Eric Ambler: the Granddaddy of Espionage Writers

When I was growing up, I used to raid my father’s library—if it is not a hyperbole to describe two cupboards chocked up with books—every now and then. The ‘library’ comprised a hodgepodge of fiction and non-fiction books. There were many crime novels and espionage thrillers cramming the shelves in the cupboard. My father considered John le Care, all of whose novels he proudly owned, to be the greatest writer writing in English. He was also a fan of Len Deighton, many of whose novels were in his collection. He was very interested in the cold war espionage. When he was in the mood, in the evenings after supper, my father would talk about spies, intelligence and counterintelligence, MI5, KGB etcetera very animatedly, frequently referring to what le carre and Deighton had written in their novels (as if they were gospels). My father infused in me the love for reading and books. Unsurprisingly, when I began reading novels for grown-ups, le Carre, that stanchion of espionage and thriller writers, was the first one I tried. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was the first (and to date only) le Carre novel I read. I found it pretty hard going not least because—I dared not say this to my father—try as I did I just could not get interested in the story, and le Carre’s siccative prose style did little to alleviate my ennui. When the coda with its big revelation was reached, my reaction was ‘Is that it?’ Next, I tried Deighton. I started with The Ipcress File and gave up after a few pages. The Game-Set-Match trilogy was more accessible. Then my elder brother gave me a slim (in volume) novel titled The Catcher in the Rye. I read it and decided that that was the sort of novel I wanted to read. I have not got round to read a single le Carre or Deighton novel since—without suspecting at any time that the rich tapestry of my life is missing threads—, although I have read the novels that Graham Greene wrote in that genre (The Human Factor remains one of my most favourite novels).

One writer I never read, even though he came highly recommended by my father, was Eric Ambler. Ambler was outstanding too [my father declared] and was more versatile than le Carre in that his novels, while they were of suspense, action, adventure and intrigues (generally in foreign lands) did not adhere only to the theme of espionage , le Carre’s metier at the time (the Cold War was still on and le Carre and Deighton had no need to look anywhere else for ideas for their novels). I remember a few Eric Ambler novels in his ‘library', such as Passage of Arms, Journey into Fear and Intercom Conspiracy.

Years went by and, immersed as I became in the world of what I liked to pompously think in those days as serious twentieth century fiction, Ambler went totally off my radar. I think that happened partly because he went out of fashion. In the High Street book shops, while le Carre continued to be allotted a prominent space amongst main-stream, contemporary fiction writers and some of Deighton’s cult novels could still be glimpsed in the ‘Crime’ section, Ambler disappeared completely. I do not remember reading the news of his death eleven years ago, at the age of 89. Then, while browsing through a second hand bookshop (owned by an old, well oldish, man who wore a toupee (which was always, ever so slightly, misaligned), and a musty cardigan with a subjacent yellow (probably not the original colour) shirt, which, like the pair of black trousers, was probably not washed since the WW2) I came across three novels of Eric Ambler: Passage of Arms, The Schirmer Inheritance, and Light of Day. Passage of Arms was a hardbound edition while the other two were dog-eared paperbacks. Feeling nostalgic for the memory of my father’s dilatations of long ago, I bought all the three books (also, they cost only a fiver). The old man seemed to approve. ‘Good choice young man,’ he said, putting the books in a brown-paper bag. I left the book shop wondering whether the epithet ‘Young Man’ was in appreciation of my youthful looks (despite a balding pate and crow’s feet) or in reference to his excessively advanced years (which, if true, meant that his looks were youthful). That was a few months ago. I added the novels to the to-read-one-of-these-days-perhaps-when-I-am-on-vacation list and forgot about them.

A few weeks ago, something happened that prompted me to order all of Ambler's first six novels except The Dark frontier. I was driving to work in the morning, listening to John Humphrys carping about I forget what subject. Suddenly Humphrys started talking about Eric Ambler and I began to pay attention. I heard that this was the year of Ambler’s birth centenary. Humphrys said that he had never heard of Ambler, nor had he read any of his novels (a piece of otiose information; if Humphrys had never heard of Ambler, it was unlikely that he had read any of his novels). ‘But,’ Humphrys continued, ‘Ambler was very popular decades ago.’ He was also held in very high esteem by Graham Greene and John le Carre. For Greene [Humphrys informed] he was unquestionably ‘our best thriller writer.’ John le Carre described him as a ‘source on which we all draw.’ Ian Falming, too, was a fan of Ambler: in his 1957 novel From Russia with Love, Bond, who couldn’t be more different from Ambler’s almost-anti-heroes, whiles away his time, while flying to Istanbul, by reading The Mask of Dimitrios, although I wouldn't have thought he continued beyond a few pages (I have not read Ian Flemming either) concentrating, instead, on his next seduction. Why then, Humphrys wanted to know, Ambler went completely out of fashion, ‘suddenly disappeared’, after the Second World War. He then briefly spoke to Ambler’s sister and an ‘Ambler expert’. Neither could throw much light on the mystery. Ambler’s sister, who, I suspected from the way she spoke of her author brother, had not remained close to him with the passage of time—either that or she belonged to that generation which thought heaping praise on someone, even if he was your brother and dead for over a decade, was vulgar. She had no idea, she said, why Eric Ambler stopped writing. She remembered how Ambler, when he received the advance for his first published novel, took her and their mother to a sea-side resort in England for a holiday. The expert informed that Ambler remained prolific until the end. He quoted from an interview Ambler gave in 1990 when he was in his eighties. In the interview Ambler claimed [the expert said] that he was still writing. (If that was the case, the publishers must have jettisoned him; Ambler’s last novel, The Care of Time, I discovered after a brief Internet search, was published in 1981. He published an autobiography, cheekily titled, Here Lies Eric Ambler, in 1985.) Ambler published six novels in the 1930s, beginning with The Dark Frontier. These six novels (one of which was Journey Into Fear which was in my father’s ‘library’, while another was The Mask of Dimitrios which, according to Ambler fans and many experts, is his best spy novel, as much for its cracking plot as for its interesting take on the history of the crucial years between the two World Wars), I learnt, were Ambler’s best. With the advent of the Second World War, Ambler stopped writing for almost a decade. During the war he joined the British army and spent much of the time training and making educational films. Noel Coward exhorted Ambler to return to novel writing, which he duly did, in 1951, with Judgment on Deltchev, borne out of his increasing disillusionment with Communism, and which, apparently, attracted much opprobrium from his former comrades who accused him of going over to the dark side. Over the next thirty odd years, Ambler published ten more novels, which, however, did not enjoy the same level of success and popularity as his pre-war novels. This happened [the expert on the BBC Radio 4 pontificated] because Ambler found the Cold War uncongenial (an interesting choice of word); he did not have a dog in the Cold War (what could he have meant by this phrase?); he could not take the Cold War seriously; and he had a low opinion of intelligence services. What the expert was circumlocuting, I concluded, was that the Cold War and its intrigues did not motivate Ambler the same way the fight against Fascism, in the 1930s, did. There may be something in this hypothesis. When Ambler returned to writing novels in the 1950s, after a long hiatus, he eschewed the subject on which John le Carre and Len Deighton built up their reputations, and, instead, concentrated on the turmoil in the Developing World: thus Passage of Arms was set in South East Asia; Levanter had the Israel-Palestinian conflict as its backdrop; and Dr Frigo, which came out towards the end, was about a group scheming to grab power in a Caribbean island. Perhaps, these subjects did not catch the fancy of the European or American readership the same way the machinations, plotting and underhand scheming of the Cold War did. This is a pity, as Ambler had (probably) lost none of the verve, intricate plotting, and easily flowing prose style that made his early novels a success. His last published novel, Care of Time begins thus (I read on the Internet): ‘The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.’

