about Padel’s appointment in National Review only a few minutes ago.
“Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”
— Attribution disputed
This is why we talk about “original sin.” To be shocked is to not understand human nature. It is an axiom that you never know a person unless you have a financial or a rival encounter with her.
Original sin rings true and is a valuable heads up. The problem is when we think it can be magically taken away or we use it as an excuse for mediocrity. Even worse when we believe that infants will go to hell if they do not have it removed.
The story of Lady Padel is a tale which happens 90% of the time. The actions are usually better disquised. Of course in this case she did not admit it. She was discovered.
Survival of the fittest by Ms. Padel, the great-great-granddaughter of who was it again? ;)
Actually, as soon as I read that she was “shattered” Walcott’s withdrawal, I knew what was coming.
Also interesting how much of her original statement could be read as a prediction of her present post-discovery feelings — the feeling of being “scooped out inside”; the consciousness of doing this to a colleague; the urgent desire not to be humiliated; the sense that harassment (hers of him) must be “taken seriously,” but that there are “other issues.”
Terrible story.
For my money, the most interesting point in the NYT article is the last paragraph:
Michael Deacon in The Telegraph cited Lord Byron (“womanizer”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“drug fiend”), John Keats (“smackhead”), Rudyard Kipling (“imperialist”), T. S. Eliot (“lines that could be construed as racist”) and Dylan Thomas (“drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends”), among others, and concluded, “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post — they just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”
It’s not to say that I condone such behavior from Walcott and others (I don’t). It’s not to say either that such behavior should be dismissed out of hands at considerations for the Oxford post or another prestigious one (it shouldn’t be dismissed). But IMO there ought to be some distance between personal conduct and talent/ability. This post, after all, concerns poetry, not morality. (Ideally, though a lot more tricky in practice, it applies to politics as well.)
Strictly speaking, the post is a university position that, presumably, includes some contact with students, and Walcott’s particular misconduct occurred in that very setting. But it was a long time ago and, apparently, quite episodic and not a continuing pattern of conduct. I’m not even sure his misconduct could be strictly classified as immoral.
John Keats was a “smackhead” most likely because he was dying from tuberculosis, and in any event, before the stuff was remotely considered illegal or dangerous.
Not to digress or go tangential, but most of the towering innovators in jazz were world-class reprobates at one time or another in their artistic careers:
Bix Biederbeck, alcoholic
Charlie Parker, heroin addict
Fats Navarro, heroin addict
Bud Powell, heroin addict
Miles Davis, heroin/cocaine addict
John Coltrane, heroin addict
Theses were men who changed the music forever, and if judged by the above standards, would not be in the Jazz Hall of Fame.
So what’s my point? Artistic talent seems to be independent of good judgment and self-discipline? But what else is new?
Like odium theologicum literary rivalry can be a powerful force, but occasionally it can be amusing, especially when it occurs among friends.
William Butler Yeats described two of his literary acquaintances, Edward Martyn, a cofounder with Yeats and Lady Gregory of the Irish Literary Theatre (and a devout Catholic) and George Moore, an Irish novelist:
“They were cousins and inseparable friends, bound one to the other by mutual contempt. When I told Martyn that Moore had good points, he replied: ‘I know Moore a great deal longer than you do. He has no good points.’ And a week or two later Moore said: ‘That man Martyn is the most selfish man alive. He thinks that I am damned and he doesn’t care.’”
Yeats described their friendship in a little play called The Cat and the Moon.
Paul Claudel was a nasty man. Terribly mean to Gide after Gide outed himself. W. H. Auden wrote of Claudel::
“Time will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.”
in original version of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
Claudel had a bout of homosexual panic about Gide, but he was not a nasty man — au contraire. I think his greatness lies beyond such categories as nice and nasty — he was a visionary giant.
By the way, the second “him” in the quote refers to Yeats, not Claudel:
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him [Yeats] for writing well.
Time currently frowns on Claudel, despite occasional revivals of his major dramas — simply because no one is ready for the effort of reading him and handling his baroque, grandiose Catholic and Biblical world view. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/aug/14/theatre.art.
