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.
vandalism ('vaendelizm). [a. F. vandalisme, first used by Henri Gregoire, Bishop of Blois, c1793.] The conduct or spirit characteristic of, or attributed to, the Vandals in respect of culture; ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable; in weakened sense, barbarous, ignorant, or inartistic treatment.
FOR Seventeen years, from 1959 to 1977, I was proud to work for the OUP: proud, generally, because I believed it to be the greatest university press in the world; specifically, because in addition to other editorial responsibilities I was entrusted with a commission close to my heart, the building of a list of new poetry.
A year or so earlier, John Bell, Chief Editor of the London Business as it was then called (OUP as distinct from the Clarendon Press), had initiated a change of policy. He proposed that, instead of publishing the occasional book of poems, the OUP should either - and ideally - develop a list of new poetry, or publish none at all. The case for a list was accepted on the following grounds:
1. The OUP made so much money from the sale of 'poets dead and gone' - Oxford English Texts, Oxford Standard Authors, World's Classics, Oxford Book of Verse, literary biographies, and so on - that there was a moral case for ploughing a little of it back into publishing the work of their successors.
2. There was a national need for an enlightened poetry publisher, who would not abort his list (as commercial firms were obliged to do) when money was short. There was no comparable need for a new fiction publisher.
3. The case of Gerard Manley Hopkins showed that OUP could usefully - and, in time, profitably - publish new poetry. The first (1918) edition of his Poems took ten years to sell its first printing of 750 copies. By the 1950s, however, a third edition was selling many thousands and, in addition, earning a substantial 'permissions' income. OUP had published his Letters, his Notebooks and Papers, and had commissioned a biography. A lucrative Hopkins Industry was under way.
The Delegates of the Press accepted these arguments and welcomed the proposal to launch a poetry list. By the time its development was entrusted to me, John Bell had published books by Charles Tomlinson and Anthony Thwaite. Even so, most poets were sending their work first to Fabers, then - as now - the country's leading poetry publisher. To try and change this, we published collections by a number of prominent American poets unknown (to any but addicts) on this side of the Atlantic: Hart Crane, Anthony Hecht, Anne Sexton, Louis Simpson. The books were successful, drawing other poets of distinction to the OUP colours: Peter Porter, Basil Bunting, David Gascoyne, Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Joseph Brodsky. We commissioned Collected editions of notable poets killed in the two World Wars - Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, and Keith Douglas - and I think I can say that the list I passed to my successor was, after Fabers', the best in the British Isles. For two decades, in the devoted hands of Jackie Simms, it has gone from strength to strength until last week when, without warning, without discussion, she and all her poets were thrown to the wolves.
They are not alone in seeing this as an act of vandalism. The public outcry has been immediate and sustained, and clearly there are questions that must be answered. Who made the management decision, and why? The OUP response (as reported in The Times of 21 November), pointed out that 90 per cent of the list sold under 200 copies last year. Some collections sold less than a handful; more than half reached only double figures. "Very few cover their costs without a lot of subsidy," OUP's Director of Trade paperbacks said. "However successful some are, it just about breaks even. The university expects us to operate on commercial grounds, especially in this day and age."
Jackie Simms says these figures give a (deliberately?) misleading picture, relating only to the back list and giving no sense of how the new books performed or of such 'lifetime' sales as those of Peter Porter's Collected Poems (1984), 7,200; Fleur Adcock's Selected Poems (1985), 8,100; Alice Oswald's The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1995), 3,500; or Jamie McKendrick's The Marble Fly (1996), 3,100. In parenthesis, it should be noted that Porter is an Australian, Adcock a New Zealander. Poets from OUP Branch areas have always been well represented in the list; a list, incidentally, of increasing importance to university students, who these days are as likely to be required to write essays on contemporary women poets or poets of the First World War as on the Scottish Chaucerians or Cavalier poets.
However, even if one were to accept (as I do not) that OUP's new poetry list 'just about breaks even', why should a charity - the OUP is not a commercial publisher - ask for more? The Chairman of its Finance Committee was able to report last year:
"Over the last five years payments to the rest of the University have totalled £53.2 million, compared with £8.6 million in the previous five years." He enumerated some serious trading difficulties, but concluded his report: "the Delegates' Property and Reserve Fund performed strongly, driven by a buoyant stock market, and fully justifying its role as a cushion for the University against difficulties in the Trading Operations".
Now we know The Reason Why: Financial Necessity.
And who made the management decision? Was it the unhappy Director of Trade Paperbacks, who gave questionable sales figures to The Times, perhaps as a response to a call from On High to squeeze the fabulous goose until its golden eggs squeaked? Surely not. One might think the fate of a list approved by the Delegates in solemn conclave would be debated by them in solemn conclave, after consideration of a detailed briefing paper setting out the pros and cons of (1) continuing the list; (2) reducing and/or freezing it; and (3) throwing it to the wolves slavering at the door. If such a paper was considered, let the Press publish it in the Oxford Magazine to reassure the doubters and restore the Delegates' credibility, damaged by the Independent's report that they were convened to rubberstamp a decision not only taken but implemented. And taken by whom? By the Finance Committee, says The Independent.
If that is true, one must ask what is the Delegates' role in determining the academic policy of the Press? What decision will they be required to rubber-stamp next? And, in the meantime, will anyone inquire who managed the Public Relations triumph of the past fortnight? And while on the subject of management, what of management priorities? What Core Activities are to benefit from the blood-money released for reinvestment by the downsizing/ruthless destruction of an international poetry list? Perhaps royalty advances for the editors of The Oxford Book of Ecclesiastical Anecdotes and The Oxford Book of Extra-marital Anecdotes, or a grant to supplement the £30,000 already pledged to restock the depleted library shelves of Christ Church, Merton, Queen's, St Johns...?
Remembering those who created the finest academic and general list of English literature in the world - R. W. Chapman, Charles Cannan, Humphrey Milford, Geoffrey Cumberlege, Kenneth Sisam, Dan Davin, Helen Gardner - I am ashamed of my University Press.
Click for Jon Stallworthy's other Oxford Magazine articles 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) and his Times letter of 12/2/99.