In Memoriam: William Empson

I picked up Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson off the shelf again today. I got the book a year ago after I first read about him in a survey of modern literary critics. He wrote it at age 22 while studying at Cambridge… it's a "niggling" account of double meanings in all kinds of classic English poems. Sort of a virtuosic experiment in semantics, half factual, half creative.

The way he teases out the things about a piece of writing that give it an ironic effect on certain readers endears Empson to me, especially the care with which he examines so many facts.

There on the flyleaf I read his short biography:

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William Empson, born in England in 1906, was educated at Cambridge University. Associated with the Auden group of young poets, he published several volumes of poetry in the 1930s and then turned his interest to literary criticism. He is best known for… etc.

Before World War II he taught English in Tokyo and Peking, and during the war years he was Chinese Editor for the BBC. In 1947 he returned to a teaching post at Peking National University and since 1953 has held a professorship at Sheffield University in England.

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Can you imagine my excitement? A young brainy literary hack, who went to China. And during the war years, too… such an interesting time. Could he be a role model for me?

Well, he turned out to be a dogged antichristian, and an enthusiastic bisexual… two things that I have to guard myself against.

What a bummer.

How do I characterize him but as an interesting, gifted, fanciful man, whose life. was. futile?

I dread reading the racy parts in his two-volume biography, but look forward to the parts about typing out a play from Shakespeare for his students from memory during the siege of Peking. How did he do it?

He jostled elbows with Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and C.S. Lewis. When the Queen of England came to see him at the University of Sheffield, he wrote a masque to be performed in her honor.

You won't see his like again. And my paperback copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity even has sewn binding.

See:

John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (vol. 1)

William Empson: Against the Christians (vol. 2)

Selected Letters of William Empson