I am shocked to learn that the poetess was guilty of the very crime she denounced. But this should make us cautious about believing unproved allegations or defenses, however movingly put forward — I think of clerical sex abuse cases.
Fr, O’Leary -
Homosexual panic? Where is the evidence that Claudel was attracted physically to Gide? He was terribly hurt bvecause Gide had not revealed to him IClaudel) that he (Gide) was gay. Considering that Claudel hsd thought that Gide was a close friend, what he had to say about Gide publicly was as nasty as anything I’ve ever read. And Claudel’s continuing to write poetry about his ex=mistress was, to put it mildly, insensitive to the feelings of his wife. He also pretty much abandoned his crazy sister in the insane asylum Didn’t visit her for years. Not my idea of a good Christian gentleman.
By the way, Claudel is one of my favorite poets. He is indeed a giant. And was a nasty man.
I may be misusing the phrase “homosexual panic” — I meant that homosexuality was troubling and shocking to Claudel in a way that suggests some of his own personal pathologies were coming into play. He was amazingly blind to Gide’s homosexuality, plainly in evidence in l’Immoraliste some twenty years earlier.
That Claudel had deep sexual pathologies is surely evident when one reads L’Annonce faite a Marie (and the even stranger earlier versions), Tete d’Or, or the Coufontaine trilogy. I had meant to write an essay on sacrifice in Claudel, but found the material so disturbing that I gave up (see Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the trilogy, or Jacques Pohier on Violaine).
The ex-mistress was a huge myth in Claudel’s imaginary world, just as Maud Gonne was in Yeats’s; Yeats’s wife never objected to that as far as I know; did Claudel’s?
On the Camille Claudel issue, I do not think we are in a position to judge. It is like Eliot’s relationship to his first wife. Severe mental illness throws many families into disarray and it is rather tasteless of the critics to barge in decades later, secure in the confidence that they would have handled it so wonderfully better.
The idea that Claudel was miffed that his close friend Gide has not confided to him that he was gay is rather misleading. Claudel thought that homosexuality was something like diabolical possession. His horror at Gide was also a moral horror, he thought Gide was a frivolous mocker, who had turned his back on Grace in the form of Claudel’s religious proselytism. I wonder if his friendship with Gide was really ‘close’ in the ordienary sense. More a literary and ideological brotherhood, perhaps, that meant a lot to the isolated Claudel (off in China etc. most of the time) and that was sorely disappointed.
Fr. O’Leary –
Do write about Claudel — not for the academics but for the current younger generations who probably have never heard of hm. (For Commonweal, maybe?) I haven’t read that much of his work, but did read read some background — the Chaigne biography, his correspondence with Gide, and a biography of his sister (which might be biased against him). One really needs some background to see what he is getting at at times And what a fascinating man he was. Much more so than Wallace Stevens, with whom he is often compared.
He’s gotten such bad press personally he needs a defender. I grant you that it would seem to be extremely unlikely that such a rotter as he supposedly was could write poetry of such surpassing beauty. Maybe you could show that the poet revealed in the poems couldn’t possibly be such an awful fellow. Complexity, complexity..
(But I still think his public statements about Gide went too far. Poor Gide.)
P. S.
His wife is barely mentioned in the biography — not a sign of a happy marriage or even a just-tolerable one. Sounds like the author was waiting for her to die before telling the whole story, whatever it was. But yes, this is just speculation.
And I also wonder what Walcott’s whole story is.
Ann Olivier and Joseph O’Leary,
Most interesting exchange on Claudel and Gide. I didn’t know about this on them & will have to look into it to learn more.
As for Olivier’s comment to O’Leary: “Do write about Claudel — not for the academics but for the current younger generations who probably have never heard of him.” Very, very true. To Americans, French intellectuals seem to peak the decade before (Claudel, Mournier, Gide, etc.) and the decade after WWII (Camus, Sartre, Marcel, etc.) But not much since. About 6 or 7 years ago, I had a drink at a country club-type place in Washington, DC, and the company included two Catholics: a sixty-something banker and a twenty-something philosophy grad student. The older man asked the younger man what he’s interested in & he said Gabriel Marcel. The older man got animated, saying he used to study Marcel in college. The rest of the table (other than myself, who had dabbled in Marcel in college) had no idea what they were talking about.