I found an interview of Ambler on the Internet, an extract of which, reproduced below, throws light on his political views and views on the Cold War:

‘Early in my life and books, I was a little to the left. I voted Labour in 1945, but that was the extent of my political involvement. What I believe in is political and social justice. I’m of the same generation as [Graham] Greene. While he was hostile to America, he was never rude about it. I never put the Cold War in any of my books. Never took sides during the Cold War, not that I was a closet Communist. I always found the Cold War distasteful. For my wartime generation, it meant taking the best years of your life and turning them around. After the war, nobody wanted to return to prewar conditions. They had dreams of an improved way of life. Unfortunately, the Cold War did not help those dreams.’

I found out a few more interesting titbits about Ambler. In the 1950s, Ambler collaborated with an Australian writer called Charles Coda, and the results, a total of five thrillers, were published under the nom de guerre Eliot Reed. Ambler later claimed that he had contributed substantially to only the first two thrillers. He also recounted an incident that stimulated him into becoming a thriller writer (this anecdote may also have been mentioned in his autobiography which is sadly out of print, like most of his novels): when Ambler was working in advertisement, in the early 1930s, he was once vacationing in Marseilles, and was cheated out of money while playing poker by an unscrupulous bartender. Ambler fantasized about killing the bartender with a rifle at a street crossing the city. At exactly the same spot, a few months later, a Croatian assassin shot dead King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Ambler claimed, almost half a century later, that this incident spurred his imagination; he became aware for the first time of a fresh bit of his personality, which was an assassin; he felt that there were people like him all over Europe, ‘ready to kill’. There were ‘strange and violent men’ with whom he felt he was in touch.

Ambler was, like James Hilton (another British novelist, hugely popular in his days but almost totally forgotten these days, who gifted the term Shangri La to the English language), also a successful screenwriter in Hollywood and, in 1953, was nominated for an Oscar for the best screenplay for a film called The Cruel Sea. Many of his own novels were also made into successful films, the most famous of which was of course Orson Wells’s Journey Into Fear; however, he did not write the screenplay of any of these films. Another successful film of the 1960s, Topkapi, was based on an Ambler novel, Light of the Day(Jack Murphy, who stole ‘Star of India’, world’s largest sapphire, from New York Natural History Museum, did so after watching Topkapi).

In an interview given towards the end of his life, Ambler remarked that thrillers said more about the way people think and governments behave than conventional novels. ‘A hundred years from now, if they last, these books may offer clues to what was going on in our world,’ he said.

It seems a pity that Ambler remains largely disregarded these days. He is, as Humphrys declared, the granddaddy of all the thriller writers.

Book of the Month: Uncommon Danger (Eric Ambler)

Eric Ambler, born a century ago, was one of the paramount designer of the espionage fiction. He lifted the genre from the turpitude of hackneyed plots, trite dialogues and unsubtle characterization into a hypersophistique cloak-and-dagger world of intrigue and moral ambiguity. He made thrillers respectable. In the 1930s, beginning with The Dark Frontier, Ambler published six espionage novels, which are generally considered to be his best. One of them was Uncommon Danger, published in America as Background to Danger.

The hero of Uncommon Danger, Desmond d’Esterre Kenton (his full name appears only once; throughout the novel he is referred to by his surname), like many of Ambler’s heroes, is not a professional spy. He is an ordinary, unexceptional man who finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a conspiracy with high stakes, double dealing, and fraudulence—of which he is unaware to begin with but, being a quick-witted person, he cottons on to what is going on—by being the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place. He is an impoverished freelance British journalist with a penchant for losing money in ill-advised games of poker. He is travelling from Nuremberg (where he was reporting a meeting of the higher echelons of the Nazi party) to Vienna to cadge money from a Jewish acquaintance whom he helped two years before to escape from Munich. On the train he meets an exotic character named Herr Sachs, who claims to be a German Jew trying to escape Nazi Germany and offers him a substantial sum of money to smuggle an envelope (containing, he says, ten thousand marks in German securities) over the frontier, because, he, Sachs, is convinced that he is being watched by a Nazi spy, ‘a small eyed man with an unwholesome face’. Kenton susses out that the man is not being truthful and that he is also not who he says he is; however, the lure of money is too strong to resist—this is another characteristic of many of Ambler’s heroes; they are ever so slightly louche—and Kenton accepts the assignment. When he reaches the hotel, after passing through the customs at the Linz station, where Herr Sachs has told him he would be waiting, he discovers that the slippery Jew, who in fact is not a Jew, has been murdered. It gets fantastically convoluted and messy after that, with several parties, political and industrial, involved, pursuing their separate agendas. At the heart of the conspiracy is a plot to install a Fascist government in Romania by whipping up hysteria and mobilising public opinion against the Soviet Union. Kenton forms an uneasy alliance with a pair of Russian brother and sister, Andreas and Tamara Zaleshoff, and, after a series cliff-hanger situations that leave you gasping for breath and action that moves continuously across the borders of more than one country, foils the evil designs of the malefactors.

All of this is great fun, and, if the ambiance is not excessively tense, the cracking pace of the narration and witty, sardonic dialogues more than adequately compensate it. Ambler does not waste time in long passages describing scenery and architecture, and gets going from the first chapter. The story, notwithstanding some fantastical situations, has an air of authenticity, which is at least partly to do with the main protagonist, who is not the ultra-suave proto-Bond, oozing charisma and charming glamorous women into bed; he is an ordinary man who has trouble keeping stiff upper lip and who, in the face of temptation is prepared to bend principles; he has never fired a gun; and when he tries to hit someone he is as much likely to miss as connect. Kenton is someone the reader has no problem identifying with. Similarly, the villains, while loathsome, are plausible. Joseph Balterghen, the unpleasant chairman of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company, is keen to have exclusive access to the oil fields in Bessarabia, Romania, and concludes that a regime change is Romania is the logical step to achieve his goal. The story also rings true because it reliably reflects what at that time was the real life political situation involving countries with different political systems: democracy, Marxism, and Totalitarianism. For example, the alleged soviet military secrets, the le point essentiel around which the plot revolves, relate to the actual source of tension between the soviet Union and Romania over the region of Bessarabia, which was controlled by Romania since the end of the First World War but over which the Soviets had staked a claim.

