Biography:In his later years William Empson was an absent-minded professor of English at the University of Sheffield, someone who dried his socks on library radiators, tried to pee in the bath at parties, and once delivered so rambling an introduction at a poetry reading that he sat down again without reading the poem.
He was also, as this magisterial second instalment of John Haffenden's biography reminds us, one of the greatest poet-critics of the 20th century.
In 1939 Empson was working as Chinese editor at the BBC, where his colleagues included George Orwell and Louis MacNeice. He returned to China from 1947 to 1952, witnessing the communist takeover and working on the great lumber room of linguistic theory and close reading that became The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Returning to England in 1953 and taking up his chair at Sheffield, Empson found intellectual life in the grip of a stifling Eliot-inspired Christian orthodoxy. Possessed of a lifelong hatred of Christianity, he poured his feelings into a marvellous jeremiad, if that isn't too Judaeo-Christian a word, Milton's God. For Empson, a religion in which the Father demands the execution of his Son for the sins of humanity was torture-worship pure and simple. In answer to Pascal's "wager" that, since the penalties for not believing in God were so awful, we should seize on any minute chance that religion might be true, Empson thundered: "This argument makes Pascal the slave of any person, professing any doctrine, who has the impudence to tell him a sufficiently extravagant lie."
EMPSON EMBODIES PERFECTLY the "disinterested" critic in Hazlitt's rather than Matthew Arnold's sense of that term: his way of respecting differences was to pick endless quarrels, with his enemies and friends alike. This, after all, was the man who sent TS Eliot what he called "the most insulting letter which I have ever received". It is richly ironic to see him described, as he often is, as a New Critic; Empson was an obsessively biographical critic, and took serious issue with his New Critical mentor, IA Richards. Among the other obsessions of his later years was a belief that John Donne's poetry reflected a belief in life on other planets, and his theory that Leopold Bloom wishes Stephen Dedalus to have an affair with his wife in Ulysses.
Empson's private life was gloriously free-spirited. He encouraged his wife to have affairs and wrote a 26-stanza poem (published here for the first time) hailing the ménage à trois as the ideal domestic arrangement, with a little homosexuality thrown in for good measure. He wrote job references for his wife's lover, Patrick Duval Smith, who fathered a child by her, and formed a long-term amorous friendship of his own with Alice Stewart. A later lover of his wife's moved into the Empson home for 12 years: he and Hetta Empson had violent fist-fights, while Empson took comfort from "rubbing himself" against his wife's lover's back at night.
If his early masterpiece, Seven Types of Ambiguity, opened the way for much contemporary literary theory, the pettifogging of his academic heirs held no appeal for Empson; it is entirely in character to find him dismissing the works of someone he calls "Jacques Nerrida" as "very disgusting". It may be that some academics prefer the pure good of theory to the works of Marvell, Donne, Coleridge and the other writers that Empson considered his primary responsibility; but that is their loss.
As a biographer, Haffenden is endlessly devoted without being merely hagiographical, and stunningly detailed and exhaustive. This is surely one of the outstanding literary biographies of our times. Crowning his countless services to his author with this second volume of biography, is Haffenden now the Alexander the Great of Empson studies, weeping that there are no more worlds for him to conquer? Not quite: a study of the faces of the Buddha, which Empson considered his masterwork, has recently resurfaced more than 60 years after it was believed lost in the back of a London taxi. Haffenden's edition of it should be along shortly.
•David Wheatley is a poet and critic. His new book is Mocker, recently published by Gallery Press
William Empson: Vol II - Against the Christians By John Haffenden OUP, 797pp. £30