Melville House Books

Ruth Padel

Poet Ruth Padel resigned from her position as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University yesterday in the wake of the revelation on Sunday that she had discussed Derek Walcott‘s history of sexual harassment with two journalists. The revelation had quickly revived a virulent anger against her that had never really died down after Walcott had pulled out of the race for the poetry position, and Padel had won it. (See this earlier MobyLives report.) Calls for her resignation, if not for her beheading, were instantaneous and sputtering with rage — so much so that Padel resigned within 24 hours.

In a statement, quoted in this report from The Independent, Padel said, “I wish to do what is best for the university and I understand that opinion there is divided. I therefore resign from the chair of poetry. I hope wounds will now heal and I wish the next professor all the best.” She further explained, “I genuinely believe I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott’s withdrawal from the election. I wish he had not pulled out. I did not engage in a smear campaign against him, but, as a result of student concern, I naively —- and with hindsight unwisely —- passed on to two journalists, whom I believed to be covering the whole election responsibly, information that was already in the public domain.”

However, the first reports of Padel’s discussion with the journalists — generally acknowledged to be this one in The Times by Richard Wood, and this one by Richard Eden in the Sunday Telegraph — do not really contextualize her remarks beyond saying that they were made before an anonymous mailing detailing Walcott’s history to some Oxford faculty members. The reports don’t even mention who the journalists were, nor why whoever leaked the emails –presumably the journalists — waited until after the Oxford election to do so, and thereby provide the overheated animus against Padel such a sweeping, vindictive gotcha. Nor do we know how much of what she said they are quoting, as both quotes give the same fairly brief snippet:

“Some [of my] supporters add that what he does for students can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, reporting one of his two recorded cases of sexual harassment and that Obama is rumoured to have turned him down for his inauguration poem because of the sexual record. But I don’t think that’s fair.â€

She is also quoted as noting, “The harassment is all documented on the web.â€

Both the Times and Telegraph reports — and others that quickly appeared, such as this one in The Guardian, Padel’s most vociferous and unrelenting critic — did re-contextualize her comments, however, as “alerts” to the press …. indicating, apparently, that Padel was responsible for bringing to these two journalists’ attention matters that were, rather famously, on the public record.

It’s the wordplay allowing the floodgate of righteous viciousness to pour forth. Padel has steadfastly maintained she had nothing to do with the anonymous campaign against Walcott. There’s nothing you can charge her with if she was discussing the public record. But if she “alerted” a press that hadn’t done its job, well, then she’s a liar, and that’s far worse in England, apparently, than being a teacher who repeatedly sexually harasses his students.

Because if one thing is clear in this story that has now reached its sorry end, it’s that what Derek Walcott did never really mattered — it was always about Ruth Padel, a woman, winning. A remark by Clive James in the Guardian article linked above spoke for a common attitude: ”Derek Walcott is unlikely to be a menace to young women at the age of 75, but he would have delivered an extremely good series of lectures.” (And of course, no one commented on any conflict of interest when James threw his own hat into the ring for the job, as per this Guardian report.)

A commentary by Michael Deacon in the Telegraph similarly demeans the seriousness of the charges against Walcott, saying with the way things are nowadays, lots of famous British poets would never have a shot at the Oxford chair — not Lord Byron, a “womanizer”, nor Coleridge, a “drug fiend”, nor Keats, a “smackhead.” Of course, the chair was extant in their lifetimes, and no one offered it to them, nor would they have taken it, nor were they teachers, nor is being a drug addict or a drunk at all the same thing as being a predator of young students.

Then there’s the charge many used — including Deacon in the Telegraph and James in the Guardian – that the harassment charges against Walcott should be ignored because they’re “decades” old. Well, so is Walcott’s Nobel, which he won in 1992, which was before at least one of the prominent harassment cases against him. But no one is suggesting that should be forgotten.

But you get the point. Now her critics’ joy at Ruth Padel’s downfall, at the chance to get her, to see her life totally ruined while Walcott remains no more nor less than he was before, is palpable, throbbing … so much so that some of them even wrote to tiny, American MobyLives to give us an “alert” to her latest nefariousness  –  see comments that came in Sunday (to our most recent post about Padel) from novelist D.M. Thomas, for example, and a Canadian poet named Judith Fitzgerald, who felt inclined to lecture: “Misogyny’s not the issue (nor was it ever).”

But of course, what’s most evident is that it was never about anything else.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.