William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (Critics of the Twentieth Century)

WILLIAM EMPSON

CRITICS OF THE WENTIETH CENTURY General Editor: Christopher Norris, University of Wales, College of Cardiff

A.J.GREIMAS AND THE NATURE OF MEANING Ronald Schleifer

CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL Robert Sullivan

FIGURING LACAN Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious Juliet Flower MacCannell

HAROLD BLOOM Towards Historical Rhetorics Peter de Bolla

JULIA KRISTEVA John Lechte

GEOFFREY HARTMAN Criticism as Answerable Style G.Douglas Atkins

INTRODUCING LYOTARD Art and Politics Bill Reading

EZRA POUND AS LITERARY CRITIC K.K.Ruthven

F.R.LEAVIS Michael Bell

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI Ronald Bogue

POSTMODERN BRECHT A Re-Presentation Elizabeth Wright

THE ECSTASIES OF ROLAND BARTHES Mary Bittner Wiseman

PAUL RICOEUR S.H.Clark

JURGEN HABERMAS Critic in the Public Sphere Robert C.Holub

WILLIAM EMPSON Prophet Against Sacrifice

Paul H.Fry

London and New York

First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Paul H.Fry All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fry, Paul H. William Empson: prophet against sacrifice—(Critics of the twentieth century). 1. English literature. Criticism. Empson, William 1906–1984 I. Title II. Series 820.9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fry, Paul H. William Empson: prophet against sacrifice/Paul H.Fry. p. cm. —(Critics of the twentieth century) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Empson, William, 1906– —Knowledge—Literature. 2. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Criticism—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Critics of the twentieth century (London, England) PR6009.M7Z66 1991 801'.95'092—dc20 91–10018 ISBN 0–415–02482–X (Print edition) ISBN 0–203–06925–0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0–203–21898–1 (Glassbook Format)

For Spencer, with love from his Dad

Contents

Editor’s foreword Preface and acknowledgments Texts frequently cited 1 Introduction: the scapegoat and the word

ix xiii xvii 1

2 Satanic criticism: Empson and the Romantic tradition 29 3 Advancing logical disorder: Empson on method

55

4 Toward late Empson: the failure of pastoral

88

5 Middle Spirits and Empson’s chain of being

119

Notes Index

147 169

Editor’s foreword

The twentieth century has produced a remarkable number of gifted and innovative literary critics. Indeed it could be argued that some of the finest literary minds of the age have turned to criticism as the medium best adapted to their complex and speculative range of interests. This has sometimes given rise to regret among those who insist on a clear demarcation between “creative” (primary) writing on the one hand, and “critical” (secondary) texts on the other. Yet this distinction is far from self-evident. It is coming under strain at the moment as novelists and poets grow increasingly aware of the conventions that govern their writing and the challenge of consciously ex-ploiting and subverting those conventions. And the critics for their part—some of them at least—are beginning to question their traditional role as humble servants of the literary text with no further claim upon the reader’s interest or attention. Quite simply, there are texts of literary criticism and theory that, for various reasons— stylistic complexity, historical influence, range of intellectual command—cannot be counted a mere appendage to those other “primary” texts. Of course, there is a logical puzzle here, since (it will be argued) “literary criticism” would never have come into being, and could hardly exist as such, were it not for the body of creative writings that provide its raison d’être. But this is not quite the kind of knockdown argument that it might appear at first glance. For one thing, it conflates some very different orders of priority, assuming that literature always comes first (in the sense that Greek tragedy had to exist before Aristotle could formulate its rules), so that literary texts are for that very reason possessed of superior value. And this argument would seem to find commonsense support in the difficulty of thinking what “literary criticism” could be if it seriously renounced all sense of the ix

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distinction between literary and critical texts. Would it not then find itself in the unfortunate position of a discipline that had willed its own demise by declaring its subject non-existent? But these objections would only hit their mark if there were indeed a special kind of writing called “literature” whose difference from other kinds of writing was enough to put criticism firmly in its place. Otherwise there is nothing in the least self-defeating or paradoxical about a discourse, nominally that of literary criticism, that accrues such interest on its own account as to force some fairly drastic rethinking of its proper powers and limits. The act of crossing over from commentary to literature—or of simply denying the difference between them—becomes quite explicit in the writing of a critic like Geoffrey Hartman. But the signs are already there in such classics as William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a text whose transformative influence on our habits of reading must surely be ranked with the great creative moments of literary modernism. Only on the most dogmatic view of the difference between “literature” and “criticism” could a work like Seven Types be counted generically an inferior, sub-literary species of production. And the same can be said for many of the critics whose writings and influence this series sets out to explore. Some, like Empson, are conspicuous individuals who belong to no particular school or larger movement. Others, like the Russian Formalists, were part of a communal enterprise and are therefore best understood as representative figures in a complex and evolving dialogue. Then again there are cases of collective identity (like the so-called “Yale deconstructors”) where a mythical group image is invented for largely polemical purposes. (The volumes in this series on Hartman and Bloom should help to dispel the idea that “Yale deconstruction” is anything more than a handy device for collapsing differences and avoiding serious debate.) So there is no question of a series format or house-style that would seek to reduce these differences to a blandly homogeneous treatment. One consequence of recent critical theory is the realization that literary texts have no self-sufficient or autonomous meaning, no existence apart from their after-life of changing interpretations and values. And the same applies to those critical texts whose meaning and significance are subject to constant shifts and realignments of interest. This is not to say that trends in criticism are just a matter of intellectual fashion or the merry-go-round of rising and falling reputations. But it is important to grasp how complex are the forces—the conjunctions of historical and cultural motive—that x

Editor’s foreword

affect the first reception and the subsequent fortunes of a critical text. This point has been raised into a systematic programme by critics like Hans-Robert Jauss, practitioners of so-called “reception theory” as a form of historical hermeneutics. The volumes in this series will therefore be concerned not only to expound what is of lasting significance but also to set these critics in the context of present-day argument and debate. In some cases (as with Walter Benjamin) this debate takes the form of a struggle for interpretative power among disciplines with sharply opposed ideological viewpoints. Such controversies cannot simply be ignored in the interests of achieving a clear and balanced account. They point to unresolved tensions and problems which are there in the critic’s work as well as in the rival appropriative readings. In the end there is no way of drawing a neat methodological line between “intrinsic” questions (what the critic really thought) and those other, supposedly “extrinsic” concerns that have to do with influence and reception history. The volumes will vary accordingly in their focus and range of coverage. They will also reflect the ways in which a speculative approach to questions of literary theory has proved to have striking consequences for the human sciences at large. This breaking-down of disciplinary bounds is among the most significant developments in recent critical thinking. As philosophers and historians, among others, come to recognize the rhetorical complexity of the texts they deal with, so literary theory takes on a new dimension of interest and relevance. It is scarcely appropriate to think of a writer like Derrida as practising “literary criticism” in any conventional sense of the term. For one thing, he is as much concerned with “philosophical” as with “literary” texts, and has indeed actively sought to subvert (or deconstruct) such tidy distinctions. A principal object in planning this series was to take full stock of these shifts in the wider intellectual terrain (including the frequent boundary disputes) brought about by critical theory. And, of course, such changes are by no means confined to literary studies, philosophy and the so-called “sciences of man.” It is equally the case in (say) nuclear physics and molecular biology that advances in the one field have decisive implications for the other, so that specialized research often tends (paradoxically) to break down existing divisions of intellectual labour. Such work is typically many years ahead of the academic disciplines and teaching institutions that have obvious reasons of their own for adopting a business-as-usual attitude. One important aspect of modern critical theory is the challenge it presents to these traditional ideas. And lest it be thought xi

William Empson

that this is merely a one-sided takeover bid by literary critics, the series will include a number of volumes by authors in those other disciplines, including, for instance, a study of Roland Barthes by an exponent of American “post-analytical” philosophy. We shall not, however, cleave to “theory” as a matter of polemical or principled stance. The series will extend to figures like F.R.Leavis, whose widespread influence went along with an express aversion to literary theory; scholars like Erich Auerbach in the mainstream European tradition; and others who resist assimilation to any clear-cut line of descent. There will also be authoritative volumes on critics such as Northrop Frye and Lionel Trilling, figures who, for various reasons, occupy an ambivalent or essentially contested place in the modern critical tradition. Above all, the series will strive to resist that current polarization of attitudes that sees no common ground of interest between “literary criticism” and “critical theory.”

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

xii

Preface and acknowledgments

William Empson’s criticism has been well served by commentary. Many of the occasional reviewers and some of the authors of retrospective studies have sallied forth from rival camps, and they have not always been kind; but for the most part Empson’s critics have been alert to the seriousness of purpose peeping through the famous off-hand manner, and nearly everyone has admitted that he is one of the most formidably nimble readers of literature in this or any century. So in setting about writing a book on Empson for this series, I had to consider what I could say that would be new, in view of everything that has been said well already (pre-eminently by the editor of the series, Christopher Norris, in his William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism), and not only new but permanently useful, knowing that we will soon have from John Haffenden what “Empson studies” most obviously needs, a biography. What remains worthwhile to do, I think, while we await fresh biographical knowledge, is to give Empson’s intellectual career a somewhat firmer outline. To this end, I have verged at times on something like a phenomenology of the author’s mind, but in the long run I have simply used any means I could think of to render a full account of what and how—and why—Empson thought. As I went on, two partly interconnected revisions of what is currently said about him did seem to force themselves on my attention: first, even though Empson himself was willing on occasion to accept his label of “verbal critic,” I came to feel that the label has distorted our understanding of his purposes, which were ethical from the beginning (“biographical,” in a sense), and has prevented us from seeing that the course of his work, from the earliest to the latest writings, is by no means discontinuous. I see Milton’s God arising from concerns left crucially unresolved in The Structure of Complex Words (they are already simmering in the first two books) and giving

xiii

William Empson

rise, in turn, to the curiously persistent cosmological concerns of the later books and essays. And second, perhaps because I do see in the late work a gathering momentum rather than a winding down (or flying apart), I place a much higher value—and a proportionately greater emphasis—on Milton’s God in particular (which I take to be intellectually thinner yet more clearsighted than its predecessors), but also on what came after it. Running through it all, I argue, there is devotion to what it seems better to call reasonableness than rationalism, but this ideal is upheld in three successive, sharply divergent “senses” (as Empson would term them in Complex Words): (1) it is reasonable to assume that all mysteries have scientific explanations (in the first three books, where the mystery of sacrifice is dispelled by The Golden Bough as a “pastoral” identification of the one with the many); (2) it is reasonable that the truth remain indistinct (in Milton’s God, where Milton muffles the Christian sacrifice, which now seems unforgivable, in evasiveness and “sublimity”); (3) it is reasonable, truth being out of reach, that no account of life go unheard (in the late books and essays, where one exemplary figure after another refuses to betray the plenitude of existence by sacrificing speculation to orthodoxy). Thus at all times and in every context, what Empson says can be seen as a warning against the perils of renunciation. I have not said this over and over, wishing to avoid tedium, but the reader will find that I could have put it in anywhere, like “lost his little bottle of oil” in The Frogs. I can add only a few images of Empson the man to what has appeared in print, and they may as well be clustered here, each of them being of some interest perhaps to British readers as glimpses of Empson on the American “land mass,” as he would call it: Empson in 1982, standing on the beach at Key Biscayne near Miami, having stripped to his undershorts to swim, telling two children who kept tadpoles that when he was a boy on his Yorkshire estate he always fed his tadpoles raw meat (the children of course went home and fed raw meat to their tadpoles, which immediately died); Empson in Toronto in 1963, sitting down to dinner with Northrop Frye, W.K.Wimsatt, and my informant, who recalls with awe the disquieting spectacle of three giants whose disapproval of each other was perfectly equilateral; and Empson at Yale ten years ago, the only time I ever encountered him, having finished his lecture on Middle Spirits in Doctor Faustus, which was delivered from a rather high dais that had steps on one side but not the other, the side nearest the exit. I had to run off somewhere and did not stay for the questions, but found I had forgotten my xiv

Preface and acknowledgments

briefcase and returned for it just when the questions were over. Coming through the door as the applause subsided, I was just in time to break the fall of Empson, who said, or should have said, he “wouldn’t fly again/For quite a bit,” like the poet of “Autumn on NanYueh.” Actually what he said was “Oh. Thank you very much. Sorry.” Naturally, after that, I felt chosen. I have tried to write dispassionately, judiciously, about Empson, but I had better say here that I am an Empson enthusiast, prepared to forgive anything and incapable of severe criticism. He was the only comic genius our line of work has produced (in quoting him I have tried to confirm that as often as possible), and the supreme value he placed on people’s lives was inseparable (as my title is meant to indicate) from the value he placed on life itself. Despite differences that make the comparison seem ludicrous, I cannot help likening Empson to Byron: he of Newstead Abbey, of Cambridge, of Don Juan, and of the Greek adventure was, it seems to me, one of Empson’s most important ancestors. The greatest debts I have incurred in preparing this book are owed to Christopher Norris and Gary Wihl, for their encouragement and their pathbreaking forays into the thickets of Empsonism; to Charles Berger, for giving me the chance to discover what I wanted to say during the Modern Language Association panel he sponsored on Empson and Burke; to the other participants (along with Norris, Wihl, and Berger) on two such panels: Pamela McCallum, Paul Jay, and especially my old classmate Richard Strier; to David Bromwich, Cyrus Hamlin, John Hollander, and the Murfins (Ross, Pam, Justin, and Audrey), for information and personal reminiscence; and, for conversations more timely than they knew, to Richard Brodhead, Jonathan Freedman, Thomas Hyde, David Marshall, my wife and colleague Brigitte Peucker, Candace Waid, and Henry Weinfield. Special mention is due also to the scholarship without which writing seriously about Empson would be impossible: Frank Day’s Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography, Roma Gill’s collection of memoirs (with the fine bibliography by Moira Megaw), and John Haffenden’s copiously informative introductions to Argufying and The Royal Beasts. Chapter 2 is an expanded version of an essay entitled “Empson’s Satan: An Ambiguous Character of the Seventh Type,” to appear in William Empson: The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.

xv

Texts frequently cited

The following texts will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation given below. While it would have been convenient to include John Haffenden’s collection of essays called Argufying in this group (as I have cited it perhaps more frequently than any other work), I have nearly always endnoted that book in order to cite the title, source, and date of the essays as well. (Indeed, rather than adhere strictly to any one endnoting protocol, I have tried throughout to supply whatever information I could imagine a reader wishing for at the moment.) William Empson, Collected Poems (1949; The Hogarth Press, London, 1984) (Collected Poems) William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B.Pirie (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986) (Shakespeare) William Empson, Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-Book and Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” ed. John Henry Jones (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987) (Faustus) William Empson, Milton’s God (1961; rev. edn Chatto & Windus, London, 1965) (Milton’s God) William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; 3rd edn New Directions, New York, 1966) (Seven Types) William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; New Directions, New York, 1968) (Pastoral) William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951; Ann Arbor Paperbacks, Ann Arbor, 1967) (Complex Words) William Empson, Using Biography (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984) (Biography) William Empson and David Pirie, eds, Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (Faber & Faber, London, 1972) (Coleridge’s Verse)

xvii

William Empson

Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974) (William Empson) Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (The Athlone Press, London, 1978) (Philosophy)

xviii

1 Introduction: the scapegoat and the word

It is tempting to begin a book about what Empson wrote by describing an essay he might have written but did not. We can take our cue from Empson himself, in Faustus and the Censor, inventing the lost, unaltered text of Doctor Faustus. The essay Empson did not write would have been called “Aristotle, Eng. Lit., and Tragedy.” It would have argued that the way in which the notion of katharsis has always been interpreted by Eng. Lit. (one of Empson’s milder terms for the academic literary profession since the Second World War) is influenced by the founding of the Christian religion on human sacrifice. After all, much as he came to hate Christianity, Empson still belonged to the generation of T.S.Eliot, and it still seemed natural in the 1930s, after Frazer, to say that “the tragic hero was a king on sacrificial as well as Aristotelian grounds; his death was somehow Christlike” — and then to quote Herrick: Not like a Thief, shall Thou ascend the mount, But like a Person of some high Account; The Crosse shall be Thy Stage; and Thou shalt there The spacious field have for Thy Theater. (Pastoral, pp. 29, 85) This hybrid view of tragedy would indicate that either we are at fault for not seeing that catharsis is a response to sacrificial atonement, or that Aristotle himself is not a sufficiently imaginative guide. Perhaps the latter: Empson was most comfortable with the anthropological approach to the classics made popular by Cambridge luminaries like Gilbert Murray (see Complex Words, p. 142: “If we regard it as the root idea of tragedy that the sacrifice of the hero re-unites his tribe with Nature or with supernatural forces…”), and he always took a rather quizzical view of the Poetics, 1

William Empson

claiming for example that the notion of “imitation” is unintelligible.1 One reason for this, especially in his later writings, was the evident ease with which Aristotle could be called on for the anti-humanistic, “neo-Christian” practice of sneering at the unworthiness of even the noblest secular motives: “the [inhumane] mistake is to assume that the Aristotelian ‘tragic flaw’ has to be a moral fault instead of a natural limitation.”2 The elaboration of these claims would furnish the bulk of the essay. For detail there would b e a diatrib e ag ainst the Shakespearean and other scholars with whom he had always broken lances, with g rudg ing admiration reserved for A.C.Bradley, whose reflections on “tragic waste” (“the central feeling of tragedy,” says Empson: Pastoral, p. 5) need not be seen, in balance, as glibly redemptive— although from Empson’s standpoint the elegiac Bradley was still much too enthusiastic about the advantages of dying. “[I]t is a fishy game, to play the amateur of tragedy,” 3 even though, or perhaps because, “[t]he prime object of tragedy is to make you feel that the death of the hero with whom you identify yourself…is aesthetically satisfying and therefore what you wanted.” 4 (Complex Words is the arena on which Empson’s mixed feelings about Bradley are played out; he is mainly concerned in the later work gathered in Essays on Shakespeare with philologists and historians of stagecraft.) And an aside would have b een required—though perhaps not g iven—to acknowledge Kenneth Burke, whose articles on catharsis and the scapegoat, with their wicked assimilation of “vicarage” to the realm of vicarious pleasure, show more clearly than anything else the profound affinity that exists between these two great critics. 5 Profound and also unusual: accustomed as we are to fictional and sociological criticism, which accords with Empson and Burke in taking the moral rigidity of anti-humanism for its target, we may forget that literary criticism, by contrast, especially academic literary criticism, has tended in the main—until quite recently—to have quite a different purpose. It is ethical, yes, but only analogically so, with ethics providing a model for the making of interpretive choices in reading; and insofar as it has admitted the consideration of values, literary criticism has generally offered, as constructive heuristics, world views amplified and enlightened by scholarship but only tacitly condoned or criticized. (I write as an American student of criticism, realizing that an Australian reader, say, steeped in the tradition of Leavis, will find what I say very strange.) Kenneth Burke and William Empson stand apart, however, because they are concerned with the 2

Introduction

ruses and subterfuges of consciousness, political and religious in outward form but at bottom ethical. Their criticism produces countless exhibits of human integrity disintegrated, not typically however in the standard works of literature (the “canon” dissected by the recent literary disciples of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche with whom they are frequently and in some ways properly compared), but in the worshipful mediations of literature produced by the mandarins who aid and abet cultural aridity. Their subtlety lies in showing not merely that such mediations exist but that they are all-pervasive, like mildew. Hence the attraction for Empson especially of the quibbles and hair’sbreadth differences of scholarly controversy, where the disclosure of bad faith appears in the placing of a comma. It will be apparent that in approaching Empson as an anatomist of cultural and personal hypocrisies I have chosen to be a lumper not a splitter, in Virginia Woolf’s terms, seeing the manifestly antiChristian work that begins with Milton’s God as continuous with those earlier works whose titles seem to bespeak attention only to language (to rhetoric and grammar, to genre, and to vocabulary, respectively). I must hasten to add that I am scarcely alone in this; however, the other critics who have grasped this continuity have seemed nonetheless to divide Empson’s career in two because they have placed a lesser value on the later work. This is what led Empson himself to think that Christopher Norris saw no connection between the early and late books, and to complain therefore in his “Postscript” responding to Norris’s seminal William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism: “I have not been entertaining myself with frippery in my old age; I have not even felt a change in my line of interest” (p. 205). But the distance between them is not as great as Empson supposes it: Norris willingly agrees that “Empson’s humanistic rationalism is present in his earliest writings, and forms a coherent and developing background to each of his books” (ibid., p. 2), while Empson proclaiming the utter seamlessness of his intentions is obviously abusing the privilege of hindsight. This he did, by the way, still more disingenuously elsewhere. When he says in 1963, for instance, “I put [Herbert’s] ‘The Sacrifice’ last of the examples in [Seven Types], to stand for the most extreme kind of ambiguity, because it presents Jesus as at the same time forgiving his torturers and condemning them to eternal torture,”6 he blithely revises his early interests in terms of what now seems to him the burning issue, and it is an important task for anyone reviewing his career to decide whether the revision is legitimate or forced. 3

William Empson

Entailed among other things in the argument of the present book is the belief that the undervaluing of Empson’s late work results directly from our tendency to exaggerate the degree to which his interests actually changed after Complex Words, and that this in turn has to do with the honored status we have accorded, in literary studies, to the autotelic aspects of language. It is true that after Complex Words Empson stopped talking about the language of literature—or at least stopped worrying at it—and began talking about biographical and historical evidence for the presence of beliefs and disbeliefs in literature, with the apparent result that neither the literariness of literature nor the complexity of language seemed any more to have a material bearing on the simple litmus test for hypocrisy (the acceptance or rejection of human sacrifice) which the critic seemed bent on administering to the exclusion of all else. What also seemed to be lost was the generous pluralism which had led Empson repeatedly to insist—and to say again as late as 1966—that “the chief benefit from reading literature is to make you realize that different people have held extremely different moral beliefs.” 7 With one major exception, commentators have found his focus on Christian anti-humanism either distasteful or comparatively unimportant,8 but it remains a question whether, had the objects of attack been other than what they were, or in any case more various, Empson would not quite readily have been seen to be carrying on work that began in Seven Types and continued through Complex Words, a book which devotes three chapters to the word “honest” and never really has any subject other than the nature of honesty itself. For half of his career, Empson was a verbal critic, yet his subject was never words. As Denis Donoghue writes, conscious of challenging received opinion, “He is completely free from the idolatry of words with which contemporary criticism is beset.”9 What follows is a preliminary survey of the issues successively raised in Empson’s critical books (setting aside for the most part his fascinating shorter pieces, including those collected by John Haffenden in Argufying, 1987) aimed at bringing out the continuity of his intentions while doing justice, at least in brief, to the diversity of his occasions. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was written under the lenient supervision of I.A.Richards while Empson was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, having just come to English from mathematics, at a time when his chief ambition was to polish the verses that eventually became Poems (1935). Proceeding none too systematically from submerged, easily neglected multiple senses through increasingly palpable but still reconcilable contradictions and 4

