As promised, my correspondent A kindly passes along this description of last Saturday’s doings at Oxford:

In rather a rush, here are some notes about Saturday’s excursion. It was a beautiful day. Hawthorn foamed along the hedgerows, its sweet stink invading the car as we drove along.

Oxford was looking its honeyed best in the May sunshine. The Divinity School is on the Bodleian site, normally open to the public, but the wrought iron gates at the Clarendon Building on Broad Street were locked. The wrought iron gates separating Schools quad from the Sheldonian were locked. The wooden gate on Catte Street was locked. Attendants were on duty at the Radcliffe Square entrance to admit only readers showing a pass card, and voters were directed to the other Catte Street entrance (the wrought iron gateway you can see framing the picture of the Clarendon Building), where we were asked for identification before being admitted through knots of resentful tourists into the quad.

We walked across past the Sheldonian Theatre to the Divinity School, where a gowned attendant was at the door. He ushered us to a desk, where more gowned officials handed us ballot papers and instructed us to fill in both sides. On the reverse was a form requiring name, former name, college, and year of matriculation. There were no booths, just high oak tables in the middle of the room, where we stood to make our marks, worrying that there was nothing to protect the polished wood from the impression of the pen. And what a room! Hard not to be a tourist, gawping up at the glorious mediaeval carving, the windows, the whole archaic institution.

We folded our ballot papers as instructed, so that our votes were concealed from the Proctors when we presented ourselves at their desk for the next stage. The Proctors are academics, hooded and gowned. They are the executive, and in days gone by, rather feared on account of the sanctions they could impose on errant undergraduates. Now they were perfectly affable, and all they wanted was to see proof that we were who we said we were.

And the ballot paper was posted into the ballot box — the same sort of shiny black box that we see at general elections.

As the results weren’t due to be announced until after 5 pm, we went off to enjoy ourselves, renewing our Bodleian library tickets at the Clarendon Building, dropping into the History of Science Museum to look at the exhibition about the transit of Venus, watching a colourful and noisy animal rights march, where police appeared to outnumber marchers. Plus ca change. Then went to the Ashmolean…

The results were announced in Convocation Hall. Charles I briefly held parliament here — dark oak panelling with broken pediment fields, and rather plain pews laid either side of the aisle. At the top end were the dark blue padded armchairs for the Council members, and the throne. There weren’t many of us there waiting for the results � no-one we recognised. We guessed they were mostly curious backwoodsmen and women like ourselves. Eventually a small procession entered, and we all stood up. A tipstaff led; everyone was hooded and gowned and wore mortarboards, which they raised to people they recognised.

I guess it must have been one of the Pro-Vice-Chancellors who announced the opening of business of Convocation — the sole item was the announcement of the poll. Everyone remained standing, as he himself didn’t sit down. The Senior Proctor announced that it was a first past the post election, that the votes cast were as follows… and I hereby declare that Christopher Ricks is elected…

And the Pro-Vice-Chancellor declared the meeting closed and they filed out again, lifting their mortar boards. It had taken no more than a couple of minutes. We followed into the sunshine, where the announcement was repeated in the gothic frame of the doorway arch, for the benefit of waiting pressmen.

It will be at least 5 years before the next election. In the meantime, I would expect there to be a move towards electronic voting. Many alumni outside Oxford take an interest, but it isn’t practicable for most of them to vote in person. The argument that if you can’t get to the lectures, you shouldn’t be voting for the lecturer wears a bit thin these days, when the lectures reach a far wider audience on publication. And the choice of who sits in the chair says something about the university.

It seems surprising that, apart from the flyers that went out three days before the election, and the informal lobbying that must have gone on in one or two senior common rooms, there was no evidence of any other campaigning. The whole business seems shrouded in gentlemanly secrecy. I wonder why Carson’s candidacy wasn’t announced till after Ricks’s and Porter’s. It seems a pity to split the pro-poet vote. Having said that, I didn’t get the impression that passions were running high on this occasion, as I think all three of the serious candidates are held in high regard. I’d be surprised if anyone is desperately dismayed that Ricks was elected. The person I feel most sorry for is McMillan, who must have been hoping for a few more votes.

A few items from Chicago papers in the last week:

* Today’s Tribune reported that Poetry magazine’s board will meet on June 2 to approve a spending plan for a portion of the magazine’s $100 million bequest.

* On Sunday, Alan Cheuse reviewed Kent Haruf’s Eventide in the Tribune. “If this account of the story seems somewhat laconic, that may be because the book moves along in the same way, inspiring just enough passion in you as a reader to keep following the intertwined stories of most of these ordinary lives. But not much more.”

* In the Sun-Times, Delia O’Hara reported that Nuala O’Faolain’s next book is novel about a 19th century Irish “thief, tart and con woman” who gets her criminal education in Chicago. I liked O’Faolain’s memoir, Are You Somebody?, a whole lot.

* In New City, John Vincler reviewed John Barth’s new story collection, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night.