Historyman –
It seems to me that one reason Claudel is not better known is because English=speaking people lump him in with other French poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud who often don’t intend to “make snese”. It’s all feelings and states of consciousness communicated primarily with images. Claudel’s images are great as any, but he also makes great overt sense, though sometimes he takes some effort to get to.
Anyway, hiw poetry deserves to be much better known. But I fear those who do know his reputation whether it be a ffair or not (anti-Semitic, super-conservitive politically and religiously, anti-homosexual) won’t be inclined to try him unless someone writes an apologia for him.
Ann, you mention anti-Semitisim, and such a large feature of the French Right before WWII that it plagued French Catholic and secular intellectuals on the Right after the war. Maritain, for example, was quite anti-Semitic, although the extent was not known until much later. To be sure, it was a problem among righ-leaning intellectuals elsewhere, not just in France (e.g., TS Eliot and his genteel anti-Semitic comments). But postwar revelations of French collaboration with the Nazis regarding Jews led to a lowering of the reputation of prewar figures such Claudel (esp. since he was involvd directly in politics). That in spite of the fact that he was very much anti-Nazi when Hitler was in power.
Ah, the world of French prewar Catholic intellectuals seems so distant from ours: Claudel, Bernanos, Peguy, Mournier, Mauriac, etc. So distant that I just realized I’ve strayed far from the original topic of this thread. Ok, just across the English Channel, so perhaps not too far. :)
Historyman –
I’m no Claudel expert, but I’ve read that though he shared some of the anti-Semitic notions otypical of middle-class French of the time that during WW II he actually wrote a public letter decrying the treatment of the Jews, and such opposition could be dangerous. So I suspect the accusations against him are greatly exaggerated.
As to Maritain, I did my dissertation on him, and I never came across any accusations of anti=Semitism I think it is very unlikely he was anti-Semitic, at least as an adult, because his wife, Raissa Maritain was a Jew, the granddaughter of two Rabbis, no less. After their conversion he was associated with some of the very conservative l’Action Francaise people,. and at the end of his life he was vert critical of the changes of Vatican II. Maybe the charges you read were a matter of guilt by association? Unfortunately, those things do happen.
Ann, thanks for catching me on Maritain. Of course it wouldn’t be Maritain, who wrote a book called “Anti-Semitism.” I knew too that his wife was a Russian Jew. It was Bernanos that I was thinking, that old monarchist. My apology to Jacques and Raissa!
Btw, I didn’t know that they were associated to l’Action Francaise. But speaking of that, Bernanos was also a supporter. Or, at least, a supporter of Maurras, its openly anti-Semitic founder. The French Old Right was something, wouldn’t you say? Full of brilliant people, but also advocates of some of the lousiest causes.
Historyman –
You inspired me to check out Bernanos on Widipedia, and I’m suprised to discover that he was so very conservative. It amazes me sometimes how the best artists manage to eliminate their personal eccentriities from their work (see Claudell too). What a mess of paradoxes Bernanos was! French intellectuals can be so crazy, but at least they think, which is more than you can say for some of the current Republican so-called leadership Rush Limbaugh indeed !
I wish dotCommonweal would have a thread or threads sometimes about the value o a basically conservative world-view. There are certainly rational conservatives on this blog, and I would like to hear them discuss their philosophical underpinnings. I tend to see them as basically pessimistic and disciplined as opposed to the more optimistic and relatively undisciplined liberals. And then there are the libertarians who are hybrids — optimistic and undisciplined
At any rate, it seems to me that fiction writers and poets as interpreters and critics of a society’s values, are much more honored in Europe than here — hence the brouhaha in England now.. Pity we don’t. It’s all very well to have philosophers and social scientists writing in academic journals, but people need images to think with — serious images, not just “reality” shows and comic books. Abstractions go just so far.