Introduction

on to the concluding examples of ambiguities revealing “a division in the author’s mind” (Seven Types, p. vi), Empson was purportedly concerned, as he would not be later, with a phenomenon specific to poetic language (there are useful generalizations in the first chapter about the role of meter and rhythm); but even here it is not clear how he would exclude ambiguity from prose, or whether, indeed, ambiguity thus subtly discovered is not discernible in any speech act whatever.10 In an important early review that Empson took very seriously, his Cambridge classmate James Smith saw clearly that the very fussiness and ingenuity of Empson’s verbal criticism militates against, not in favor of, that formalism which those who think of him as a barmy uncle of the American New Critics still seem to expect from him. The fact is, as Smith rightly grasped it, that any form of attention to local detail which is accretive rather than selective will blur and confuse rather than clarify poetic argument. “A poem is a noumenon rather than a phenomenon,” Smith wrote, and it is him, not Empson, whom the New Critics follow in this their key tenet.11 It is a rare moment when Empson himself declares, as he does in Pastoral (forestalling a Smith’s objections to his ensuing dismemberment of a sonnet), “[t]he niggler is routed here; one has honestly to consider what seems important” (p. 89).12 Granted, then, for Empson a poem is a “phenomenon” —but of what? Of the complexity and, finally—when Freud comes in at the level of the seventh ambiguity—the internal contradictions, not of poems but of the human mind. By this is meant, despite the jeers of Empson’s hermeneutically conservative critics, primarily though not entirely the author’s mind, not the reader’s. The “Wimsatt Law,” as Empson came to call it, vexed him all his life, and it cannot be said that he ever made any very trenchant contribution to the problem of intentionality, but he did see the contours of the problem, and some of its implications, more clearly than his bluff remarks would suggest. In the first place, although it is doubtful whether he knew anything about hermeneutics, he was never a narrow adherent to the author’s “conscious intentions,” and he always followed the principle first laid down by Schleiermacher, namely—as Empson puts it—that “Critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew” (Seven Types, p. xiv). At times this premise appears to extend only as far as the Freudian “pre-conscious” (called “tacit knowledge” by Michael Polanyi and countenanced as “meaning” even by E.D.Hirsch), while at other times the range of intentionality as Empson understands it appears to extend downward to the unconscious and outward to 5

William Empson

social determinants; and it is this latitude which has led critics to believe that he was himself indifferent to authorial intention. It is important to remember also that Empson quite understood the logic of the objection to arguments from intention, as is clear from his acknowledgement, in an undated letter, that “[m]aybe, as an intention is only known as it is shown, all references to intentions can in theory be avoided.” 13 But, by analogy, he goes on, although we do not actually see forces in the equations given by the science of dynamics, we could not possibly understand dynamics without supposing forces to be at work. For the New Critic, the “poem” is an equation in dynamics with the motivating force left invisible, whereas for Empson the equation is in itself a barren abstraction from the realm of psychological reality to which we gropingly return only with its aid, the possibility of return being the sole value of the equation. Because intention can only be “known as it is shown,” there are times when Empson treats the text, especially the anonymous or generically-defined text, as a kind of stage on which we can discern an implied reader and an implied author, as in the distinction (Pastoral, p. 6) between fairy stories and ballads, which are by and for but not about “the people,” and pastoral, which is about but not by and for. But such implied, shadowy human agents are never conjured up to make the text self-subsistent; they exist at most alongside their real-life counterparts and never replace them. Empson agrees with anti-intentionalist logic, together with most hermeneutic theory, in granting that “success” in the realization of intention “is never complete”: “But it is nearer completeness in a successful piece of literature than in any other use of language” (Biography, p. vii). This is so for Empson not because the piece of literature is the harmonious realization of a complex formal conception, as W.K.Wimsatt himself argued (Empson’s unlovely “piece of literature” avoids the holistic suggestion of Wimsatt’s “poem”), but rather because it is the vehicle reserved for the most intense sincerity and self-honesty of which consciousness is capable. Indeed, it is not ultimately the possibility of understanding alone which is at stake for Empson in defending intentionalism, but the possibility of respect for the authenticity of other thinking minds. Thus the poems of Rochester are “a test case…against some recent critics who have said that one ought to ignore biography,” not because the poems would in that case be misunderstood but because they would simply lack value: “if one didn’t believe Rochester, his poems couldn’t come off properly.” 14 By implication, the anti6

Introduction

intentionalist hypothesis of their being spoken by a “speaker” is pointless and trifling. As always for Empson, then, the issue of intentionalism presents itself simply as an appeal from words to reason. So far from being a logological avatar of deconstruction (with which movement his thinking has considerable practical affinity, as we shall see), Empson never for a moment questions the sturdy Lockian distinction between word and thought still upheld by Richards and the Cambridge philosophers. For him “the defile of the signifier” may be limitless, as his formalist critics complain, but it is always unvaryingly reflective upon, never confluent with, the purely mental signified. The relation between word and thought in Empson is nevertheless not an arbitrary one, as it is for the Saussurean linguist, but is rather governed, in diachronic linguistics as in literary interpretation, by the intentionalist invocation of rational and empirical choice. Thus in the Appendix on Leonard Bloomfield in Complex Words Empson says of the history of sound-change in the word “cuckoo”: “It is not true to say that no criterion of decision had been offered; indeed, Jesperson had offered living evidence, in the shape of a lady who pronounced the first vowel of the word as in ‘but’ and came from a part of Scotland lacking in cuckoos” (Complex Words, p. 435). In view of all these quite obvious descriptive remarks, the critic who is most spectacularly wrong about Empson must surely be Elder Olson, who of course echoes many other critics both of the poems (“crossword puzzles”) and of the criticism but whose error in complaining that Empson puts too much stress on language (“diction”) is unusually vivid and shortsighted in having for its point of view a mentalistic poetics quite as radical as Empson’s own.15 To Empson it was obvious that no one is really a language-bound critic, that we nearly always appeal to intention whether we know it or not, all the more foolishly when we are on our guard against doing so, owing to “a secondary ill-effect of the Wimsatt Law”: “the effort to ignore the author’s Intention makes the critic impute to him some wrong Intention” (Biography, p. 104) —the intention, for instance, to treat a serious conflict of beliefs frivolously by turning it into a triumph of form. It seems clear that Empson’s occasional efforts to shore up his approach with what amounts to a hermeneutic theory were never really necessary to his enterprise, which derives all its tension and energy precisely from the act of leaping in the dark, as he knew perfectly well. It was enough to say, with Johnson and Coleridge 7

William Empson

before him, that in honoring literature we are praising the scope of the human mind, hence should keep the mind as fully in view as the static interference of the text will allow. Not the mind as formal principle (or “intentional structure”: that would simply return us to the poem it forms) but the thinking mind observed through the only lens we have at our disposal, that of reading. Empson’s seven types on the face of it are six types of ambiguity followed by one type of ambivalence (“division in the author’s mind”), but many passages in Seven Types could be adduced to show the role played by ambivalence from the beginning.16 The idea, then, that specifically literary considerations are sacrificed to the moralism of the later Empson is not as easy to defend as may appear, simply because it would be so difficult to find any such considerations in the early Empson. When he speaks as a writer of poems, curiously enough, we do find him talking about things that can only be said in poems, about the poem as a uniquely efficacious representation of unresolved conflict, and so on; but as a critic he is always interested in the progress of thought more or less irrespective of format. Again Kenneth Burke is relevant: as a critic, Empson sees literary maneuvers essentially as interesting illustrations of those “dramatistic ratios,” as Burke would call them, which shape human behavior. As to the Christian bogey, by far the most controversial reading in Seven Types, the above-mentioned depiction of Christ on the cross in Herbert’s “The Sacrifice” as a boy stealing fruit in an orchard, gave rise to a controversy with Rosamund Tuve that continued for decades. At first the debate concerned predictable issues governing interpretation—the relevance of Freud, the use and abuse of history, the provenance of convention and genre (Tuve’s specialty: note that here it is she, like Smith, who invokes against Empson a specifically literary mode of semantic determinacy) —but eventually Empson came to see, quite rightly, that it was his opponent’s Christianized horizon alone which made visible everything she was capable of seeing in Herbert’s cultural milieu.17 Tuve, he wrote in 1963, “seemed disposed to treat me as a pagan stumbling towards the light. Clearer now about what the light illuminates, I am keen to stumble away from it.”18 And at that point he was “the later Empson.” Some Versions of Pastoral (1935: the American edition of 1938 was blandly and misleadingly called English Pastoral Poetry) elaborates the multiple senses of expression in Seven Types into an account of mutually reflective social perspectives in literature. A central idea in the new book, “the pastoral process of putting the complex in the 8

Introduction

simple” (“‘the fool sees true’”: Pastoral, pp. 22, 10), can be read as an expiation of the allegedly excessive ingenuity of Seven Types, as it were routing the niggler in himself. “Pastoral,” writes Norris, “is ‘about’ the complex man (often referred to in late chapters as ‘the critic’) and his half-guilty pleasure in the equivocal business of ‘interpreting’ his simple counterpart.”19 But the connection between Pastoral and the first book is at once more subtle and more fundamental: at the heart of the new book is the theme of ambivalence—of classes, professions, and regions (country and city) toward each other, of the individual and society toward each other, of gods and men toward each other, of men toward nature, and—not least—of the author toward his material, which always reinforces some form or another of false and sometimes pernicious consciousness. Thus “pastoral” is a kind of theoretical synecdoche for ambiguity, enabling Empson to formulate a clearer and broader framework for the first book while taking up only one of the seven types, the seventh. Much of the book was written during Empson’s years teaching in Japan, whither he had repaired after his dismissal from his graduate post at Cambridge, in 1929, when it was discovered that he had been entertaining a woman in his rooms. 20 We need not trace Empson’s emergent political concerns, or even his irreverence toward social and literary conventions, solely back to his victimization on this occasion in order to see that his life would have gone very differently had it not occurred. For one thing, had he b ecome, as predicted, a Cambridge don, his antiprofessionalism would have been much harder to cultivate. And there is very little in his life’s work, after all, which is unrelated to the hatred of puritans, pharisees, and plain hypocrites that this episode must have enlivened. His lack of evident self-pity, and his continued capacity for shrewd detachment from the fallibly generous-spirited Tom Joneses of life and letters with whom he nevertheless openly identified, has most to do with the urbane offhandedness which is the hallmark of his social class. 21 It is inconceivable that he was not incurably embittered by his expulsion, and the bemused detachment of the poem called “Warning to Undergraduates” he wrote on his Yorkshire estate in the ensuing weeks should not lead us to think otherwise.22 However, it would be foolish to reduce Empson’s politics to personal experience alone. For one thing, the ominous growth of nationalism and power worship in Japan distressed him (see Milton’s God, p. 13) and no doubt led him to think afresh about the 9

William Empson

equilibrium and the complex reciprocity of power relations in his own country, and also about those mysteries of identification whereby individuals or classes can make themselves universals. Japanese nationalism embodied in the Emperor is an example of the pastoral pars pro toto which he may have found too obvious to mention. And then—it must also be said—the fact that Empson’s most politically-oriented, Left-leaning work appeared in the 1930s, when he was scarcely alone in saying that “literature is a social process” (Pastoral, p. 19), is of course no accident. His stubborn individuality was, indeed, not so much a buffer against as a foil for all the influences that made him as much as anyone a creature of his times—not only in politics but in those influences that filter through fashionable reading: Frazer’s Hanged Man is as important in Pastoral as it was in The Waste Land, and the pastoral hero of 1935, assimilable to Christ as readily as to the tragic hero or the king, is already the tortured scapegoat of later years. With this interesting difference, however: whereas Pastoral concerns the permeability of roles and the readiness with which the political sense of representation pervades the symbols and plots of literature, with the result that the various social perspectives are both specularities and parallelisms (and finally inter-identities), the work beginning with Milton’s God (work dating from Empson’s return from China in 1953) seems rather to be about the failure of this process, about the isolation of a scapegoat who is no longer representative in an imaginatively satisfactory way but is only a sop hypocritically thrown to Cerberus—or lion thrown to the Christians. (In the fourth chapter I shall trace Empson’s gradual loss of faith in the efficacy of symbolic identification in some detail.) The later work, then, while it is less overtly political than Pastoral and has little more to say of Marx, Gorky, and Russia, 23 seems if anything more stridently to urge social vengeance, the sacrificial victim of injustice being no longer vested with that absorptive or redemptive authority (redeeming human sin in the West, natural catastrophe in the East) which the “trick of pastoral” had accorded it. Empson knew it was a trick in the 1930s (the word is everywhere in Pastoral), but unlike Marx he seemed at least intermittently cordial toward false consciousness, largely agreeing even with those who see illusion as a necessary opiate. For the most part it is with admiration that he analyzes the ways in which literature makes what is socially arbitrary look natural, at least until he gets to the nineteenth century (warning signals having been given in 10

Introduction

the reading of Gray and the chapter on The Beggar’s Opera), where he sees the hearty rationalizations of and by the lower orders, always essentially the nostalgia of the complex for the simple, destroyed by industrialism (presumably: the argument is not explicit) and lamentably displaced onto what he calls “child-cult.” 24 It is interesting to see his generation’s condescension toward the nineteenth century (in Seven Types, p. 2 0, he mocked the Romantics’ need for a “tap-root” back to infancy) thus recast in plausibly challenging political terms. The degree of Empson’s sympathy with Marxist criticism in Pastoral can be gauged quite precisely from the brilliant opening remarks on the “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen” stanza in Gray’s Elegy, remarks which pointedly place the technique of Seven Types at the service of social commentary. This is a reading in two paragraphs, the first of which is “Marxist,” reminding us of Gray’s pre-Napoleonic admission that in eighteenth-century England there is no “carrière ouverte aux talents,” an admission papered over however by Gray’s strenuous effort, via the natural blooming of flowers and the natural serenity of gems, to suggest that arbitrary social exclusions are natural and inevitable. Thus far there is nothing that any politicized historical critic of our day could refine upon or wish to alter; but in the next paragraph we find the turn of thought which goes far to undermine what precedes it: “And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers” (p. 5). Empson always insisted that he was an historical critic, and there is no doubt that his intermittent research enthusiasms were spurred by the wish to establish his philological credentials. Still, though, it was passages like this one, with its appeal to the “permanent,” which gave his critics another target to shoot at. 25 Yet the passage is easily defended as a mark of that very breadth of moral sympathy (the bourgeois illusion is exposed, but illusion is necessary, and this is only one illusion of many, all of which are colored by truth) which is less rather than more in evidence in the later work. And in Empson’s universalism, which is quite cheerfully offered, with no sense of contradiction, as the universalism of his own moment, there is none of that objectifying of the past—as though it had nothing to teach— which is a weakness of traditional historiography. Empson anticipates the radical perspectivism of current anthropology in saying that when we consider remote times and places 11

William Empson

[t]here is a tendency to imply ‘They, the objects of study, have very quaint ideas; but we, the English-speakers or the scientific world, have sensible and transparent ones’; whereas we may only be understanding the foreign ideas, if at all, through a similar complexity in our own. (Complex Words, p. 73) There is even a complex moment when Empson historicizes by defending another epoch’s—his favorite’s—tendency not to historicize, and thus to keep permanent human realities squarely in view: “I don’t think the Elizabethans were as conscious of historical changes as all that.”26 As Philip Hobsbaum writes, with Tuve in mind, Empson “reads Herbert and the other classics as we read the living.”27 Empson to this end begins his late attack on John Carey by reducing all the priestly formulations of the hermeneutic circle to his own mode of gruff homily: “Surely, if a critic reads in nothing, he has nothing to say.”28 Empson normally respects what many would now call the “essentialist” category of the “human,” defining “man” categorically as a rational animal who is always slandered by any imputation of inability to act decently (this is an Empson keyword) —and what matters most to him always therefore seems unattached to time or place, the effects of which he is apt to minimize: “it never ceases to be startling,” he wrote in reviewing two books on ancient cities, “when you are faced with the details of life in these great towns, to see how little things have changed.” 29 Satan’s having the courage to act on his convictions “has been an essential bit of equipment since the human mind was first evolved” (Milton’s God, p. 47); and thus we find Empson defending his reading of Marvell’s “The Garden” in Pastoral against the critique of Frank Kermode by saying that “Marvell was playing with deeply rooted ideas, so native to human life that any full civilization would arrive at them.”30 The trace of value-preference implied in that “full” is not accidental; Empson would say that the ideal of humanism is latent at all times but brought to fulfillment (he can be very frank about this) by cultures and classes not unlike his own. Thus it is that at the end of Pastoral, almost as the last word in this his most class-conscious book, he defends the alleged “snobbery” of the Alice books as a fundamental sense of manners that “would be recognised in a degree by any tolerable society” (Pastoral, p. 293). In ensuing chapters there will be plenty of occasion to return to the business of “positioning” Empson’s largely unconcealed social perspective more fully. 12

Introduction

Not by accident, Empson in the defense of Marvell just cited uses the word “native,” somewhat provocatively, very soon after the publication of his third book, The Structure of Complex Words, which in a preliminary discussion distinguishes between fundamental and historically determined meanings of that word (pp. 49–50: providing, among other things, a splendid early model for today’s analyses of the rhetoric of colonialism, one which is more pointed and precise even than his memorable picture of Mr Bertram in Mansfield Park piously banning his children’s home theatricals having “just returned home from his slave plantation in Antigua”31). To be native is to be snobbishly “other” with respect to interlopers and parvenus or to be viewed exploitatively as other by the forces of colonization, and these are both meanings that have an historical trajectory; at the same time, however—and here is the turn resembling the rebuke to historicism in Pastoral cited above—to be native is to be inherent, implicit, fundamental, and it is in that anti-historicist sense that Empson pointedly uses the word in saying that the values balanced in “The Garden” are “native to human life.” 32 Returning to the insistence in Seven Types that notions of “pure sound” improperly isolate emotion from the context of meaning, and joining that insistence now to the Pastoral question whether and how that context is historically conditioned, Complex Words is an anatomy of the way in which keywords help to shape boundaries of morally and socially authentic selfhood. Bifurcations of “Mood” within the words form modes of comparison and ostracism which keep in view, indeed frequently sharpen and particularize, the class specularity theme of Pastoral—so that to be “native” is to be classbound at either of two social extremes—while the complexity of this process lends a sense of indeterminacy, of meaning-explosion, which returns us to the atmosphere of Seven Types. The immediate provocation for Complex Words, insofar as one can infer such a thing from Empson’s final arrangement of its materials, produced at intervals over a ten-year period (much of the time bivouacking through the hills of China with the rest of the Peking University), was the belief that his mentor Richards had got the relation between emotions and statements wrong, the result being the dangerous doctrine that “emotional beliefs” invested in the “pseudo-statements” of poetry are separable from the “intellectual beliefs” embodied in the statements of science. If Keats “leads up with clear marks of solemnity to saying that Beauty is Truth he does not want to be told, any more than anyone 13

William Empson

else, that ‘of course’ he meant nothing at all except to excite Emotion” (Complex Words, p. 7). Once again Empson is attacking the notion of autotelic expression which would isolate the poet from the rest of us (“any more than anyone else”) as a frivolous aesthete who thinks it vulgar to express conviction. Empson thought we had been driven to this sort of hieraticism, which all the great universities featured when he went up to Cambridge (where “Q,” Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch, had been its pure embodiment), by an opposite and equally extreme tendency, the fanatic rationalism of ancestral expositors like Bentley, who “scared later English critics into an anxiety to show that they were sympathetic and did not mind about the sense” (Pastoral, p. 152). The opening pages of Complex Words, against Richards, were written not accidentally for the Kenyon Review in 1948, when Empson took a summer residency at Kenyon College and formed a closer acquaintance with the circle of New Critics there, headed by the Kenyon editor, John Crowe Ransom. We can see Complex Words, then, as a summa against that mode of “verbal criticism” which derived from Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism rather than from Seven Types (itself covertly a revision of Richards); and the issue drawn concerns the concept of autonomous meaning, formally determined, as Ransom had defined it in The World’s Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941). The “world” of Ransom’s earlier title was neither a dwelling-place nor a perspective but a principle of fullness and inner logic, an ontologically-independent entity, derived from Richards’s Arnoldian belief that coherent “Pseudo-Statements” are required to preserve man’s psychological well-being in a dehumanized universe; on this view literature is judged as an analogue of the real world, perhaps preposterous but coherent as truth itself, and not as a concerned attitude toward the real world in which coherence may not be achieved but conflict is held successfully in suspension, its impasses at arm’s length. Empson held the latter view, and Complex Words is his major effort to expound it, complete with the “little bits of machinery” which to most have seemed irreducible to a system, perhaps because they are themselves a reflection of the unsystematic way in which the expression of meaning, even in poetry, goes about its business. A word or two more is in order about Empson’s lack of interest in ontological objects, verbal icons, well-wrought urns, and the like. As Jonathan Culler writes, Empsonian ambiguities “derive precisely from the continuity between language in poems and language in other situations,”33 meaning by “precisely” that the presumed higher density 14

Introduction

of poems alerts us to effects we can also find, once alerted, in ordinary language—the calisthenic training of Seven Types as it were putting the mind in trim for the marathon of Complex Words, where words like “quite,” “just,” “no doubt,” and “certainly” are sifted for their intricate semantic ore. And conversely, as we have seen and as Christopher Norris aptly remarks, Empson continues in the latter book to reverse the argument of Richards about pseudo-statements “by finding the ‘machinery’ of logical thought at work within poetry itself.”34 It is not accurate, however, concerning either Richards or Empson’s sense of him, to hold that Richards for his part actually views poems as verbal microcosms. Empson is at pains to say that in Science and Poetry Richards presents pseudo-statements “as an alternative to the idea that false statements in poetry belong to ‘a supposed universe of discourse, a world of make-believe, of imagination, of recognised fictions common to the poet and his readers’” (Complex Words, p. 13). But, Empson continues, Richards “went on (wrongly, I think) to say that ‘except occasionally and by accident, logic does not enter at all’” (ibid.). Here is the exact point of divergence: while neither Empson nor Richards, unlike the American New Critics, placed any emphasis on the “internal logic” or discrete coherence of poetry, agreeing that it refers primarily to reality, not to itself, Empson resists Richards’s implication that it has no intellectual responsibility of any kind, replying to what Richards had said of “emotions in words” that “[n]ormally they are dependent on a Sense which is believed to deserve them” (ibid., p. 35); in short, that in poetry their claim to truth and to respect differs not at all from that of emotions (and “moods” and “pregnancies”) in factual statements. Thus it is with both Richards and his New-Critical descendants in mind that Empson replies to the Times Literary Supplement reviewer of Milton’s God who said that “instead of questioning the morality of the epic, I should have laid ‘a heavier stress on the terrible conclusiveness of Disobedience within the scheme of Paradise Lost’”: “But I deny that a poem is a private self-subsisting world of this kind.” 35 Empson is aware that in various formal ways literature can be defined discretely, and would not have b een surprised to encounter, for example, John Searle on the “pretended asserted illocution” of “fictional discourse”: 36 “It can no doubt be objected that I am using truth in some peculiar literary sense here,” but, he goes on to say, “[t]he distinction seems to me extraordinarily hard to draw” (Complex Words, p. 14). Empson sees no use in any case for the category of the provisional or quoted truth-claim (why not take 15

William Empson

responsibility for it? he would say), and by the same token, as we have seen, he opposes the New-Critical doctrine of the “speaker,” persona, or lyric protagonist which derives equally from the “masks” of Yeats and Pound and from the distinction of Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” between personal emotion and poetic feeling. Cleanth Brooks, Empson says ironically, returning to Keats’s Grecian Urn at the end of Complex Words, “is not very patient with personal expressions of feeling from a writer who is engaged in building one of these complicated structures” (ibid., p. 369). 37 This last phrase may suggest that the rather flat title of Empson’s book has a hidden negative meaning, with “Words” to be symbolized according to his scheme as “-A,” for “deliberate exclusion of Sense A from a use of the word”: the submerged title of this book, we are then to infer, is Not the Structure of Complex Poems. Just as his critics charged him with ignoring literature as such, so he charged them with smothering “argufying” under the blanket of the literary. Pastoral had called literature a social process, but now he wants to say, more decisively in revolt from formalism, that “language,” in all of its manifestations whatsoever, “is essentially a social product” (ibid., p. 18). Not just the New Critics and those who invoke “conventions,” like Tuve, suppress the will to mean of individual authors; the Chicagoans too, more surprisingly but quite tellingly, stand accused of having found their own way, via the categorical license they took from Aristotle, to avoid the scandalous immediacy of real meanings that may matter to an audience: “Where Mr Crane becomes absurd, I think, is in assuming that because Macbeth is ‘imitative’ it can’t be ‘didactic’ as well…I think this quaint belief in the mind of Mr Crane belongs to the naughty nineties and not to Aristotle at all.”38 Crane may seem prim and pedantic, in other words, but he is still an aesthete. From Richards Empson had learned to distrust the “phantom aesthetic state” (as it is called in Principles of Literary Criticism), and learned perhaps also—though this is less clear—to trace this state back through the nineteenth century to Kant. The effect of the remark on Crane is cunningly to merge the Chicagoans with the New Critics (the two schools normally viewed each other as enemies), suggesting that modern notions of unity derive not from Aristotle’s “imitation of an action, complete and of a certain magnitude,” but from the “purposive, not purposeful, manifold” of the Critique of Judgment, which enters the English mainstream, swimming there with some awkwardness and embarrassment, by way of Coleridge. These are the clustered concepts on which 16