News Item: Assembly Line Tours Resume at Ford Rouge Plant

From Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the Center of the Night (1932), translated by John H. P. Marks:

When we’d put on our clothes again, we were sent off in slow-moving single files and hesitant groups towards the places where the vast crashing sound of the machines came from. The whole building shook, and oneself from one’s soles to one’s ears was possessed by this shaking, which vibrated from the ground, the glass panes and all this metal, a series of shocks from floor to ceiling. One was turned by force into a machine oneself, the whole of one’s carcass quivering in this vast frenzy of noise, which filled you within and all around the inside of your skull, and lower down rattled your bowels, and climbed to your eyes in infinite, little, quick unending strokes. As you went along, you lost your companions. You gave them a little smile when they fell away, as if it was all the greatest fun in the world. You couldn’t speak to them any longer or hear them. Each time, three or four stayed behind around a machine…. The little bucking trolley car loaded with metal bits and pieces strives to make headway through the workmen. Out of the light! They jump aside to let the hysterical little thing pass along. And hop! There it goes like mad thing, clinking on its way amid belts and flywheels, taking the men their ration of shackles.

You already know Ricks prevailed, but here’s how the votes fell, as A informs me:

Ricks 214
Porter 175
Carson 105
Walker 20
McMillan 17

So, 531 votes cast, 80 more than in the last contested election in 1994. A adds, “So the dons’ choice won, but not by an overall majority. Election was by first-past-the-post method…. It wasn’t a secret ballot, because we had to give our name and address and date of matriculation/college, etc., on the other side of the ballot sheet.”

I haven’t spotted any post-election coverage worthy of note, but today’s last-minute pre-election coverage included James Fenton in the Guardian recalling both times he stood as a candidate. He also parts the curtain on the life of a chair-holder:

Five scary years followed, in which I dreaded giving my lectures. I should have been happier, perhaps, if I had realised that Auden had been worried sick when giving his, but I did not find this out until the last few weeks, as I wrote my Auden series. I was very glad to have held the post, but ecstatic to be through with it.

Also pre-election, John Walsh offered a gossipy take in the Independent:

“Then in the 1960s, it became democratic, when all the MAs could cast votes for their champion, and there were farcical scenes. When Edmund Blunden stood against Robert Lowell and won in 1966, charabancs of doddery old MAs would come rattling into town to cast their votes. It attracts much more attention now than it used to. Poets take it very seriously.”

And there is something shocking about the hostility and Ealing-comedy shenanigans that surround the voting. “I think I got my first taste of how venomous the literary world can be in 1978,” said the novelist and biographer DJ Taylor, “when I read Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator saying about the professorship: ‘One looks forward with considerable relish to voting against Stephen Spender.’”

But in a cheerful segment on BBC Radio 4, candidates Porter and McMillan were having none of it. Porter I knew I liked; I found I also liked McMillan:

Poetry sometimes gets marginalized and people talk about it as being a frippery, and I don’t think it is. I think poetry could be part of council meetings, it could be part of academic meetings, it could be part of every school in Oxford, every workplace in Oxford, and every bus in Oxford and every bicycle in Oxford, because you do have a lot of bicycles.

Good man, good race. I may in a few days have some word-pictures to share from the scene of today’s vote, but otherwise, we’re done.

From Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940), by Henry Green, reissued in April 2004 by New Directions:

Poole, so they say, could never forgive my mother when soon after marriage she made him bowl mangel wurzels across one lawn for her to shoot at. I see her better after she had put her gun away, when she would come out as she still does with her retriever and a long hooked stick and all day would stand some way off with it raised on high, threatening the dog. Not one of her many dogs obeyed one of her commands. But in those days she used to call out, “Gardener, gardener, I’m going to shoot!” and it was for him then clumsily to bowl them. She called him gardener it is said but I know she called him Poole.

Most people remember very little of when they were small and what small part of this time there is that stays is coloured it is only fair to say, coloured and readjusted until the picture which was there, what does come back, has been over-painted and retouched enough to make it an unreliable account of what used to be. But while this presentation is inaccurate and so can no longer be called a movie, or a set of stills, it does gain by what it is not, or, in other words, it does set out what seems to have gone on; that is it gives, as far as such things can and as far as they can be interesting, what one thinks has gone to make one up.

Although my correspondent A informed me immediately yesterday when the campaign flysheets appeared in this week’s Gazette, I’ve been negligent in transmitting that news to you. I feel as R. K. Narayan once did during his brief tenure as editor of Indian Thought: “I felt that my readers would be justified in stoning me on sight.”

Well, tomorrow’s the big day. We didn’t get the debate we wanted — nay, deserved — but we are blessed with two ridiculous candidates to supplement the three serious ones. See The Guardian and The Scotsman for some good election-eve coverage.

