The New Criterion

John Haffenden William Empson,
Volume I: Among the Mandarins.
Oxford University Press, 695 pages, $45

After working on this biography for twenty years, John Haffenden probably knows more about William Empson than Empson did, but he has lost all sense of proportion. His 570 pages of text take us only up to 1939, with forty-five years of his subject’s life yet to come. Does a mere literary critic, even a great one as Empson indisputably was, deserve such lavish attention? He left only scraps of diaries, and kept no letters; Haffenden has been indefatigable in interviewing surviving witnesses, but there is frequently more background than foreground in his book. He is notably good at fitting Empson’s writings (creative as well as critical) into a biographical context, but the analyses can be over-elaborate—fifty pages, for instance, on the writing of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Moreover, with every quotation Haffenden inevitably, and unfortunately, draws attention to the contrast between Empson’s racy zest and his own less readable prose.

Born in 1906, of old upper-middle-class landed-gentry stock, Empson was never quite at home on this planet. He regarded his family with affectionate bemusement; it was, he said, “like being in the company of steam engines.” He deplored their Toryism and their Anglicanism, hating the “torture worship” of Christianity even in childhood. A certain remoteness was both an instinctive and a congenial reaction. Myopic and bookish, he was happy at prep school, at Winchester College where he was a Scholar, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1925 to read Mathematics. His contemporaries respected his ability, his tirelessness in argument, and his independent outlook, but tended to pigeon-hole him as eccentric. Like many who are so judged, he simply lived most intensely in his own head; the external world did not much matter to him, and he was always happy to dress like a tramp and to be oblivious to squalor (there is a grisly vignette of him, in his Cambridge lodgings, “patiently sucking some beer-stains out of the carpet”).

When Empson switched from Mathematics to English in his last undergraduate year, under the influence of I. A. Richards, there was no essential contradiction; the beauty of Mathematics, he felt, was its ability to give the mind “a logical grasp on situations of greater complexity,” just the sort of thing he was to do in his early criticism by his dazzling analyses of verbal ambiguity. To see this, as his early supporter F. R. Leavis came to do, as facile game-playing, was a mistake; Empson could show off, but he deplored frivolity. Words were a serious business. Haffenden makes plain the width and weight of experience which informed his work; his briskness was edged with fear and trouble. His “casual” style, uniquely winning, was the product of draft after draft. His abstracted manner and gruff mode of speech led many to misconstrue him as coldly clinical, even inhuman. The tensions and contradictions he discerned everywhere in literature were in his life too.

His handling of relationships could be clumsy. He was bisexual, and some of his love poems have hidden male addressees; his autobiographical jottings about this display a slightly unconvincing jauntiness. His career appeared to be in ruins when, in 1929, weeks after being elected to a junior fellowship at Magdalene, he was expelled from Cambridge when contraceptives were found in his room; five years later he was in trouble with the police in Japan, when a university professor there, for propositioning a male taxi-driver (“Japanese men and women look so alike that I made a mistake”). He behaved unchivalrously towards a Japanese girl, Haru, with whom he was intermittently involved between 1933 and 1940, and towards Chiyoko Hatakeyama, whose faltering English poems he reworked for publication in the mid-1930s. When this volume ends, Empson’s future wife Hetta has not yet come on the scene. Haffenden persuasively speculates that many of Empson’s insights into the concepts of scapegoat and sacrifice had autobiographical foundations.

Empson’s criticism was the fruit of his teaching, which he took immensely seriously (one reason for his propagation of Basic English). From 1931 to 1934 he was in Japan, and from 1937 to 1939 in China, where the National University was forced into exile after the Japanese invasion. The dangers were real. Haffenden gives a graphic account of Empson the old campaigner, sleeping on his blackboard, lecturing on Shakespeare and A. E. Housman, and beginning an Orwellian fable, The Royal Beasts, about a tribe of mutants who expose the pretensions of Western civilization. What survives of this is very good; it is a pity he never finished it. His unworldly indifference to material comforts stood him in good stead during this period, but the strain was terrible. The end of Among the Mandarins finds Empson in Los Angeles in October 1939. He made his way to a summit in the city park and screamed aloud. “After I had been screaming for a bit I found I was being shot at by boys with air-guns; this satisfied me in some way; I came down the hill, and took the train to San Francisco.” Somehow that little anecdote seems to sum up everything lovable about this eminent man.