Introduction

traditional criticism has endlessly ruminated, and Empson is in nothing more remarkable, at least from the standpoint of a sympathetic American writer, than in his brusque treatment of them.39 Complex Words will seem to put the greatest strain on my contention that Empson was not a “language critic.” Two main points, though, support my argument: first, that here even more than hitherto all emphases are shaped by an underlying concern for character; and second, that Empson’s mentalistic focus is enabled by his choice of words rather than sentences as units for analysis. The first point can be grounded, at some risk of misunderstanding but with commensurate interest, in the rather enigmatic words of Empson’s review of George Rylands’s Words and Poetry written for Granta in 1928: There is a charming introduction by Lytton Strachey, about Poetry being written with words, but it is a tiresome dogma…. In fact, all the bad poetry of the moment seems to be written with words; I believe myself poetry is written with the sort of joke you find in hymns. (Argufying, p. 69) Although I am not sure I can reconstruct the arch undergraduate conversation which drifts within earshot here, I take this to mean that poetry written as an exercise in wordplay (his own verbal fireworks had not yet acquired that reputation) is empty stuff, a mere “complicated structure,” whereas the true occasion of poetry is the longing for the reciprocal attention of other minds, a longing made absurd in hymns by the non-existence of the other mind addressed but marking for that very reason the poignancy and urgency of all poetry projecting its words into silence. On this view, not just the drama but all poetry—indeed, all uttered language by 1951—is at bottom a stage where characters confront each other and perhaps meet; but in developing this idea with his greatest persistence in Complex Words Empson will naturally find his attention drawn most by the drama. It is in the four chapters purportedly on keywords in Shakespeare plays (“Fool in Lear,” “Timon’s Dog,” “Honest in Othello,” “Sense in Measure for Measure”) that the tension between the apparent topic, words, and the actual topic, character, is greatest. Each of these chapters is preceded by chapters that are at least in part sociolectical surveys of the word in question; and one is struck in reading the chapters on the plays by how little is 17

William Empson

added to the verbal complexities already worked out—by how difficult it is, in fact, for Empson to keep the words steadily before him. The most telling moment comes at the end of “Fool in Lear,” when Empson decides that much of what “fool” had come to mean in Shakespeare’s time, and at times elsewhere in Shakespeare (specifically the “Erasmus fool,” “superlatively wise and holy”) does not actually apply to the character of Lear: “It seems hard to deny that this idea is knocking about, and yet I think it belongs to the play rather than the character” (Complex Words, p. 157). Words, that is, have an undeniable life of their own, especially when treated as part of the image patterns made popular by Caroline Spurgeon and others, but the lives of words in their self-referential aspect, even the very words singled out for special attention, are not organically unified with or internal to the lives that people the stage. Lear is an old blowhard who has really learned very little, Empson argues; not so much a mere fool as an ordinary person whose mind has failed to grasp the difficulty of renunciation (an idea of George Orwell’s that shapes his reading), one who is memorable mainly for the sheer copiousness of his experience; and the Fool too is no saint, but no fool either, clinging loyally to Lear at least in part to save his own skin. What Empson’s brilliant and convincing analysis serves to show, in fact, is that a keyword, however “complex,” can be positively misleading, or at least shackling, if we expect it to unlock the secrets of lived experience. Empson is clearer about this peculiarly subversive tendency in his mode of analysis in the Othello chapter, where he writes disarmingly: I have gone into the matter [of Iago’s character] at perhaps tedious length without using the word ‘honest’ at all, because there seems a suggestion of trickery or triviality about saying that the character is only made plausible by puns on one word. (ibid., p. 235) The reason why this recurrent division of purpose, so obvious at moments like this, has not been clearer to Empson’s readers, or perhaps even to Empson himself, is that his mentalism is frequently obscured by the bristling appearance of his “machinery,” which was aimed, again, at disproving that any aspect of language is either wholly aesthetic (“pure sound”) or wholly “emotive” (in the Ricardian sense of “non-cognitive”). In the first chapter, pointedly called “Feelings in Words,” Empson grapples inconclusively with the problem raised by his preposition: “Being ‘in’ the word is of course a matter of degree” (ibid., p. 25). 18

Introduction

Some degree does always seem to be involved, even for the lexicographer, who is urged to recognize the emotions “in” words more fully, with the apparently negligible risk that in the context of a dictionary “it might be argued that an Emotion is simply one of the kinds of Implication” (ibid., p. 31). One does not balk at this, if only because everyday language bears out the elision, but it remains one of those moments which cast the “structure” of the machinery in doubt. If an emotion viewed as the property of a word is an implication, why are not “sense” (implied meaning), “existence-assertion” (implied truth-claim), “mood” (implied attitude toward auditor, hence toward self ), and “pregnancy” (implied range) implications to an equal extent, leaving the analyst of the word in itself little use for more than one term, “signification,” which Empson never uses? It is only when all of these implications (perhaps even including “implication” itself ) are taken out of the word and located in something like an intentional structure that the bits of machinery become substantive and useful. And that, I would suggest, is what Empson really meant to do; or if he did not, the wonderful cogency of his practical semantics depends on its being done for him now. The confusion leaving this matter in doubt arises actually from one of his keywords, “sense,” which on his own showing in a series of chapters is variably somatic (feeling), semantic (meaning), and semiotic (signification, which comes closest to being “in” words); and this confusion is oddly compounded by his never at any time reflecting that it may be the complexity of “sense,” sliding back and forth between body and mind in his analyses of the word, which causes it to slide back and forth between its metalingual status as keyword and its unexamined role in the prose of his theoretical preamble. Confusing theory and practice in an eerie Möbius strip effect, the very last sentence of “Feelings in Words” is a joke which seems to confess more than it admits: “what I have to avoid is often ‘the sense “sense” of sense’, a phrase which can leave no impression on the mind except that of a sordid form of lunacy” (ibid., p. 38). Scarcely confined to Empson, the confusion begins with Hobbes and can be said to constitute the empirical tradition to which Empson belongs—together with Wordsworth, in whose Prelude Empson sees tricks with “sense” reaching new depths of legerdemain. But there is a very great advantage in this confusion: in much of the rest of this book I shall argue that in everything from pastoral perspectivism to Middle Spirits—to name two Empsonian themes— “sense” is a muddle, as he himself would call it, from which the broadest coherence of his thought paradoxically emerges, serving to 19

William Empson

create rich intermediary registers of being that keep the easy rigors of idealism and somatic materialism at arm’s length. The effect of this muddle on his attitude toward words, meanwhile, is quite surprisingly to make him wish they were something else, something far less arbitrary and independent than words must after all continue to be: “a man tends finally to make up his mind, in a practical question of human relations, much more in terms of…vague rich intimate words than in the clear words of his official language” (ibid., p. 158). 40 Words, that is, which dissolve, via sense, into feelings.41 If he had not in some measure wanted this to happen to words, I am convinced—to turn to my second point—that he would not have taken words for his unit of study at all, but chosen, instead, that linguistic unit which can bypass mentalism when confined to syntactical analysis: namely, the sentence. There is a great deal in his work that seems to entertain this possibility, especially his enlistment in the campaign of Ogden and Richards for Basic English. In the very interesting essay of 1940, “Basic English and Wordsworth” (the poet by whom Empson was always fascinated because he could not help seeing featured in “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude his own partly suppressed confusions), we find him explaining the advantage, as an interpretive tool, of translating poetic and other complex expressions into the bare-bones grammar and vocabulary of Basic. Adherence to the radical referentialism of the Cambridge logical positivists is certainly his chief motive, as it was for Richards, and this would seem to make him even less wordcentered, the efficacy of paraphrase constituting a kind of proof that “meaning” is psychological, not textual. But the activity of paraphrase, viewed as a process, would seem actually to point in the opposite direction, to suggest that it is not meaning but words to which words refer: that which is “around” the phrase is another phrase. It is with this understanding, not with the extreme implication that there is no such thing as meaning but suggesting rather that meaning can only be analyzed as an immanence of “its” representation (“only known as it is shown”), that the intentional milieu studied by the Ordinary Language philosophers and the “deep structure” disclosed by Chomskyan linguistics are mapped out in metalingual sentences or symbolic equations. In isolating words intermittently from their use in sentences, Empson on the other hand can enfold them in a penumbra that at least seems psychological,42 whereas if he had developed, instead of his “bits of machinery,” a method of sorting meanings by putting words in sentences (a system of paraphrases in Basic, for 20

Introduction

example, must have seemed a tempting alternative), he could never for a moment have suppressed the brute fact of exposition, which is that meaning is a matter of putting words into other words. Comparable to his hedging with the word “sense” is the uncertain play of the word “context” somewhere between language and mental atmosphere in the following passage—in which, without this hedging, he might have surprised himself into suspecting that as a methodological choice the isolation of words as units of meaning was questionable: I do not know whether any experiments have been done on which meanings people think of first when a word is given without context, but I should expect the results to be very mixed; the technique seems a psycho-analytic rather than a linguistic one. (Complex Words, p. 47) And so it is. Six keywords are chosen for at least one chapter’s worth of study each, and together they comprise a history, from the Renaissance to the present, of the way in which English-speakers have formulated the integrity of selfhood over against the world and other selves. Three words are characterological (Fool, Dog, and Honest) and three are epistemological (All, Wit, and Sense), the two triads to some extent covering parallel ground. Thus “Fool” and “All” illustrate the frame of mind to which the radical reductions of pastoral seem adequate modes of knowledge; folly in Erasmus is at once a subversive perspective and an allcomprehending insightfulness, while “All” in Milton is at once a sign of paranoid psychosis and a word (embedded in “Fall”) signifying the central Miltonic principle of much ensuing from little. “Dog” and “Wit” together run the gamut of confused admiration and opprobrium with which the Restoration rogue aristocrat forms moral and intellectual estimates of himself and others. “Honest” and “Sense,” the hardest words with the broadest historical range, g iven three chapters each, yield kindred meditations on the ways in which consciousness struggles to achieve unblinkered immediacy to truth and experience. Underlying all six terms, arguably, is the word “natural” (the fool is a “natural,” all is “nature,” dogs are natural, wit is natural, honesty and sense are both guarantors of the nature of things), and Empson indeed devotes a good deal of space to the question 21

William Empson

whether realizing one’s own nature is accomplished in conformance with external nature, as in Confucian or Aristotelian thought, or in opposition to it, as in Buddhism and Christianity. Running through all this is the problem of “false identity” (“A is B”) at the heart of all predication (see ibid., p. 350), modulating toward superstition in the epistemological domain and false consciousness in the moral. With this linguistically founded relativism in view, Empson’s evaluatively versatile and generousspirited aim (he avoids contempt for most beliefs because, he says, there is no knowing the difference between “conscious and unconscious hypocrites”: ibid., p. 165) is to show, for each pair of terms, both the limits and the adequacy of their meanings; “fool” and “all” enable both superstition and Occamite clarity, “dog” and “wit” constitute both a critique and a final elegant codification of an increasingly strained class system, and “honest” and “sense,” forms of cognitive pluralism opposed to the idée fixe (fool and all) and to socially homogenized thought (dog and wit), respectively, disclose both the muddles and the genuine advances in every facet of self-knowledge. All six terms are mystified and partial, yet each also indicates a mode of truth-telling, or “blowing the gaff”: speaking of “candid,” Empson says “[t]he word offers a remarkably different ideal of the truth-teller from the fool as clown or the honest man or the wit or the man of sense” (ibid., p. 309). Clearly all six terms, contradictions and all, are more than a little germane to Empson’s own personality, both as he sees it and as he knows others to see it (whereas “native,” “delicate” and other words discussed in passing are not), and it should not then be surprising that a book devoted to the analysis of self-conception becomes at the same time a wonderfully suggestive moral and intellectual autobiography. We are tempted to write such things either in calm of mind, all passion spent, or in times of personal turmoil, and Complex Words is certainly an instance of the latter case. It is the seething yet majestic crest of a wave that was to break when Empson returned once and for all to England in 1953. At stake, we can see in retrospect, was his provisional faith in the doctrine of the scapegoat which had hitherto seemed to him to invest the universe with a kind of moral and eschatological economy, never in its specifically Christian form but always rather when mediated by Frazerian syncretism—making Christianity itself seem poetic, even necessary—or by the Freudian overdetermination of the father. The scapegoat is not as prominent in Complex Words as in the first two books, perhaps because the war may 22

Introduction

have raised vivid questions in the mind of even a willing and enthusiastic radio propagandist about the facility with which people could be made to “die for” things (you could just as easily argue, though, that participating in his country’s Finest Hour postponed the ensuing bitterness), but partly also because the theme of the scapegoat has been absorbed into a seemingly unrelated issue, the problem of predication in language. The “trick” of Pastoral survives here as the protean trick which pervades all language, the assertion in rhetoric (metaphor) and grammar (predicate and copula) that A is B. Only if we accept the fallacy that Empson is a “verbal critic” can we avoid seeing that in thus laying bare the arbitrary structure of all belief systems as an inescapable universal Empson has succeeded in identifying the broadest possible context for understanding the cultural persistence of sacrificial victims. In Complex Words he declares, clinging to the unruffled attitude he would soon abandon, that the problem is not a tragically threatening one even though it is dangerous and should be monitored: “I suppose I really meant to argue all along that the human mind, that is, the public human mind as expressed in language, is not irredeemably lunatic and cannot be made so” (p. 83). From the time he took his teaching position at Sheffield, he was not so sure, for reasons that I can only guess at (see pp. 117–18), reasons surely not exhausted in citing either the pressures of historical change (he blamed the resurgence of Christianity on anticommunism, and struggled not to find 19 84 prophetic), his expressions of surprise at his colleagues’ turn to irrationalism in his absence, or any internal logic discernible in the development of his own work. Indeed, Complex Words arrives at a pinnacle of dispassionate analysis from which there was no obviously pressing reason to descend. But as soon as Complex Words had appeared he came down from Olympus, sleeves rolled up, and began laying about him against his generation’s equivalent of what we now call the neo-conservatives. 43 He started lecturing on Shakespeare at Sheffield (see Shakespeare, p. 183), and the first major essays of this period, on Falstaff, Macbeth, and Hamlet (collected in the Essays on Shakespeare, 1986), seem more like conclusions of unfinished business in Complex Words than promises of something new; yet they do in fact look forward. Falstaff and Hal, Empson argues, are too big to encompass from any one standpoint, and Falstaff in any case is not so much an ethical or political anatomy as a victim of disappointed love; the atmosphere of Macbeth is deliberately confused and obscure, a fog, in short, and Dover Wilson was wrong 23

William Empson

to conjecture that there must have been explanatory scenes leading up to the murder; and Hamlet, too, is sustained by the deliberate withholding of clear motive, a play insisting at every level on the theatricality and inauthenticity of selfhood.44 What is new in all three essays, then, and what marks their importance, is a rebuke to the positivism he had learned at Cambridge, with its insistence that there is a scientific explanation for any mystery. Empson now typically professes himself baffled, but prefers (still in the mode of explanation) to see his predicament as the thematization of bafflement in Shakespeare, thus for the first time countenancing the notion that genius can see farther, albeit obscurely, than rationality can. The stage is set for Milton’s God. This acknowledgment of what I shall call the sublime in Chapter 4 is a way of throwing up one’s hands before the sacrificial mysteries— Does rejecting a friend purify the state? Is there substance in primogeniture? How should the father be obeyed? — hitherto dispelled by the planting and harvest rituals which had seemed sufficiently scientific explanations. Milton’s God is known, rightly in the case of the last chapter, as Empson’s attack on Christianity; but what this view of the book distorts is the contrast, when Milton is at his best (“struggling to make his God less wicked”: Milton’s God, p. 11), between the history of Christianity and Milton’s revision of its cosmology. Even when Milton remains hagridden by the intractable elements of his story, Empson argues, there is still a tension, if not a contrast, between received religion and the poet’s sense of justice. Milton makes God less wicked, Empson argues from somewhat tenuous evidence, by planning to have him “abdicate” at the Millennium, thus exonerating him from the sadism of planning to take personal pleasure in man’s eternal torment;45 the fact that the theology of this argument is utterly obscure, Empson feels, is what makes it useful for Milton’s purpose. As I shall try to show more fully in Chapter 3, what Empson sees Milton embracing, in an all-out effort to evade the sheer nastiness of his subject, is the sort of obscurantism which is only rational in the face of our profound cosmological uncertainties. Empson at this point in his career, always reaching for the most sublime explanation (as he says repeatedly of his author in Milton’s God: see pp. 129, 159, 189), takes just the same course. It is all quite deliberate, I believe, and a good deal depends on saying that it is deliberate in Milton too, departing in this regard from the earlier verdict in Complex Words (p. 104): “that his feelings were crying out against his appalling theology…was I think not obvious 24

Introduction

to him.” 46 Milton’s God is a splendid book, thinner and crankier than anything preceding it in Empson’s career, hence normally identified as the beginning of a sharp intellectual decline; but I find it superior even to Complex Words for the full honesty of its selfaccounting, with every weight and force in the author’s mind held openly in balance with every other, all without the enabling comfort of Empson’s long-standing, hitherto stalwart belief that problems exist, as in mathematics, only to be solved. The permanent effect of this Keatsian phase of negative capability in Empson’s thinking, when he was caught in the penetralium of a mystery without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, is by no means a happy quietude or complacency of unknowing. Indeed, after Milton’s God one hears little more talk of sublimity. What Empson seems most usefully to have learned from having ceased to believe that there is any efficacy in the proposition “A is B” is not that all is grass or that all is fire (he denied any personal belief in the Buddhist Fire Sermon he had placed at the head of his 1949 Collected Poems) , 47 but rather that it is just as much the case that all explanations are rational as that none are. No longer merely withholding contempt from bizarre views, he now seems actually to prefer them. He becomes fascinated with the diversity of known planets and possible worlds, poised in Donne as at present between fantasy and astronomy (see his major late essays on Donne); with the baroque exuberance of early scientific theories, intermingled with and enabled by alchemy and white magic (materials which resurface in his anti-Christian readings of Yeats); with arcana and cabbala of all kinds (already surfacing in the Milton book, and central to the late work on Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Yeats); with the high-wire acts of conjectural biography, confirming the plurality of other minds (most fantastically perhaps in the excurses on Marvell, Dryden, and Joyce in Using Biography, 1984); and with the mediation of the stark metaphysical opposites on which orthodoxy reposes by ontological hybrids known traditionally as Middle Spirits—everywhere in the late work but climactically, of course, in the posthumous Faustus and the Censor (1987). Such beliefs appealed to him at least as much for moral as for cognitive reasons. What he had acquired from his sojourn in the East, from the war, and finally from the cold war, was a violent dislike of censorship, not on principled constitutional grounds, and certainly not because he enjoyed seeing rubbish pass for truth, but because it had become so clear to him that truth, whatever it is, is an untidy thing, wild, sprawling, and biological, hence inimical to 25

William Empson

the ideals of order, fixed and transcendental, on which conventional statecraft is founded. Beyond state censorship there is the more elusive silencing by the disapproval of groups, by opinions, sanctioned in university settings, which may in themselves be subversive and are disenfranchised in other quarters but still constitute doxolog ical norms against which truly independent thinking becomes invisible. Empson had little chance to study this phenomenon in history because infra-societal institutions have never before been so curiously at odds with each other as they are today, but what he saw and hated among his new colleagues after the war, a cultural conservatism considerably more rigid than anything called for by the state, is really an instance of it. Today it is just the opposite, with universities throughout the West increasingly to the left of their governments but enforcing (as control of promotion and publication passes to a new generation) a counter-conformism of their own; and one cannot imagine that Empson would like what he saw today any better, despite the neoconservatives’ having for the most part decamped from the university to the state. That he was much preoccupied with censorship in his late writings is very probably a mild paranoiac symptom, although his announced reason is rational enough (he cannot understand why modern scholars “are unable to imagine living under a censorship or making an effort to avoid trouble with Thought Police”: Shakespeare, p. 93), but that does not diminish the epistemological and moral importance of his last themes. The wild profusion of his scientific, hermetic, and biographical materials is just the point, aimed directly at censorship of all kinds. It is all much too luxuriant to summarize here, and I shall try to make as much sense of it as I can in my fifth and final chapter, concluding this one with a word about Empson’s last book-length project, Faustus. The cogency of the thesis I leave, here as always, to the experts, remarking only that in his editor and sometime assistant John Henry Jones Empson had in his corner a scholarly authority who seems largely sympathetic with his aims. Empson argues that Marlowe rewrote the cautionary tale told by the German Faust-Book so as to make it consistent with his “atheism,” that is, with the disbelief in hell and the sacraments that would later be called Deism (the same freethinking with which, in Biography, Empson also tried to align Dryden). Marlowe’s task was made imaginatively and intellectually easier, Empson says, by the fact that the translator of the Faust-Book, “P.F.Gent.,” whom 26

Introduction

Marlowe may have known familiarly, had already insinuated much of what needed to be said. Only the censor needed to be eluded, together with the modern neo- Christian scholars. Working backwards from the belief that Faustus’s last words in the A-text, “Ah, Mephastophilis,” are an expression of intense relief and must mean that he has escaped hell, Empson reconstructs the story as follows: “Meph” is not a devil but a Middle Spirit without a soul, one of “the longaevi,” who “lived longer than we do, but then died completely, like the beasts” (Faustus, p. 99), who wants Faust’s soul not for Lucifer but— hoping for immortality—for himself, hence pretends to be a devil in order to strike the bargain. (Lacking diabolical omniscience, he is constantly in difficulties answering Faust’s questions.) Faust meanwhile knows at first that Meph is no devil (how else to explain the fatuity of “Come, I think hell’s a fable”?), but is soon convinced that he is one after all by a diabolical tableau Meph puts on with his friends to fend off the constant threat of Faust’s repentance. (Empson does not make clear how the pact could be binding if it is not backed by diabolical, or ultimately divine, authority. Or, conversely, if it is enough for Meph to possess Faust’s blood to have taken his soul, it is not clear why he need fear his repentance.) For the rest of the play Faust is in despair, only to realize at the last minute, when Meph comes toward him with open arms, that there is indeed no hell and that he has only to relinquish his soul, as promised, in order to sink gratefully into oblivion, “like little water drops,/And fall into the ocean, ne’er to be found,” exactly in accordance with the doctrine of a sect (known also to Donne) called the Family of Love. It seems improbable to say the least; but the play could be acted this way (Empson explains how, very carefully); and read by this light it does indeed have an attractive speculative interest about it, and a good deal of the apparent silliness and hackwork usually ascribed to the “memorial reconstruction” of actors after Marlowe’s death does seem somewhat better motivated. Above all it is rich in suggestion and consolation for Empson himself. Faustus as he reads it celebrates Marlowe’s triumph over censorship, both in fact (the censorship of Edmund Tilney) and in theme (the censorship imposed on Christian faith, here and in the hereafter). It is also, in a closely related sense, William Empson’s meditation on death, on the possibility that the radioactive half-life of all things may cushion the abruptness of our demise (in becoming a Middle Spirit Faust ought to have bought some two 27

William Empson

thousand years, but this seems not to be the case in this one instance, relief to have escaped hell being compensation enough) while protecting us from the twin indignity of eternal police states, whether singing hosannas or gnashing our teeth. (Why Meph should prefer either of these conditions to his own, if they are so plainly wretched, is another question that needs answering.) What Doctor Faustus dramatizes for Empson, then, is the wish for sheer oblivion, with its comfortable sense of biological belonging, which makes him indifferent to the Christian promise of immortality in any form, and causes him to admire the Bodhisattvas of Buddhism more than Christ because “they have sacrificed their deaths for the sake of man, not their lives.”48 The truth in any case comes to Faustus not in a word but in an exhalation (“ah”), and the permeability of matter and spirit in Empson’s chain of being ensures a continuity among all existent things which replaces the synthetic unity made available, until Milton’s God, by the efficacy of symbolic identification. Life, not its representations, is what lives, and Empson’s sole remaining sacrificial victim is the very thing many commentators have supposed him to preserve at all costs: the word.

