Recording the poetry magazine Voice. Standing, George Orwell, Nancy Barratt, Empson. Sitting. Venu Citale, JM Tambitmuttu, TS Eliot, Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand |
The eccentric Prof who lit up literature
With an open marriage, wild parties and
shoe-burning lectures, William Empson was not your average professor of English, writes Piers Plowright
William Empson Volume II, Against The Christians by John Haffenden, Oxford University Press, £30 order this book
SHEFFIELD, mid 1950s, the new Professor of English Literature at the University began the tutorial on Henry James by removing his shoes and socks.
He then threw the socks on the fire, and produced a new pair which he put on. “James would have approved,” was all he said.
Back in London, the professor’s wife was pregnant by her new lover in the chaotic Hampstead house, furnished in a blend of Chinese improvisation and Bohemian disorder, the professor and she sometimes shared along with their own two sons, assorted lodgers and a stream of visitors.
Wiliam Empson and his flamboyant South African wife Hetta had bought Studio House on the corner of Rosslyn Hill and Hampstead Hill Gardens in 1946 and they were to stay put for the rest of Empson’s life.
Parties there – at which guests were rarely introduced to each other – might include TS Eliot, Lucian Freud, Roy Campbell, Louis MacNeice, Stanley Spencer, Kathleen Raine, Elias Canetti, scholars, poets, drifters, broadcasters and at least one chef.
In his memoirs, the chef, Kenneth Lo, wrote of his hosts: “William was one step removed from contemporary reality and seemed to stroll through life unhindered by its troublesome details.
Hetta, who was at least as handsome as Ingrid Bergman, was trying to create Inner Mongolia in NW3, and while the adults slept off their hangovers, Mogador and Jacob (the Empson sons) could often be found on tiptoe in the kitchen, trying to reach up to the cooker to make themselves breakfast before setting off for school.
External chaos, in other words. Inwardly though, Empson, the scintillating critic and poet who’d begun life as a scientist, and who had written one of the great works of English Literary Criticism – Seven Types of Ambiguity – while still a Cambridge undergraduate, was as sharp and ordered as ever.
This concluding volume of John Haffenden’s definitive biography takes Empson from his return to Britain in 1939 – he’d been teaching in China – through wartime work for the BBC – he met Hetta there – a further stint in China just as the Communists swept into Peking, the Sheffield job, and a long and distinguished retirement, continuing to startle and stimulate with his critical writing, his eccentric appearance and voice, and, above all, the wit and overwhelming good-nature, which allowed him to keep friends in spite of the harshness of his judgements.
Haffenden calls this volume Against the Christians because Empson’s harshest words were directed at those he called the ‘Neo-Christians’, like TS Eliot and Helen Gardner whose reading of poets like Milton, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, seemed to him to take at face value their religious beliefs without analysing what Empson saw as the self deception, and confusion that all writers are prone to.
Ambiguity again. This was a view most powerfully stated in his 1961 book Milton’s God which is both an attack on the ‘cruelty’ of the Christian God and an argument for Milton’s unknowing religious doubts.
Like all of Empson’s books, it was greeted with fruitful controversy. And gregarious, hospitable, and generous, as he could be, Empson thrived on controversy.
In the end, he saw literature as a moral castle that needed to be fought for. Studying literature, he wrote in a letter, “is frivolous unless related to judgements of value, experience of life, some kind of trying out of the different kinds of attitude or world view, so as to decide which are good ones”.
If this makes him sound austere, Empson was anything but.
His conversation and his writing sparkled and even his heaviest works race along. His letters too show a lovely mix of the chatty and the profound.
Here he is writing to the poet and novelist, John Wain about the fashion for ignoring the life of a writer: “The hatred of ‘biography’ and the claim that a good poem should have all requirements for reading it ‘within itself’ seems to me mere petulance, like saying: ‘I won’t visit any house that hasn’t got a Coca-Cola machine and a sun-bathing apparatus’.’’
I don’t imagine Studio House was fitted with either, but to know what matters about its owner, read this book.
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