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“But I don’t think that’s fair”. The press has caught Ruth Padel redhanded in the “smear” campaign against Derek Walcott. (“Smear” may be a misnomer: as Katy Evans-Bush notes on the Guardian website, a “smear” is a “slanderous untruth“, and Walcott himself admitted that some of the allegations against him are true.) According to the Times, Padel sent an e-mail to journalists last month in which she said:

Some [of my] supporters add that what [Derek Walcott] does for students can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, reporting one of his two recorded cases of sexual harassment and that Obama is rumoured to have turned him down for his inauguration poem because of the sexual period. But I don’t think that’s fair.

Padel, who resigned from the position this week, acknowledges that she sent the e-mails, though she defended herself in a message to the Guardian. The problem for her is that even if she had nothing to do with the anonymous packages that appeared in Oxford dons’ mailboxes with photocopied passages from The Lecherous Professor, she is herself a lying professor. The Times dredges up a 12 May quote in which Padel said: “Neither they [my campaign managers] nor I mentioned Walcott’s harassment record and had nothing to do with any behind-doors operation.” Her disclaimer about “any behind-doors operation” might be true, but she clearly did mention Walcott’s harassment record.

If Walcott is looking for solace, he might find it in an homage by Clive James. James–perhaps inspired by the New York Times‘ lament on the “lost art of reading aloud“–reads his poetic paean to Walcott on the website of the Guardian and at this month’s Hay Literary Festival in Wales. (Sidenote: James’s reference to “railway station porters [who] with one impatient word rape teenage daughters” does seem like a strange way of paying tribute to a man who stands accused of sexual harrassment.) Meanwhile, Walcott does not stand alone as the honoree of an homage by a prominent poet: Douglas Hogg, who in recent weeks has also had his named dragged through the mud (or, more precisely, through the moat) is the subject of a new couplet by the recently elected poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy:

What did we do with the trust of your vote?

Hired a flunky to flush out the moat.

Duffy isn’t the first poet laureate to tackle a timely topic. Her predecessor Andrew Motion recently wrote five sonnets about climate change that will function as the libretto for Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s new symphony, slated to debut at King’s College Cambridge on 13 June. Meanwhile, the Times Literary Supplement takes a look at Motion’s new collection of poems, The Cinder Path; reviewer Peter McDonald suggests that the collection borders on bathos, but by Motion’s standards, that counts as a warm reception. When he was named poet laureate in 1999 (a position that entitles him to a “butt of sack“), one anonymous critic compared Motion’s life work to a sack of something else.

The Horrors of Train Travel. A world away from Clive James’s “railway station porters”, FT columnist Matthew Engel analyses the lesser evils of rail transport in his new book Eleven Minutes Late. The Guardian reviews Engel’s book and pines for the days when the bar on The Flying Scotsman featured 32 cocktails. (Now, its menu merely offers a “selection of Schweppes mixers”.)

The High-Flying Welshman. Meanwhile, Matthew Engel himself travels to Wales for the Hay Festival (though he doesn’t say what mode of transport he used for the journey). Engel seeks to explain how a town of 2,000 became home to 30 second-hand bookstores and an international literary festival that Bill Clinton christened as the “Woodstock of the Mind“. The story revolves around Richard Booth, who graduated from Oxford in 1961, set up a store in his family’s Welsh hometown, and soon tranformed Hay into a booklovers’ mecca. Along the way, he crowned himself king of the independent state of Hay-on-Wye and–more recently–launched a long-shot bid for European Parliament on the Socialist Labour line.

Not Feeling the Festive Spirit? The other major literary festival this past weekend was Calabash in Jamaica, and last year’s headliner (Walcott) was not in attendance. Indeed, he almost certainly wasn’t invited back. The poet who allegedly sought to seduce his female students made no attempt to seduce his Caribbean colleagues in 2008; rather, he used the occasion to lash out at the Trinidadian Nobel laureate VS Naipaul:

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection

Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.

Auden on Screen…and Auden on Screen. An Oxford professor of poetry maligning a highly respected colleague? History repeats itself, as History Boys veteran Alan Bennett notes. Bennett’s “The Habit of the Art” explores the tempestuous relationship between WH Auden (a onetime holder of Padel’s new post) and composer Benjamin Britten: after a productive collaboration in the 1930s, Auden was “crudely disparaging” of Britten’s later work. (One hopes that the aforementioned collaboration between poet Motion and composer Davies ends on a more positive note.) This week, Variety reports that the National Theatre will bring the Auden-Britten drama to cinemas across Britain as part of its NT Live programme.