28

2 Satanic criticism: Empson and the Romantic tradition

As for myself, when I was a little boy I was very afraid I might not have the courage I knew life to demand of me; my life has turned out pretty easy so far, but, if some bully said he would burn me alive unless I pretended to believe he had created me, I hope I would have enough honour to tell him that the evidence did not seem to me decisive. I dare not despise Satan for making this answer. (Milton’s God, p. 89)

“My attitude in writing it was that an honest man erected the ignoring of ‘tact’ into a point of honour.” Thus, with the word “tact” in ironic quotes, Empson looks back on Seven Types in the 1947 “Preface to the Second Edition” (p. vii). There is a remarkable selfawareness in this sentence, which grants that there may have been an element of pose, perhaps of defensiveness—of tact, in short— in the author’s cultivation of expository insouciance. Just where he was most slapdash and most offensive to scholarly method, just there, he says, he imagined himself to have been most honorable. Thus he confirms what we knew instinctively, that his unbuttoned rhetoric embodied the tactless tact of the gentleman’s fireside conversation, “using tact about the assertion of class” (Complex Words, p. 205). But decidedly the conversation of a Dissenting Gentleman: the person Arthur Mizener in 1938 called “the revolutionary critic in the guise of a correspondent of the T.L.S.”1 Empson’s style has long been seen by admirers and detractors alike as somewhat out of keeping with both his populism and his intellectualism. Everyone has recognized in this style the transcribed talk of the gentry, but there is little consensus about its undoubtedly complex strategic aims. 2 His sympathetic contemporary, 29

William Empson

M.C.Bradbrook, sees him as acting a part despite belonging in the part, a well-bred but scapegrace orphan found to be the true heir in a romance: “For the occasion of his honorary degree at Cambridge [the site of his disgrace, a subject worthy of Fielding], Empson appeared as a country gentleman, a reformed Tom Jones in a canary yellow waistcoat.”3 This sort of patrician-as-rustic-buffer act can arouse bitterness, and does so among a good many Americans, but it was left to an Englishman, Geoffrey Grigson, to insinuate during a depressingly vicious exchange of letters that Empson was not what he was pretending to be but was really the phthisic snob he was pretending not to be: “Mr. Empson, ranging himself with the Sitwells as an English gentleman, might have stood up for his friends…”4 This seems quite wildly wrong, but it shows the kind of spleen a calculated manner can set going. Like his scholarly carelessness, Empson’s disregard for the conventions of academic style and format helps foster the image of the unindentured amateur, and the social corollaries of this fact as Terry Eagleton draws them out are worth attention: “The racy, underplayed speech of the patrician, in a familiar English paradox, makes implicit alliance with the tongue of the ‘people’ over the heads of a linguistically pretentious bourgeoisie.”5 It is true that Empson admires the broad appeal of plain language when used where a jargon might be expected, as when “Eddington could carry on a profound discussion in…apparently popularizing language” (Complex Words, p. 365); but popularizing is not the vox populi, and in those passages where Empson reflects indirectly on his own style, Eagleton’s Marxist contention about the stylistic alliance of aristocracy and proletariat can be found refuted, simply because Empson thinks, more realistically, of the public for reading and writing not as a three-class but as a two-class system broadly unchanged since the emergence of what we call the white-collar professions: Inherent in the delightful ease of [Rochester’s] style there is also a puzzle about class. The reason he could talk in this absolutely plain-man way was that he was a great lord and a favourite of the king; a person of lower class, such as a university professor or a Puritan preacher, would obviously have to talk in a more affected manner.6 Complaining that much nonsense could be averted if only writers would submit their prose to the test of translation into Basic, Empson returns late to the question of patrician plain talk, indicating that while 30

Satanic criticism

it may have the common touch it is not common to all—and that in this very fact, including the fact of his own example, there is something that an Eagleton might well be dismayed at: If you heard Charles II talking to a Bishop, you felt not merely that he showed the man up to be a pedant but that this was the right man to be King, because he spoke in such an absolutely plain-man way. If you felt so you were deluded, and I do not say that the political effects were good, only that the effects on the language were.7 Bradbrook’s feel for the Empson stance seems best, and fits perfectly when for example one finds him arguing (against John Wain and F.W.Bateson) for the generous-spiritedness that flourishes amid sexual disarray in Restoration Comedy;8 but it must be said that in her description of Empson receiving his degree she has put the yellow waistcoat on the wrong hero. Not Tom Jones but Young Werther, very surprisingly indeed, merits whatever sartorial allusion there may have been at the Cambridge ceremony, and it is this tension, the tension between Bradbrook’s “reformed Tom Jones,” an excellent description of much that is important in Empson, and the creature whose fantastical sensibility inspired a fashion for yellow waistcoats and suicide all over Europe, which I shall attempt to characterize in the present chapter.9 In Empson’s style as in his chosen subjects, the bluff squire, with his keen English nose for nonsense, almost completely conceals a deep sympathy with Romantic attitudes.10 It is as though Shelley were to disguise himself as the father who had threatened to disown him. When an honest man in any case erects the ignoring of tact into a point of honor, the word “tact” becomes hard to assign a “$” value, to use the notation—on “American typewriters” —of Complex Words (p. 17). Empson views tact as a kind of self-inhibiting, veiled insinuation meant to cushion the potential shock of what one has to say (see Milton’s God, p. 66), especially in a “social situation calling for some tact and delicacy” (Seven Types, p. 130: this is impishly let drop during one of his tactless, indelicate readings of Herbert). “Milton,” for example, was ready to avoid disturbing the simple-minded reader, though he would aim more at the fit one, who could appreciate his sustained analysis of Satan’s character. What Milton had to say was so grim that he might reasonably use some of the tact which modern readers find him so lacking in. (Milton’s God, p. 66) 31

William Empson

It is tact of this deployed kind which for Empson controls the structure of irony: A speaks with veiled derision to B about C in the presence of C, who must then choose either to seem unimplicated but obtuse or alert but guilty as charged.11 I am tempted to say even that this sense of tact as manipulated communication brings one close to what Empson means when he skirts the idea of literary form, as when he says, “It is partly this tact which makes Marvell’s puns charming and not detached from his poetry” (Seven Types, p. 106); and if this is so, then his preference for ignoring tact may suggest a connection between his restiveness under social constraints and his customary indifference to questions of overarching literary structure. Both his own prose and his typical interpretive emphases isolate the “logic,” the common but also complex sense, of the discrete instance; and “a purely logical point” —again concerning Herbert— “can be made more clearly if it is not muffled by a sympathetic tone” (ibid., p. 184n.). Hence Bentley, whom Empson admired for refusing to rest satisfied with symbolizing explanations, becomes “the Man who said the Tactless Thing” in trying to impose a prose logic on Milton’s poetic flights (Pastoral, p. 149). For Empson himself, ignoring tact becomes a question of offsetting one kind of shock, the arty o altitudo, with another kind, the slurred sound of unedited talk: Then [someone at a party] said, “How do you manage to get it as loose as that? Do you dictate it?” I explained I used beer, but that when I saw the stuff in print (I had to admit) it shocked my eye as much as it did his…. One thing is, I have to read so much Mandarin English Prose now, especially in literary criticism, and am so accustomed to being shocked by its emptiness, that I feel I must do otherwise at all costs.12 If “tact” then can mean either cant or—less unequivocally—doing the humane thing, it puts us in the grips of an ambiguity of the seventh type, “when two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined from the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind” (Seven Types, p. 192). This is just the form of ambivalence discernible in Empson’s attitude toward Romanticism: ignoring tact he calls it cant, tactfully he declares it the latest period flowering of humanism. Itself a fissure in tact (as in Wordsworth’s inadvertent registering of the tactility or lack thereof in the complex word “Sense”), Romanticism as Empson understands it discloses the historically growing urgency, as theme and 32

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crisis, of mental division. Thus part of Empson’s importance is to show by example that the Modernist ethos which shaped and alienated his mind was only an antithetical chapter in the continuing story of Romanticism. Here and elsewhere, I am admittedly shuttling the word “Romanticism” between three partially overlapping usages: as the label for a specific period, as a binary term (opposed to “classicism”) covering a whole set of more or less permanent attitudes toward life and letters, and finally, with Hegel’s disillusioned descendants, as a broad epochal designation for the history of alienated consciousness from Descartes and Milton through the Enlightenment to the present time, with “child cult” remaining as crucial to the postFreudians as it was to Lewis Carroll or Wordsworth. These deliberately unmarked shifts in the range of the word will be found also in Empson himself, strategically consistent with an English literary historiography, governing much if not all of his writing, which is partly chronological (the Elizabethan or Restoration “period”), partly typological (there is always an “Elizabethan” or “Restoration” attitude), and partly epochal (the “Elizabethan” is part of what precedes the glacial shift of emergent scientific rationalism, while the “Restoration” reflects the ambivalences of the shift itself: the Royal Society, say, versus the twilight of pre-industrial Cavalier heartiness). In each period, finally, permanent attitudes acquire a period flavor, as when the pastoral figure of the underdog-as-judge undergoes a “slow shift” from “fool to rogue to child” (Pastoral, p. 259). Mizener’s Empson sounding like anything but a “revolutionary critic” actually exemplifies this principle, as Empson realizes obliquely in speaking of Lewis Carroll at the end of Pastoral (p. 294): It is the High Table of Christ Church that we must think of here. The gentleman is not the slave of his conventions because at need he could destroy them; and yet, even if he did this, and all the more because he does not, he must adopt while despising it the attitude to them of a child. Each period term carries these three senses for Empson, chronological, typical, and epochal, roughly as follows. Chronologically, the “medieval” —to which Empson does not much attend apart from nods to Chaucer—is everything which the “Elizabethan” is not but which convention-mongering commentators like Tuve suppose it to be, forcing Donne and others 33

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to mean as little as possible. 13 The presumed rig idity and theocentrism of the medieval period, in other words, is used by Empson as a way of neg atively defining the dialogistic, psychologically flexible, and politically subversive “complexity of sympathy” (Pastoral, p. 65) he so much admires in the age of Shakespeare and Donne, elements standing as it were between two historical rigidities—and which are much in evidence in the current historiography of such scholars as Jonathan Dollimore. This binarism then is what gives period names to permanently opposed world views, but both periods belong together as aspects of a Christian-centered culture whose scientific expressions are admirably imaginative but unprogressive. The seventeenth century, holding all the Empsonian typifications in suspension, is too diverse to be a period label, but there are chronological foci in the Civil War (a political division of mind emblematic of Milton’s proto-Romanticism and Marvell’s omnibus, crossroads sensibility) and the Restoration. Running through it all with special prominence are the two permanent types Puritan and Rogue Aristocrat; while the whole period witnesses, as I have said, the epochally definitive emergence of scientific rationalism. The tensions involved here are summed up in the last sentence of “Milton and Bentley” in Pastoral (pp. 190–1): I suppose that in Satan determining to destroy the innocent happiness of Eden, for the highest political motives, without hatred, not without tears, we may find some echo of the Elizabethan fulness of life that Milton as a poet abandoned, and as a Puritan helped to destroy. The eighteenth century by contrast is not a diverse period at all but a kind of crystalline suspension, “a placid and apparently unbreakable world” in reaction against the “pretty wild characters” of the Restoration,14 a period in which history pauses, resembling the medieval period in its fixity but standing on the other side of the epochal divide marked by the emergence of progressive science. Thus in The Beggar’s Opera as in Gray’s “Elegy,” “the root of the normal order of society is a mean injustice; it is ludicrous to be complacent about this; but one cannot conceive its being otherwise” (Pastoral, p. 221). “A basic impulse of the Romantics,” he writes, “was to escape from the eighteenth century, their enlightened parents, in fact, so as to experience …the variety of the world.”15 Typologically the eighteenth century embodies the encoded or convention-ridden mind in its most civilized form, a “classicism” 34

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forming a last line of defense against the coming anguish of estrangement from the universe,16 looking back to Chaucer and Dante and forward to such Modernist proponents of inorganic form and human limits as Hulme, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis, to whose antiphenomenological Time and Western Man Empson constantly reverted. For the Victorians, whom he sometimes defended, he did still entertain the Oedipal dislike one finds in nearly all his contemporaries, admiring mainly their subversions from within, aspects which are not period but typical (the decadence of Swinburne, laying bare, perhaps, the sadism of official imperialist culture—though Empson never says this) and epochal (the scientific scepticism—tinged in some cases with an historical pessimism of which Empson did not approve —of Buckle, Taine, Spencer, and above all Darwin, Marx, and Frazer). Empson recognized Modernism, finally, as his own educational crucible, a diverse Formalism within which the noble humanism of a Joyce (as Empson reads him) could flourish, but which led more often to the orthodoxy that makes it typical rather than period, the resurfacing of which as “Neo-Christianity” after the Second World War Empson came to see as something of epochal significance, a perilously recurrent answer to man’s estrangement by science which is comprised of Puritanism, pharisaism, and rootless Toryism—and which calls forth all the combative resources of rationalistic humanism. Working within the three-tiered generalities of this scheme, I hope to explain Empson’s pioneering role in the rescue of the Romantic poets from the disfavor of High Modernism;17 and in pursuing this issue I would like to follow Empson’s lead and “use biography” —to show how he settles into this role, intermittently and at times reluctantly, by finding in certain literary heroes a likeness to himself. Not for him the “middle-class anti-heroic propag anda” of Wordsworth and H.G.Wells: 18 As Martin Dodsworth and others have been at pains to remind us, Empson was a landed gentleman. 19 His family understood the administration of neighboring communities, and he himself liked Tom Jones not least because Fielding could judge characters as a magistrate.20 The fact that Shelley was a landed gentleman too (so described three years after the Tom Jones essay) is what accords that poet, still much derided in 1961, the complexity of attitude Empson requires in order to invoke his authority (cited from the “Preface” to Prometheus Unbound) for the qualified vindication of Milton’s Satan: 35

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Shelley does not speak as an Underdog or Outsider, tormented to hysteria by his wrongs, but as the heir to an estate who may expect to do a good deal of administration himself; he takes for granted that he ought to learn to be a good judge, not that he is a victim. (Milton’s God, p. 20) “Fortunately we have had Empson,” wrote Harold Bloom, who was well situated to recognize that passage as a sign of change in the history of literary taste, “with his apt rallying cry: ‘Back to Shelley!’”21 Like Bloom, whose emphasis likewise falls mainly on character, Empson finds models for his hero as readily among the poets as among their creations. And no wonder, for, as I have argued and as many have pointed out before me (with condescension from the 1930s through to the 1950s, more often with admiration since then), Empson reserves no impermeable aesthetic realm for literature but reads it as though it were continuous with life. 22 He sees, as Christopher Ricks finely says, “in real terms the situation out of which the person speaks.” 23 In this respect as in others, for Empson “literature is a social process” (Pastoral, p. 19). While he claims in 1961 that it has taken him some time to “get out of” the fashion for attacking character analysis (Milton’s God, p. 69; he is thinking of his having, in Pastoral, ascribed inconsistencies in Satan’s character to the overall scheme of the poem), it seems clear looking back that his criticism was always passionately human-centered and skeptical of any claim that literature may symbolize, intimate, or inhabit realms of being inaccessible to human life. Indeed, what he can never be found admiring in Romanticism itself, in common with T.E.Hulme, is its oceanic tendency, its leakage of concrete material personhood into the circumambient gas. Authors and poets then are at once texts to be read and characters living among us. In the first chapter I began to portray the hero of this community of beings, drawing my material from the main keywords of Complex Words. This figure, viewed from the middle distance, is everywhere typologically the same: “He stood for ‘honour,’ pride rather than humility, self-realization rather than self-denial, caste rather than democracy” (Pastoral, p. 85); and in Empson’s view the sort of Romanticism which is rooted in the progressive Enlightenment simply transfers this Theophrastean character-type to the poet, 24 whose being an “outcast and unacknowledged legislator, equally strong in Byron and Shelley, puts him exactly in the position of the mythical tragic hero” (ibid., p. 207). Hence for every Faustus (“the 36

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demigod rogue…the ideal drinking companion, the great fixer, who can break taboos for you and get away with it”: Faustus, pp. 46–7) or Falstaff (“the scandalous aristocrat”: Shakespeare, p. 72) or even Stephen Dedalus (“not less than archangel ruined”: Biography, p. 212) there was a Rochester (“only in real high life could a man learn to talk so that anybody could understand him at once”25) or even, in his moments of brave disorder—rhyming “delight” with “Wit” —a Pope: no one but the broad, unspecialized and in a way careless person (the well-born soul) can recognise a new development of the imagination even when it is thrust under his nose, and… even he only does it by rejoicing. The whole world of the Rules and the “slight faults” is dwarfed and trampled upon, and the bad rhyme is meant as a brave illustration of the virtues of carelessness which are being praised. (Complex Words, p. 96) A slant rhyme as Empson reads it is as assuredly as anything else a sign of character. In this regard Hugh Kenner is right, for all his hostility, to point out that not one of Empson’s complex words is an “image,” with the partial exception of “dog,” which immediately becomes a person.26 But despite his mistrust of the “image,” which would appear to suggest an affinity with the Romantic idealist tradition, Empson’s is decidedly the empiricist Romanticism one finds also in the work of his Cambridge contemporaries Basil Willey and Hugh Sykes-Davies; hence for Empson the keyword modifying what would be called “unhappy consciousness” on the Continent 27 is the very word which ambiguously designates the site of the image, “Sense.” Honestly sensual, honestly sensitive, honestly sensible: these expressions hover around the central chapters of Complex Words: “I should say the English could claim that their present extreme muddle with this family [of meanings] came from having faced first the realist and then the romantic issues with more of the permanent human balance than their neighbours” (Complex Words, p. 253). Only for the inattentive reader does Empson’s having called “Tintern Abbey” a “muddle” and the Grecian Urn a “pot” render him indifferent to the subtly divided Romantic character—whenever, that is, the division can indeed be understood as a subtlety.28 What he dislikes is the radical dualism of metaphysics which brings the Blakean sky god into being; but he assumes, rightly, that that is just what English Romanticism dislikes as well, “Coleridge, with his 37

William Empson

Ommjective and Summjective”29 notwithstanding. Any and all ideas of authority “over against” common humanity breed tyranny in Empson’s view, particularly ideas of the Hidden God (armed with Foucauldian panopticon to spy out crimes made possible by his own sadistic non-interference) which surface in literary history as, for example, God in Paradise Lost or the Duke in Measure for Measure, whose behind-the-scenes puppeteering makes even Angelo look attractive (see Complex Words, p. 283). It is their boot-licking admiration for this figure which makes Neo-Christian critics distort the literature of the Christian epoch (most readily: but this can be done to any text, such as Ulysses) by dehumanizing it well beyond its own requirements, making the revenger in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, for example—and Hamlet to some extent—heroic rather than crazed and remorseful.30 The villainous tyrant rethought by English Romanticism as a sky god persists as today’s “transcendental” or “phallocentric signifier,” and together they function as a transhistorical critique of metaphysics: “I cannot quite wean myself from a suspicion,” writes Empson in response to a Neo-Christian reading of Othello (note that his metaphor evokes the Child at the High Table), “that all sentiments in favor of cruelty to others are inherently or metaphysically evil.”31 Reading Wordsworth as brilliantly as anyone ever has, Empson shows on several occasions how the late revisions of The Prelude unconsciously reintroduce the figure of cruel detachment as the tyranny of the poetic eye. In Complex Words he argues that through the process of “packing the lines more fully,” Wordsworth invoked “Milton and his sense of the unrelaxing Will; whereas the whole point and delicacy of the first version was to represent a wavering and untrammelled natural growth” (p. 294). And in the 1940 “Basic English and Wordsworth” (reprinted in Argufying) he reads the revisions of the 1805 passage on the morning of Wordsworth’s poetic election, “Magnificent/The morning was, a memorable pomp” (IV, 330–4) to the 1850 “Magnificent/the morning rose, in memorable pomp” (IV, 323–7) as a process of imposing poetic control by substituting active verbs for Basic verbs of being and location; and also by according to the sun rising an exclusive power of illumination, as an enskyed double of the poetic eye, which power in the earlier version had suffused, with a happy vagueness, the entire scene. Although the “pomp” of the morning is like a king coming forth, “you are not [in the early version] to have any protest in your mind against rulers and the way they make themselves important,” hence 38

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the morning was truly bright in itself (glorious), and the sea was not self-important, it was laughing. There is a sort of pull here between two ideas, that of the authority of the good ruler and the natural good of being free. (p. 235) In the revision, though, Wordsworth stations everything more clearly, helped by the sun: You see how cold this makes him; he is an expert on views of mountains. But in the old lines it was his feelings about the sea and the mountains and the morning that were important, and the forces working in his heart…. In fact there are only two important persons now, the sun and Wordsworth…. The weight now has all come down on the side of authority…. The poor mountains are nobody now, but it is pleasing to see a smile from a mountain when Wordsworth or the sun goes past. A good mountain, at such a time, will take its hat off. It is a strange and sad thing, but it probably seemed to Wordsworth, when he made these changes, that he was only giving the lines a bit of polish. What he was doing was more like turning the guns round from firing at the Germans and pointing them against the French. (pp. 237–8) It is not just the war Empson is thinking of in this passage, showing him at his best in 1940; at a time when it seemed legitimate propaganda to find a basis in nature for expedient alliances, he is surely thinking of German metaphysics as well. Its excesses in tone as well as in metaphysics keep Romanticism at arm’s length. Sharing his generation’s distaste for “undisciplined squads of emotion” (Eliot, “East Coker”), Empson as late as 1972 thus discriminatingly endorses Coleridge’s sonnet to Schiller: “Not any extravagance of emotion is being praised but the kind which purges and renews, because it prepares you to resist tyranny” (Coleridge’s Verse, p. 16). In 1930 the influence of Hulme via Eliot was yet more difficult to escape, hence Empson at that time dutifully deplores “the apparently direct sensory image” in Romantic effusions “which cannot be attached to any of the senses” (Seven Types, p. 175). What he does not openly acknowledge is that this hovering among intentions and referents, which is praiseworthy in Wordsworth by 1940, is just the sort of muddle one can find in each and every type of ambiguity. 39