It is worth while noting the gentle treatment meted out to the Communists in the novel. The Zaleshoffs are depicted as essentially decent folk of integrity, and Communism is not viewed as the evil nemesis of the free world, as it came to be viewed in the post-WW2 fiction. Ambler was never officially a Communist; however, between the two World Wars, he leaned, ideologically so to speak, to the Left. As reflected in Uncommon Danger and his other masterpieces in the 1930s, he viewed Fascism as the main enemy. (Ambler would jettison his allegiance later, in his 1951 novel Judgement on Deltchev, which marked Ambler’s return to the world of crime fiction after a hiatus of more than a decade).

Beautifully written, superbly paced, and minaciously real, Uncommon Danger manages the rare feat of providig escapist entertainment and appearing bona fide at the same time, by a clever mix of grand political themes and topical action. It is unputdownable.

Michael Vaughn Retires

Cricket lovers in England and other cricket-playing countries will have been saddened by the retirement of Michael Vaughn, last month. The former England captain finally accepted that he had lost the battle against the recurrent knee injury. Vaughn had hoped for one last hurrah against the Aussies this season, but continued concerns about his fitness and lack of form in the County championship meant that the man who led England to a historic Ashes win in 2005 was left out of the test squad. Vaughn, in a style characteristic of his batting, did not waste much time dithering, and announced his retirement from all forms of cricket with immediate effect.

Vaughn was England’s most successful cricket captain in recent years. The statistics speak for themselves. He won 26 out of 51 tests in which he captained England, a very impressive success rate of more than 50%. He led England to six successive test series victories in a row, which included, in addition to the Ashes win in 2005—the first time in twenty years England beat the old enemy—a first series-win in South Africa for more than forty years. He also became the first England captain not to lose a test series in India for more than 30 years when England belied pundits’ predictions of a ‘brownwash’ and squared the series. Andrew Flintoff had no hesitation in choosing the best moments of his career: ‘It was when Michael Vaughn took over as captain for the South Africa series and the years after that,’ said the all-rounder, whose own test career, riven by injuries, will sadly come to an end at the end of the current Ashes series. Most England test players of recent years, who played with or under Vaughn would agree. Vaughn’s relaxed style of captaincy was in sharp contrast to the dour, bum-cheeks-firmly-clenched style of his predecessor, Nasir Hussain. For Hussain, a test match was a war and losing it was a catastrophe; the players needed to be badgered and continuously exhorted to focus; he rarely smiled on the field—one would feel sore in muscles by just watching his intense, glowering countenance. For Vaughn, as the cliché goes, cricket was just a game; he treated people as grown-ups, allowed his players the freedom to do their own things—he knew that players like Flintoff and Pieterson needed to be given an attacking license even if that meant that sometimes they played injudicious shots when caution was required— and, counterintuitively, got the best out of his players. Matthew Hoggard, another seamer who flourished under Vaughn, put it even more bluntly than Flintoff. When asked whom he preferred playing for, Vaughn or Hussain, Hogaard answered without hesitation: ‘Vaughn. He does not shout at me as much as Naseer.’ Vaughn brought a sense of fun and enjoyment to the England dressing room. Boycott, who is known to suffer from tongue impediment when it comes to praising people, compared Vaughn to Mike Brearley. The comparison is apposite: both Brearley and Vaughn succeeded in blending harmoniously the talents of diverse groups of players to forge winning units. They were both unflappable, calm, collected and had excellent man-management skills.

Unlike Brearley, who even by his own estimation was a mediocre batsman (he was that rare entity in cricket; he held his place in the team because of his leadership skills and not playing abilities), Vaughn was a very gifted batsman, who, at his best ranked amongst the top players in the world. Blessed with oodles of natural talent, he had a kind of lazy grace, which made batting look easy and world-class bowlers club-class. At his peak Vaughn was one of the most majestic players to watch, who utterly dominated the opponents. Different batsmen have different styles of batting. Some, like Boycott and Gavaskar, systematically ground the opposition to dust by batting for hours. (I remember watching a test match between England and India when Sunny Gavaskar batted for almost three days—he scored 70 runs on the first day, added another 70 on the second, and batted for a few more hours on the third day; when he finally got out having scored 170 odd runs, the test match was dead and all except die-hard Gavaskar fans had lost the will to live. Boycott was once dropped from the side after he scored 246 because the selection committee felt he took too long to score the runs and put his personal milestones ahead of the interests of the team.) Others, like Vivian Richards, wanted to destroy the opposition from the first ball. Vaughn’s style can be best described as silken. He was temperamentally incapable of being a grinder; neither was he a destroyer. He was pure elegance and a treat to watch. Repeatedly the bowlers were left shaking their heads in wonder and admiration as Vaughn leaned into his trademark cover drive sending the ball to the boundary as if in a slow motion. Vaughn was probably at his best in the 2002 and 2003 season. He scored three big hundreds against India, which included 197 in the second test, his highest score in tests, and 195 in the last test. He continued his excellent form when England toured Australia and scored three big hundreds in an otherwise dire tour for England, which included a match-winning 183 in the final test. He became, briefly, during this period, the number one batsman in the world, according to ICC ranking, ahead of Tendulakar and Lara. It was inevitable that he would lead England when Nasir Hussain stepped down in 2003. At that time his test batting average was an impressive 50.98. Vaughn did not manage to maintain the same form and consistency over the next few years which could have been a result of knee problems and the pressure of captaincy; but he scored when it mattered, and when he got going, like he did when he scored a regal 166 in the epic 2005 Ashes series, he was a pleasure to watch. He had wanted to play for England again and had withdrawn from the lucrative IPL (Indian Premiere League) in order to concentrate on his return to the test squad. However, his form deserted him; playing for Yorkshire, he managed 159 runs in eight innings, and Newspapers began speculating whether he would retain his place in the Yorkshire team. In the press conference, announcing his retirement Vaughn was brutal in his own assessment. ‘I guess two weeks ago in the garden with my little lad Archie, he bowled a ball that hit a weed and it knocked my off-stump out of the ground. I think that was the time. If a three-year-old is bowling me out, it's time to move over.’ When asked how he would liked to be remembered, he replied, ‘As a nice player on the eye, and an intuitive captain with an attacking style.’ He certainly was that.

