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.
"Watch this space", we said some weeks ago - in something of the spirit of a watcher on the heights above Balaclava - as a Light Brigade of poets was spiking the Big Guns of OUP. Now that the smoke has cleared, we can report a victory, but as the Duke of Wellington once said: "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."
Counting the cost today, we find that, as usual, Truth was the first casualty. The official (spin-doctored) communique represented the cultural-cleansers as refugee aid-workers:
OXFORD POETS SAFEGUARDED Oxford University Press and the Oxford University English Faculty Board are pleased to announce that thet have reached an agreement with Carcanet for the Oxford Poets list to be jointly published by OUP and Carcanet.
OUP and Carcanet will work closely with an editorial board appointed by the English Faculty Board and chaired by a member of the Faculty. To oversee the publication of new titles, the board will include senior representatives from OUP and Carcanet.
All living poets on the OUP list have been invited to join this new venture, where their books will continue to be promoted collectively as "Oxford Poets".
Mr Henry Reece, Secretary to the Delegates and Chief Executive of OUP, said:
"This promises to be an excellent partnership, and will appeal to all those concerned about the widest possible dissemination of poetry. Carcanet has an established reputation in poetry publishing, and the agreement with OUP will ensure a diversity of publishing in Britain alongside Faber, which was always one of the underlying aims of the English Faculty and OUP.We have been trying to find a solution that keeps the poetry list together for the last six months. Carcanet is a specialist publisher, and offers just that. Moreover, it has skills in the publishing and marketing of poetry that a diverse publisher like OUP could simply never possess."
In a university dedicated to discriminating between truth and untruth, this Orwellian Newspeak should not be allowed to pass unchallenged:
OXFORD POETS SAFEGUARDED... when something like two thirds have been driven away?
Ensure a diversity of publishing... by reducing the number of active publishers?
Skills in the publishing and marketing of poetry that... OUP could simply never possess: what skills are these? A copy-writer's fiction. OUP has more publishing skill and marketing muscle - at home and overseas - than any other publisher of poetry in the UK; it simply no longer wishes to waste them on something so unremunerative.
Truth is not the only casualty. Others include those whose redundancies had to be rushed through for Christmas; an exemplary poetry editor, one of the few members of the OUP (now ex-OUP) staff to emerge with honour from the affair; and, more generally, the morale of those beseiged behind the walls of Jericho, the reputation of the Press, that of the Delegates, and - it must be said - the University.
The cost of victory is high, but victory it is - for common sense, for poetry, for the Oxford English Faculty, even for the Press - if in its implementation of the agreement with Carcanet it can regain some of the credibility and goodwill lost over the past six months. Certainly, the English Faculty is as committed to the New Deal, to helping the two Presses develop the Oxford Poets, as it was implacably opposed to the closure of the list.
The OUP has done the University much service - most recently and most notably in the millions contributed to its central funds - but elderly bodies require medical check-ups from time to time. The University itself benefited from its examination at the hands of Dr Franks, as did a younger OUP from the prescriptions of Dr Waldock (see link below). But that was a quarter of a century ago, and when a headline in the TLS (of 2 April) tells us - and the world - 'Why the present constitution of OUP cannot work' [a reference to The War for Jericho] - it tells us nothing that we did not know already. It is time for a check-up, a full-scale Waldock-style review of the governance of the OUP, its academic and financial objectives, the role of the Delegates (expert advisors, rubber-stampers, and/or policy-makers?), and of such other aspects of the business as need to be harmonized if The Press is to regain, in the next millennium, the academic pre-eminence it held for so long in this.
Click for Jon Stallworthy's other Oxford Magazine articles: Vandalism (4/12/98, at the time of the axing), and Minding Our Own Business (12/2/99, after Alan Howarth's Freud Cafe speech), and his Times letter of 12/2/99.
Click for The Waldock Report, Oxford University's own resonant 1970, pre-tax-exempt, investigation into the workings of its Press