Jon Stallworthy is a poet, biographer, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Professor of English at Oxford. He was formerly Deputy Academic Publisher of OUP and in 1959 launched Oxford's modern poetry list.
Sir, Henry Reece, Chief Executive of the Oxford University Press (letter, January 9; see also letter, January 11), describes Alan Howarth's charge of "barbarianism" against the OUP as "bizarre". However, he fails to address the central argument of the minister's speech, in which he said:
The Press is rightly proud to publish the new Oxford English Dictionary. Sir Keith Thomas, a great scholar whom I hold in warm regard, claims indeed that to be guardian of the OED is to be the custodian of the English language. But poets, certainly no less than lexicographers, are shapers of the English language. The custodian is abandoning its task if it abandons our poets. If it is appropriate for the OUP to subsidise the Dictionary, is it not equally appropriate to subsidise the poetry list (and at a small fraction of the cost)?So there is a clear public interest in this matter. That is a view taken not only by me, but also by 63 of our acknowledged legislators of all parties who have signed a motion in the House of Commons deploring this decision of the OUP.
Another aspect of the "public interest" argument is that, when 35 OUP poets are laid off, they go to the head of the queue at the doors of more enlightened publishers, thereby preventing or at least delaying the publication of a comparable number of other poets. The whole structure and economy of the nation's poetry publishing has been distorted by the OUP's revised "strategic priorities". These might be justified had the Press never published new poetry, but contraception is not the same as murder of a healthy 39-year-old.
Finally, when Mr Reece says "We have never published any other kind of contemporary adult creative writing", he seems not to know his own list, which today boasts the plays of Christopher Fry, the brothers Capek, the Nobel Prize-winning Wole Soyinka, and has under contract a reissue of the plays of Athol Fugard. Similarly, the OUP's series of Twentieth Century Classics boasted many contemporary novels by, among others, John Bayley and D. J. Enright.
Yours faithfully,
JON STALLWORTHY
(Deputy Academic Publisher, OUP, 1975-77),
Wolfson College. Oxford OX2 6UD
February 11.
Click for Jon Stallworthy's Oxford Magazine articles Vandalism (4/12/98, at the time of the axing), Minding Our Own Business (12/2/99, after Alan Howarth's Freud Cafe speech) and Counting the Cost (23/4/99, after the Carcanet deal).