Book of the Month: People of the Book (Geraldine Brooks)

In the afterword of her novel, People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks mentions that the novel was inspired by the true story of the Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Brooks, who, for years, worked as a newspaper reporter, first heard of the Haggadah when she was in Bosnia, in the early 1990s, covering the Bosnian war. (In a talk given in a literary event to promote the novel, Brooks said that the Serbs were deliberately targeting the City’s library, the National Museum, and The Oriental Institute, intent as they were on the cultural annihilation of the Bosnians.) The fate of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which had resided in the city for over hundred years—it came to light in Sarajevo, the outermost post of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in 1894, the year in which Gavrilo Princip, the Yugoslav nationalist, who, twenty years later, would assassinate Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg empire, and his wife, an event that would trigger the First World War, was born—was not known at the time. After the Bosnian wars of the 1990s ended, it was revealed that a Muslim librarian, Enver Imamovich had rescued the codex at the height of the war when Sarajevo was being shelled every day, and hidden it in a bank vault. The librarian, Brooks recounted in a talk, requested the City’s police force to accompany him into the museum. The police, unsurprisingly, were not keen. Imamovich then announced that he would go into the museum on his own and the police force was shamed into giving him an escort of six police officers into the museum. However, this was not the first time in the twentieth century that the Haggadah was saved from destruction in nick of time. In 1941, Dervis Korkut, an Islamic scholar smuggled it out of the museum and saved it from falling into the hands of a Nazi General, Johan Hans Fortner (subsequently hanged for war crimes). The Haggadah, which is thought to have created in Spain sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century; which somehow survived the years of Jewish expulsion from Spain; which travelled across more than one European country—in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it had made its way to Venice, where it was saved from the book burnings of the Pope’s Inquisition by a Catholic priest called Vistrioni—before emerging, 250 years later, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where an indigenous and impoverished Jewish family, which had had the Haggadah in its possession for at least a century, offered it to the authorities for sale; which, after spending a few months in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire where it was sent for restoration (and where it was terribly mishandled) was returned to Sarajevo; and which has survived the turbulent twentieth century that saw the two Great Wars and a Civil war, now sits in the restored National Museum in Sarajevo.

Hannah Heath, an Australian rare-books expert, is offered the job of restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, which, it has turned out, was not destroyed or lost, as feared by many, during the civil war that engulfed Bosnia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. She meets the man who has saved the Haggadah during the war. The man informs her that the book was saved half a century earlier by the then librarian from falling into the hands of the Nazis. This arouses Hannah’s interest in the book. While restoring the Haggadah she also discovers interesting artefacts such as an insect’s wing, wine and blood stains, traces of salt, and white hair probably of a cat. She is also intrigued by the imagery depicted in the Haggadah, which shows what appears to be a Moorish woman amongst a Jewish family. Hannah assumes that the woman was a family servant, and is puzzled by her presence in the imagery. Hannah decides to investigate further and her investigations take her to Europe and America. The chapters telling Hannah’s story are interlocked with a series of flashbacks, each a quasi-historical vignette, as the novel goes back in time and traces the crucial moments in the 600-year history of the Haggadah. Each artefact Hannah discovers serves as a springboard for Brooks to spin an engrossing yarn, each one different from the next. The ‘historical’ chapters, separate as they are, are still linked by the Haggadah; however, there is a very clear motif: the trials and tribulations of the Jewish race over the centuries. As the novel goes back in time, tracing the provenance of the Haggadah, there is, perforce, rather a lot about the treatment of the Jewish people over centuries at the hands of the Christians; the reader at times may feel a bit deluged by unpleasant images of cruelty and torture.

Brooks may not have the stylistic flair to her narrative, but her prose flows easily, and, coupled with the riveting storyline involving plausible, if imperfect, characters, the narrative sucks you in. However, Brooks also appears to have a hidden agenda. People of the Book is not just a literary mystery—the first one to be published since A.S. Byatt’s Possessions—it is also attempting—and not very subtly—a quasi-political message: Jews and Muslims can live in harmony, sharing as they do the same roots. This theme recurs so often that you might as well be getting hit over the head with it—very little is left to piece together. Those who prefer their authors’ messages to be subtle, may feel a tad disappointed. All the characters in the novel, especially the Muslims, behave with impeccable integrity, tolerance, and understanding. They are all saints—wise, gentle, self-sacrificing, and not blood but milk of human kindness flows through their veins. The reader is always conscious of the ventriloquistic presence of Brooks, the puppeteer, pulling strings, intent on conducting a lesson in religious tolerance—it seems a bit contrived at times, and makes for rather thin, one dimensional fictional universe. The female characters, through the ages, are all crypto-feminists, or at least think like contemporary feminists. Thus the Moorish woman, the one who is credited in the novel as the creator of the images in the Haggadah, animadverts the Emir for his religious intolerance, while a Bosnian woman in the middle of the twentieth century decides that the Nazis are evil because they are against diversity! That said the historical sections are the most satisfying part of the novel. Brooks, a former Wall Street correspondent, is in her elements here, doing what she probably loves the most—researching extensively to create for the reader a tableau vivant of a bygone world, be it seventeenth century Venice, or fifteenth century Spain. By contrast, the ‘modern’ section of the novel, the story of the main protagonist Hannah, her relationships with her friends and colleagues, and her overbearing Neurosurgeon mother, the mystery of her absent father, who—surprise! Surprise!—turns out to be Jewish (the extraneous plot-line merely distracts from the compelling mystery of the Haggadah), leading, eventually, to the melodramatic, implausible and unconvincing finale, fails to grip. Hannah, rather than coming across gutsy, intelligent, and resourceful, comes across as irritating, opinionated and hysterical.

People of the Book shows glimpses of what Geraldine Brooks, who won the Pulitzer for an earlier novel, March, is capable of. The novel has passages of great beauty and emotions, and tackles grand themes which have contemporary resonance, sometimes in predictable ways, sometimes in flights of fancy that demand suspension of credulity by the reader.

King of Pop

‘Where were you when you heard that Jacko was dead?’ This was an e-mail I received from someone who thinks I am her friend (because I tolerate her), yesterday. I replied that there were so many exciting things happening daily in my busy and exciting life that I could not remember where I was and what I was doing at the exact moment when I heard that the ‘King of Pop’ was dead. (As it happened, I was driving from place A to place B and cursing under my breath every five minutes as I was stuck in the morning rush hour traffic.) Then I read on Charlie Brooker’s blog that souvenir shops were selling tee shirts with printed slogans such as ‘I was at Glastonbury when Jacko died’. Is this turning into a ‘flashbulb memory’ event, similar to the ‘Diana moment’ 12 years ago, I wondered.

The response, certainly the online one, to Jackson’s death has been unbelievable. Google news had so many searches for him that they thought they were under automated attack. Wikipedia got roiled because so many people were trying to update the page on Michael Jackson. And Yahoo’s story on his hospitalization apparently got more than three quarters of a million page-views in ten minutes. On twitter, as many as 30% of tweets related to Jackson on the day of his death. People are in danger of running out of superlatives to describe him. He is the greatest; he was their idol; he touched their lives; he changed their lives; he will live in their hearts forever; he healed the world; he eradicated racism in the world; we have not just lost a legend, we have lost a part of our heart; and so on and so forth.

