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.
Now we know: and can thank Keith Thomas and Henry Reece for answering the question so many people in the University and outside have been asking: 'How well do the senior officers of the Oxford University Press know their business?' (or can we perhaps say our business?) Look at the evidence of their 'Reply' - in the Oxford Magazine 162, p.3 - to the charges brought against them in the two preceding numbers; charges repeated in the national newspapers, in both Houses of Parliament, and by representatives of the Arts Council, British Council, Royal Society of Literature, etc.
1. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say:
'the proposal to drop contemporary poetry was discussed and unanimously agreed by the Finance Committee. As chance had it, the next scheduled meeting of the Delegates was cancelled, owing to lack of other business. The need to put in place the elaborate arrangements involved in implementing redundancies before the onset of the Christmas season meant that action could not be delayed until the following Delegates' Meeting. Those Delegates not on Finance Committee were therefore informed individually of the position by Ietter and given the opportunity to raise any objections.'
That the Finance Committee's decision was unanimous is extremely surprising, but that it voted to drop contemporary poetry is not surprising at all. Officers of the Press and suits from the City outnumber the Delegates on the Committee and would naturally support their Chairman and Chief Executive's plans for execution. The letter to those Delegates not on the Finance Committee was sent out on 9 November, so that the meeting called for 10 November - but cancelled 'owing to lack of other business' - could not be re-called whatever the response to the letter might be. A section of the OUP list approved by the Delegates in full session (as was once the custom) was to be abandoned on the recommendation of a one-eyed Finance Committee with its one eye on the bottom line (as now appears to be the custom), without proper discussion by the Delegates or any discussion with the Faculty concerned; a classic demonstration of 'divide and rule'. The fact that the Delegates subsequently ratified the officers' decision - to save their collective face - in no way excuses the 'procedural impropriety' or proves that the correct procedure would have produced the same regrettable result.
2. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'the Oxford poetry list has been losing money'. Their spokesman, Andrew Potter, was quoted in The Times (21 November) as saying: 'it just about breaks even', but -
3. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'The issue is not primarily a financial one. It is a matter of the Press's long-term strategic priorities' What a relief! We were beginning to fear that, having made their art-history and music book editors redundant, they would have to dispense with the services of their master confectioner... Martin Rasgauski, chef-manager at Oxford University Press'. Anyone who missed the account of OUP's latest initiative in response to commercial pressures is encouraged to order a selection of his hazelnut praline chocolates in a £5.00 'gold box with blue ribbon' from The Printer's House, Oxford University Press (Oxford Magazine, 160, p.7).
4. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'we have never published contemporary fiction or drama'. They do not know their own (our own) list, which once boasted the best-selling plays of Christopher Fry and still boasts those of 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.
5. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'the contemporary poetry list... dates only from the 1960s, when it reflected the particular enthusiasms of the Press's officers at that time'. As already explained (Oxford Magazine 160, p.12), the list also reflected the enthusiasm of the Delegates at that time who, meeting in full session, accepted:
i. that there was a moral case for ploughing back some of the money made out of 'poets dead and gone' into publishing the work of their successors;ii. that 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; and
iii. that the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins showed that the OUP could usefully - and, in time, profitably - publish new poetry.
Those principles remain as true in 1999 as they were in 1959.
6. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'the whole list comes very much second to Faber's'. If the contemporary poetry list is being scrapped because it is only the second best (of eighty odd) in the UK, that perhaps explains the advertized scrapping of the Clarendon Press imprint, many specialist sections of which are not even the second best.
7. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'Not one of the poets in the English and Modern Languages Faculty who have protested... publishes their poetry with OUP'. Further proof that the officers do not know their own (our own) list, which boasts two poetry books by Craig Raine (New College), three by Jamie McKendrick (Hertford), and formerly contained (I will not say boasted) two by the author of this indictment. How many poets in the Oxford Faculty have had their work rejected by OUP is not a matter of public record.
8. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'The Press's only dedicated member of staff for contemporary poetry is a part-time freelance editor. No one else has any expertise in publishing contemporary poetry'. The success of the list must testify to the in-house expertise of the editorial, production, publicity, and subsidiary rights staff who, for many years, have assisted the (underpaid) freelance editor.
9. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'The Press's poets have complained for years about the marketing of their books.' They are not alone in this. As the author of Printing in Oxford since 1478 (1998) reminds us: 'Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, recalled this crucial weakness in the Oxford Press: "The vending of books we never could compass".' Plus ca change...
10. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'we are ill-placed to market and sell poetry'. They seem not to know that, in the poetry shelves of just about every bookshop in the country (other than Blackwell's), contemporary and canonical poets stand shoulder to shoulder, Shapcott by Shakespeare, Tomlinson by Tennyson. Why should the OUP sales representatives not continue to offer their customers the new with the old?
11. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'we shall continue to pubIish our collected editions of canonical twentieth-century poets like Basil Bunting, Keith Douglas... It should be emphasized that we were not the original publisher of these poets'. Bunting was a living poet (ugh!) when taken on to the OUP list in 1978. The OUP made him and Douglas canonical. It should also be emphasized that Fabers were not the original publisher of Larkin, Plath, or Walcott...
12. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'The Press has a responsibility... to its authors'. What of its responsibility to Peter Porter, who over twenty-nine years has published fourteen collections of poems with OUP (and the blessing of the Delegates) - including two Poetry Book Society Choices and three PBS Recommendations? They have won him and the OUP the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His poems are widely studied in schools and universities and are the subiect of two critical studies - both published by the OUP. When such a man is told, on the eve of his seventieth birthday, not to darken his publisher's expensive postmodern portal again, what can one call that but betrayal? When, moreover, such a man is told that he and the rest of the OUP's poets are to be sold - like a huddle of slaves - to the highest bidder, what can one call that but insult added to injury?
In the event, of course, no publisher could be found to enter into such a ridiculous and obscene transaction, and 'the Press' (the officers? the Delegates?) decided to 'hang on to the dead poets' - as a necrophiliac senior officer put it - but to try and sell stocks of the living to the Poetry Book Society for a knock-down price. If such a sale is negotiated, Peter Porter and the others will receive a reduced royalty on the books they see transferred to a Society that does what it does well, but does not promote and sell books to bookshops.
The personal cost - in terms of money and reputation - to the (living) poets has been clear for some time, but the national cost is only now beginning to emerge. When thirty-five OUP poets are told not to darken etc., 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. In other words, the whole structure and economv 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 what might be adequate reasons for not launching a list are quite inadequate reasons for cutting it. Contraception is not the same as murder of a healthy thirty-nine-year-old.
13. The Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Secretary to the Delegates say: 'The Press has a responsibility to its... owners', but nowhere do they acknowledge any other responsibility to us, Masters and Scholars, than to maximize the profits of their (or our) business. Their rambling piece justificative acknowledges no responsibility to confer with their fellow departments about what they (or we) should publish; and, most dismayingly, conveys no sense that they understand the material and symbolic damage their 'dropping' of contemporary poetry has done to them - and to us.
So much for the Bad News. The Good News is, firstly, that speech is still free in Oxford, matters of vital public interest can be debated in public; and, secondly, that the Oxford English Faculty, while united in outrage at the OUP's act of vandalism, will do all it can to negotiate a restoration of the list in some modified form acceptable to all parties.
Watch this space.
Click for Jon Stallworthy's other Oxford Magazine articles Vandalism (4/12/98, at the time of the axing), and Counting the Cost (23/4/99, after the Carcanet deal) and his Times letter of 12/2/99.