Speaking of poetic homages to questionable characters, the Times Literary Supplement reveals that in the mid-1930s, Auden wrote three “peasant folk songs eulogizing [Lenin] and promoting Stalin as his political heir“. The songs were for a Russian propaganda film commissioned by Stalin to mark the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. The British Film Institute will present the movie and the accompanying Auden poems at an 8 June event on its Southbank stage.

Spies Like Mom? MI5 sought to prove that Auden aided Soviet spies but could never close the case. Meanwhile, two children growing up on the English countryside in the 1960s seek to determine whether their mother was a Soviet spy in Georgina Harding’s newest novel, reviewed in this week’s New York Times. In the Washington Times, David Chambers has no qualms about admitting that his grandfather was a Soviet spy, but he laments the fact that Susan Jacoby, author of Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, won’t acknowledge that new findings from the Soviet archives “seal the coffin…on Mr. Hiss’ guilt”. (ORB excoriated Jacoby for other omissions in last week’s edition.) The New Haven Independent offers an overview of the controversy sparked by Spies: The Rise and Fall of KGB in America, which claims the legendary left/liberal journalist IF Stone was in cahoots with the Kremlin. (The authors of the book—one of whom is ex-KGB himself—also present their findings in the current issue of Commentary.) Eric Alterman, writing in the Daily Beast, says that it all depends on what the definition of a “spy” is: Stone helped the KGB identify potential recruits, but he didn’t pass along secret information. Alterman looks the word up in the dictionary and decides that Stone doesn’t qualify.

A Short Dictionary of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, the American-born author and “accidental chancellor” of Durham University, is selling a new edition of his Dictionary for Writers and Editors. (It’s actually called Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors: the author has named it for himself. An American might say that Bryson has named it after himself, but as the Daily Mail notes, the “after” would be improprer on the British Isles.) While the Daily Mail mulls Bryson’s dictionary, the Guardian examines a fictional Daily Mail Dictionary: Guardian readers are defined as “empty-headed leftie liberal morons who don’t understand anything“.

Meanwhile, as the Guardian celebrates the silver anniversary of its media section (and celebrates the fact that it was the only quality title in the UK to increase its sales numbers last month), the New Statesman facilitates a journalistic ménage à trois like none other. Evening Standard correspondent Gideon Spanier takes out a column in the Statesman and takes up Independent managing director Simon Kelner’s charge that the Guardian uses its media section “purposely to damage their biggest commercial rival”. (The Guardian has spread speculation that the cash-strapped Indie is trying to sell itself to the Daily Mail and General Trust.) Guardian exec Emily Bell admires the Indie MD for having “the balls to be very explicit” (though as Bell knows well, media execs do not need male gonads in order to be very explicit).

A Recipe for Failure. There are two days left in the London Times‘ “Recipe Exchange“: Gordon Ramsay will pick the five best entries next week. One early entrant is historian and all-around public intellectual Simon Schama, who contributes a cheese soufflé. The Wall Street Journal takes no position on Schama’s gruyère-parmesan mixture but says that Schama’s new book, America’s Future, “is to be savored“. But the NYT‘s David Brooks says that Schama has cooked up a “gopping goo of pure pretension“. According to Brooks, Schama’s attempt at reportage is—like a soufflé gone awry—thin. Instead of getting down and dirty with the nitty gritty of modern American life, Schama ensconces himself in “the realm of enlightened High Thinking that exists where The New York Review of Books reaches out and air-­kisses The London Review of Books“.

Dispatches From The Realm of Enlightened High Thinking That Exists Where The New York Review of Books Reaches Out and Air-Kisses The London Review of Books. In the NYRB, Hussein Agha (of St. Antony’s College) and Robert Malley (formerly of the Clinton administration) call for a “new language” to address Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the two-state solution may be wise, but the phrase “two-state solution” is tainted…Gary Willis looks at Lincoln’s efforts to give new meaning to the language of the Declaration. Willis concludes that Lincoln misinterpreted Jefferson, but that’s not such a bad thing after all: “Thank you, Mr. Lincoln, for doing us the favor of fruitfully being wrong