A distraught fan posted the following:

Michael Jackson was a brilliant singer i really miss him now i heard that he died from a heart attack i am really upset about it and i wish he was alive now so i can get his new songs he makes but because he is dead i'll never get to hear his newer songs he will make. Rest in pease Michael Jackson

Here is another heartfelt tribute:

a absolutely loved michael jackson i was going to see him in the o2 i had even booked V.I.P, i loved michael he was my dear freind i met him a couple of times in 1972 and recently in 2004 i am also a freind of uri geller michael's freind, i wish i was there to protect him, and now i give my thanks to his fans freinds including me and family, we love you michael R.I.P

If you thought that the public outpouring of grief was tad hysterical, you would not be the only one. In the UK, similar noisy, public breast-beating had taken place after Diana died in a car crash while trying to flee from the paparazzi who wanted to photograph her and her then lover Dodi Al-Fayed, who was also in the car at the time. It seemed that there were lots of people, whose lives were so empty that the death of an emotionally disturbed woman who had not done an honest day’s work in her life, who had no discernible talent other than fluttering her eyelids coquettishly at the camera and hooking up with stinking rich men, and whom they had never known personally, left them feeling utterly bereft. Diana was compared to Mother Teresa and, at her memorial service, Elton John sang a saccharine (and nauseating) version of Candle in the Wind. We must thank Barrak Obama for not joining the chorus of maudlin, cliché-ridden tributes, unlike Toni Blair, the then British prime minister, who managed to get himself in every photograph and look more grief-stricken than the family.

It would be fair to say that by the time his tired heart beat for the last time, Jackson’s glory days were behind him. He had not released a new album for eight years. His last album, Invincible, was branded a failure despite debuting at number 1 in not just the USA but also in 12 other countries and selling almost 10 million copies worldwide. Indeed, all of Jackson’s albums after Thriller, with possible exception of Dangerous, were branded as failures despite achieving mind boggling sales: Bad sold 30 million copies (in the UK, according to Wikipedia, it sold more copies than even Thriller, and it also holds the record of all its released singles, five in total, reaching the number one spot in the USA, a feat no other album has managed to achieve in the history of US Billboard); Dangerous sold 35million copies; and HIStory, a multiple disc album, sold more than 20 million copies. These are figures most artists can only dream of; sells of each of these albums were five to ten times more than what most artists achieve in their whole careers. It was Jackson’s misfortune that all of these albums were always compared to the seminal 1982 album Thriller, which sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. I once heard Louis de Bernieres saying in a literary programme that he was resigned to his fate that he would always be asked about and probably associated with only one novel, the mega-successful Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, although he had written novels before and after it. Joseph Heller wrote several novels, most of which were very entertaining, but they always suffered in comparison with his debut novel, Catch 22.

After Jackson’s death, a friend, who revels in arguments the point of which, insofar as there is one, is scoring petty points—his general strategy, during these arguments, alternates between presenting lopsided, preconceived judgments as facts—believing, mistakenly, that bullshit will baffle brain—and focusing on non-issues, eliding the crux of the argument—tried to convince me that ‘Bad’ was awful, and sent me a link of a survey carried out by the Rolling Stone magazine, which apparently came to the same conclusion and in which 23,000 Americans participated. Bad, my friend argued, is bad because Jackson wrote the lyrics of the majority of the songs in Bad, which, in his considered opinion, are not up to scratch, especially in comparison with Thriller, where Quincy Jones wrote most of the lyrics. I wrangled with him a bit but my heart was not in it, primarily because, if truth were told, I am not a die-hard, obsessive Michael Jackson fan, although I have liked his music—from Off the Wall to Invincible—for its melody and rhythm. I also think that his voice was unique and had a dulcet quality to it, thought it was not the sweetest. I have never thought that the lyrics—I can’t be bothered to investigate who wrote the lyrics; I am not interested—, either of Thriller or of subsequent albums, were profound commentaries on the human condition—they are, like those of countless popular Pop and Rock numbers, rather silly. (I once heard a song, where the singer shouted at his beloved that he liked very much to ‘come and go’ between her ‘kidneys’. In case you wondered which end he was planning to enter, the singer left you in no doubt as he provided description of the procedure, which was graphic enough to turn most healthy stomachs.) I doubt that lyrics contributed substantively to Jackson’s stratospheric popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s and his iconic status. Another argument often put forth by those who just cannot stomach the commercial success and popularity of Jackson’s music is that he had become a brand, implying that a behind-the-scene PR machine was in overdrive. This is a specious argument: Jackson was no more a brand than say Elvis or Beatles were. Indeed, it was Bernie Epstein, the Beatles manager, who is credited with first creating the concept of commodity tie-ins for pop music. Remember Beatles lunchboxes and Beatles cartoons?

My friend also threw in, during what he described as his polemic, the oft-heard tattle about Jackson’s personal life: the (unproven) charges of child sex abuse, the progressive lightening of Jackson’s skin colour over the years—‘The man could not even accept what he was, and tried to become what he was not, and could never be’— and the plastic surgeries. This is not surprising; people find it difficult to extricate Jackson’s music from his persona, from all the allegations, scandals, and the inevitable media frenzy that blighted his later years. Perhaps it is impossible to separate the real Michael Jackson from all the media speculation. May be only those—if them— who were near and dear to him had an idea what sort person Jackson really was. The rest of us should not even try.

The public life of Michael Jackson can be roughly divided into three phases: the first phase as a child prodigy when he was the star performer of the Jackson Five; then the dazzling height in the eighties and early nineties, post-Thriller, the phase of multi-million-selling albums, spectacular live tours and television appearances; and finally, the phase as a freak, his behaviour becoming increasingly erratic—if anyone initially thought that the whole thing was a propaganda initiated by Jackson’s PR machine, they would have soon be left in no doubt, as the news of Jackson spending long periods in a hyperbaric chamber began circulating, that the man had not just lost the plot, he had lost the whole library— , increasingly coming to resemble a manakin who had had a run in with a lawnmower, getting dragged through the courts on charges of sexual abuse, getting mired in debts, leading an increasingly nomadic existence—moving from one continent to another—, and career coming to a grinding halt. Posterity, however, will remember Jackson for his musical genius and for all those wonderful performances with which he entertained us. The final phase will be a mere footnote. A long footnote, perhaps, but only a footnote.

Book of the Month: Offshore (Penelope Fitzgerald)

Penelope Fitzgerald was sixty when her first novel, The Golden Child, was published. This late bloomer had pursued various careers including journalism, working for BBC and Ministry for food, and being a full time mother of three, before she found her niche as a novelist. Over the next two decades, Fitzgerald published eight more novels that established her reputations as one of the major figures writing in English.