In the matter of the flysheets, which are accessible at the Oxford site, only the supporters of Carson, Porter, and Ricks went to the trouble. I can merely speculate, but performance poet McMillan may prefer to utter his qualifications aloud; give him a jingle. Walker, by contrast, may simply feel that his work speaks for itself.

Both Porter’s and Carson’s flysheets argue, as you might expect, that the post is better filled by poet than by critic. Carson’s and Ricks’s both vaunt their candidate’s skill as lecturer. (Carson’s somewhat undercuts the claim by citing in evidence comments from her students at the University of Michigan, whose faulty judgment and intelligence I can prove documentarily — by showing you my diploma.) Porter’s takes a frank approach to the same issue. Although he has “much experience in lecturing,” his addresses on poetry are “too-rare,” and what’s more “he did not attend a university himself.” Plus, he’s “an Australian.” In case you didn’t get the message.

But elsewhere, Porter’s flysheet hits the nail on the head. Placing a poet in the post often gives us something we might otherwise never get. “It is thus that we now have the benefit of such books as W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand, Roy Fuller’s Owls and Artificers, Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry and James Fenton’s The Strength of Poetry among many others.” I love Ricks, but I think he’s going to be writing his wonderful, allusive, hyperkinetic essays regardless of his location for the next five years. That’s not the case with Porter and Carson. And though it’s close, I give my nod to Porter. I know Ladbrokes disagrees, but there you have it. I’m no good with the ponies either.

ADDITION 5/15: The ‘Brokes boys got it right. Ricks wins.

Located in Chicago or environs? Check. Non-university affiliated? Check. Publishes fiction? Check.

Still, I’m not sure this is what Jessa had in mind.

Incidentally, Jessa’s book club is reading Cort�zar next. Very cool.

I was delighted to discover this announcement yesterday on the website for the Goethe Institute Chicago. If you read this blog regularly, you know that Susan Bernofsky is one of my favorite translators, so it’s great to see her win an honorable mention this year.

Bernofsky’s also reading next week at PEN’s Annual Works-in-Progress Translation Reading in New York. If you live in New York, check out the rest of the events at the PEN Center this month. PEN has declared May 2004 “World in Translation Month.” Who knew?

The 2004 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize / Wolff Symposium

When: Thursday, June 3, 7:00 pm
Where: Chicago Cultural Center, 5th floor meeting room, 78 E. Washington, Chicago, IL

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, given annually for an outstanding translation from German into English, has been awarded this year to Breon Mitchell for his superb translation of the novel Morenga by Uwe Timm. Honorable Mention has been given to Susan Bernofsky for her translation of The Trip to Bordeaux by Ludwig Harig.

Financed by the German government and administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, the Wolff Prize consists of $10,000 and a three-month stay at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. Please join us at the Chicago Cultural Center as we celebrate the abiding pleasures of both literature and translation. The award ceremony is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is necessary. Please call 312/263.0472 or e-mail ProgramAssistant@goethe-chicago.org.

The next day, Friday, June 4th, the Institut hosts the Wolff Symposium, an annual, daylong event that examines issues impacting both publishing and translation. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Translation: A Brave New Word”, and promises to be a lively look at the state of literary life on both sides of the Atlantic. Attendance at this event is by invitation only, but if interested, please contact Jeffrey Essmann at ProgramCoordinator@goethe-chicago.org.

News of a new location for one of my favorite literary blogs. (Apologies to Auden and Kallman.)

ANNE TRUELOVE: The woods are green, and bird and beast at play,
For all things keep this festival of May;
With fragrant odours and with happiness
The pious earth observes The Rake’s Progress.

TOM RAKEWELL: Now is the season when the Cyprian Queen
With genial charm translates our mortal scene,
To a new platform; where with newborn spasm
I fresh engage in my old sarcasm.

ANNE TRUELOVE: How sweet within the budding grove,
To browse, to blog.
How sweet beside the pliant stream.
To link, to dream. How sweet.

TOM RAKEWELL: How sweet beside the pliant stream
To link, to dream
How sweet within the budding grove
To blog, to browse. How sweet.

Over at the London News Review Books Diary, Sean shares the latest line on the race for Oxford Professor of Poetry:

Christopher Ricks 2-1
Anne Carson 5-2
Peter Porter 4-1
Ian McMillan 5-1
Mark Walker 5-1

In Sean’s view, “you’re a fool to yourself if you don’t put a saver on Porter.” I’ll second that.

Here we are, four days from election day, and still so little coverage in the press. Last thing I saw was a BBC item on candidate McMillan.

By the way, Porter’s countryman Clive James wrote an appreciation for the Feb 13 TLS. Not the world’s greatest prose, but insightful I think:

In the best sense, the body of Porter’s work, both in poetry and prose, is an education: an education both for him and for us. From his published beginnings, he showed none of the mandatory Movement diffidence about a display of erudition, and he has gone on to build in print the university he never attended, and which can’t be attended by anyone in any other form but this. What the Germans call Bildung is made manifest as the work of a lifetime.