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Intent on suppressing the tone of Romanticism, Empson does not notice that his own acerbic iconoclasm reflects just the same degree of disaffection. One voice of the character he fashions for himself can repeat the most fullblown sentiments of the tragic hero and the Romantic poet-rebel, but with the epigrammatic calm of an ancien régime moralist: “About anything established there settles this curious double sentiment, that it is both right because it is customary and customary because it is right; and the idea of what is normal, since both are contrasted with the confusion of actual occurrences, allies itself to the ideal of what is best” (Complex Words, p. 315). The effect is an oblique, at times perhaps self-deluding mode of identification with the aristocratic republican tradition, adopted by one whose allegiance to the Modernist revolution in literary taste, with its apprenticing of the individual talent to tradition, was never wholly shaken off despite his growing horror at the implied politics and religious abasement of this movement. But Empson is far too cagily self-conscious to be an historical exhibit merely, as Hulme for all his brilliance has become. Evidently Empson’s purpose from the beginning was to find a way of reading that made the Classical—Romantic distinction given prominence especially by Hulme seem artificial. “It seemed,” he writes of the task he had envisioned in Seven Types, “that one could only enjoy both groups by approaching them with different and incompatible presuppositions, and that this was one of the great problems which a critic ought to tackle” (p. viii). One way of solving the problem was to acknowledge that “complexity of the order of…mind” is not a partisan virtue (ranged in Empson’s day along the Classicist-Modernist axis) but a quality which only the sympathy of an interpreter can securely distinguish from its near cousin, the dreaded “muddle” (see ibid., p. 154). Reviewing the history of English literature from this standpoint, one can see in Empson’s ransacking of the whole tradition the assumption that whatever else may set the periods apart they nevertheless have in common, even in the eighteenth century (“the very sanctuary of rationality”: ibid., p. 68), the ambivalence—typically between principle and experience, theory and practice—to which humane intelligence falls prey. Thus inevitably we find a “Romantic” Milton in his canon, but just as inevitably we find a Miltonized Herbert, full of ambivalence about Christ’s mortification, about the meaning of “Passion” (see Seven Types, p. 130), and about his vocation (ibid., p. 18 4: “‘Damn me if I don’t stick to the parsonage’”), despite the admitted “period” fact that “Herbert in 40

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writing about himself keeps a certain reserve” (ibid., p. 190n.), a fact which allowed Tuve, F.L.Lucas, and others to accuse Empson of distorting both the poet and his age. To illustrate Empson’s saving “division” of mind, we need only— once innocent—our first sentence: “My attitude in writing it was that an honest man erected the ignoring of ‘tact’ into a point of honour.” As we have seen, not only is “tact” double-edged, but there are also two potentially divergent points of honor, the school-tie code and the politics of humaneness. There are also—in this case—two types of “honesty”: Empson’s early self as “honest man,” he now knows, is at once innocent and ironist, fool rushing in and sage looking askance, opposites who meet in the common task of blowing the gaff. Finally there is the seventh-type ambiguity of the word “erected”: Futurist, architectural, and therefore tactful as a Marinetti machine or steel trap, but also the organic phallus, deconstructive, disseminative, and therefore tactless. It was enough to rise higher and higher. The young Empson skiing would have encountered English leftist journalists and German rightist film-makers in equal profusion on the slopes, perhaps acknowledging a little of each in himself, but above all, I believe, though Milton’s God was three decades hence, he would have seen himself as Satan on Mount Niphates. I want to reinforce this identification in part with reference to themes, but also, at closer range, by stressing the typical movement of Empsonian interpretation. Like his structureless, trouvaillebedizened arguments, Empson’s ambiguities are neither architectonic nor resolvable: rather they are open-ended meditations on the dialectic of signification and force, the conflict between the available paraphrases of a word and the atmosphere of tone and feeling that leaves paraphrase in disarray. Perhaps more continuously than he knows, Empson discloses violent motives that implicate both interpretation and the interpreted. Handled by Empson, the well-wrought urn becomes a broken pot, not only in specific outbursts of interpretation but also in the overall arrangement of the seven ambiguities in what he disarmingly calls “stages of advancing logical disorder” (ibid., p. 48). For my case in point I shall choose what Empson calls a “test case” for his method, the reading of Macbeth’s “Come, seeling night” (ibid., pp. 18–20),32 a reading in which Empson shows, as he says in his best deadpan, how Macbeth “imposed the pathetic fallacy on the reader by means of an ambiguity, and tricked him into an irrational or primitive mode of thought under colour of talking about the view” (ibid., p. 38). Empson’s theme here, which I shall attempt to read as an 41

William Empson

allegory of Empsonian interpretation, concerns the loneliness of being cut off, that state in which tact is irrelevant and in which one can speak with what Empson elsewhere calls, referring to Lear on the heath, a “disregard for dignity” (ibid., p. 46). There is much in this reading that must have encouraged the American New Critics. In Empson’s “particular irrelevance” Ransom may have found his “texture of local irrelevance,” although he does not say so when discussing Empson in The New Criticism. Neither Empson nor Ransom of course means that anything they find worth mentioning is truly “irrelevant,” a word they choose merely to make us take notice, but Empson is allowing for a certain looseness of connection, a dissolve into “atmosphere,” and this distinguishes him both from Ransom and from his own mentor, Richards, whose entirely unironic concept of “irrelevant association” in Practical Criticism Empson’s wilder and more tactless assault on poems is meant to rehabilitate. A more genuinely Hartleyan associationist than Richards, Empson typically suggests the impossibility of irrelevance. The suspicion that there are subterranean links between every point on the compass of signification informs what can legitimately be called Empson’s semiotic. We can easily look forward to Jakobson’s endlessly extensible “axis of selection” when Empson shows in Seven Types how one word “supplants” another—the verb is his—in an author’s mind, or when he wonders how, “if one’s mind does not in some way run through the various meaning of a word,” it “can… arrive at the right one.” “Shakespeare actually intended,” he writes, “by putting down something a little removed from any of the approximate homonyms, to set the reader groping about their network” (ibid., pp. 82, 64, 83). Notice, though, that when Empson talks about “Come, seeling night” it is not just Shakespeare who is given an “atmosphere,” a palpable but indeterminate sphere of implication; Empson himself says things at his most challenging that one cannot quite track to their lair. What is this “something physiological and odd,” picked up later in “the whole frame of body”? These expressions are motivated I think by Shakespeare’s word “thickens,” and they perhaps inadvertently evoke the Russian Formalists’ “palpability of the sign,” not however with the iconographic, concretizing aim of Formalism but rather to effect the irrational crossing over of language into reality and vice versa which undoes the binarism of semiotics and merges the signifier inextricably and once for all with the signified. Again and—I would argue—as always, Empson’s every move can be domesticated 42

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within a Formalist aesthetic only to deconstruct itself in that setting, and Formalism with it. Without programmatic staging, Empson’s prose reflects an openness to ambiguity or division within the self. The result is a more or less continuous ambiguity of the seventh type that I am calling “tactless”: a word which within itself plays out the dramatic conflict between tactility (“the ‘tact’ of an exploring fingertip”),33 bodily presence, and disappearance into the thickening light, the wooded overgrowth, of association. But the drama at bottom—to move closer now to the Macbeth passage—concerns association itself considered as community:

Come, seeling Night, Skarfe up the tender Eye of pitiful Day And with thy bloddie and invisible Hand Cancel and teare to pieces that great Bond That keepes me pale. Light thickens, and the Crow Makes Wing to th’ Rookie Wood. Good things of Day begin to droope, and drowse, While Night’s black Agents to their Prey’s doe rowse. Thou marvell’st at my words, but hold thee still; Things bad begun, make strong themselves by ill: So prythee go with me. (III, ii, 50, quoted p. 18) Empson reads the pathos of Macbeth’s speech as an indecisive reflection on the marginal but perhaps fatal difference between crow and rook, predator and colony: as a tragedy, that is, of the imperfect semantic overlap that reflects Macbeth’s longing to return to the fold from which the word “crow” has banished him. “He is anxious…to be at one with the other rooks, not to murder them; that he can no longer, or that he may not yet, be united with the rookery; that he is murdering Banquo in a forlorn attempt to obtain peace of mind.” To be “at one,” to forge a union only by cutting off the relevance of whatever is exiguous to the group, the preferred thicket of meaning— this is a tempting choice for Empson the critic (everyone scolded him for spurning it), here reflected in the reluctance of Macbeth’s alienation. In the force of Empson’s readings, their transgressions, there is antagonism toward orders both social and hermeneutic which he still in part wishes to confirm and rejoin, 43

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in keeping with what he elsewhere calls “[t]he Byronic theme” (Pastoral, p. 284). What is involved once again is the scapegoat principle, “the tragic king, comic people convention” (ibid., p. 43), with self-sacrifice as the privileged individual’s gesture of ambivalence toward the group. “Thou marvell’st at my words,” Macbeth tells his wife, “‘So prythee go with me,’” as though by way of consolation a plurality of destructive “black agents” (in the foregoing lines there was only one such agent) could form an alternative rookery of their own. What authenticates individual consciousness for Empson is the belief here teased forth but elsewhere proclaimed that the mind is itself a—potentially divided—community: “the mind is complex and ill-connected like an audience, and it is as surprising in the one case as the other that a sort of unity can be produced by a play” (ibid., p. 68) —whence comes the issue that unifies the Essays on Shakespeare more than anything else, Shakespeare’s obsessive fear of civil war. It is the rebel Empson’s humane longing to be reunited with the rookery which makes him loathe those adversarial roles that can only be transumed in bad faith, paramount among them the nightmare drama of Christian sacrifice looming everywhere in his later work. These convictions about the mind as frail polity explain his lifelong enthusiasm for the playwright’s many voices and his suspicion, which anticipates the Bakhtinian vein of so much current criticism, that Romantic lyricism at its worst is monoglossal as well as monocular. Yet it is in Romanticism (in this case, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner) that for Empson the Totem and Taboo anomalies of Christianity are alone confronted through “[a]cceptance of the ethics of Jesus, but revolt against the Father who enjoyed sacrifice” (Coleridge’s Verse, p. 34; and see Biography, p. 117). If Pastoral can be read as an effort to redefine ambiguity in literary works as reciprocal social critique, as a “double plot” delimiting the horizons of classes and other groups (unity being preserved by the paradox that our common humanity resides in our inescapable partiality), and to extend our awareness of this practice into non-theatrical modes, we should not be surprised that one of the main tenets guiding this argument, “that you can say everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple people” (Pastoral, p. 137), hearkens back directly to a founding text of British Romanticism, Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”: “Humble and rustic life was generally chosen” for his experimental poems, says Wordsworth, “because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil….”34 44

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To return to the Macbeth passage, it is clear that what accomplishes the movement toward an antithetical community (“prythee go with me”) is not reconciliatory but rather, more dangerously, like the Christian sacrifice, a rationalization of evil. As Empson astutely argues in his analysis of the crow, Macbeth’s commingling of light and dark—focused again in the word “thickens” —attempts unsuccessfully to invest black agencies with legitimate authority. Theirs is the power, the force made strong by ill, while the good things of day, for all their great Bond, are anemic, studies in the pallor and lassitude that in our allegory of reading we can refer to as “weak.” Like a Bloomian weak reading, with its synecdochic “tender Eye,” day is unified, kept safely in bondage, only by taking a monocular view, while the “bloddie and invisible” hand of night, a violently disjointed metonymy—bloodied as much by amputation as by guilt—deconstructs the thin-blooded tissues of order. This it manages by the mise-en-abîme effect that typically undoes logical progression: being invisible, the bloody hand must have scarfed up itself along with the tender eye, suppressing any and all fragments of the human that would have retained the “Bond” of signification, in place of which there then appears a repetition in the register of the inhuman, a crow’s wing for a man’s hand. The mystery that emerges amid these mangled traces of community is the one that I think is in the back of Empson’s mind just as probably as this passage from Macbeth was at the back of Milton’s mind: the mystery of “darkness visible.”35 If one rereads Seven Types with these emphases in mind, and with the understanding that they exaggerate when taken in isolation, bringing out a strain of “romantic diabolism” (Pastoral, p. 167) which is at odds with Empson’s aristocratic but sociable republicanism, it comes as a surprise to see how steadily the themes of revolt, alienation, and darkness recur in his exhibits. Macbeth keeps coming back as an example in key places: ambiguity itself is made to “‘float,’” with Macbeth, “‘on a wild and violent Sea/Each way, and move’” (Seven Types, p. 101); and the words of the play are always, as Empson says in advance of Cleanth Brooks’s great essay humanizing this theme, “words which must be swaddled in darkness” (ibid., p. 49). While in Seven Types Shakespeare is the author who most consistently transmits these themes, both in their diabolical and their reconcilable forms, if we look ahead in Empson’s career we will find an increased, increasingly fascinated attention given for similar reasons to Milton, culminating in the sympathetic chapter on Satan in Milton’s God.36 Just as Macbeth embodies the decentralized feudal order Duncan has tried to weaken by creating new and more centrally answerable titled ranks, 45

William Empson

so Satan, prince of the North, is presented by Empson as a Norman baron, an aristocratic republican (see Milton’s God, pp. 75–82, for the political philosophy involved) rebelling against the tyranny of central authority and the parvenu pretensions of the Son. I think Empson would not have objected to being told that Macbeth and Malcolm help shape his impression of Satan and Christ. He says that Satan is “not so much a Scotsman, though that has been proposed, as a Yorkshireman” (Milton’s God, p. 77) —like Empson himself.37 This may be the place for the stunningly tactless anecdote that readers of Milton’s God will scarcely need to see quoted. It is meant to defend the plausibility of the rebel mountaineer Satan’s speech on Niphates: The idea of a soliloquy being observed has been found absurdly theatrical or literary, so I make bold to remark that it once happened to me. I had landed at Los Angeles on my way from China to England, and there is a park in that city which rises to a fairly bluff summit. I went to the top of it and screamed; this was in 1939, so my feelings need not all be blamed on Los Angeles. After I had been screaming for a bit I found I was being shot at by boys with air guns; this satisfied me in some way; I came down the hill, and took the train to San Francisco. (pp. 66–7) He continued, in other words, unlike Satan, homeward toward his place of birth, there to join forces as a propagandist against what must then have seemed the true rebel angels abroad in the land. The irony to which I am trying here to call attention, as evidence of Empson’s division of mind concerning the implications of Romantic divisiveness itself, can be expressed perhaps as follows: the strategically unguarded autobiographical moment in Empson’s defense of Satan cited above stands curiously apart from the cultural iconoclasm of Milton’s God and becomes historically recognizable, rather, amid the fiercely traditionalist wartime propaganda of quite another book on Milton, ostensibly so foreign to Empson’s purposes that he can find nothing to say about it, Douglas Bush’s “Paradise Lost” in Our Time.38 More anti-American even than usual at the time here referred to, Empson was fiercely critical of the Americans’ delay getting into the war, and saw himself en route to Boston as a propagandist for the support of the Allies, as it were turning around guns normally aimed at one’s own officialdom and pointing them at the Germans.39 46

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It would be wrong to imagine that Empson’s championship of Satan was unique in its day or that it would necessarily have entailed, in itself, a turn to Romanticism. By the time of Milton’s God, C.S. Lewis nearly alone was arguing unequivocally that the devil is an ass. 40 Empson needs the Lewis argument, which he exaggerates somewhat,41 just as he needs John Dover Wilson as a foil for his qualified defense of Falstaff (“he need not throw the drama away by pretending that the bogey was always ridiculous”: Shakespeare, p. 68), and John Bayley was right to say, thinking more perhaps of Byron’s “Vision of Judgement” than of Paradise Lost, that “Empson’s tribute…to his dead opponent has a splendidly infernal courtesy quite in keeping with the poem.”42 Empson’s enthusiasm in insisting that “Satan is Milton as rebel” (Pastoral, p. 169) is never secure enough to warrant suppressing the awkwardness of defending a view which he deems old-fashioned, not forward-looking: “before we began to worry [in the Victorian period] about Milton’s God being wicked, we had a long period [dating from Blake] of suspecting that his Satan was in some romantic way good” (Milton’s God, p. 17).43 Indeed, in a letter to The Listener defending his BBC broadcasts on Paradise Lost in the face of Lewis’s protest, Empson goes so far as to point out that it is just the human fellow-feeling tempting us to identify with Satan which ought to cause us, if we are believers, to oppose him—and to remind us that not even Blake thought that Milton was knowingly “of the Devil’s party”: “Milton would think it in order to be sardonic about the enemy of mankind, and seems to have disliked the character he had imagined.” 44 It is important then to see just what it is that sets Empson’s position apart from a view that has always been very widely held. It is, I think, a certain aspect of Satan’s self-justification which will carry us back to our epigraph and forward to a sufficiently specific understanding of Empson’s partial alliance with Romanticism. What Empson likes about Satan, “a very argufying character” (Milton’s God, p. 62), is that he knows no time when he was not as now. He has no idea, as Empson says over and over, whether God created him or not, and naturally prefers to imagine—and not for the first time in Milton45 —that he made himself. Hence “[i]f Satan believed God to be a usurping angel there is no romantic diabolism at all in giving him our heartiest admiration” (Pastoral, p. 167). But there is plenty of Romantic autarchy. Empson is always distressed by arguments from simple causation which tend to place individual consciousness in a chain of determination. He is much more comfortable with immediate appearances, being willing even to speculate wildly about them (as in 47

William Empson

his giddier reconstructions of probable motives), trusting to circumstantial evidence like Satan when he looks around him from his new bad eminence, takes stock, and denies that the true conditions of his past life can ever be known. This is the most all-pervading trait that Empson shares with Milton’s rebel angel; it does not extend to the simple Gnostic inversion of believing in diabolic creation, but it does embrace that more skeptical Gnosticism which doubts the existence of any truly originary creative intelligence (see Milton’s God, p. 86, for both these views),46 leaving each and every individual consciousness—and conscience—freely self-emergent. And every poem: But surely Herbert did not feel himself shackled by tradition to this extreme degree; and if the scholar is allowed to cut down the meaning of every poem to that of a previous poem there will be a considerable change in the literary scene. I am reminded of an Emperor of China, who returned a poem to its author with a somewhat embarrassed air and said “But surely there is no such poem?”, meaning he could not recall the classical poem it must be presumed to imitate.47 It follows as a matter of hermeneutic principle that the critic need not be wholly subservient to his author, at least not to the point of suspending his own world-picture, especially his ethical sense, in deference to the mere priority of alien ideas (see ibid., pp. 204–5). It is owing to his conviction that individuality must generate itself unrestrainedly that even in his most Marx-influenced book Empson does not shrink from the heresy that “the most valuable works of art… often have a political implication which can be pounced on and called bourgeois” (Pastoral, p. 20). Even here, however, the link with Romanticism must be forged by inference. So great would be the strain on his literary loyalties were he to associate this indispensable outlook, the sense of the individual as autochthonous which is the basis of his politics, decisively with Romanticism that Empson appears most comfortable proclaiming it through his expositions of Buddhism, especially the concept of dharma or self-actualizing “nature” —in place of “a transcendent God” — which he derives in part from Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy; but even in such places he cites the “Nature” of Wordsworth (see Complex Words, pp. 69–71, where the “Nature” of Richards’s Mencius on the Mind is also mentioned). However, the metaphysics of Romantic subjectivity, even in the acceptably mediated form I have attempted to 48

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illustrate, is always less important to him than its politics, and his anthropocentric suspicion of grounding such beliefs in nature understood as mere landscape, belittled as “the view” (Seven Types, p. 38) or “scenery” (Complex Words, p. 298), was normally more prominent than the appreciative pantheism of “Basic English and Wordsworth.” In contrast with Wordsworth especially, by whom he was always for this reason both fascinated and put off, the selfrealization of the individual for Empson made complete sense, was free of muddle, only as a political idea. It is tempting to ascribe the less interestingly equivocal, more tendentious recent work of Empson to the getting of Satan behind him. While he never ceased ignoring tact, while Marlowe’s Promethean Faustus can be said to have become his last hero, and while to the end he labored mightily to rescue Donne and others from the tender eye of orthodoxy, Empson seems to have returned to the taste of his earliest youth, the taste of Eliot which survives in Seven Types, though even there it is broken in upon by the dissociations of ambiguity itself.48 Be this as it may, whenever it is at full strength Empson’s work requires that strain of Romanticism which is first and best reflected for a Renaissance specialist by the drama of Protestantism, Dissent, and Revolution which shapes the character of Satan. It is ironic perhaps that Empson was driven away from these themes as they have developed since the Enlightenment and back into that more homogeneous epoch in which the sole imaginative alternatives were some form of received religion or atheism by the very finality of his alienation from the Christian rookery. Tact gives way to tactics, and there is no place for ambiguity among such decided feelings. There is also a narrowing, perhaps, of Empson’s sympathies in an area of concern, no doubt greater for the current generation than for his, which merits consideration here as a supplement to, and indeed confirmation of, his Romanticism. Empson’s literary horizon is a masculine one. This is plain enough from the assumed ranges of the keywords in Complex Words. There is no mention that Folly in Erasmus (Moria) is a woman, and a vigorously independent one at that; and the notion that Lear’s “And my poor fool is hanged!” may refer to Cordelia is strongly doubted—despite Bradley’s plausible suggestion of senile identity confusion—because “it seems extraordinarily out of place to describe Cordelia” (Complex Words, p. 152). Hence no woman can be either a holy or a wiser-than-the-graybeards fool. “All” is something that a woman lost in Milton. No stress is given to the kind of “dog” a woman might be. “Wit” evokes the coffee-house 49

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exclusively. “Honest” has only one feminine application: “Of women: chaste” (ibid., p. 35ff.); and “Sense,” anchored in a discussion of Sense and Sensibility and much at issue in the alleged awakening of Isabella’s senses in Measure for Measure, somehow intensifies the mildly unpleasant prurience that comes and goes in Empson’s writings. Perhaps most telling, though, are such instances as his failure to notice, in discussing the “pregnancy” of “man” in the stress-pattern crux “He was a man, take him for all in all,/I shall not look upon his like again,” that for a woman reader the word “man” is pregnant regardless of whether it receives a stress (denoting a “real man,” not just a typical man) because it is plain to her that in Hamlet’s mind to be exemplary is ipso facto to be a man, the function of the context being precisely to nullify the difference between the exceptional and the typical. It is an object-lesson in horizon change that, considered as an interpretive gesture, what I have just said here about “man” is the kind of thing Empson’s genius for verbal analysis was likeliest to reveal; yet this particular thing it would no more have occurred to him to say than it did to Hamlet. There are also certain moments when Empson, especially the older Empson, betrays very decided opinions about women. Critic of historicism that we have seen him to be, he is too prone to fall back on “human nature” at such times: “an ancient truth about the relations of men and women,” or “women though not inferior to men have a deep ‘disparity’ from men”49 will be thought not quite to have side-stepped misogyny. Suddenly, in a New Statesman review of 1962, we do come across this quite uncharacteristic bit of men’s-club talk: “Spenser thought it urgent for men to keep control over women, because women are so like horses; this is not at all a bad view; but it is very unlike Shakespeare’s feeling for women everywhere else.”50 And it is really quite unlike Empson’s feeling for women anywhere else. He is quite aware of the tendency in others, hearing it in “the quaintly smoking-room comment” of Claudius, “‘Pretty Ophelia’” (Shakespeare, p. 108). There is, in fact, in the breadth and generosity of his global outlook, and in his—occasionally perhaps voyeuristic— campaign for both sexes against sexual puritanism, a respect for women as individuals, and a general willingness to share social space with them, which is remarkable for his generation and way of life. His references to his wife are always of a companionable sort, and dwell much on shared opinions. Among his many literary adversaries were two women, Rosamund Tuve and Helen Gardner, but one would be hard put to show how his protracted quarrels with them differed in any respect, measured either as condescension or gallantry, from his 50