Colm Tóibín traces the fortunes of the two James brothers who followed Lincoln’s call to arms (Wilkie and Bob) and the two who did not (William and Henry). The two Alices—the spinster sister as well as William’s wife—figure prominently as well…Across the pond at the LRB, John Lanchester traces the fortunes of the Royal Bank of Scotland…RBS banknotes, he helpfully points out, are not legal tender in England and Wales…Wales (Jimmy) is the subject of the LRB‘s other lead article this week: the Wikipedia founder who once said that “the real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks” is himself a partisan of Ayn Rand, the philosopher-cum-novelist noted for her hostility toward philanthropy. According to LRB reviewer David Runciman (and according to Wales’s own Wikipedia page), Wales takes Rand’s objectivist philosophy quite seriously:

His first wife, Pam, was quoted in a September 2008 W magazine article as saying that Wales, because he believed altruism was evil, discouraged her from pursuing a nursing degree when they were married.

Hot-Selling Classics, and Hot-Selling Clerics. Although Ayn Rand sales are surging (The Economist attributes the spike to the recession), the Boston Globe notes that even amid Rand-a-mania, last week’s Simpsons episode—which followed the plot line of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (and which featured Jodie Foster as Maggie)—was “the least watched in Simpsons history” …And while Atlas Shrugged flies off the bookshelves in the US, a book titled Sex As You Don’t Know It is flying off the bookshelves in Poland. That might not be so surprising…except for the fact that the author has taken a vow of celibacy. (He is a Catholic priest.)

Meanwhile, The Sun summarises a new book that condenses the classics into 140-character tweets. Atlas Shrugged doesn’t make the cut (even though an online poll by Random House rated it the best novel of all time), but Ulysses (which a Random House survey of experts rated as the best novel of all time) does. The Twitter version: “Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.”

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Susan Jacoby
Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
Yale University Press, 2009
176 pages
£10.99
ISBN 978-0199559527

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When American journalist Susan Jacoby told her 86-year-old mother that she planned to write a book on “changing perceptions of the Hiss case”, her mother shot back an e-mail asking, “Who cares about that anymore?” For the younger Jacoby, the answer is axiomatic: everyone. Forty-nine years after a US federal court convicted Alger Hiss of perjury, Jacoby claims that the case still “strikes chords located along ideological fault lines”. If Jacoby had written those words a decade ago, they might have rung true. But Jacoby’s mother—who is impressively quick with the keyboard for an octogenarian—has her fingers more firmly on the pulse of America circa 2009.

After Hiss died in 1996, his ghost lingered for several years. According to search statistics from the Lexis-Nexis database, US newspapers mentioned Hiss’s name in 274 articles in 1997, and Hiss references reached a post-Cold War peak of 350 in 1999. At that point, it might have made sense to ask (as Jacoby’s book does): “Why…does the Alger Hiss case still matter in such vastly changed geopolitical circumstances?” But since the turn of the millennium, Hiss has fallen into obscurity. In 2008, US newspapers made reference to Hiss on only 72 occasions. Perhaps the pertinent question is: why has the Hiss case ceased to matter to the vast majority of Americans?

For readers unfamiliar with “Hiss-teria”, the facts of the case are as follows: Harvard-educated Alger Hiss was a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he was a Roosevelt administration official during the New Deal years; he was the secretary-general of the United Nations organising conference in 1945; and he was the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace until 1949. He was also a Soviet spy.

Jacoby waffles on this last point: she says she is “98 or 99 percent convinced of Hiss’s guilt”, but she never explains why her certainty is less than complete. A few remaining defenders of Hiss insist that no single “smoking gun” has been found, but the evidence against Hiss amounts to an entire smoking arsenal. In 1948, a confessed Soviet agent named Whittaker Chambers turned over a cache of transcribed, top-secret State Department cables—some handwritten, others typed—to US House investigators. Forensics experts hired by Hiss acknowledged that the handwriting matched Hiss’s and that the typed transcriptions came from Hiss’s own Woodstock typewriter, serial number N230099.

Chambers claimed that Hiss provided material support—cash, a car, lodging—to underground American communists. Bank statements, automobile registrations, and real estate records supported Chambers’s charges. Hiss had the best defense attorneys money could buy—actually, better than money could buy, because top lawyers agreed to work for him pro bono. Two sitting Supreme Court justices, the governor of Illinois, and one former Democratic presidential nominee all agreed to testify as character witnesses on Hiss’s behalf. After two trials, which the generally liberal New York Times editorial board described as “full and fair”, Hiss was convicted by a jury of his peers. He served 44 months in a federal penitentiary, where by all accounts he was well-treated.

