|
|
 |
| |
| 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
|
John Haffenden
William Empson in his Cambridge days
Piers Plowright
|
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 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.
• Piers Plowright is an award-winning BBC drama and documentary
producer. Documentary-making has earned him three Italia prizes
and several Sony Golds. He lives in Well Walk in Hampstead. |
|
|