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quarrels with men.51 The latter case is the more remarkable, as it is the textual cruces concerning Donne’s sexuality and his attitude toward women which are most at issue in the quarrel; yet the harsh but gender-neutral words deployed against Gardner (who seems always to have viewed Empson with urbane charity, even fellow-feeling)52 were largely of a piece with the fiercer and more personal invective reserved for John Carey on the same topics. It is true that Laura Riding late in life complained bitterly that Empson had never granted her the pioneer status he accorded to Robert Graves in the development of verbal criticism—and had rudely refused to recant even in person—but whatever Empson may have said in person the written record is somewhat more complex than her complaint would suggest.53 And it is remarkable, to conclude in this vein, that among the relatively few reminiscences of Empson that have appeared, most of them perforce drawn from the academic world, three are by women—M.C.Bradbrook, Kathleen Raine, and Janet Adam Smith (a fourth essay in William Empson, by Amy G.Stock, is not a memoir)—and each is marked by the same authentic-seeming mixture of loyal affection and amused tolerance, the bibulous and volatile Empson having been, it is said, a difficult companion in any and all settings.54 What I am verging on saying is that although Empson is a “man of the world” and a creature of the rationalist British Enlightenment he is not conspicuously anti-feminist by the standards of this milieu. Rather the contrary, as he is evidently at ease with the prominent and distinguished women of his acquaintance; he pays them the very high compliment of taking them for granted. He is also sensitive in some areas to what we would now call feminist themes, witches and witchhunts forming, for example, a broad plank in his platform against Christian cruelty. There are feminist sympathies, too, in his “Reflection from Anita Loos” (Collected Poems, p. 68: “Gentlemen prefer bound feet and the wasp waist./A girl can’t go on laughing all the time”); but then he partly retracts his sympathy in the notes (see ibid., p. 108). Insofar, however, as Empson does inherit the world view of British Romanticism (and that is the somewhat controversial idea that I have wanted to set forth in this chapter), the place of women was severely curtailed in his imagination just as it was among the Romantics themselves. Among the recent feminist readings of Romanticism by Mary Jacobus, Alan Richardson, Anne Mellors, Julie Carlson, and others, all of which are pertinent here, I would single out the recurrent idea that under cover of paying homage to women the feminization of the Romantic mind (with its emphasis on sensitivity 51

William Empson

and intuition and its attack on what Keats called “consequitive reasoning”) was actually a hegemonic usurpation—with no accompanying divestment of masculine privilege—of the only sort of unique role to which women had ever been permitted to lay claim. And so it is with Empson, who must be said actually to extend his masculine prerogative into the domain of the feminine through his very gestures of sympathy. The difficulty lies with his inherited sense of the sexes as a kind of primordial duality, which is not without its feminist adherents but which makes almost inevitable, whether in the traditional or the feminist view, a lively sense of Manichaean struggle, especially when women do the feeling and men do the talking. (In Milton’s God Eve, whom Empson in some ways admires, is “typically a woman in that her decision is intuitive”: p. 159.) I myself have never thought, for example, that Donne’s “The Exstacie” is a poem of seduction, simply because for the purpose of seduction learned quibbling would scarcely seem apropos. It seems to me rather that we are meant to envision lovers whose relationship is established and who therefore have at least temporary leisure for talk about metaphysics—or for talk about foreplay, as in “Elegy XIX,” which while seductive is not a seduction poem either. To be sure, it is still the man doing the talking in these cases, and plenty of it, but at least the poems as I read them dissolve the link Empson seems willing to acquiesce in forging between language and masculine seduction. There is a certain disarming humility about this assumption—we are to understand that Ben Jonson cut such a poor figure that he had no other means of seduction at his disposal55 —but the power thereby given in this arena to women over pompous, absurdly babbling men cuts them off the more effectively from language and the ability to use it. Yet more characteristically, there is a gender division within language itself, and it is in his orientation to that division that we find both Empson’s Romanticism and his resistance to it. In a gesture which confirms the feminist thesis about the English Romantics, we find him saying that ambiguity itself is feminine and very admirable, the fabric of poetry—but then submitting it to the sharp eye of analysis in the plainest style imaginable: relieving himself against the flower of beauty, as he says, dog that he is, then scratching it up (see Seven Types, p. 9). Writing much in the quibbling style of Johnson against Johnson on the “quibble” in Shakespeare (“the fatal Cleopatra for whom he lost the world”), which of course he wishes to defend, Empson nevertheless concedes a great deal to his opponent: 52

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It shows lack of decision and will-power, a feminine pleasure in yielding to the mesmerism of language, in getting one’s way, if at all, by deceit and flattery, for a poet to be so fearfully susceptible to puns. Many of us could wish the Bard had been more manly in his literary habits, and I am afraid the Sitwells are just as bad. (ibid., p. 87) In the relation of author to language here there is a complex dialectic of aggression and passivity, and Empson goes on to speculate that one could “relate a taste for puns with the author’s sexual constitution,” historicizing the matter somewhat by saying “one would have to consider what a variety of notions of manliness have held sway.” Then comes a bemused inventory of attitudes, concluding with the “extravagant gestures with which the Ganymedes and the Titans of Michael Angelo express respectively their yielding and their power” (ibid.). Related to this feeling is the distaste Empson shares with I.A. Richards for metaphors of fusion or for definitions of metaphors as fusion. The chapter on metaphor in Complex Words (see especially p. 345) closely follows the distinction Richards makes in The Philosophy of Rhetoric between tenor and vehicle, with its insistence that the things to be compared even in an identity statement are to be considered with respect to their differences as well as their similarities. It is just here that both critics are closest to the taste, both psychological and literary, of their Modernist contemporaries and furthest from the feminization of intellect in Romanticism. The attitude surfaces in accusing “Tintern Abbey” of “muddle” and saying of the cancelled first stanza of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” that “[t]he desire to swoon back into pure sensation, abandonment of the difficulties of life, femininity (from the masculine point of view), or death from consumption is taken for granted in the reader” (Seven Types, p. 205). The measure of partial change in this attitude can be gauged from the more sympathetic response to Wordsworth (still muddled but now fortunately muddled) which we have witnessed at the time of Complex Words, and from the wholehearted agreement with B.Rajan, repeatedly in Milton’s God (especially p. 34), that the broadest purpose of Paradise Lost is to communicate an impression of indistinct sublimity— a view plainly differing from Empson’s rationalist support of Bentley against the aesthetes in Pastoral.

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Empson’s having become reconciled with confused metaphysics and with an aesthetic of sublimity is crucial to a full understanding of his work, and the issues involved are so complex that they furnish the materials for subsequent chapters. It is a pertinent matter here in serving to show that in accepting the Romantic blueprint for heroism to a larger extent than has been acknowledged, Empson also perforce accepts the Romantic mythology, including its sexual mythology, despite the impression of dry classicism he is at pains to cultivate. If there are no women among the rebel angels, it can be retorted there are none among the loyal remnant either; and Satan’s legions can at least be credited with wishing for their presence—and even with paying them the doubtful compliment, on occasion, of imitating their imagined behavior. It is, in balance, better than Hulme saying classicism is small, dry, and hard, while Romanticism, which has “debauched us,” is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table.

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3 Advancing logical disorder: Empson on method

The safety valve alone Knows the worst truth about the engine. (“Your Teeth are Ivory Towers,” Collected Poems, p. 46) Everyone quotes the passage about the arrangement of the seven types of ambiguity being “intended as stages of advancing logical disorder” (Seven Types, p. 48), but no one has remarked that the expression itself harbors several ambiguities of the third type, with “two ideas…given in one word simultaneously” (ibid., p. 102). No fewer than three of the words prepare us to witness the case history of a chronic disease; and of course this disorder as it advances plays havoc with logic, making it sick or deranged if you oppose the process or healthily unstable if you approve. But it could be that the disorder itself is what is logical: a rigorously consistent irregularity or a madness yielding its secrets to method, depending on whether the logic stands revealed by the ambiguity or by the analyst, respectively. The logical disorder may “advance” in keeping with its own nature, hence according to a logic, suggesting at least an orderly sequence mediating the confusion; or it may be advanced as one advances a hypothesis, either in sequence or more interconnectedly; either in “stages,” that is, pausing to change horses, or staged in such a way that every meaning of every word seems spoken by a different actor.1 In sum, we cannot be sure just what Empson means. There is evidence in Seven Types and elsewhere for every one of the senses teased forth here, singly or together, and for all the unresolved contradictions among them. What complicates things further is that the passage follows close after what some have seen to be the clearest indication that the seven types are indeed somehow arranged and “not merely a convenient 55

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framework” (ibid.). There are three ways of distributing ambiguities, Empson says: according to “the degree of logical or grammatical disorder” (modern criticism and philosophy of language by the way have accepted this collapsing of two studies of the Trivium, logic and grammar, into one), and also—second and third—“the degree to which the ambiguity must be conscious, and the degree of psychological complexity concerned” (ibid.). He will then choose the first way, he goes on, about which, insofar as it keeps questions of intention out of the picture, “there is the least danger of talking nonsense” (ibid.).2 This explanation may serve to clear up the meaning of what we began by quoting out of context, but the problem remains that no one has ever thought it accounts for the book itself. It is not just that all three approaches intermingle after all, as Empson admits, but that the question of “logical or grammatical disorder” proves at best a peripheral issue, far less important than the psychological disorder to which most ambiguities bear witness. What is really advanced, then, is the logical disorder of Empson’s approach to logical disorder; for if it is the case, as he says earlier, that he will “arrange [the ambiguities] in order of increasing distance from simple statement and logical exposition” (ibid., p. 7), then why is the crowning exhibit a grammatically pellucid poem, “The Sacrifice” (ibid., pp. 226–33), which becomes disordered only when its rhetoric, staking everything on the efficacy of salvific metaphors, affords us a glimpse of anxieties induced by illogical doctrine? “Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree.” Grammatically, Christ is not-man, excluded by the logic of “but,” but in that case there is no Atonement. Rhetorically, on the other hand, Christ is man, drawn within the natural order by the merger of the Tree of Knowledge with the Cross and also, via “must,” by his yielding to the compulsion, the fatedness, of subordinate being—and hence, disturbingly, he must also be implicated in the theft committed by the class of which he is a member. Thus, in practice, we find Empson very precariously “clinging to the logical aspect of this series” as it has been proposed in theory (ibid., p. 192). In turning now to the issue of Empson on method, after these preliminary signals that the issue is and will remain an extremely confused one, I come to the Empson most likely to be “claimed” by this or that school of criticism. My own view is best presented in comparison with those of other readers who have likewise supposed the maddeningly casual theory supporting his critical practice to be worth taking seriously. In 1954 Paul de Man, to begin with him, wrote an article for Critique called “The Dead-End of Formalist 56

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Criticism” which was meant to awaken the French from their dogmatic slumbers (now difficult to recall) by exposing them to the daring of Anglo-American Formalism. His star exhibit was Empson— but for the unsettling reason that Empson was not a Formalist! Having written several pages on the pioneering role played by Richards in developing the techniques of close reading with the rationale that some synthesis be kept in view (or rather synaesthesis, the balancing of impulses), de Man then asks, on Empson’s behalf: “But what happens when one studies poetry a little closer following these instructions?” 3 Ignoring the instrumentality of the term “ambiguity” and presuming that it is “metaphor” that Empson takes as his starting point4 (but, especially in Complex Words, Empson actually gives metaphor a very narrow range of application), de Man argues, concerning the famous proliferation of senses for Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” in Seven Types (pp. 2–3), that far from fusing or resolving meaning, “[w]hat the metaphor does is just the opposite.”5 This approach to Empson, bringing out what would later be called the “deconstructive” tendency of his readings, has influenced many readers, and seems to me indisputable up to a point. But it needs much qualification and revision. In the first place, Empson’s skepticism about the unifying power of “fusion metaphors” (see Complex Words, p. 344ff.), which deepens and takes varying guises as his career proceeds, is actually something he learned from Richards, whose distinction between “tenor” and “vehicle” in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (19 3 6) 6 Empson enthusiastically adopted in support of his contention, in Complex Words, that we compare things not to assert their identity but to learn how they are different. For Richards himself, the tenorvehicle distinction represents a troubled complication of the happy fit between “sign” and “referent” he and C.K.Ogden had still envisioned in The Meaning of Meaning, a complication which corresponds chronologically to the belated acknowledgment, in Coleridge on Imagination (1934), that the discourse of science is as much “mythical,” as fully estranged from nature as such and its referents, as the discourse of poetry.7 In Coleridge on Imagination, in other words, Richards had already anticipated de Man’s “What is the pastoral convention…if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural?” 8 So much, by 1934, for statement vs. pseudo-statement. This revolution in Richards’s thought was a very quiet one, however, and he appears to have concealed its 57

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implications—which would have undermined his growing didacticism—even from himself;9 and Empson, while he seized on the tenor—vehicle distinction for his own purposes (that, Benthamism, and faith in Basic are the only Ricardian positions he never criticized), seems not to have realized how deeply the Cambridge positivism of his mentor had come to be threatened from within. Empson is quite clear about these implications for his own work, and is not untroubled by them, especially in the final chapter on “Theories of Value” in Complex Words, but ultimately he founds his liberal humanism on the very uncertainty principle which lurks, on his own showing, at the heart of reference. Thus de Man gets the insights and the blindnesses of his authors— and hence his own on this occasion—exactly backward. Richards himself introduced the subversion of Formalism by metaphor but remained blind to its implications, whereas Empson, who is presumed by de Man to have insightfully revised Richards on metaphor but not to have understood his own position (otherwise there would be no point in putting him in an essay on the “dead-end” of Formalism), was blind to the consequences of Richards on metaphor for Richards himself but insightfully incorporated the theory into his own broadly revisionary position. De Man’s discussion is in fact rather flattening, even slipshod, owing no doubt to a lack of detailed information (Complex Words is mentioned as being “technical” and falling outside the scope of the inquiry, but I suspect de Man had not then read it); the discussion results, however, in a dazzling sentence, the more so in predating Milton’s God, which could easily serve as epigraph to the present book: The “conflict [in ambiguity] can be resolved only by the supreme sacrifice: there is no stronger way of stating the impossibility of an incarnate and happy truth.”10 In William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism and in several recent articles (one of them a comparison of Empson and de Man),11 Christopher Norris in salutary contrast with de Man gives us an extremely Ricardian Empson, broadly humanistic, committed even at his most seemingly involuted to a rationalist belief in the possibility of explaining all mysteries (one thinks of Empson’s contemporary, the demystifying magician Houdini) in the service of human communication, “the complex interchange of feelings found most typically in a responsive theatre audience” (Philosophy, p. 75). This view, which entails the recognition that “the language of poetry is continuous with—directly qualified by—the expository language of prose” (ibid., p. 5), I think fairly reflects Empson’s intentions and proves highly serviceable in unifying his career. Perhaps it is his grasp 58

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of Empson’s affinity with Richards that allows Norris to pinpoint their divergences with such accuracy—not only the disagreement about “emotive language” which motivates Complex Words12 but also the more subtle disagreement about the meaning of “context” which gives Empson’s decision to study single words, itself derived from Richards’s practice of “multiple definition,” its special cast. For Richards context is sentences, the surrounding language in which nestled words gain their multiple definitions, and this careful confinement to the plane of the signifier is what aligns Richards with formalism despite his announced psychologism; whereas for Empson, says Norris (ibid., p. 93), context is a more vertical affair, a “communicative situation” involving cultural and psychological factors, thus aligning him from the beginning with Bradleyan or characterological concerns despite his announced commitment to, and notorious practice of, “verbal criticism.” This is all crucially important, and it is only in its relation to the exact shape of Empson’s career, its trends and turnings, that I have any reservations about Norris’s path-breaking study. Where Norris sees Empson’s rationalism as growing and deepening through the sequence Seven Types to Complex Words, traceable through shifting tastes and a growing faith in generalization, I see it actually eroding somewhat, subject to what I called “Romanticism” in the last chapter and will describe, toward the end of this one, as his coming to terms with the “sublime.” Certainly there is evidence for Norris’s view. We have Empson’s well-known recollection, for instance, that he was half on Eliot’s (that is, James Smith’s) side at Cambridge and didn’t fully accept the “scientism” of Richards until he worked for him preparing speeches on Basic English in 1939.13 I cannot agree, however, that there is a newly holistic emphasis in Pastoral (where texts are now not scattered piecemeal, says Norris, but purposefully organized with respect to a “subjective correlative”: Philosophy, p. 69).14 While it is true that in Pastoral more single texts are discussed in a sustained way than in Seven Types, no more attention is given there to literature as “intentional structure” (Norris forges this link between Empson and Husserl) than hitherto. Otherwise we would not have Brooks complaining that Empson ignores the whole of Gray’s “Elegy” or the many critics who have said the same thing about the reading of Marvell’s “Garden,” or H.A.Mason complaining in Scrutiny that the plays in Pastoral are “never approached as a whole.” 15 Indeed, what is emphasized in all the Pastoral readings is the heteroglossal jostling and discontinuity of voices within single texts, this being why new pastoral is old 59

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ambiguity writ large. Nor am I convinced that by the time of Complex Words Empson’s literary taste had shifted from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century (ibid., p. 101). The only shift I can see is the virtual disappearance of the Metaphysicals (with Shakespeare more important than ever, and the eighteenth century neither more nor less prominent than in Pastoral) —not because they were too irrational, surely, but if anything because their faith in fusion metaphors forged by the power of intellect was too confident. In three closely argued recent essays, Gary Wihl shares with Norris —and Stanley Cavell, whom he follows here—a strong sense of Empson’s pragmatism, his close attention to “what sort of literary meanings may be elaborated between certain speakers,”16 and with de Man an emphasis on Empson’s will to Formalism and a sense that a difference in value can be assigned to literary and non-literary utterances.17 Taking a relatively isolated set of issues in Complex Words for his focus, which amounts to a definition of metaphor as a usefully overcome “resistance” to a Prägnanz in both tenor and vehicle (Empson’s term “pregnancy” is taken from Gustaf Stern, who wrote in English but would naturally have understood the German provenance of the word18), Wihl thereby restores the de Manian blanket term “metaphor” to a position of central importance. In this position metaphor thus defined becomes the ultimate proof that all tropes yield to rational analysis. In Empson, that is: Wihl himself does not quite agree with this position, hence joins de Man in wishing to expose a blindness. Unlike de Man, though, Wihl sees Empson as actively invoking analysis (the structure of equation) against the blandishments of fusion metaphor, resulting not in the dispersion of meaning, as in deconstruction, but the hypostasis of meaning, as in Ordinary Language philosophy. This gives pregnant metaphor the demystifying role of “allegory” in de Man’s more recent work, as I am sure Wihl would agree, holding reference in suspension by preventing us from deciding which term in the equation is the tenor and which the vehicle, even though the terms remain wholly distinct. (To this end Empson reads the famous river-as-mind—or mind-as-river—lines in Denham’s Cooper’s Hill: Complex Words, pp. 345–6.) From this careful account I diverge only concerning the role of “resistance,” which Wihl sees as hesitation en route to the typification of a pregnancy. As I will attempt to show at the end of this chapter, I see resistance rather as a temporary unwillingness to accept indistinctness. The measure, or test, of difference between our positions is quite specific: I believe, with the help of the key essay 60

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“Basic English and Wordsworth,” that between Seven Types and Complex Words Empson’s attitude toward “muddle” in Wordsworth changed fundamentally, whereas Wihl believes that despite his more conciliatory tone Empson continued to view the poet’s failure to produce a “third term” elucidating metaphors involving “sense” to be an unqualified one. Here I follow de Man in “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” who singles out Empson’s “Sense in The Prelude” for its admiring and unblinking confrontation with the protodeconstructive element in Wordsworth himself 19 —however optimistic the hope of linguistic “spousal” may have been in the Prospectus to the “Recluse.” The business of the present chapter will be to build on the assertion of Chapter 2 by showing that Empson’s Romanticism is not unrelated to his theory, or anti-theory, of interpretation. Unlike any of the three commentators discussed above, I shall argue that by the middle of his career the very openness to experience entailed in Empson’s rationalism—or better, reasonableness—led him to acknowledge verbal implications which remain insusceptible of analysis, although such implications are still neither “aesthetic” nor “emotive” (he never drops his vigilance against tea-tasting criticism). In the next chapter I will try to show that his turn to the indistinctness of the sublime was in fact only an intermediate phase, a strategy of defense against his growing inability to believe in the cultural efficacy of symbolic identification— of pastoral synecdoche, that is, or of fusion metaphor. This phase gave way in turn, I believe, to a kind of materialist Plotinianism, a preoccupation with Middle Spirits and other mediatory agents in all spheres, which was always present in his work but which dominates his thinking after Milton’s God. For many students of criticism there is a corollation evident, for a given author, between critical method and concept of literature, with commentary tending to confirm that its own guiding principles likewise shape the literary work; but it is still best to keep method and object distinct, moving in the present case from the former to the latter. It is peculiar, yet utterly characteristic, that we can find two passages in early Empson reviews which apparently hold opposite opinions about the scientific method. The first, written just when Seven Types was appearing, comes in an unusually long-winded Criterion review of Studies in Elizabethan Imagery by Elizabeth Holmes which is full of second thoughts about Seven Types material and which criticizes Holmes chiefly for the impressionism of her descriptive approach: “People seem to think it is unwise to say the whole of your meaning…. With this lack of total statement goes a 61

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lack of governing idea.” 20 Method should be deductive, then, or there will be no “whole meaning” to say. Yet because all would agree that if Seven Types has a governing idea at all it is a very ex post facto affair, Empson’s assertion here must seem ruefully self-critical. Yet most would also agree that Seven Types is the stronger for its weakness, unleashing powerful insights that would have been restrained by a firm initial premise. Indeed, more than any other book in the history of criticism Empson’s belies the very platitude he wants to turn against Holmes. I take his comment then to be an extremely complex instance of what is now called “spin control” in politics. The reviews of Seven Types were coming out, and Empson, suspecting they would say of him just what he says of Holmes, wants to disarm the reviewers by giving the impression that he agrees with them, in hopes that they will then read his book with the presupposition (the “governing idea”) that it must have a governing idea. That Empson meanwhile privately cared very little whether it had a governing idea as long as it had a lot of good incidental ideas is I think proven by what he says in another review, written in 1936, just after the appearance of his next book, Pastoral. It is argued among other things in a book called The Unlimited Community by J.W.Friend and J.Feibleman that great ideas in science, specifically astronomy, are derived from first principles. To this Empson responds that “Tycho Brahe did little else [but “accumulate innumerable facts and refrain from large generalizations”], and Kepler got his three rules by taking Tycho’s facts and trying out any rule he could think of, year after year.” 21 Not that he is openly defending induction: his argument could perhaps be taken as a covert defense of induction, but his point is that the whole debate is misguided and has a psychological resolution—involving the trial-and-error creativity studied by Piaget— rather than a philosophical one. Supposing this review to be as closely linked to Pastoral as the Holmes review to Seven Types, we may have in hand another means of testing Norris’s assertion that Pastoral advances beyond Seven Types because of its willingness to generalize. Certainly there is more generalization in the book, but what this review would suggest is that now that Empson has some confidence in his own deductive powers he can criticize deduction more openly than hitherto—and that we need not look, as Norris does, for any higher valuation of prior and general determinants in literature. 22 Pastoral is a generic idea, to be sure, but its horizons are as hazy as those of Ambiguity, a linguistic idea, 62