Memories of the case might have faded if not for a pair of post-trial events. First, two weeks after Hiss’s sentencing, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that communist agents had infiltrated the US State Department; the fact that Hiss had served at the department for nine years lent prima facie credibility to McCarthy’s claims. Then, two decades after the Hiss scandal surfaced, Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency. As a young congressman, Nixon had played an important role in bringing Hiss to justice. Nixon haters embraced Hiss as the enemy of their enemy—and thus, as their friend.

Jacoby argues that the Hiss case was—chronologically and symbolically—“the beginning of the McCarthy era”. More accurately, it was the end of the pre-McCarthy era. Senator McCarthy had no personal involvement in the prosecution of Hiss. From the vantage point of the 21st century, what is striking about the Hiss trial is not that the prosecution engaged in shameless red-baiting (it did not), but that Hiss’s defense team engaged in shameless gay-baiting. Unable to discredit Chambers based on the facts of the case, Hiss’s lawyers (with the defendant’s encouragement) sought to smear Chambers based on the fact that he was bisexual. Fortunately, the jurors in the Hiss case were not as horrifyingly homophobic as Hiss and his attorneys. In retrospect, if either side of the trial engaged in egregious behaviour, it was the defense—not the prosecution.

But for Jacoby—as for Hiss and his lawyers—the facts of the case take on secondary importance. “It is not my intention, in this slim volume, to reexamine or reevaluate the actual evidence in the Hiss case”, she writes. “Furthermore, my own view that Hiss lied is based less on the vast body of old and new evidence…than on Hiss’s own elliptical and emotionally unconvincing memoirs.” These sentences are disturbing in their own right: can anyone be “98 or 99 percent” certain of a defendant’s guilt because the defendant’s statements are “emotionally unconvincing”? I, for one, propose that Susan Jacoby be barred from ever serving on a jury.

Whether or not wishy-washiness on the Hiss case ought to be a disqualification for jury duty, it apparently is a disqualification for higher office in the US. In November 1996, Democratic diplomat Anthony Lake told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that evidence of Hiss’s guilt was not “conclusive”. The following year, when President Clinton nominated Lake to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Republican senators suggested that a Hiss apologist was unfit to serve as the nation’s chief spy. Ultimately, Lake withdrew his name from consideration.

What motivated the Democratic defenders of Hiss, and why did they engage in this strange form of self-immolation? In part, the answer lies in the fact that if Hiss was guilty, then Richard Nixon was—at least on this point—correct. For Nixon foes such as Lake (who left the Nixon administration in protest in 1970) and former Senator George McGovern (who lost to Nixon in the presidential election of 1972 and continues to challenge Hiss’s conviction), that concession is a step too far.

But for a younger generation of American liberals (this reviewer included), Nixon was a tragic figure rather than an out-and-out evil one. He did more to protect the environment than any president previous or subsequent. Other Nixonian initiatives included the Earned Income Tax Credit, which Clinton ultimately embraced, and affirmative action, which has been a central plank of the Democratic Party platform ever since. Moreover, by engaging the USSR and China in direct dialogue, Nixon arguably did more to stabilize the Cold War world than any other single figure.

Yes, he was a criminal, and a war criminal to boot, but younger American liberals admit that Nixon was right on the environment, right on anti-poverty issues, and right on détente. From there, it is only a small step to say that he was right on Alger Hiss as well.

Today, the Hiss case does not, as Jacoby claims, “strike chords located along ideological fault lines”. To the contrary, the Hiss case is one issue upon which consensus transcends ideological divides. With the election of Barack Obama, the torch has been passed to a new generation of American liberals—post-Baby Boomers who remember Richard Nixon as a historical figure rather than a real-life foe and who are perfectly willing to admit Hiss’s guilt. The Battle for History thus appears at the precise moment that its subject has lost his place in the progressive pantheon. To its credit, this book is a lively read. But it is not a timely one.

Susan Jacoby is a talented writer, though one might wish she were a more obedient daughter. As far as the Alger Hiss case goes, her mother was the wiser. Unfortunately, Jacoby has chosen to channel her talents into a monograph at precisely the time that her subject slipped to the status of historical footnote.

Daniel Hemel is an MPhil student in International Relations at New College, Oxford. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.