Fizgerald won the 1979 Booker prize with her third novel, Offshore, piping to the post, in the process, Patrick White, the Nobel laureate, and V.S. Naipaul who had won the prestigious award previously and who went on to win the Nobel himself two decades later. However, according to Paul Theroux, the American novelist who was on the panel of judges that year, Offshore was a compromise choice.

In his scabrous (and therefore utterly engaging) memoirs, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Throux devotes a couple of paragraphs to the 1979 Booker prize and how Offshore came to win it. The Bookie’s favourite that year was apparently V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend In the River. Writes Theroux: ‘A Bend In the River was shortlisted for the Booker prize that year. I was one of the Booker judges. I reread the book . . . But when it came to the decision I voted against it. Mine was the deciding vote. I preferred Patrick Whites novel, The Twyborn Affair. “Patrick White? Over my dead body,” one of the panellists said. Another said to me, “I thought Naipaul was your friend." . . .In the end we compromised on Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, and most people jeered at our choice. They said Naipaul should have won . . . It was thought that because I was a judge, Vidia [V.S. Naipaul] should be a shoo-in. Not at all.’

Penelope Fitzgerald wrote novels that are known for their brevity. Offshore, at hardly more than 50,000 words, is no exception. It describes a houseboat community living on the river Thames near Battersea Reach. Most of the action, such as it is, takes place on the barges which, rise and fall as they may with the tide of the Thames, are, in fact, not going anywhere. The same can be said of the lives of the characters that inhabit this delectably quirky novel. Many of them are either ill at ease in the society out there ‘on the land’ or are plain misfits. The novel traces their longings, prejudices, secret crushes, aspirations, sense of camaraderie, and, in the process, almost imperceptibly, poses questions about dilemmas that have eternally faced the human existence. The ending is abrupt, which, I think, is apt in as far as it adds salience to the sense of surreality that pervades the novel. That said Offshore is probably not the book I would recommend to be acquainted with this remarkably gifted writer. Start with The Beginning of Spring; move, next, on to The Gate of Angels; let the writing style grow on you; then pick up Offshore. I guarantee you will enjoy it.

Penelope Fitzgerald is almost unsurpassable when it comes to vivid characterization with, I would risk calling, oxymoronically, maximum economy, and, in Offshore she achieves near perfection. She also manages to give a remarkable background visual feel to the narration with such ease that you almost don’t notice it. Fitzgerald—Beryl Bainbridge and Jane Gardam are some other names that immediately come to mind—had what I would describe as ‘minimum fuss’ style of writing. She seemed to abhor ostentation or adornment of any kind. If ten words would do, why waste fifty, which would add nothing to the descriptiveness, but will most definitely to the reader’s ennui?

It is a cliché, but length is not everything, and, makes no mistake, this novella is a gem. Did it deserve the Booker? Probably not; but that is only because I happen to think that Naipaul’s Bend In the River is one of the greatest books of the 20th century.

Professor of Poetry

I do not get poetry, especially modern poetry. I struggle with it; rather I would struggle with it if I were to read it. The little, and it is very little, of modern poetry that I have read, has not seemed like poetry at all. It just seems like ordinary language only with peculiar, syntax-defying, arrangements of words, or lists of crossword puzzle clues. Whenever I have attempted to read modern free verses (not very often), the only question that comes to my mind is who set them free. Very occasionally, I feel bad about my lack of ability to appreciate poetry, but, at the end of the day, I am damned if I want to do anything about it. Indeed, I am not sure that I can do anything about it. Understanding and appreciating poetry, like creating it, is a gift, and not everyone is blessed with it. You have to take it on the chin and move on. Some time ago, I attended a literary programme where Stephen Fry spoke. As it happened, he was peddling what at the time was his most recent ware—Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet within. Fry spoke for about half an hour. As was only to be expected, the garrulous narcissist spent the whole time telling the audience how clever he was and how well read he was and how exceptional his memory was and how many rare words (which nobody had used since 1708) he knew. Occasionally, during this paean to his exceptional talent, Fry seemed to remember why he was there, and put it to the audience, smirking condescendingly under his crooked nose, that writing poem was awfully simple, anyone could do it, really, and spat out words like iambic and trochee, which probably put most in the audience off writing poetry. But I digress. Poetry is an indelible part of the literary life of a society, and most would agree that those who produce such works of creativity should be suitably rewarded. And what higher accolade could be bestowed upon them than the professorship in as august a university as Oxford? I had never heard of it before (the professorship of poetry, that is; I have heard of Oxford, obviously) but as already acknowledged, I am an ignoramus when it comes to poetry (and not just poetry). The post of Oxford University Professor of poetry has, like most things in Oxford, a great history and tradition behind it. I have it on reliable information that the role goes back three centuries, and, its first incumbent, one John Trapp, could recite works of Shakespeare in Latin. This tradition apparently continued until the middle of the nineteenth century when the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold finally convinced the faculty members that reading lectures in English rather than Latin might be an idea worth giving a go. The salary, at 7000 pounds a year (plus 40 pounds travel allowance), would have been considered meagre by the mean, money-minded materialistic, selfish ex-bankers when they still had their jobs, but the worth of not everything can be measured in money. In addition, the job, which involves giving three lectures a year and an oration every other year, is not exactly backbreaking. Some have described the post as one of the most influential positions in poetry, which, to me, sounds a tad hyperbolic. Nevertheless, the post has attracted, over the years, some of the big guns from the world of poetry, W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney amongst them, the latter a Nobel Laureate.

