AMONG CONTRADICTIONS

Abstract

William Empson: Among the Mandarins. By John Haffenden. Oxford University Press, 2005; £30. This first volume of John Haffenden's biography of Empson covers only the first thirty-three years of his life, ending with his return from China to England in 1939. By that time he had published three books of lasting importance (Seven Types of Ambiguity, Poems, and Some Versions of Pastoral) and written nearly half his next critical book, as well as all the poems for his second, and last, book of poetry. It is remarkable that such a young man should have achieved so much, but even more so if one considers the conditions under which he did it. He was born into privilege, among the Yorkshire landed gentry, and educated among the elite at Winchester and Cambridge, but his career at university ended in disaster when, in 1929, he was expelled for being found in possession of contraceptives. He was rescued from a hand-to-mouth existence in London by a university post in Japan from 1931 to 1934, but this was at a time of militaristic nationalism there and he was very unhappy. Two more miserable years in London were followed by a second academic job in China. As China was under attack from the Japanese, Empson spent his time far from libraries on the run with his Chinese colleagues, living and teaching rough, while he experienced the horror and disorganisation of modern warfare. All the time after leaving Cambridge he was drinking heavily.