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and in any case Pastoral does not account, Chicago style, for the content or “plot” of any text. That limitation, at least as much as his spontaneous organization of materials, is what prevents readers from following Empson’s “argument.” His most considered statement on method appears in an Appendix to Complex Words (p. 434) which criticizes a perceived element of tunnel vision (here, “‘mechanist’” psychology) in Leonard Bloomfield’s Language: The connection between theory and practice, where both are living and growing, need not be very tidy; they may work best where there is some mutual irritation. Also the difference between any two conflicting theories is partly a matter of what they put first, that is, what they ask you to think of first; by the time that you get hold of the refinements and exceptions the theories may come to much the same, and you may be too muddled to know how much. Again, there is no suggestion that one can or ever does get along without theory. The point is only that because theory and practice are constantly out of step with, yet corrective of, each other, like the viewer and the viewed in the Uncertainty Principle, any faith that the demonstrative power of one methodology is superior to, or even finally different from, that of others will be disappointed. Sooner or later one is always likely to see the same things newly disguised— though the disguise prevents one from knowing for sure that this is the case. (Acting on this conviction, Empson confidently spent his whole career using the scholarly evidence of his opponents to prove his case against them.) Despite the evidence of first impressions, that is, it is not clear whether differing approaches can place different objects on view once analysis has been conscientiously completed—this being no proof, however, that the mist of subjectivity gets burned away by the strong light of objective truth, but only that theory itself is dissipated, like a will-o’-the-wisp, by the intense light and solid opacity of an object fully realized in and by the subject. The thing itself becomes so dense with interconnection that taking one approach to it to the exclusion of another seems finally pointless. Because “the bottom, to quote one of Mr. Eliot’s solemn thoughts, is a great way down” (ibid.), it may be that theories only conflict when they dig too shallow. Yet decently humane instincts prevail and one goes on digging, if possible to find a genuine, fundamental conflict which would enable the adjudication of values transideologically: 63

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It may be that the human mind can recognize actually incommensurable values, and that the chief human value is to stand up between them; but I do not see how we could know that they were incommensurable till the calculation had been attempted. (ibid., p. 421) But again, as when the appeal to psychology against the philosophy of induction itself indirectly supports induction, so here theory and practice do not really fight to a draw. The unrelenting defiance of classification by complexity militates so clearly in favor of attempting paradigm-neutral observation that we find Empson saying perhaps more than he intended in a footnote on R.G.Collingwood’s Philosophical Method. Collingwood’s argument “looks to me,” he says, “like a grand exposure of philosophy from the inside,” and this not because Collingwood abandons analysis but because he attempts to complicate the complex yet further, retaining “[t]he idea of an essence which is different at every stage of discussion” —an effort which is selfdefeating for the reason given by Empson in a sly parenthesis: Collingwood “imputes a vastly (perhaps infinitely) higher degree of complexity than I do to any word when used philosophically” (ibid., p. 320n.; emphasis mine). The joke is itself both complex and uneasy: complex because the evident fact that no finite thing is “infinitely” complex leaves open in theory, but only in theory, the possibility of exhaustive analysis; uneasy because it may really be “the little bits of machinery I am trying to get clear” (ibid.), not Collingwood, which expose philosophy from the inside. That the joke is also a partisan one, supporting empiricism and the school of Russell against the Hegelians and thereby deflecting attention from the Ricardian “multiple definition” which is Empson’s model, may not turn out to be sufficient for selfprotection, because the fact that definitions are not laid out in dialectical order in Richards or in Empson does not prevent each definition from having an essence imputed to it. Thus if Empson is not himself to subside into essentialism, he will have to treat his theoretical scaffolding as an imminently collapsible affair, strong enough to support only the nimblest observer for a moment or two at otherwise unreachable levels. Part of the joke against Collingwood is that he tries to keep up the illusion of distinct “stages” of discussion— like Empson with his advancing stages of logical disorder in Seven Types. It is better to acknowledge that theory, with its ability to draw distinctions, and practice, with its disclosure of exceptions and 64

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irrelevancies, don’t fit perfectly together, perhaps even keeping them apart so that each can function comfortably within its appropriate mode of specificity: “if you jam the literary criticism and the linguistics together, detail by detail, you interfere with the normal processes of judgment” (ibid., p. 202). Literary criticism, though, has of course its own theory, or guidelines in any case, and this is the place to consider what if any interpretive and evaluative guidelines can be found in a critic of Empson’s enormous intellectual relaxation. Governing all his interpretive writing, to an extent which has irritated hermeneutic conservatives from the beginning, there is tremendous latitude about what counts as meaning, and only an occasional effort to delimit context. I shall first try to characterize Empson’s latitude, and then piece together, as carefully as possible, his scattered pronouncements on the exclusion of senses, first concerning interpretation in general and then as delimitation is narrowed further by literary or formal considerations, relating these pronouncements to his strained and evidently uncomfortable thinking about the problem of relativism. As an interpreter, Empson begins with lists of word meanings: N.E.D. entries, emendation-mad early editions like Bentley’s and Theobald’s, and the variorum notes of later editions, always with the proviso that whereas the compilers and editors were trying to decide among meanings Empson for his part will try to show that no exclusive choice is necessary—for reasons closely related to his belief that “at bottom” there are no conflicting theories. 23 “Empson’s method,” writes Norris, “is to multiply meanings to a point where methodical distinctions collapse in a seemingly endless proliferation of sense.”24 But the result is not always a happy pluralism, at least in the opinion of those whose darker view of plurisignificance colors their sense of Empson as a forerunner to their own enterprise, and again the test is his view of Wordsworth: “Empson shows,” writes de Man, that, if one follows the trace of a recurrent word in a given corpus, the emerging confusion cannot be reduced to any known model of trope that would control an identifiable semantic field; it is impossible, in other words, to make sense out of Wordsworth’s “sense.” This can hardly be an entirely trivial matter, and commentators have had to forget Empson’s inquiry in order to carry on.25 The exercise of meaning proliferation is sometimes performed for the sake of making a choice, as though traditional editorial 65

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principles were still in view: “if one’s mind does not in some way run through the various meanings of a word, how can it arrive at the right one?” (Seven Types, p. 64). Empson argues that if there is to be any choice it must arise from context, not the “Implications” of the word itself traced along the byways of what Ogden and Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning, called “sign chains” (see Complex Words, p. 37). In the Appendix to The Meaning of Meaning Ogden and Richards had interpreted C.S.Peirce’s term “interpretant” (as explained in Peirce’s letters to Lady Welby) in such a way as to correspond to their own term “referent” —to make the interpretant, in other words, a mental event, hence theoretically a still point around which verbal signs can be clustered. But in speaking elsewhere—in the passage quoted by Empson—of “sign chains,” Ogden and Richards more accurately reflect Peirce as many have since read him by conceding that the interpretant is a sign pointing to another sign, which points to another sign, and so on, with no natural terminus in sight. Recognizing the dangerous implications of this model, Empson here in Complex Words avoids the notion of sign-chains; but in so doing, in saying that he has chosen context rather than implication in delimiting meaning, he runs counter to the project of Complex Words taken as a whole. More consistent with his practice is his remark, elsewhere (ibid., p. 57), that Richards’s (non-Peircian) tendency to enclose a unified sense together with an attached emotion makes an artificial unit out of a theoretically limitless series: “No doubt, but the process will not stop there; the Emotion ‘B!’ (combined with the word in question) will then call up its Sense ‘B!’…” —this because, as he says in a note on his poem, “Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics,” “[t]wo mirrors have any number of reflections (the self-conscious mind); a dotted line is used for ‘and so on’” (Collected Poems, p. 91). Nothing is more rigidly monistic than the series “abc…n,” of which the “signifying chain” of deconstructive and Lacanian polemic is a version, yet the more typically Empsonian labyrinth (as when Shakespeare, “by putting down something a little removed from any of the approximate homonyms, set the reader groping about their network”: Seven Types, p. 83) is scarcely less indeterminate.26 No doubt the emphasis in Complex Words on the exclusion of meanings in the notation “-A,” “deliberate exclusion of Sense A from a use of the word,” was meant to reassure readers who felt that in Seven Types he had excluded nothing. But “context,” prudently invoked on occasion to circumvent this problem, as we have seen, will not actually lend much assistance to a critic who refuses to distinguish between 66

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grammar and rhetoric—who seems quite indifferent, for example, to the question whether the equation “A is B” is a copulative predication or a metaphor (see, for example, Complex Words, p. 358).27 For Empson rhetoric is of interest only as part of an intentionalist scheme making it visible—and distinguishable from predication—as deliberate lying, like the pathetic fallacy of Pope’s Pastorals: “the nostalgia of their frank untruth is almost heartbreaking; but still the thing is meant to be untrue; it is a trope.”28 “Biography,” indeed, with its freely embraced circularity of knowing what a thing means because you claim to know what it was meant to mean, will be Empson’s ultimate shelter from interpretive anarchy; and while intention is not invoked as pervasively or as automatically in his work as has been supposed, it does certainly play a role at times when he tries to tie off the signifying chain. He is concerned to do so despite his permissive intellectual temper because it is not lost on him that interpretation can be subverted by license; and it is tellingly against Richards, charged at times with the opposite fault in Complex Words, that we find him half-heartedly turning the cry of anarchy in a review, as always on such occasions mainly concerned to warn the Richards (or the Holmes, or the Friend and Feibleman) in himself. Responding to the notion set forth in The Philosophy of Rhetoric that to explain one word you need to “‘drag in almost the whole of the rest of language,’” Empson writes: “It is a great flash of poetry. The trouble is, if you take it seriously, there is no longer much hope of talking about a particular case.”29 By “poetry” Empson of course means bold and colorful hyperbole—but the complex word betrays him into conceding that Richards’s unguarded moment may just have revealed, in a flash, the indiscriminate poetry which subverts interpretation in all particular cases of language use. Simple exhaustion, coupled with habitual neglect of certain kinds of meaning-source, account perhaps as much as anything for the possibility of taking an interpretive stand. It is interesting, for example, that despite talk of groping about the network of approximate homonyms Empson can read Mrs Peachum’s speech, in The Beggar’s Opera, on “Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality” being lost on “handsome daughters,” without noticing the splendidly period pun, augmented by pronunciation and by the popularity of malapropism, on “lechers” (see Pastoral, p. 216), not to mention the allusive rhythm—the more pointed for being couched in prose— recalling Milton’s “Rocks, fens, caves, bogs, a universe of death” and perhaps Otway’s “Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber,” with all their semantic lumber. 67

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This one example, to which one could add those aspects of convention and genre that Empson always militantly disregards, will serve to remind us that for all his exuberant ingenuity there is a great deal that Empson rarely if ever talks about. The most striking omission is the verbal aspect of literary allusion, of which very few instances are given in his writings. (There are many fine discussions of conceptual influence, however, notably the Homeric Milton recurring in Milton’s God and the Miltonic later Wordsworth of “Basic English and Wordsworth.”) He refuses, in Seven Types, to admit full homonymns as semantic shadows of each other (see p. 64 on “rows” and “rose”), probably because to do so would violate the integrity of the linguistic unit he can always be charged with hypostasizing, the word. That he rarely discusses the semantics of suprasegmentals is the more remarkable in view of his hostility to proponents of “pure sound,” but when he does indulge such possibilities he says excellent things. It matters, in talking about Nashe’s “Brightness falls from the air,” that the last word might have meant more before “all this fuss about aitches” curtailed it (Seven Types, p. 26); and the brief chapter in Complex Words on “All” in Paradise Lost brilliantly shows how the word is augmented in lines like “Forsaken o[f all] good, I see thy f[all]!” (p. 103). I wonder whether the oft-repeated judgment by Empson’s readers that this chapter is a failure (and no one has ever found the aside on Nashe worth commending, either) cannot be ascribed to their distaste for an exegetical mode which is even more daring, more receptive to the texture of language, than Empson’s above-mentioned respect for the indivisibility of words will normally allow. To repeat again, in hopes that the feeling of mere paradox will give way to conviction: Empson is not really a verbal critic. And that is just as well, considering that the problem of semantic delimitation remains. A comparable hermeneutic indecision governs his attitude toward anachronistic meanings, which the logic of a more genuinely language-bound theory obliges one to admit. Consider for example the stunningly radical footnote to Wimsatt’s essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” which has been forgotten during the current effort—abetted by Empson and the newer historicisms— to make the New Criticism seem dull: “And the history of words after a poem is written may contribute meanings which if relevant to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a scruple about intention.” 30 Wild Empson never would have said this, but his scruples both intentionalist and historicist would have alerted him to reply, had he wished, that this apparent invitation to anarchy is actually issued to support the narrow semantic closure entailed in 68

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Wimsatt’s Formalist ontology. Wimsatt would not have accepted the anachronistic senses of “The great Creator rais’d his plastic Arm” (Akenside) or “And those that build them again are gay” (Yeats) unless the “original[!] patterns” seemed amenable; and we know that Empson would after all be the more flexible advocate for the poetic relevance of both anachronisms. Indeed, when confronting any historicism more stringent than his own, as when C.S.Lewis refuses to allow that “unkind” in Herbert may mean anything other than “unnatural,” Empson can be goaded into a moderate version of the “Wimsatt Law,” but supplemented with historicist assurances of his own: “Border on the absurd as it may, the ‘dangerous’ modern meaning here is the overwhelming one, and there are some parallels to justify ascribing it to the first readers of Herbert. They merely had a bit more padding than we have against the shock.”31 “The chief technical question raised by Miss Tuve,” he says elsewhere, “is how far the meanings of words in such poetry are meant to be narrowed.” 32 “Meant,” that is, in a cunning ambiguity, by any arbitrary historicism which would impose blinders on what can be “meant” by poems. The reason for such tacking and veering is that for a humanist critic historicism and intentionalism are actually on a collision course. Empson turns strongly against anachronistic meaning when its implausibility within the integrity of a given authorial consciousness is masked by invoking the overriding determinacy of ideology. Thus the knowing economic historicism invested by a Marxist, Raymond Williams, in the uses of the keyword “interest” during the Industrial Revolution could certainly be supported by the dictionary—the confusion of base and superstructure would prove more lively then than now, in fact—yet has no necessary bearing on the history of language use by specific individuals: We would often like an influence from past uses to survive in a word, when it plainly doesn’t. Jane Austen was relentless in making phrases for her ladies such as “found herself obliged to be attached” (to a barely rich enough man); she would be bound to use the pun on interest, if it had not felt too remote.33 Here as so often, in this miniature drama of what is actively “felt” idiolectically triumphing over the passivity of being “bound” ideologically, with its implicit denial that anything like a “sociolect” can be safely invoked to bridge the gap between the lexical resources of language and the event of speech, we can find real theoretical 69

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precision disguised in casual language—and also, in this case, a timely rebuke to the vagueness which typically besets historicism just when its gestures most showily proclaim specificity. But such discriminations do require the insistence not only that there are distinct speakers but also distinct kinds of speech. In turning now to Empson’s concept of literature—insofar as he can be said to hold to one—we can begin with John Crowe Ransom’s distinction, concerning the ontology of the literary work, between logical structure and texture of local irrelevance—which is in some important respects parallel, by the way, to Empson’s view of method, with its allowance for the loose fit between class and individual. This distinction, which is unique among American NewCritical adaptations of Richards on metaphor (for example, Allen Tate’s “extension vs. intension” or Wimsatt’s “concrete universal”) in laying special emphasis on the disparities among things to be compared, receives Empson’s hedging endorsement in a 1964 “tribute” to Ransom. In the scope for wandering from the point given by the distinction Empson finds, or claims to find, “[a] tone of pawky but fundamental permissiveness”; but he hurries on to say, with a rather absurd lingering caveat about how very un-British it all is, that “it is a vote for freedom which perhaps derives from Emerson.”34 Ransom for his part had long before found in Empson’s practice (but not his theory) a model for his distinction as he developed it in The New Criticism, pointing rightly to the discussion of “diffuseness” in Sidney’s sestina from Arcadia (Seven Types, pp. 34–8) as evidence that not all ambiguity for Empson was a matter of compression and density.35 More than Empson seems to realize, however, Ransom aims ultimately to subsume “irrelevance” under structure, arguing to that end, with many echoes of Eliot, even in the course of praising Empson on diffuseness: “The particular detail must actually belong to the objective situation. But any detail has all its facets of particularity, and is so heterogeneous that it will attach somewhere to the logical interest which the poet is developing” (The New Criticism, p. 113). Can we find any evidence in Empson of this faith in the unifying power of human intentionality, evidence which among other things would justify Norris’s placing Empson alongside Husserl? In Seven Types there is one gesture toward the notion of organic form, although even there Empson speaks not of believing in such an idea but of “understanding the view of a work…whose flesh has the character of the flesh of an organism” (pp. 44–5). And broadly speaking, there is always a sense in which things are held together: Empson certainly does hold that 70

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there are subterranean links between all points on the linguistic compass, for example; and, like Coleridge, he extends this view to the lexicon of at least one individual speaker, Shakespeare. But these links do not constitute a logical structure, no matter whether a structure of that kind be understood as conscious, preconscious, or unconscious; they are structural only insofar as they are not infinite, and to all intents and purposes they are endlessly permutable, beyond any possible calculation. More narrowly speaking, on the other hand, concerning the way in which an intentional structure—to call it that—might specifically characterize the literary work, the evidence in Empson is scattered and inconclusive. Writing with his own poetry in mind, as I have said, he insists that poetry has special formal properties, staying very close to Eliot’s pronouncement, in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult…. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” Empson is closest to this—yet taking many sides of the question—in an unpublished essay of c. 1930 on writing explanatory notes to poems (“Obscurity and Annotation”) where he argues, for example, that reading J.L.Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu does not help us to see that in the Coleridge poems “a new thing had been made out of the materials”36 —the unmarked neutrality of the word “thing,” ordinarily a throwaway in Empson’s writing, being here augmented by some of the ontological aura it receives in Formalist theory. It is interesting that although we can find Empson defining poetry in terms of “the compactness which is likely to require notes” (ibid., p. 76), we must look for such evidence not in his books but in articles and casual remarks, Seven Types having ostensibly set forth an Eliot-influenced principle of complexity—in turn supporting an Eliot-influenced evaluation of the periods of English poetry—without, however, tying this principle decisively to any one form of discourse.37 It is just this refusal to draw holistic conclusions which baffled and confused the first reviewers—and which the New Critics had to ignore in order to claim Empson as a precursor. 38 Even on those occasions when Empson does cite complexity as a criterion, it should be noted that his attitude (like Eliot’s, for that matter, with his “at present”) is descriptive and historical, not prescriptive, and that he can view the complexity of poems almost condescendingly as a territorial retrenchment: novels and biographies having captured the public’s attention, “the 71

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poets are now writing concentrated and distilled things, such as could only be said in poetry; they assume a small public interested in poetry as such.” 39 “Poetry as such,” though, is what gains prominence from this retrenchment: presumably, that is, the aesthetic features which define the mode are now dominant. In that case, Empson would appear to be saying, what may only be a current vogue has the virtue at least of bringing into view a possibility for objective definition which would otherwise have remained latent in the material. The fact is that Empson simply does not know whether his own taste is principled or historically conditioned, and he very refreshingly says as much: Another trouble that seems to crop up is the idea that poetry is good in proportion as it is complicated, or simply hard to construe; it seems quite a common delusion, and always shocks me when expressed. And yet I suppose it is very near my own position.40 On at least one occasion he feels more decisively that it is only an illusion that good poetry can be written in more than one way, namely, the technique of getting “thought crushed into a small space” (so it will be “like gunpowder”): “this is not the only way of writing poetry” —he seems to concede, but then holds to his position, remembering the Pastoral secret of putting the complex into the simple—“or if it is, then the trick may be done with very simple words.”41 There is no doubt that Empson takes an interest in the “trick” aspect of all utterance, and John Bayley sees this as explaining his alleged preference for poetry (by 1965 he had written major essays on Mrs Dalloway and Tom Jones but had not yet turned to Ulysses), which Empson’s indifference to poetic ontology would not otherwise appear to warrant: Not caring much for the novel, he has always seen ambiguity not as the kinds of complexity in motive and behaviour which a novelist almost unconsciously understands and renders, but as an arrangement of counters simple in themselves, as in mahjongg.42 Yet in my view it remains somewhat unclear why Empson continued to quarry poetry rather than other modes, and I would suggest that habit had not a little to do with it. Empson did after all 72

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take some interest in novels despite disliking the hair-splitting of Henry James which I suspect Bayley has in mind here. His frequent asides on Austen and Dickens are always wonderfully suggestive; in his writing and teaching he recurred to highly diverse fiction by Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, Lawrence, Beerbohm, Powys, and Orwell; and we should not be misled into supposing he did not read novelists he never mentions.43 Certainly in any case he wrote extensively on plays, treating them only on occasion as poetry; and, like Richards, he wrote brilliantly and often on expository prose, usually the prose of rival commentators. What Bayley has to overlook in order to make his case is Empson’s special genius, noted by Harold Beaver (concerning the late readings of Yeats’s Byzantium poems), for following storylines.44 Bayley’s disregard of this side of Empson is the more strained, it seems to me, considering that the very layout of Milton’s God, the book he is reviewing, is designed for concentration on narrative sequence: “now I must follow the story of the epic, more or less in its own order, and try to recapture the way it was meant to strike the fit reader” (Milton’s God, p. 36). Only the chapter titles naming characters and places can divert us from the fact that the book is a plot summary. This very small point of contention is important, I think, for our overall understanding of Empson, which should derive at all times from his emphasis on meaning. His intermittent nods to the formal aspects of poetry are in themselves nearly all designed to explain semantic issues, and the rare exceptions, such as the letter to the Hudson Review in which he tries to claim that he dealt mostly with short lyrics in Seven Types because he was “keen on explaining why they were so beautiful,”45 seem to me to ring false. There is no striking preponderance of short poems in Seven Types, and those which do appear are not chosen because they are appreciable as wholes. The point can be made from another angle by considering what Empson means when he speaks—as in fact he rarely does, unlike, say, Ransom —of interpreting whole texts exhaustively: “There is room for a great deal of exposition, in which the business of the critic is simply to show how the machine is meant to work, and therefore to show all its working parts in turn.”46 There is the idea here, certainly, that a text is unified by an intentional structure (the “experience” the machine is meant to reproduce: ibid.), and that nothing in it will lack a function; and Empson is certainly capable of firm structural observations with this idea in view.47 But what qualifies the idea somewhat is the expression “in turn,” showing how little importance is attached to patterning, cross-reference, and the other “mah-jongg” aspects of spatial form which give critics an excuse, Empson often complains, 73

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for turning verisimilitude into mere “imagism” —and how greatly, by contrast, Empson’s idea of form is influenced by mathematical concepts of sequence and linearity: Adam and Eve breed still their dotted line, Repeated incest, a plain series, Their trick is all philosophers’ disease. (“Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics,” Collected Poems, p. 9) To revert to the title of this chapter, the word “order” in commonplace evocations of form encourages imprecision by straddling both spatial and temporal accounts of totality—just as “sign-chains” in Ogden and Richards can either circumscribe a meaning or pursue it down an endless row. Strongly opposed to the Wyndham Lewis whose Time and Western Man he once reviewed and repeatedly cites with fascination, Empson always reads for sequence and chronology, the more strenuously when his reading is aimed at seeing through and beyond the space orientation of the Modernist canon: Byzantium, he says, symbol of the ideal geometric spirit in art for Lewis and Hulme, should be read in Yeats’s treatment as an unfolding story of an aesthete discovering the social horrors of the place; while Ulysses, somewhat perversely attacked by Lewis for wallowing in the messiness of actuality which—to Empson’s disgust— Lewis’s disciple Hugh Kenner says it properly excludes, should be read as a simple story about the restorative advantages for a young byzantine aesthete of going to bed with an older woman and about the generosity of the older man in offering her. Part of what Empson means by “using biography” (the title of the book in which these arguments appear) is that the work of art in common with the work of criticism is the unfolding of an episode in an unfolding life: biography using itself up. I hope I have been able to show, then, not too tortuously, that there is really no formal definition of literature, much less poetry, to be found in Empson, because form understood as sequence is nothing other than the signifying chain which constitutes all discourse. What remains, though, and what keeps Empson worlds apart from his poststructuralist admirers, is the purposeful control of authors and speakers.48 Wholly in agreement, ironically enough, with his critic E.D.Hirsch about the meaning of meaning (what else can it mean but intention?), Empson introduced in Complex Words the only solid and permanent stay against interpretation unrestrained by structure to be found anywhere in his work. This comes in the form of the distinction 74

