Adventures in Ambiguity

By Stephen Burt
• Sept. 10, 2006
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SELECTED LETTERS OF

WILLIAM EMPSON

Edited by John Haffenden.

729 pp. Oxford University Press. $74.

WILLIAM EMPSON

Among the Mandarins.

By John Haffenden.

Illustrated. 695 pp. Oxford University Press.

$49.95.

Thank you very much for your book," the English poet and critic William Empson told
another writer in 1938. "It followed me to Hong Kong, where I was having a very lazy
and agreeable time waiting for my students to finish walking 800 miles to Yunnan. The
new term is to begin in a tin mine in a few days." Few critics have done more for poetry
than Empson (1906-84); few have led stranger or more adventurous lives. Empson had
gone to Beijing to teach, only to find the city besieged by the Japanese Army. His
university was forced to move, first to a mountaintop, then to remote western China,
where Empson slept on a blackboard for lack of a bed, where "air raid alarms sounded"
constantly and where students required armed escorts to ward off bandits. He taught
much of the canon of English literature from memory.

The British critic and biographer John Haffenden has devoted the last 20 years to
Empson's legacy, compiling three volumes of Empson's essays, editing his poetry,
collecting (and selecting from) his prolific correspondence and completing a two-volume
biography, of which "William Empson: Among the Mandarins" is Volume 1.

Empson's travels make entertaining reading, but they are not what made him
important. His legacy was assured, before he left Britain, by his first book, "Seven Types
of Ambiguity" (1930), which he began writing while at Cambridge University. He
finished the book in a slovenly London flat, Cambridge having expelled him after a
college porter found condoms in his rooms. Vigorously informal in its style,
encyclopedic in its examples, "Seven Types" argued that many poems depend on
multiple, even opposed, meanings for the same word or phrase: "buckle" in Gerard
Manley Hopkins's poem "The Windhover," for example, meant both "fasten" (buckle
your belt) and "crumple" (the bicycle wheel buckled on impact), just as Hopkins (in
Empson's view) felt both completed and crushed by his Jesuit training. Though teachers
now routinely find ambiguities in Shakespeare, at the time Empson's idea provoked hot
dispute: readers who believed that older poets used deliberate ambiguities might be
suspected of liking still-controversial modernist poetry like T. S. Eliot's, which certainly
did not stick with one clear sense. The book made Empson as famous as young critics
got.
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It did not, however, land him a teaching job in Britain. Instead, his Cambridge mentor,
the literary theorist I. A. Richards, helped him find work overseas. Empson disliked
Japan and its nationalist regime, where students "seem so much spied upon that it is
mere nagging to try to extract thought from them." After making a pass at a taxi driver
in 1935, Empson, who was bisexual, was nearly kicked out of the country. To China, by
contrast, Empson developed some loyalty. He remained there until 1939, when he
returned to Britain to help with the war effort. (The journey home, across America,
involved a robbery, a radio gig and money borrowed from W. H. Auden.) Empson spent
the next few years at the BBC alongside George Orwell, writing and editing broadcasts to
the Far East. Empson and his wife returned to Beijing and stayed until 1952, when
Maoist thought police made the teaching of literature impossible.

Settling in at the University of Sheffield, the older Empson traveled less, but took just as
many intellectual risks. Early and late, in letters and in books, his prose combined
wisdom with shock value, snappy insults with long-honed insights: "I rewrite everything
I print about 12 times," Empson advised a rival, "and I think you had much better do
that too." Empson contended, sometimes with strong evidence, that the young John
Donne conceived, heretically, of life on other planets; that James Joyce's "Ulysses"
promoted group sex; that Samuel Taylor Coleridge "literally believed in ... fairies." "
'Paradise Lost,' " he wrote, "is wonderful because it is an awful warning, not against
eating the apple but against worshiping that God." A man of unconventional sexual
appetites, whose collegiate career was derailed by puritanical rules, might well hate the
faith in whose name such rules were enforced. Haffenden dates Empson's anti-Christian
feeling instead to his boarding-school days, where it distinguished the young left-wing
rationalist from his pious, aristocratic mother. Asia gave him a later basis for
comparison: "I think Buddhism much better than Christianity," he wrote, "because it
managed to get away from the Neolithic craving to gloat over human sacrifice."

The mature iconoclast began as an eccentric undergraduate poet. His Cambridge friend
Basil Wright thought he "looked like a myna bird," "dressed abominably" and drank a
great deal, "but the chief thing ... about him was his marvelous incisiveness of mind."
(The drinking continued: "If Bill is left to himself he will certainly stay until the whiskey
is gone," Eliot warned a mutual friend.) Richard Eberhart recalled that at Cambridge,
"Everybody talked about Empson's poetry," which "seemed to defy the understanding,"
though Ludwig Wittgenstein, for one, claimed to get it. Inspired by Donne and by
modern science, Empson's poems can sometimes seem impenetrable; the best, though,
are spare, lucid, tense and bleak. Often the poems depict Empson's seventh type of
ambiguity, an irresolvable conflict in the poet's mind. In "Aubade," a Japanese
earthquake catalyzes the end of a romance already on edge: "My house was on a cliff.
The thing could take / Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. / ... It seemed the
best thing to be up and go." In another poem, a gleaming Japanese troop train startles
the poet into unwanted admiration, since it represents the invader: "It lopes for home /
And I a twister love what I abhor."

"The main purpose of reading imaginative literature," Empson decided in one late essay,
"is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very
unlike our own." The main reason for reading about Empson is to imagine his wide
variety of experience, but the main reason for reading Empson's own writings is to see
what he made of the authors he cherished. (He was the best reader Donne ever had.)
Travel and war work reinforced his virtues: his ability to see the English language as if
from the outside, his way of looking at great writers as dissenters within their own
societies, his indifference to polite opinion and his habit of keeping great poems in his
head. John Haffenden's unstintingly admiring if overlong biography (which takes the
man only to 1939) imagines its readers as committed Empsonians: those who require
introductions had better start with Empson's own books -- with "Seven Types," with
"Milton's God" (1961) or with "Using Biography" (1984). "I like poetry that argues,"
Empson said, and neither his

poems nor his prose shrank from a mental fight. In an era when readers debate whether
poetry matters, it helps to remember a man who defended it, and pursued his own
arguments about it, even to the ends of the earth.