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Tracking down a giant of English literature
William Empson survived civil wars, bandits and bugs, writes Piers Plowright. And he remains the most important figure in English literary criticism
Among The Mandarins:William Empson Vol I by John Haffenden, Oxford Univeristy Press, £30 order this book
THIS is a big and sometimes difficult book about a big and sometimes difficult man. Occasionally, like an overloaded cart on a steep hill, it spills straw and bricks onto the innocent reader who imagined they were merely going for an afternoon stroll. But it’s worth the climb.
William Empson was undoubtedly the 20th century’s most stimulating critic of English Literature, as well as being a poet of skill and wit. John Haffenden, Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield – a post which Empson himself once held – has devoted years of research and analysis to this first volume of a two part biography. Haffenden knew Empson and had his blessing – well, kind of.
“I think I can only help you when I’m dead,” was a typically Empsonian piece of encouragement – and he has travelled everywhere and talked to everybody, including former students in China and Japan, to track the man down. And what a man. Born to a wealthy and eccentric Yorkshire family in 1906, he got a first in mathematics at Magdalene College, Cambridge before switching to English Literature, scoring another first and being sacked from the college the day after he was appointed a junior fellow because a packet of condoms was found in his luggage.
Undeterred, he completed work on the single most important work of criticism in the history of English Lit., Seven Types of Ambiguity, and pushed off to Japan and then China, at a turbulent moment in their histories, surviving nationalism, communism, civil-war, bandits, and bugs, with amazing good humour.
Teaching his students with endless patience in an array of dilapidated huts, he continued to write a flood of poetry and at least two more important books of criticism before his return to England at the end of 1939 just in time for World War II. London – Haverstock Hill – and a job with the BBC Chinese Service lay immediately ahead but William Empson survived civil wars, bandits and bugs, writes Piers Plowright. And he remains the most important figure in English literary criticism Among The Mandarins:William Empson Vol I by John Haffenden, Oxford Univeristy Press, £30 Volume 1 stops here.
Haffenden’s great strength is an ability to balance anecdote, event and penetrating criticism, with a skill that would probably have delighted his subject.
There are lots of good stories, some hilarious extracts from Empson’s diaries and letters and brilliant portraits of his friends and enemies.
From the beginning, Empson struck his Cambridge contemporaries with awe.
“We worshipped him,” wrote Julian Trevelyan. “By far the most brilliant member of the group…. he rolled his great eyes round and round as he read his poems, looking like the mythical dog with eyes like saucers in Anderson’s Tinderbox”.
Leavis and Witgenstein admired him, though Leavis was later to call him “dangerously clever”, and the influential teacher and critic, I A Richards, thought he was the most brilliant student he’d ever taught. It was Richards who encouraged Empson to go ahead with Seven Types while he was still an undergraduate and it was Richards who inspired him to go to China.
As a scientist and a literary man, Empson was able to apply a logic and a passion to the reading of texts that changed the course of criticism and there’s a freshness and zip to his critical writing that continually breathes new life into work that had become staled by conventional discussion.
Haffenden makes a good case too for Empson’s own poetry which has been rather neglected since his death in 1984.
Nothing was too small for Empson to consider in his reading of poetry and prose which could, on an off day, overwhelm the work under discussion and I have the same minor reservation about his biographer. We are occasionally told a little more than we need to know and – a case for a rather more scrupulous revision of the book before its second edition – we are sometimes told the same thing two or three times. Nonetheless, Among the Mandarins – the title itself has a nicely ambiguous ring – is a major achievement.
I met Empson once, interviewing him for a Radio 3 programme about the poet and translator Arthur Waley. I don’t remember much about our meeting but I do remember the torture of trying to edit the tape afterwards. The combination of his droning voice, a complete absence of pauses and eccentric changes of pace, made it almost impossible to cut or tidy. Perhaps he did it on purpose, determined that every nuance of his thought should be preserved. In any case, what he said was excellent and what he wrote was even better. John Haffenden has done both full justice.
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