Customer Reviews

William Empson: Against the Christians Volume II

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I've just finished reading my longest book yet. Since I've been reading between ten and twelve pages a day, and only yesterday did I get to the end. I might have made better progress had I actually read Volume I of Haffenden's study, but between you and me, life's too short. This one took a full five months out of my life. He seems to be rather a drug on the market in the USA, seeing that I'm the first one actually to give this book a review, but in England people like Jeremy Prynne have made this two-volume set a best seller. If you quibble about paying $65 for a book like this, you're mad, because it will keep you entertained for weeks on end. If only I had been sent to a desert island with it!

I met Empson once, at the MLA Convention in New York in the late 1970s, he was in a wheelchair on an escalator, and I bumped into him, causing his elevated foot tremendous pain. Volume II of John Haffenden's biography picks right up with World War II and focuses on Empson's service to the masters of British propaganda at the BBC and at Bletchley Park, where he encountered an equally eccentric George Orwell, whose body odor, in part the result of his consumption, revolted Empson and put him off his feed almost entirely, though in fairness he did try to take Orwell up on his own terms. It seems that everyone he knew or met at this period took Empson for a [...] man, and as we find out, they were almost eighty per cent correct. He married a terrifyingly alive bohemian sculptor, Hetta, a "tall South African, handsome as Ingrid Bergman," sort of a model for Glenda Jackson in WOMEN IN LOVE, and rather camp. and she bore him two sons, Mogador and Jacob. Both William and Hetta took other lovers when they wanted to, but William had a further kink, one that he believed he shared with Leopold Bloom--leave it to him to find a literary, modernist forebear for his own sexual quirks--that is, he thought that a man should be paid back for sharing his wife with a handsome young man by sexual favors from the young consort. The resulting menage a trois had its ups and downs, and at one point Hetta went so far as to have yet another son by another man, while passing him off as an Empson, but presently Simon Duval Smith emerged as his own man.

Empson was definitely a drunk and the book is vibrant with disgusting passages in which Empson betrays his own better nature by passing out, throwing up, getting in drunken rows, drooling, etc. He called the kettle black over and over again, on one memorable bender outdrinking JB Priestley, stopping the car, and dumping his lifeless body into an ordure-filled gutter.

Empson spent many years in China and knew all sorts of inside scoop about China that made him anathema to the hard-line anticommunist front that administered, say, entry back and forth to the USA. Stephen Spender, editor of the CIA-funded ENCOUNTER magazine, got into beef after beef with him, claiming years later, "We were ideologically apart." I'll say! But then again Empson found something to dislike about nearly every major British writer and poet of the 20th century. He did love the Queen however, and the most beautiful part of the book shows the Queen coming to Sheffield, where Empson was teaching, and him writing a masque to welcome her, which she had to sit through and smile after. A lovely gesture like something Ben Jonson might have done. Now that play I have to read!

We pick up Volume II after Empson's heroic work on his two famous books SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY and SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL; rather unconvincingly Haffenden spends whole chapters arguing that the two later books, THE STRUCTURE OF COMPLEX WORDS and MILTON'S GOD, are just as good. I don't think so and he has definitely put paid to any notion I might have had about re-reading them at this late date. Haffenden amply demonstrates Empson's contempt for post structuralism and scoffs his way through several volumes of theory by "horrible Frenchmen," including "Jacques Nerrida" (sic), implying that everything any of them had to say was filched from his book on Complex Words. Well, he was right and wrong at the same time.