The New Criterion

John Haffenden
William Empson:
Against the Christians.
Oxford University Press, 797 pages, £30.

This is the second and final volume of John Haffenden’s epic biography of William Empson (I reviewed the first for The New Criterion in May 2005). Once again, Haffenden marshals a wealth of detail into a narrative always fresh and engrossing. The last four decades of William Empson’s life took him from propaganda war work for the Far Eastern unit of the BBC, to a British Council lectureship at the National Peking University, where he remained throughout the civil war and well into the communist regime; thence back to his native Yorkshire and a seventeen-year professorship at Sheffield before a productive retirement. The writing went on unceasingly: major books—The Structure of Complex Words (1951) and Milton’s God (1961)—massive essays, new and revised, on Donne, Marvell, and Coleridge, among others, a projected book on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and much else, all of which Haffenden edited after Empson’s death. He has now also been allowed to print the long, unfinished, and unfortunately not very good poem “The Wife Is Praised,” one of the few which Empson wrote after those in The Gathering Storm (1940). It celebrates the unconventional sexual life Empson shared with his turbulent wife, Hetta, a South African artist whom he married in 1941. Although their mutual devotion is unquestionable, both had lovers (Empson’s were of both sexes) who sometimes lived in the house, and at one point Hetta took off for a year with the father of her illegitimate son, an arrangement Empson accepted with saintly patience. Haffenden, normally indulgent to his subject, doesn’t hesitate to describe the effect of this disordered ménage on the Empsons’ two young sons as emotional abuse. The boys were neglected, often having to pick their way across the recumbent bodies of their parents and the previous evening’s guests, all sleeping off massive hangovers, to get their own breakfast in a morning before setting off for school, and they witnessed numerous scenes of verbal and physical violence. “Oh, why can’t you just be normal?” one of them cried out to Hetta during one such episode. It says much for all concerned that their tributes to her and to Empson today are nonetheless deeply loving.

Empson had always spoken up for China within the BBC and in his broadcasts, and happily returned there in 1947 with his family. Haffenden’s account of his stay occupies nearly two hundred pages of this volume. Remarkably, while his Chinese colleagues were subjected to “re-education” programs—a euphemism for brainwashing and indoctrination—when the communists took over, Empson was left alone to teach more or less as he pleased. His regular courses included Shakespeare, poetry from the seventeenth century to the present day, and composition. Since he spoke no Chinese, finding the language unpalatable, he wrote his lecture on the blackboard as he extemporized it, to make sure the students could follow his drift; this was just as well, given that a combination of slurred rapidity and mumbling made his speech difficult even for English audiences, even if he had remembered (which he sometimes didn’t) to put his false teeth in.

Empson made no concessions to his students; he did not expect to be understood by more than a tiny minority, but believed it was his job to set high expectations. His annotations of their essays were detailed and intricately argued. When one student announced at the end of a course that he had been disgusted by T. S. Eliot and was switching to study engineering, Empson’s reaction was to feel “solid satisfaction” because his teaching was clearly “getting definite results.” The possibility of political tension rarely arose, even under Communism, since Empson insisted on independent judgment of dogma of every kind, observing, “If you believe everything you read you are much worse off than if you were unable to read at all.” For their part, the students seem to have regarded him with a respect which went far beyond the traditional Chinese reverence for the sensei. Anyone whose appearance and behavior were so bizarre must be some sort of sage, they concluded—rightly, of course. Less positively, Empson’s anxiety always to think the best of the Chinese led him to turn a blind eye to repression and censorship, since he was unaffected by them. One wonders uneasily whether this liberty was accorded because he was felt, wrongly, to be a secret communist sympathizer.

Empson’s appointment in 1952 to Sheffield was, as he admitted, “bold.” It would now be unthinkable. He had never held even a lectureship in an English university, yet he was applying to be a full professor and head of department. Could he cope with the administrative responsibilities, he was asked at interview. His reply was, “I can do sums—I shall be able to add up the marks.” Throughout his professorship he rented an insanitary one-room apartment in the city; Hetta, who loathed Sheffield on sight, remained with the children (and assorted lodgers and lovers) in London, where Empson joined her on vacations. Haffenden’s depiction of Empson at Sheffield is a highlight of the book, full of hysterical vignettes: the socks left to dry on radiators in the university library or thrown onto the fire in his teaching room, the visiting lecturer entertained with honey, pickles, and a bottle of whisky to while away the tedious time before the pubs opened, and the scrounging of bed linen and hot baths from colleagues. Yet Haffenden also does justice to Empson’s kindly care for his colleagues and pupils. He expected, indeed relished, disagreement, but would never talk down to students or dismiss their nervous or callow comments; they were treated as fellow-practitioners, their essays annotated voluminously. For all his swagger, Empson was a humble man, never too proud to learn from a first-year undergraduate, and refusing to defer to the eminent or powerful. The department had almost no student riots or protests during the 1970s, for the obvious reason that no student could have been more of a rebel than Empson. They knew a professional when they saw one.

Empson’s critical works receive extended treatment in separate chapters. The Structure of Complex Words strikes me as his least successful book. I find its linguistic theory unintelligible and unnecessary, and scant compensation for some brilliant chapters on individual writers. Moreover, many literary theorists of the 1970s saw Complex Words as their ur-text, although Empson would have been appalled by this. On Milton, he had a strong case that Milton’s Arianism led to the presence of a heretical subtext in his religious epics; as Blake said, he was “of the Devil’s party,” but consciously subversive.

Haffenden provides an elaborate and illuminating discussion of Empson’s disagreement with the aestheticist view of his mentor, I. A. Richards, that poetic language is simply emotive and that supposed “statements” in poems cannot be referential to the world outside the poem. For Empson, this made both poetry and criticism impossible. Many of his own critical preoccupations in his later work had a biographical origin in his hatred (the word is not too strong) of Christianity. Undoubtedly the tendency, sanctioned by T. S. Eliot, to see a writer’s religious orthodoxy as a mark of literary quality, produced some distorted and dull readings, and led to skewed valuations, but Empson’s own obsessions led him in turn into special pleading and wilfulness. One may feel his intelligence failed him here, while remaining grateful for the writing. No contemporary critic can match him as a prose stylist, and none can equal the breadth and depth of his learning or the fertility and agility of his thought.

Empson’s old age was far from tranquil. There were fresh marital crises; his visiting professorships in America were a mixed success owing to increasing drink and depression; he was worried about money and his children’s inheritance. He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1984, aged seventy-seven. Hetta survived him by twelve years, indomitable and unconventional to the last, and, despite everything, inconsolable at her loss. She would ring up old friends simply to ask, “Tell me about William.” John Haffenden has told us more about William than any biographer has done, or I dare say ever will do, for any modern literary critic, and his two volumes are a grand and noble work. Nonetheless, I would like to end with one anecdote which has escaped him. I had it on good authority, and hope it is true (it ought to be). Empson came to Manchester University to give a lecture on Donne. After not quite an hour of intermittently intelligible muttering he stopped in mid-sentence, very slowly removed his spectacles, put them in a pocket, eyed the audience with blurred benevolence, and announced, “I’m afraid I must end there—I find I’ve left my spectacles in Sheffield.”