Biography: Robert Lowell called him "the king of the critics", endorsing earlier plaudits, and indeed few would dispute the pre-eminence of William Empson in the field of literary criticism in the whole of the 20th century.
What Barbara Hardy experienced in the 1940s as "a sense of discovery and delight" on first looking into Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity might stand as the reaction of any alert reader brought face to face with that astonishing work, published in 1930 when its author was aged just 24. Seven Types of Ambiguity was a singular achievement, not least because its critical insights, refreshingly, accommodated a playful element.
This playfulness had long been a part of Empson's engaging but wayward personality. Born in 1906 into a family of minor Yorkshire lords of the manor, he fitted into a tradition of English idiosyncrasy which earned him respect and affection during his schooldays at Winchester, and later as an undergraduate. As someone noted for being "delightfully weird', or even a bit of an "oddball", he was able to exercise his flair for subversiveness - and it is greatly to the credit of Winchester that it never attempted to quash any of Empson's contentiously radical views. (Unlike a good many of his contemporaries - WH Auden, for instance - Empson had nothing but praise for the value and effectiveness of his public-school education.) Magdalene College, Cambridge, too, afforded scope for his unique talents (first in the faculty of mathematics, then English) - until it all went wrong. In the summer of 1929, the brilliant Empson gained a bye- fellowship at Magdalene College and then promptly lost it, as a consequence of what the university grandiosely termed "sexual misconduct".
The sorry turn of events is well recorded: how a college servant, moving Empson's possessions to his new quarters, stumbled on a packet of contraceptives and failed to keep this enticing piece of gossip to himself; how the board of governors, forced to take action, acted in the most drastically punitive way. Empson's reported retort, when summoned to account for his delinquency - "Would you prefer me to go in for buggery?" - was reiterated in his poem, Advice to Undergraduates:
Would you please those who control your ends
Follow where their high patronage commends,
And stick to what you learned at school, my friends.
There's a certain irony at work here. Condoms notwithstanding, it seemed for quite a long time as if Empson actually did prefer boys to girls - and five years after the expulsion from Cambridge, a drunken escapade involving an uncompliant taxi driver in Tokyo was among the factors contributing to a further expulsion, this time from Japan. True, Empson's three-year appointment there, as a professor of English language and literature, had finished shortly before he was, as he notes self-mockingly, "most rightly/ . . . deported from that virtuous and aesthetic country". But an incident involving the Japanese police, however peripherally, hardly made a fitting end to the years of committed teaching and quizzical immersion in the country's alien mores.
It can't have been exactly an easy matter, after the convivialities of Cambridge - where his friends and contemporaries included TH White, Kathleen Raine, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Redgrave, Malcolm Lowry, Muriel Bradbrook and Alastair Cooke - and after the subsequent, rather congenial bohemianism of a Bloomsbury bedsit, to make the transition to the Far East, especially at a time when Japan was in the throes of an ultra-nationalist revival. But Empson was game for anything. Though he'd have preferred to follow his friend and one-time supervisor, IA Richards, to China, he accepted the Japanese post when it became available. Six years later, in 1937, an appointment at Peking University enabled him finally to join Richards and his wife and to experience at first hand the effects of the Japanese invasion of China, with its implications for university teaching (suspended), along with hazardous but exhilarating trekking about the country, attending conferences, being a tourist/observer, and ending up attached to the exiled Peking University on a mountain in Nan-Yueh. Through it all, according to one associate, Empson preserved, or paraded, a demeanour "very Cambridge, very English abroad".
In the meantime, the publication in 1935 of a striking slim volume, Poems, and a second collection of essays, Some Versions of Pastoral - a work of incomparable charm and cogency - had kept the spotlight on Empson's protean ingenuity. His reputation for other things besides eccentricity was growing, and following his return to England in 1940, he became a wartime propagandist with the BBC. Some years later, after a further sojourn in China, he was appointed to a chair of English at Sheffield University, where his biographer will follow him nearly a quarter of a century on.
John Haffenden, Empson scholar extraordinaire, who's already edited the Complete Poems (2000) and the posthumous collection, The Royal Beasts (1986), began work on his massive two-volume biography as far back as 1982. As he says about someone else, the result is "comprehensive and erudite". He's as much attuned to the intellectual excitements of Empson's life as he is to the biographical facts, providing a close analysis of the work, influences, modes of thought and so on. He gets to grips, for example, with the extent to which Empson's critical approach diverges from that of his mentor, IA Richards, applauds his subject's independence of outlook and shares with him the view that art "is at odds with orthodoxy".
Densely and illuminatingly written, Among the Mandarins ends in 1939, with Empson's marriage, friendships with George Orwell, Louis MacNeice and others, and all his later honours still to come. How did family life suit him? Why did he give up poetry? What became his ultimate preoccupations? We shall have to wait - agog - for Volume II to find out.
Patricia Craig is a writer and critic. Her biography of Brian Moore was published by Bloomsbury in 2002 and came out in paperback last year