Among Contradictions

William Empson: Among the Mandarins. By John Haffenden. Oxford University Press, 2005; £30.

This first volume of John Haffenden's biography of Empson covers only the first thirty-three years of his life, ending with his return from China to England in 1939. By that time he had published three books of lasting importance (Seven Types of Ambiguity, Poems, and Some Versions of Pastoral) and written nearly half his next critical book, as well as all the poems for his second, and last, book of poetry. It is remarkable that such a young man should have achieved so much, but even more so if one considers the conditions under which he did it. He was born into privilege, among the Yorkshire landed gentry, and educated among the elite at Winchester and Cambridge, but his career at university ended in disaster when, in 1929, he was expelled for being found in possession of contraceptives. He was rescued from a hand-to-mouth existence in London by a university post in Japan from 1931 to 1934, but this was at a time of militaristic nationalism there and he was very unhappy. Two more miserable years in London were followed by a second academic job in China. As China was under attack from the Japanese, Empson spent his time far from libraries on the run with his Chinese colleagues, living and teaching rough, while he experienced the horror and disorganisation of modern warfare. All the time after leaving Cambridge he was drinking heavily.

Empson's early life, then, combines great intellectual achievement with unusual eventfulness, an eventfulness, furthermore, that is enmeshed with complex national and international politics; this dual aspect in itself constitutes a problem for the biographer. John Haffenden, already the author of a life of John Berryman, was authorised by Empson himself to be his biographer, and had the full support of Lady Empson. His knowledge of the Empson papers is profound, as any one who has used his editions of the complete poems and the miscellaneous prose will know. He is a thorough scholar; here he puts to excellent use such things as the unpublished diary of Dorothea Pilley (Mrs I. A. Richards) or Victor Purcell's account of travelling from Hong Kong to Changsha with Empson and the Richardses in 1937 (published a year later, with names altered, as Chinese Evergreen). His prose is always lucid and readable, but he does not succeed in telling the story of Empson's life as clearly as it should be told.

This may come as a surprise to those who noted this biography's frequent presence among the books of the year for 2005. Both Frank Kermode and Terry Eagleton singled it out for praise. How could that be? The answer probably lies in its extremely generous use of quotation from Empson himself. The strengths of his easy, direct and idiosyncratic style really come through in the many excerpts from letters, notes and drafts for articles, as well as from journals kept at Winchester and Cambridge. The style is already essentially there at Winchester, but it is at its most inspiriting in the letters, which reveal their author to be, for his fluency and penetration, for the range of interests he displays and for the strange and compelling stories he has to tell, one of the foremost letter-writers of the twentieth century. It is good to know that a Selected Letters is already projected. Haffenden's extensive use of quotation ensures that the complex, captivating personality of his subject is always present to the reader.

Nevertheless, Haffenden's solution to the problem posed by a subject whose life was eventful but whose distinction depended on a large contribution to the life of the mind is not a happy one. Throughout the biography long chapters on Empson's books interrupt the flow of the narrative and make it difficult to see how the life develops. What they have to say is, mostly, unexceptionable, but they lack...