He is the modern world’s greatest living poet. Or a dirty old man who should
not be left alone with female students. Or both. Or neither. Of those four
options, only the last seems wholly unlikely in the case of Derek Walcott.
The winner of the 1992 Nobel prize in literature and the most widely
applauded writer to have emerged from the cultural stewpot of the Caribbean
could have woken up this morning as Oxford University’s professor of poetry.
Lionised by leading academics, intellectual powerhouses, fellow poets and a
huge number of the electorate – the university’s graduates – Walcott would
have been the first black person to take up the 300-year-old largely
honorary position previously held by such figures as Matthew Arnold, WH
Auden, Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney. But at almost the last moment
Walcott withdrew his candidacy, blaming “a low and degrading attempt at
character assassination. I do not want to be a part of it”. His unrelenting
opponents say Walcott was unfit for the job because of the way he treated
young female students who did not want to be a part of his love life, a
charge primarily related to two incidents 14 years apart, neither of which
evolved into a full-blooded scandal.
It will have little effect on his fame or army of admirers back home in St
Lucia, where Walcott was born in 1930. The main square in the capital,
Castries, is named after him. He is as popular in the West Indies as their
cricket team, as immediately recognised as any rap star.
It has been Walcott’s life’s work to try to express the soul and spirit of the
Caribbean. He sees it as a colonial region from which all indigenous
influences have been eradicated and which endlessly tries without succeeding
to grow into itself.
He has African, Dutch and English blood in his veins, grew up speaking an
Anglo-French patois but devoted himself to carrying on the cultural
tradition “of Marlowe and Milton” in poetry and playwriting that
deliberately fused his West Indian experience with a wealth of European
culture and myth.
He has never accepted the “Black Word” movement of some young black writers
who want to divorce themselves from European tradition, arguing that in the
melting pot of the Caribbean his ancestry lies as much in the world of
Alfred Lord Tennyson as in the African jungle.
The 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya tormented him. In the poem A Far Cry from
Africa he asked: I, who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I
turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British
rule, how choose Between this Africa and the England tongue I love? Betray
them both, or give back what they give? One of his grandfathers was English,
the other Dutch. His father, Warwick, an amateur painter and writer, died
when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were just a year old. His mother,
the headmistress of a Methodist school who had to take in washing to make
ends meet, saw that the boys got “a sound colonial education”.
An intelligent woman, she inspired a love of language in her sons and would
quote Shakespeare to them. Derek self-published his first collection, 25
Poems, in 1948, aged just 18, with money he borrowed from her. He wrote his
first play in verse two years later. Those early volumes are now prized as
rare first editions worth thousands of pounds.
Self-doubt never stalked him. “This is going to sound vain, but I knew from an
early age that I was writing well as a prodigy. Let me explain. I am not
Mozart and would not compare myself to him but, in the same way, if somebody
came up and said to him, do you know you play the piano well, he would say,
yes. I, too, never had any crisis about whether I was any good.”
Early on he also saw that the culture and history of the West Indies were more
than just the sum of their parts. He studied at University College in
Jamaica, but moved to Trinidad in 1953, earning a living teaching and
writing theatre reviews, before a spell as a journalist.
In 1959 he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, where almost all his verse
plays have first been performed. For Walcott, poetry and performance meld
together: his poems are sprinkled with the voices of characters. Perhaps the
best tribute to that was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s specially
commissioned stage version of Omeros, his 8,000-word epic of life in St
Lucia re-envisioned as Homer’s Odyssey.
Omeros, published in 1990, was a work of no mean ambition, taking on not just
Homer, but Virgil and Dante, too. The Crusader, St Lucia’s weekly paper,
exulted in his achievement of “taking ordinary characters, bums and figures
of fun, whom he ennobled into heroic Greek prototypes . . . [transforming]
the dross of St Lucian street and country life into a finely spun tableau of
classical literature”. It sealed his Nobel prize.
The Nobel committee arguably would never have heard of him had he not first
come to the attention of Alan Ross, the editor of London Magazine, who
showed his work to the publishing house Jonathan Cape. The result was In a
Green Night (Poems 1948-1962), which brought Walcott immediate fame.
He followed that with one successful collection after another – such as The
Castaway and Other Poems (1965), The Sea Grapes (1976) – all won enormous
critical acclaim for his use of language, his stylistic mastery and his
enthusiasm for life. In 1981 he was offered a professorship at the
University of Boston, which, while regularly returning to his beloved
Caribbean, he held until his retirement in 2007.
It was on secondment from Boston to Harvard for a year that the first
suggestion of impropriety with young female students occurred. He allegedly
repeatedly pressed one to have sex with him and gave her a low mark in her
work when she refused. Walcott responded that teaching poetry was
“deliberately personal and intense”.
The one other celebrated recipient of Walcott’s unwanted advances stood up for
him last week. In 1996 Nicole Kelby, the American writer, sued Boston
University for $500,000 (then worth £330,000) over alleged “offensive
touching”, although the case was later “settled” and never came to court.
Writing in this newspaper last week she said she was “appalled” by his
treatment: “It is his way to be sexual, to push the envelope of both decorum
and good taste. . . Like any man he is flawed. But like any great man he is
retrospect and understands that his flaws are universal. And from them he
creates art.”
The Oxford position has nothing to do with teaching one-on-one or even in
small groups. The duties involved in the £6,901-a-year job are delivering
three annual lectures on poetry to the entire university and a biennial
lecture in honour of a 17th-century financial donor.
Shirley Dent, communications director at the Institute of Ideas, said: “This
is a shameful day for intellectual life in our country . . . if the worst
thing that is ever said to you as a woman is: ‘Imagine me making love to
you. What would I do? . . . Would you make love with me if I asked you?’,
you need to get out more.”
Hermione Lee, president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and one of Walcott’s
keenest supporters, lamented that “as a result of the insulting smear
campaign that has been deployed against him, Oxford loses the opportunity to
hear lectures on poetry from one of the great poets of the world . . . and a
writer who is on the Oxford syllabus”.
James Fenton, a former incumbent of the professorship, went further, blaming
Ruth Padel, Walcott’s chief rival for the post, and more pertinently the
journalist John Walsh, who wrote an inflammatory piece in The Independent
asking if Walcott’s fans had forgotten “the shadows of sexual harassment
that have swirled around their man over the years”. Subsequently,
photocopied pages from a book by two American campaigners against sexual
harassment on US campuses were posted to Oxford dons.
Fenton raged: “It has been disgusting to watch as this hypocritical duo have
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.”
Padel herself has disclaimed any responsibility: “What we all should have been
talking about all this time was – and is – poetry.” There are few, including
Walcott, who criticise Padel’s poetry, although fewer who would place it in
the same league as his.
But then Walcott will not be surprised. In What the Twilight Says, his
autobiographical essay, he wrote: “Colonials, we already had this malarial
enervation: that nothing could ever be built among those rotting shacks,
barefooted backyards and moulting shingles, that being poor we already had
the theatre of our lives.”
This little tragedy may just be the final act.
