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  • Some Versions of Empson
  • Ann E. Berthoff (bio)
John Haffenden , William Empson, Volume II: Against the Christians. Oxford University Press, 2006. 792 pages. Illustrated. $65; Selected Letters of William Empson, edited by John Haffenden. Oxford University Press, 2006. 730 pages. $74.

The second volume of John Haffenden's biography of William Empson takes up the story with his return from China as the Second World War is beginning. T. S. Eliot takes him to lunch and reports: "He is dirtier and more distrait than ever. It was most refreshing to see him." That about sums up what everybody observed and how most reacted to Empson, then and later: tolerance of disgusting habits and behavior was a price willingly paid because of the return in the way of entertainment, stimulation, even instruction. John Haffenden's biography encourages this sympathetic attitude.

A third of the chapters record Empson's experiences in China at the time of the final struggle between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and Mao Tse-tung's People's Liberation Army. We are given a full account of Empson's response to this great Maoist revolution in its early days and his growing sense that the People's Republic of China had betrayed its ideals. One benefit of having the China years so thoroughly represented is that we can more readily understand Empson's intense distaste for "the Mandarins" and their prose. Upon his return to Britain with the hardships and dangers, as well as the exhilaration, of having lived through a revolution fresh in mind, Empson found literary criticism a mess of absurd squabbles. Haffenden's biography tells the story of how Empson carried out his mission of changing the way literature was discussed.

The rest of the book covers the remaining thirty years of Empson's life, in London and in Sheffield, where he taught for eighteen years, beginning in 1953, with time out for travels in the U.S. and Canada and a brief sojourn in Ghana. On the whole Haffenden manages to balance public history and professional career with Empson's private life. Reading this part of the biography is a bit like reading Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time—twelve novels depicting the disorienting effects of the collapse of the British Empire and the hardships of postwar life in Britain as a match for the giddiness and despair of the 1920s and 1930s. And of course in both the novels and the biography there is a fascinating picture of Bohemian life. It must be said, though, that after reading dozens of pages recounting drunken brawls, mad shouting matches with his wife, Empson's falling out of chairs, [End Page 293] people throwing Chinese stirrups (used as ash trays) at one another; after a fifty-page chapter explaining the Empsons' open marriage, including tell-all descriptions of sexual practices, what is suggested is not so much Powell's witty and subtle novels but a tawdry soap opera or even, occasionally, an old-fashioned comic strip like the Katzenjammer Kids: "I went to sleep," Hetta Empson writes her quondam husband, "and suddenly [Michael, one of her lovers] jumped on me and was seriously trying to strangle me . . . except that dear Jake came in and hit him over the head with a hockey stick."

There are many descriptions of the filthy state of Studio House, the Empsons' abode in Hampstead that they ran as a rooming house, but it should be remembered that in postwar Britain filthiness was a national habit. For hygienic Americans this kind of dirty disorder had a certain charm, as when Robert Lowell writes that the Empsons' household "had a weird, sordid nobility."

Haffenden tactfully considers Empson's bisexuality in relation to his personal and professional behavior as well as in certain of his interpretations. What should concern us is not Empson's psychological makeup but its effects on his critical stance; Haffenden continually offers sound comment on this score. When he comes to a discussion by Empson of the "complex words" in Shakespeare's plays, the biographer brings to bear his extensive knowledge of Empson's personal life, his anxieties and obsessions. He writes glowingly of Empson's...

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