This year, after Professor Christopher Ricks—an academic who is an expert on American poetry and is known to speak for hours on the lyrics of Bob Dylan—stepped down after completing his term of five years, three poets, one each from America, Britain and India, put forth their nominations. They were, in no particular order: Derek Walcott, the 79 year old St Lucia-born poet who won the 1992 Nobel prize for literature; Ruth Padel, the 63 year old great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin (from her mother’s side) and a descendent of the great British surgeon John Hunter (from her father’s side), who, according to her personal website, is a prize-winning British poet (she won a national poetry competition in 1997); and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra whose age was not known, neither was his contribution to poetry other than that he had ‘much to say of value . . .on issues . . . that are pressingly important in today’s world’, according to one Peter D McDonald (about whom, too, is not much known other than he lives somewhere in Oxford). Mehrotra was a late entry and it is doubtful that he was a serious contender. It was thought to be a two-horse race between Walcott, a man of immense stature (according to his supporters, which included the 2004 Booker winner Alan Holinghurst and Hermione Lee) and Padel, a woman of immense connections (according to her detractors, all of whom are coming out of woodwork). A week before voting— members of the convocation vote to elect the professor—anonymous letters were sent to more than 100 Oxford professors, majority of them women, who had voting rights. The letters, postmarked London, referred to the allegations of sexual harassment made against Walcott in 1982, by a student of the Harvard University. Accompanying the letters were photocopied pages of a book published in the 1980s, titled Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus, which contained details of the claim and subsequent investigation carried out by the Harvard University. The student had complained that, while discussing her work with Walcott after the class, Walcott invited her to imagine him making love to her; he also wanted to know, among other things, how she made love and whether she would make love to him if he asked her to. When informed that the student was unable to imagine having a sexual congress with him (perhaps because she found him repulsive, but this is a guess) and would not sleep with him even if he begged her to (perhaps for the same reason—this is a guess too), Walcott gave her a C grade in his class, which, apparently, is the Harvard equivalent of a failure. Walcott denied propositioning the student; his defence was that his teaching style was ‘deliberately personal and intense’—he wasn’t a dirty old man chasing frocks; he was following his unique way of poetry teaching, which contained the obligatory module of sleeping with female students decades younger than him—and that he had sensed no reluctance [in the student] to pursue the topic of sexual relationships. Walcott was reprimanded and was made to apologize to the student. What the anonymous correspondence did not contain were details of another sexual harassment case against Walcott, brought out by another female student from Boston University, in the mid-1990s, who sued him for half a million dollars (Walcott reached out of court settlement with the woman). Following this, Walcott withdrew from the race, claiming that the election had ‘degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination’; he was disappointed that such ‘low tactics’ were being used (almost as low as the ones he used, some might point out, to get his female students to sleep with him). At this stage, Nicole Kelby, the woman who sued Walcott in 1996 for sexual harassment and with whom he came to an out-of-court settlement, probably feeling left out—her name was not mentioned in the anonymous letters circulated—decided to join the fray, and, bizarrely, came out publically to Walcott’s defence. Writing in the Times, Ms Kelby described Walcott as ‘the greatest living poet’, and urged his critics to consider that poetry is a ‘passionate art’. She went on to give the following insight—no doubt gained during the prolonged negotiations in 1996 that resulted in her receiving hefty sums of money for not dragging Walcott through the American penal system—into Walcott’s alleged behavior, over the years, towards his female students: ‘it is his [Walcott’s] way to be sexual, to push the envelope of both decorum and good taste’. Walcott then extended his support to Padel, described her as a gifted poet, and predicted that she would become a great professor of poetry (so generous of him). There were murmurs that the hugely ambitious and moderately talented Padel, Walcott’s only serious rival for the post, was behind the smear campaign. Padel denied the rumours and declared that she had ‘absolutely no wish to see Walcott humiliated’ and that she was ‘very very sorry’ that he had pulled out. She, nevertheless, felt obliged to clarify that she did not intend to withdraw from the race—ignoring the public exhortation from the pompous A.C. Grayling, the professor of Philosophy and one of her supporters for the post, to do so (‘To win because anonymous and malicious persons witch-hunted Walcott out of the race would be a hollow and tainted thing,’ wrote Grayling in blog in the Guardian)—even though she was ‘deeply disappointed’ to find herself in the position of winning as it were by default. ‘All along, we should have been talking about poetry and the role of poetry,’ she said. ‘This is not what poetry is for.’ It was, she demurely indicated, her sense of duty that drove her on; and the satisfaction she would get from fulfilling her role as the Professor of Poetry would help her to cope with the deep disappointment of winning the position. The reaction of her remaining rival, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was not known (probably because no one bothered to find out), so we can’t be certain whether he, too, was deeply disappointed that Walcott had withdrawn from the race.

This is what happened next. Oxford decided to go ahead with the election, which Padel duly won, beating the little known Indian poet by what the election analysts like to describe as a comfortable margin, the only surprise being Mehrotra managed to attract more than hundred votes. Padel described herself as honoured and humbled to accept the professorship. Feminists, lesbians, and lesbian feminists were overjoyed. May 2009 was described as a landmark month, which saw the election of the first woman professor of poetry at Oxford and the first woman poet laureate (Carole Ann Duffy). Their joy lasted for about a week, at the end of which the humble professor looked set to eat a humble pie. Padel, it turned out, was not the innocent bystander she had all along claimed to be to the ‘Walcott Character Assassination’ plot. It was revealed that she had sent e-mails to journalists alerting them of Walcott’s naughty behavior all those years ago. The Evening Standard published details of an e-mail she sent to one of its journalists in which she referred to the sexual harassment claims made against Walcott, helpfully pointing them in the direction of the book Lecherous Professor if they (the journalist) wanted to know what Walcott ‘actually’ did for students. Her e-mail, littered with typos, was as follows:

'Hi Olivia [‘The Evening Standard’ journalist], ON the CHair, there is still no other nomination except (so extraordinarily) Derek W and me. But thye close on 29th April so another or others may well turnup... ‘THere is aupposed to be a book called The Lecherous Professor, which has 6 pages on Derek Walcott's two cases of sexual harassment, which might provide interestigfn copy on what Oxford wants from its professors.. ALl best, Ruth.’

There were predictable gasps of horror from the academics, including Padel’s supporters (for her campaign), who could not now wait to dissociate themselves publically from her. Padel claimed she was disappointed (again). She admitted to sending the two e-mails to journalists, but felt aggrieved that what she had done in good faith was being construed as an underhand, dirty trick to undermine Walccott and derail his campaign. ‘The papers today quote from email in which I passed on, in good faith, the concerns of a student who believed a professor's relations with women students were relevant to her university's appointment of a professor,’ Padel wrote in an e-mail (one hopes, with less typos) to a broadsheet. She (Padel) wanted these concerns to be heard. ‘The details I passed on were in the public domain and were a source of genuine unease to her [the student], and I communicated them to two journalists who had asked to be kept informed.’ It made little difference. The chorus of ‘Padel must go’ became shriller; A.C. Grayling and Melvyn Bragg became even more blusterous and self-righteous. (‘The professorship is a very serious thing," Grayling reminded the audience at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. ‘This is dirty tricks and character assassination.’) Padel was –pardon the awful pun—up the proverbial creek without a pedal. She saw and accepted the writing on the wall and stepped down from the post to which she was elected just nine days earlier. In her resignation speech, Padel tried a different approach. She was ‘naive and silly’ (and not a knavish, malignant, deceitful, unscrupulous bitch) when she sent the e-mails. It was, we were to understand, a bad error of judgment. ‘I can of course see that people can misconstrue these two isolated emails of mine as part of a larger campaign I had nothing to do with,’ was her defence. The lesbian feminists were incandescent. They smelt a rat. This surely was a male conspiracy against Padel, the first woman to become professor of Poetry at Oxford. Lesbian novelist Janette Winterson fumed: ‘It's a pity she [Padel]has been backed into a corner. What she has done is so much more -trivial than her contribution to poetry. This feels malicious and nasty. We ought to be able to look beyond the woman to the poetry. This is a way of reducing women; it wouldn't have happened to a man. But then Oxford is a sexist little dump.’ (If you are not sure which side to support in a controversy, I’d suggest you wait for Jeanette Winterson to contribute her whining, malevolent, risible, and illogical two pence worth of tripe, and then you can safely come down on the other side.) Lesbian poet Jackie Kay agreed. ‘This was the first time that we had a woman as Oxford professor of poetry – and she has had to resign over two emails. The old boys have closed in on her. It would not have happened to a man, and I am very sad,’ she said. Reaction of the fellow academics was outwardly of sadness (and, no doubt, inwardly of schadenfreude). The reaction of the rest of the great British public was one of indifference—there were more pressing matters that needed their urgent attention (rather than what a bunch of naval gazing, back-stabbing academics from Oxford got up to) such as whether Susan Boyle, the latest sensation on Britain’ s Got Talent, whose looks and physiognomy belied a great voice (appreciated even by Simon Cowell—the voice, that is, not the looks), was, in addition to being a spinster, a virgin, and, if she was, would anyone dare to sleep with her? A reporter finally made a long-distance phone call to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (remember him? He was the third contestant) to get his reaction. Mehrotra opined (his reply could not be heard clearly, as the connection was not good and the noises from the street of Allahabad interfered): ‘From India where I live, these extra-literary goings-on appear more unfortunate than amusing.’ (Obviously, such instances of skulduggery and backstabbing are unheard of in the land of Krishna.)

