Stuart Kelly: The Browser

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 13:08

HENRY Kissinger is sometimes credited with the quip "academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small".

It's a maxim that must have cropped up during the fiasco over the election of a new Oxford Professor of Poetry. To recap: Nobel laureate Derek Walcott withdrew from the competition after a "smear campaign" of anonymous letters drew attention to allegations of sexual harassment against him in 1982.

Previous incumbents include the adulterer Cecil Day-Lewis, enthusiastic nudist Maurice Bowra and Lenin panegyricist W H Auden. Ruth Padel was duly elected, only for it to be revealed that she had informed journalists of the allegations a fortnight before the "horrible" campaign commenced.

Neither she nor her "campaign managers" were involved, she said – I was worried

enough already that a poet even had campaign managers.

Padel then resigned, claiming she had been "misconstrued". She also suggested the whole thing had been a conspiracy against her. She "acted in good faith" and it was "not her intention" to vilify Walcott. I'm fully expecting her to say she "behaved within the rules" next.

In all the coverage, very little has been said about poetry: Walcott, it seems to me, is a poet of epic ambition and achievement, and Padel's work is marred by a perpetual solipsism and self-regarding. So who will get the job now?

Munro bagged

The International Man Booker has been awarded to Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, the third author after Ismail Kadare and Chinua Achebe. Munro is sometimes claimed as an "honorary Scot". Her memoir, The View From Castle Rock, revealed a genealogical connection to James Hogg. Whatever her nationality, she's a fine choice: indeed, my colleague Chitra Ramaswamy praised her last book for confirming her "rightful reputation alongside such classics as Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov".

Dalkey's delight

There are very few novels where the plot synopsis and the author's bio might be mistaken for one another. But that's the case with a book which arrived at my desk from the wonderful Dalkey Archive – Op Oloop by Juan Filloy. Filloy was a caricaturist, judge, boxing referee, polyglot and champion palindrome writer who died at the age of 106 in 2000. He only ever used titles that were seven letters long. Op Oloop is a Finnish statistician in Buenos Aires, whose manically timetabled life is thrown into disarray on the day of his engagement, leading to various erotic, philosophical and culinary chaos. Long may Dalkey Archive continue to unearth such forgotten gems and quirky writers.