Ambiguous type.(William Empson, Volume I: Among the Mandarins)(Book Review)

Ambiguous type

John Haffenden William Empson, Volume I: Among the Mandarins. Oxford University Press, 695 pages, $45

After working on this biography for twenty years, John Haffenden probably knows more about William Empson than Empson did, but he has lost all sense of proportion. His 570 pages of text take us only up to 1939, with forty-five years of his subject's life yet to come. Does a mere literary critic, even a great one as Empson indisputably was, deserve such lavish attention? He left only scraps of diaries, and kept no letters; Haffenden has been indefatigable in interviewing surviving witnesses, but there is frequently more background than foreground in his book. He is notably good at fitting Empson's writings (creative as well as critical) into a biographical context, but the analyses can be over-elaborate--fifty pages, for instance, on the writing of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Moreover, with every quotation Haffenden inevitably, and unfortunately, draws attention to the contrast between Empson's racy zest and his own less readable prose.

Born in 1906, of old upper-middle-class landed-gentry stock, Empson was never quite at home on this planet. He regarded his family with affectionate bemusement; it was, he said, "like being in the company of steam engines." He deplored their Toryism and their Anglicanism, hating the "torture worship" of Christianity even in childhood. A certain remoteness was both an instinctive and a congenial reaction. Myopic and bookish, he was happy at prep school, at Winchester College where he was a Scholar, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1925 to read Mathematics. His contemporaries respected his ability, his tirelessness in argument, and his independent outlook, but tended to pigeon-hole him as eccentric. Like many who are so judged, he simply lived most intensely in his own head; the external world did not much matter to him, and he was always happy to dress like a tramp and to be oblivious to squalor (there is a grisly vignette of him, in his Cambridge lodgings, "patiently sucking some beer-stains out of the carpet").

When Empson switched from Mathematics to English in his last undergraduate year, under the influence of I. A. Richards, there was no essential contradiction; the beauty of Mathematics, he felt, was its ability to give the mind "a logical grasp on situations of greater complexity," just the sort of thing he was to do in his early criticism by his dazzling analyses of verbal ambiguity. To see this, as his early supporter F. R. Leavis came to do, as facile game-playing, was a mistake; Empson could show off, but he deplored ...