The state of play at present is as follows. The post of Professor of Poetry is empty. Both Walcott and Padel have announced that they would not run the next election, the former because he does not want to be associated with ‘that awful business’, the latter because ‘no one would believe me now’. Mehrotra will ‘cross the bridge’ when it comes (which means he is interested, because he thinks that he stands a chance.) Clive James has indicated that he is interested in the job.

Let’s get back to Padel’s insistence that she was not associated with the smear campaign in any way. Indeed, she claimed in an interview that the so-called smear campaign against Walcott could have been instigated to ‘undermine her’! There was a conspiracy all right, but it was against her, not against Walcott! Let’s not go into what intellectual pyrotechniques Padel performed in order to arrive at this conclusion. If we believe in the conspiracy theory, then whoever was behind the smear campaign wanted both Padel and Walcott out of the race. (If you suspect that the story is beginning to resemble an Agatha Christie mystery, the suspicion is justified.) Who could have benefitted from both Padel and Walcott being out of the way? Arvind Krishna Mehrotra! So, did the wily Indian, sitting in his den in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, plan the intricate and subversive plot that claimed two high-profile victims? But hold on! The person who benefitted from the smear campaign was Padel, not Mehrotra! The smear campaign ensured that Walcott was conveniently out of the way, and his exit paved Padel’s way for the coveted job. What forced her to resign was not the smear campaign but the revelation that she had sent e-mails to journalists, alerting them to Walcott’s sexual misdemeanours. Doesn’t it strike you a tad curious that she did not think it was necessary to inform the public about the e-mails she had sent, when she was expressing her ‘deep disappointment’ at Walcott’s humiliation and premature exit in the wake of the poisonous letters sent to Oxford Professors, the content of which was identical to her e-mails? We can conclude that Ms Padel’s conjecture that the smear campaign was aimed at damaging her credibility, while it might convince lesbian feminists, does not hold water for the non-deluded, non-partisan, non-gullible heterosexuals.

Should we believe Padel’s claim that she had nothing to do with the smear campaign? This is probably an opportune time to introduce another character who played a vital part in the ‘Walcott character assassination’ plot (if there was one). He is John Walsh, and he is a columnist for the Independent. It was his drumbeating column in said broadsheet in April 2009 that publically set cat amongst the pigeons. Walsh declared himself a supporter of Padel and attempted a demolition job on Walcott’s reputation worthy of Iraqi looters. In the article he spieled about Walcott’s reputation as the dirty old man, quoting extensively from—you have guessed it— the 1984 book Lecherous Professor (was this book on the bestsellers’ list, or what?), although the book is not about Walcott, there being many other priapic academics with extensive experience of deflowering nubile female students; he is mentioned on a couple of pages. A professor of poetry, who shall remain unnamed, initiated and circulated a story that Padel, a close friend of John Walsh, had provided him with the details. Padel responded by labelling the claim as ridiculous. ‘I used to know John 10 years ago and I see him once a year at parties,’ she said. She must have got to know Walsh really well, as he is said to have made free with Padel’s (middle aged) loins ten years ago. Indeed, according to a piece in the Sunday Times, a poem by Padel, titled Home Cooking, which ends with a fuck on a kitchen table, is about her affair with said Walsh. What was the chronology of these events? Walsh’s piece in the Independent appeared a couple of days after Padel sent her e-mails to the journalists (not to Walsh, though), and the anonymous letters to Oxford academics were posted a day after Walsh’s article appeared. So, is it possible that Padel did not have anything to do with the smear campaign? It is possible in the same way that it is possible that the roof of the room in which I am typing this piece will collapse and kill me. Many things are possible. Even if one gives Padel the benefit of doubt and agree that she may not have been directly involved in the smear campaign, it seems undeniable that she was orchestrating her own smear campaign with roughly the same aim. John Walsh’s column in the Independent sought to do the same thing to Walcott’s reputation what the anonymous letters sought. If one accepts Padel’s assertion, improbable as it may seem, that she had nothing to do with Walsh’s piece either, there is still the matter of e-mails she sent to journalists, which, for all appearances, had the same design as Walsh’s column and the anonymous letters: influence, albeit indirectly, the voters by making them aware of Walcott’s history of predatory behaviour towards his female students. She says that she sent these emails in good conscience, has absolutely no idea who sent the anonymous letters, and has nothing to do with Walsh’s deplorable column in the Independent in which he took the hatchet to Walcott. So, here we have a woman who is either honourable and straightforward, and most unfortunately the chain of events conspired to make her look like a sneaky, ruthless, calculating, machinating, vicious harridan, who, together with her despicable cabal (which included a former lover) plotted to bring down a man who is considered to be one of the most outstanding poets of our generation; or she is a sneaky, ruthless, calculating, machinating, vicious harridan, who, together with her despicable cabal (which included a former lover) plotted to bring down a man who is considered to be one of the most outstanding poets of our generation; she is also a barefaced liar capable of breathtaking hypocrisy, not a word of whose is to be trusted (including ‘and’ and ‘the’). Take your pick. I know what I am thinking.

Whither goest Padel from here? The clever woman she is, she will no doubt have gleaned the single most important lesson: do not leave your fingerprints anywhere near the crime scene. The bard said it centuries ago:

Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
They must lie there: go carry them; and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.
(Macbeth)

Who will be the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford? My money is on Clive James: he is tanned, rested, and suitably mediocre.

Why are academic disputes so vicious? Woodrow Wilson thought it was because so little is at stake.