When Nobel laureate Derek Walcott died in March 2017, The New York Times ran a 2,000 word obituary highlighting the brilliance of his imagination as a poet and dramatist. After the quotations and citations, including one from the Nobel committee, were the following two paragraphs:
“In 2009, Mr. Walcott was proposed for the honorary post of professor of poetry at Oxford University. His candidacy was derailed when academics at Oxford received an anonymous package containing photocopied pages of a book describing allegations of sexual harassment brought by a Harvard student decades earlier. Mr. Walcott withdrew his name.
“’I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election, and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role or to myself,’ he told The Evening Standard of London. He added, ‘While I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it.’”
Several days after the obituary was published, Adam Cohen wrote a letter to the Times to call out the newspaper’s description of those “allegations of sexual harassment” that marred Walcott’s tenure at Harvard and BU. His letter forcefully corrects the record, citing the Times’ own reporting, and concludes, “You do a disservice to these courageous victims, and to history, when you overlook the factual record — which you yourself have previously confirmed — and dismiss offenses like Mr. Walcott’s.”
The Times must have taken Cohen’s letter seriously; the account of Walcott’s life in the Magazine’s year-end feature “The Lives They Lived” includes this paragraph:
“Not all of his dealings with younger writers were positive: In 1982, a Harvard student charged that Walcott pressured her sexually and retaliated when she rebuffed him, for which he was reprimanded by the university. One former graduate student, Nicole Mary Milligan, sued Walcott and Boston University for sexual harassment in 1996, eventually settling out of court. ‘I think that his work stands for the ages, and that’s born of a deep humanity he has,’ she says now, her voice navigating a suite of complex emotions. ‘If this is about his work and how he should be remembered, it’s: He was a great poet.’ He was also, she says, ‘perhaps more human than God intended.’”
(For those interested in a fuller description of what happened at BU, you can read what Nicole Kelby told the Guardian in 2009.)
“The Lives They Lived” article also refers to an essay by Sven Birkerts first published in AGNI 86, and featured by Poetry Daily throughout the last weeks of 2017.
Birkerts offers a brilliant tribute to Walcott with his memory of a time when the Boston/Cambridge poetry scene included three Nobel winners or winners-to-be: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. There’s no better close reader than Birkerts, whether he’s writing about poetry or deconstructing the nature of style in prose. Here, for example, Birkerts describes how Walcott informed his understanding of sound as the pulse of a poem’s life:
“Derek’s instruction, his sleeves-rolled-up approach to the poetic line, was persuasive, but even so I’m surprised all these years later how much those incantatory repetitions have stuck with me, how they inform not just my sense of the various poems we discussed, but my reading of poetry in general. The process, I’ve learned, is very different from engaging with prose, even highly crafted literary prose. A poem is a thing made of sound, Rilke’s ‘tall tree in the ear.’ You do not address it in logical sequence, as a set of messages, and hurry on. Instead, you greet it with a different kind of attention: all those syllables, those sounds, have combined to make meanings and sensations. You grasp that primary fact at the same time as you grasp those meanings and sensations. Derek never stated the matter in quite these terms, but this is what I understood him to be communicating.”
But since “Derek Walcott at BU: A Sorting” is an essay about a particular time and place as well as an elucidation of a poet’s work and teaching style, I’m distressed that Birkerts omits or glosses over a side of the writer that’s inextricable from that history. When he writes,
“Memories of Derek bring back the feel of the times, how it was for all of us who came up together wanting to be writers. We showed up at the same readings, went to the same bars afterward. We watched each others’ trajectories closely as we sent our work to literary journals,”
he excludes from “all of us” those who had to deal, in one way or another, with Walcott’s sexual harassment problems. I doubt that the literary parties he describes—and that some of my friends attended—were as much fun for those women writers trying to secure a space for themselves in the world as they were for the men. The record needs to show that the “feel of the times” reads very differently in the second decade of the twenty-first century than it did at the end of the twentieth.