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we have already encountered in his critique of Raymond Williams’s assumption that sociolectical meaning wholly governs idiolectical meaning. Concerning “statements in words” based on AB equations in which the aim is to avoid subverting the dictionary, Empson says he found that few of the literary examples of double meaning he had given in Seven Types and Pastoral would serve his purpose: In an ordinary literary use both the meanings are imposed by the immediate context, which has been twisted round to do it, and the suggestion is not ‘as everyone admits, so that language itself bears me out’ but ‘as I by my magic can make appear.’ (Complex Words, p. 74) But if it appears that Empson returns here to Richards’s unwary early distinction between science and poetry, that is not really the case, because his distinction between standard and creative usage only obtains in actuality between dummy speakers of metalingual equations and real speakers with personalities, not between one genre of living speech and another. Empson thus distinguishes (ibid., p. 38) between “head” meanings which are simply given as the primary senses of words, meanings which however can more or less officially be changed by authors (thus for Erasmus the head meaning of “folly” always entails a kind of wisdom), and “chief” meanings “which the user feels to be the first…in play at the moment”: “If the ‘chief meaning’ is allowed a suggestion of local or tribal chieftains I think it can easily be remembered as applying to a local occasion.” To an equal extent in literature and in casual speech and writing, then, interpretation can finally depend on the decision whether a head or a chief meaning is in play. Concerning head meanings interpretation will be a matter of properly marshalled lexical evidence or the evidence given by an authorial concordance, while for chief meanings one turns, somewhat less reliably, to consider the tension between an immediate context and the relevant lexical data. Yet in practice Complex Words is carried out, as Michael Wood says, on “the slippery ground between langue and parole.”49 It was with these notions at command—and really with no others that I can discover—that Empson in 1947 could outface his skeptical reviewers by claiming, in the “Preface” to the second edition of Seven Types: “I recognized in the book that one does not want merely irrelevant ambiguities, and I should claim to have had some success in keeping them out” (p. xiii). Whether in 1930 he had programmatically “recognized” anything of the kind is doubtful, but now at least he can give a technical 75

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explanation for the fact that in practice for the most part he really was very far from “ignoring tact.” What one sees emerging from this sorting out of a critic’s inconsistent hermeneutic priorities is something like a personality conflict, and also, by extension, a taste for conflict. The poet-critic who is Romantic in thought but un-Romantic in mode is likewise torn, in caste and temperament, between an admiration for synaesthetic orders both mental and social, partly influenced by Richards and his own training in mathematics, and the acknowledgment, partly influenced by scientific speculation after Einstein and Heisenberg, that epistemologies which exclude chaos are not only unsympathetic to human bewilderment but actually naïve about the nature of things. This tension appears with admirable clarity in Norris’s treatment of Empson as a “rationalist” paving the way for deconstruction; although, as William Cain has pointed out in reviewing Norris, some of the seeming paradox in this may vanish when one clarifies what is meant by “rational.”50 We have seen in Empson’s ethical pragmatism and in his casual approach to form how far he is from any Platonic or Kantian apotheosis of reason. Because he thinks in the spirit of a tradition that is largely content to revise Locke’s account of “understanding” as an all-purpose faculty for processing and representing sense-data, it would seem best therefore to call him “understanding” or “reasonable,” a purveyor of workable truths, not transcendental or even general truth, who is far less trustful even of empirically derived universals than the Age of Reason with which Norris would identify him. For this kind of mind there is a gyre-like effect attendant on saying, from the standpoint of believing nothing to be certain, that it is “reasonable” to believe “in” practically anything provisionally (ghosts, Middle Spirits, Nirvana, life on other planets) in the form of what Empson reluctantly once again calls, in his essay on Value, “verbal fictions” (Complex Words, p. 423). Anything, that is (and here he closely follows Richards), which is conducive to the expansion and mobility of the mind rather than its narrowing and enslavement. Empson’s personal credo—others are satisfied when you satisfy yourself51 —is never hazarded as a demonstrable truth, yet he is nonetheless passionate about the importance of belief. The well-known passage written during his undergraduate dispute about Richards with John Sparrow outlines a “philosophy” (most similar, oddly enough, to American pragmatism, and less so to the cool relativism of Russell and Ayer), from which he never departed: 76

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The prime intellectual difficulty of our age is that true beliefs may make it impossible to act rightly; that we cannot think without verbal fictions; that they must not be taken for true beliefs, and yet must be taken seriously; that it is essential to analyse beauty; essential to accept it unanalysed; essential to believe that the universe is deterministic; essential to act as if it was not.52 It is important to see that in at least two respects this passage cannot be considered “Nietzschean,” hence is not quite anticipatory of the gay scientism marking literary theory in the 1970s. First, as a running counter-logic to the skeptical sense of the passage, there is a deep-seated belief in belief: not the cynical view that we cannot help but believe, but a melioristic trust that belief is “essential.” Empson’s “judgments,” writes Bradbrook, “if undogmatic, are not uncommitted” (William Empson, p. 9). And second, there is the willingness forthrightly to express unresolved contradictions without knowingly putting them “under erasure.” In this case there is an open and palpable contradiction between holding pernicious true beliefs (one feels a natural hesitation in trying to guess what such beliefs might be) and never mistaking the verbal fictions with which one necessarily thinks for true beliefs. Thus you both know and do not know that you have true beliefs. This is so gross that it must be deliberate, in the service of two different ends. First, the influence of Nietzsche which has been domesticated in the cadences of Wilde’s prose was at all costs to be avoided in 1930, after the war and the market crash, and still in 1951 (see the rather petulant snub of Wilde in Complex Words, p. 53). It is crucial to remember this or we will have difficulty understanding, from our own cultural standpoint, why Empson inveterately disliked, in Wilde, a wit as mordant and as socially barbed as his own. “Pooh! Buck Mulligan said [in Ulysses]. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.” This is complex: Mulligan of all characters has not done so, but he knows enough to say he has, anachronistically on the fictitious date of 1904 but not at the time of Joyce’s writing—the Irish Literary Revival having supplied yet another motive for repugnance in seeing jokes about values as the grinning tricksterism of a debased national mind, with its “cracked lookingglass” (the one Wilde held up for Caliban), grown habitually subservient: “Wilde’s version” of the well-bred, charming but coyly vague diction of Dodgson’s Alice, wrote Empson jingoistically in Pastoral (p. 284), “leaves rather a bad taste in the mouth because it is slavish; it has something of the naïve 77

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snobbery of the high-class servant.” And then again, homosexuality was highly visible at Empson’s Cambridge, so much so that Peter Quennell and others started a semi-facetious campaign boosting heterosexuality, with which Empson is likely to have sided at the time, despite his later, sometimes fascinated expressions of tolerance for everything except anal penetration and his Wildean interest in the identity of Shakespeare’s W.H. It is a question of content and attitude that we should keep before us here, though we can remark in passing that it was probably the periodic eleg ance of Wilde’s jokes (and Beerbohm’s and Chesterton’s) that drove Empson to cultivate a rhythmically imbalanced offhandedness for his own. What he dislikes is not at bottom the socially ambitious style but the nihilism, so conceived (The Soul of Man under Socialism, had Empson read it, would have been hard though I suppose not impossible to write off as merely the worst of Wilde’s jokes in bad taste), which appears to characterize the Nietzschean Wilde and does characterize the whole of that broader attitude which we now sometimes call Camp and which permeates, for example, the delicious novels of the Cantabrigian E.F.Benson. Hence Empson’s strangely personal and prissy attack on the joking reaction—attributed to an American anti-British satire— to the news that an important dignitary requested that his mistress be allowed to travel with him: “‘How awful for the Foreign Office’” (Complex Words, p. 60). Benson’s Miss Knapp or Lucia would say that, and to us it seems like harmless fun, but Empson’s dignity is offended because “[s]he [he leaves us to assume the speaker is a woman] appears as a slave to petty social embarrassments which are entirely unconnected with any moral conviction” (ibid.). It is precisely and indeed only when someone says life is a game or that, worse, Empson himself is playing a game, that his sense of humor deserts him. Very little in his prose matches his fury in response to Geoffrey Strickland’s mild, heavily qualified suggestion that he could not have taken everything he wrote in Complex Words seriously (“cooking up,” Empson fumes, “a fatuously tiresome mass of spoof”): “The meanmindedness of anybody who can believe I did that feels to me quite sickening.”53 This much, I think, needs to be said of the writer whom so many commentators have undertaken to explain by citing the last two stanzas of his poem, “This Last Pain,” which concludes: “And learn a style from a despair” (Collected Poems, p. 32).54 Complaining of this response in the interview with Ricks, Empson insists that to misread or over-read this line is to mistake him for Oscar Wilde,55 and I agree. 78

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It is time, having stressed the importance of belief, to consider the uncertainty with which belief struggles, and to trace its consequences for Empson’s rationalism. Empson’s early dislike of “muddle,” best known from his interrogation of “Tintern Abbey” in Seven Types (pp. 151–4), is equally evident in a 1929 essay on “An Early Romantic,” Vaughan, whose conceits at their least disciplined “are dissolved… into an apparently direct sensory image which cannot be attached to any one of the senses.”56 As long as he lived one of Empson’s favorite words was “clear,”57 yet it is possible and important to argue, as I shall for the remainder of this chapter, that in the long run what his very clearsightedness came to acknowledge, and accommodate, was that unclarity itself, when irreducible, is a form of truth without which experience cannot be fully represented. It was difficult for him to come to this point because there was always some cult of the irrational, from critical Impressionism to Christian mystery-mongering, which needed opposing.58 Bentley— who was, as Norris says, “an early model for the ‘absurd’ rationalist philosopher, one of the constituent types of Pastoral” like the White Knight in Alice or like Empson himself according to Kenner (Philosophy, p. 21)—had the right idea but unfortunately misused it too much of the time, with the historical ill-effects that Empson found himself contesting: “Reason had to be muzzled, and Bentley hooted as a pedant, because reason obviously gave the wrong answer” (Pastoral, p. 152). Empson’s task, then, carried forward mainly in Milton’s God, was to show that reason could also give the right answer, the one Bentley’s reason kept rejecting—the answer that, for example, Paradise Lost is not always clear, and is none the worse for it because its obscurity is both verisimilar and sublime. I take Milton’s God despite its defects to mark a more significant advance beyond Empson’s other work than Complex Words because it is here that he first squarely acknowledges, and appreciates, the potential grandeur of whatever it is that must remain unclear. Thus Norris’s insistence on reason as a control on the deconstructive tendency of Empson, in many ways a proper and necessary move, seems still somewhat misleading. Bentley himself, and indeed all textual editors, are apt to linger over the same textual cruces that interest deconstructive readers, and to handle them, up to a point, in the same way, parting company only when the time comes to decide for or against the resolution of meaning. 59 It is not so much a question of “hints of recondite meaning…the analyst could reasonably claim to find”60 as a question whether the meaning found, recondite or other wise, need be (a) clear and (b) valued 79

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accordingly as it is clear. Also involved is what strikes us more vividly as an ethical assertion than as a literary one, even though what is at stake is nothing less than the value of literary formalism: the ability to “stand up” honestly between contradictions, or simply between the issues in a conflict, without the itch to resolve them illegitimately.61 There are hints pointing toward the value of irresolution in Seven Types, one of them concerning, of all poems, Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes: “These couplets are a triumph for Johnson, but they are the by-product of a failure to achieve, rather than the reward for achieving, the compactness and polish he desired” (Seven Types, p. 70). (Scholars in Empson’s generation like Basil Willey and R.D.Havens were beginning to disturb the surface of the Leslie Stephen commonplaces about the “Age of Reason,” Henry Beers and Paul van Tieghem having already, a generation earlier, pushed “PreRomanticism” backward to Thomson at the latest, and it should always be pointed out that it is this moderately revisionary view of the eighteenth century that Empson was most comfortable with.) Of the meaning of the word “tomb” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 83 (“For I impair not beauty being mute,/When others would give life, and bring a tomb”), Empson similarly writes that it had been a clear metaphor in Sonnet 17, which “is glowing and dancing with his certitude,” but now, “when the metaphor is repeated, this time without being explained, it has grown dark with an incipient double meaning” (ibid., p. 138). But beyond these suggestions we must not overlook—as Empson himself may have done until he wrote the “Preface” of 1947—the plain truth about ambiguity itself, underlying all the exegetical triumphs, which is that by definition one does not know what it means. It is amazing how completely this simple and obvious fact about Empson’s first project has been overlooked, perhaps because he seemed to confine the interpreter’s hesitancy to the first and the fifth types. By 1947, though, Empson sees that a degree of impasse is fundamental to ambiguity, writing that “[i]f a pun is quite obvious it would not ordinarily be called ambiguous, because there is no room for puzzling,” and again: “most readers would consider the ironies of Gibbon unambiguous, though possessed of a ‘double meaning,’ because they would feel that no one could be deceived by them” (ibid., p. x). Of course, the point of it all is still clarification: “the criterion for the ordinary use of the word [ambiguity] is that somebody might be puzzled, even if not yourself (ibid.); but in all cases there is a moment of hesitation involved (if only to decide upon 80

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the best form of explanation); it is, an interval of indecisiveness or confusion during which the ambiguity remains a crux, and this moment is just the “resistance” which Gary Wihl has emphasized in Complex Words. Pregnancy, again, either typifies or qualifies the sense of a word, but it is hard in a given instance to know how much, because (and it seems to me that this is what Wihl plays down) “[a]ny pregnancy can be regarded as a confusion about Range, or a failure to make the defining property fit the class” (Complex Words, p. 336). How then is the resistance to be surmounted? To be sure, we parse metaphors, Empson says, by overcoming “the feeling of resistance to a false identity” (ibid., p. 334), but we should watch him very closely here to make certain that this is not merely what we would like to do. If there is no “A is B” which is not in some sense false, then it is hard to understand why, in writing “what appears to be an existence assertion can often be regarded as a more complex figure of speech” (ibid., p. 331), he did not say “always” instead of “often.” Perhaps he is aware that to do so is to give too much away: at stake is nothing short of the mode of symbolic identification which gives the Christian Atonement its attractive Frazerian interest for the early Empson but becomes a sadistic hoax for the later Empson, and in 1950 Empson is just at the crossroads between these views—that being, I believe, why it is so hard to know what the point of Complex Words finally is. Overcoming your resistance to the metaphor of the one as the many, you agree that what is possible, clarifiable, in reality is governed by the magic of language. But suppose this resistance were supplanted, not by clarity but by some other feeling, perhaps an equally accepting feeling? No doubt “psychic resistance” is a “stimulus to interpret the false identity” (ibid., p. 345; see also p. 341), but interpretation can claim only to mediate, not to erase falsehood meretriciously. “Resistance” was of course a psychoanalytic concept which had readily been absorbed into mainstream psychology. It was in the air, and Empson might have had it direct from Freud or from R.E. Money-Kyrle, whom he frequently cites on related matters. But in aesthetics it goes farther back, to the Romantic period in fact, where one finds it used in opposing ways, both highly pertinent. In Coleridge the “immediate pleasure” given by the metrical language of poetry is the pleasure of a “difficulty overcome,” and resistance of this kind plainly subserves the achievement of clarity. The other resistance is in Kant: the “blockage” (as Neil Hertz has called it), “the momentary checking of the vital powers” which precedes the 81

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unveiling of the sublime.62 In Kant, of course, the sublime is an absolute, the disclosed object of a mental faculty, and while it may not be clear there is nothing hazy about it either. Sometimes for Empson too the sublime seems to involve some ultimate unity or perfection, supplanting a resistance with a soaring triumph of revelation, as when he discusses the sexuality of the angels in Milton’s God: The question is thus rather muddling, and one would expect Milton to have a firm justification ready. I am now to offer a sublime one…. The angels feel that their act of love, being a unification of only two divine natures, is a step away from making ‘one individual soul’ with God. (p. 107) But the actual focus here, I would suggest, has to do with the clarification gained from envisioning mediatory stages of being (an important habit of mind in Empson to which I shall turn in my final chapter), and is not centrally connected with the promise of sublime unity. On the contrary, what Empson responds to most freely is the sublimity of material being, of “the newly created world,” for example, in Paradise Lost (Milton’s God, p. 62). This is the domain of death, not of transcendence, and I suspect that it is the quasi-biological hypothesis that “the aim of all life is death” (anticipated by Doctor Faustus as Empson reads it) which moves him to say that “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which introduces Nirvana, is a splendid and aweinspiring book.”63 Empson in any case shows no evidence of knowing Kant; what he knows, and discusses in Complex Words as one of his central exhibits of Wordsworth’s creative confusion about “sense,” is the Kantian resistance attendant on crossing Simplon Pass in The Prelude (here quoted from the 1805 version Empson preferred—though the 1850 version he admits in this case to be “tidier”): Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted, without a struggle to break through. And now recovering, to my soul I say I recognise thy glory; in such strength 82

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Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world…. (VI, 525–36) As Empson was the first to notice, “the light of sense/Goes out” in the 1805 version is totally ambiguous (Complex Words, p. 294) and nothing can be decided about it by appealing to context—which does resolve the matter, against “issues forth” and in favor of “is extinguished,” in 1850. But even in 1850 (“Goes out, but with a flash”) Wordsworth oddly anticipates the effect of an exploding lightbulb and leaves a glare on the retina which is both brighter and more obscure than darkness or ordinary light, and which repeats the feeling of being halted by a vaporous cloud. You will see less if you use your bright headlamps in the fog. Thus in this case resistance and recovery have exactly the same structure and dwell in exactly the same obscurity; and thus Wordsworth “identifies the horror caused by the immediate sensations with the exultation that developed from them” (ibid., p. 304). Halted by indistinctness, Wordsworth then accepts indistinctness as truth, as the truth rejected in Seven Types and now accepted in Complex Words (p. 305: “the result makes very good poetry, and probably suggests important truths”), that we cannot know whether “sense” is a sensory glow or a suprasensible gleam— nor even whether what we have just read is a vehicle allegorically denoting the tenor of a past physical experience or owes to the vehicular power of narrative the disclosed tenor of a present mental experience. The Wordsworth passage, which I believe occasions the seachange for which I am arguing in the nature of Empson’s rationalism, leaves us with two nearly indistinguishable images for indistinctness, both inherited: Shakespeare’s fog and Milton’s “darkness visible.” The latter trope, to which, as we have seen, the early Empson owes the last line of “To an Old Lady,” stands for what Milton’s God keeps insisting on (as Pastoral, with its Bentleyan insistence on making sense, does not): “the principle of Mr Rajan that the characteristic virtue of the poem is sublimity” (Milton’s God, p. 159; see also p. 129) ,64 What Empson seems to evoke in these places is close to the quality which is sometimes called “deep,” with facetious overtones. He is quite solemn about it, though, and wants to insist as much as he can on Raphael’s reminder that one cannot expect to make sense of supernatural doings in human language in 83

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order to support his claim that Milton “is struggling to make his God appear less wicked” by reposing in part on indistinctness and inconsistency: “I thus tend to accept the details of interpretation which various recent critics have used to prove the poem bad, and then try to show that they make it good” (ibid., p. 11). In Complex Words, to move backward a little, we can again see him at a turning point between resolution of sense and acceptance of the nebulous when he discusses “all,” which Norris calls a “symbol” (Philosophy, p. 96), but which seems to me more like a sublimity, an extremist gesture—as Empson argues—meant to suggest incommensurable magnitudes: “an obviously important word for which an Emotive theory is about all that you can hold” (Complex Words, p. 101). But the whole business of Complex Words is to qualify this possibility wherever it appears, and in this case Empson retrenches by saying that “all” reflects a structural tension between Milton’s conscious theology and his unconscious hatred of it (see ibid., p. 104). In Milton’s God, by contrast, Milton is taken to know what he is doing, for the most part, hence deliberately to have confused the picture. Norris is less comfortable with this Milton, feeling that it prefigures Empson’s loss of “imaginative breadth and subtlety” by allowing a vagueness to settle in alongside his new shrillness. For this reason Norris disapproves of emphasizing the “‘splendid and appalling’” Milton or the “‘obscure but splendid claim’” of Wordsworth (Philosophy, p. 170), and prefers the earlier clinging to logic.65 But neither this change nor its prefigurations in the early work are confined to the readings of Wordsworth and Milton. Shakespeare sets Macbeth, the key exhibit of Seven Types, in the fog, and we can trace once more the movement of Empson’s rationalism as we have outlined it here by seeing the degree to which the fog takes over in Empson’s successive readings of the play. There is no mention of fog in Seven Types, but “Light thickens” there already, and Empson writes of “words hissed in the passage where servants were passing, which must be swaddled with darkness” (p. 49); but we are to understand that such effects are chiefly confined, with dramatic propriety, to the diseased psyche of the protagonist, “dishevelled and fumbling among the powers of darkness” (ibid., p. 50). Ambiguity is embodied by the atmosphere of Macbeth (to “‘float upon a wilde and violent Sea/Each way, and move’” (ibid., p. 101), as the witches put it), but the optimism of the plot seems also to correspond to the optimism with which meaning can be sought and found: “‘The Night is long, that never finds the Day’” (ibid., p. 202). 84

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Late in his career, Empson had come to see this optimism certainly as part of Shakespeare’s design, but only the design of the conscientious fable about the end of feudal decentralization which Shakespeare cobbled together to please James I, a fable Empson probably learned to recognize from the full-length treatment of it by another scholar, and rather sneers at as a merely mechanical aspect of the play’s occasion.66 (As we have seen, because God is the central authority in Paradise Lost, Empson in Milton’s God unequivocally envisions independent thaneships for Satan and his peers as a golden age of celestial politics.) By 1950—if I may be allowed to pursue the allegory of interpretation I find invariably present whenever Empson talks about Macbeth—the possibility of clearing is indeed viewed in a more ironic light, because it is from within the lost mind of Macbeth himself: “if only he can get the murder done efficiently, he thinks, all this fog will lift and he will be able to see clearly again.”67 Returning to the “wild and violent sea” of ambivalence in 1961, Empson says something worth quoting at length: The witches only mean there is a fog, giving flying conditions which they find agreeable; but Shakespeare behind them means, as Dickens did at the start of Bleak House, that the characters are in a mental fog too. So that makes the fog part of the Imagery. But even in this atmospheric kind of case you do better if you arrive at seeing the point with both halves of the comparison vivid in your mind; both the Vehicle and the Tenor…, the thing which is really meant as well as the thing it is compared to.68 This looks like the fog clearing, but the clearing is an illusion, because it is precisely fog itself, persistent and undissolving, which is “the thing which is really meant,” an indistinctness accepted after a resistance, poised like “the light of sense” between the physical (what the witches like to fly in) and the mental. The succession of fog upon fog which gives the false appearance of a clearing (the tenor in our allegory of interpretation would be the apparent movement from fog to clarity which is rewarded in the academic polis) corresponds to the succession of equally flawed political systems made to seem progressive only by the expediency of Shakespeare’s flattery. In the somewhat earlier Macbeth essay in Essays on Shakespeare, fog has already taken over completely. Here one of Empson’s main points is that Shakespeare likes a mystery (in Hamlet as well, he is “thickening the atmosphere”: Shakespeare, p. 112), and the brunt of his quarrel with Dover Wilson’s 1947 Macbeth edition is that it is wrongheaded to try to clarify the meaning of the 85

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play by drawing it out, supplying expository scenes that would give the characters adequate motives for the murder. If you did that there would be no fog and filthy air. Repeated in Hamlet, the actual suppression of motives is “a habit to which [Shakespeare] was becoming attached” (ibid., p. 103). J.M. Robertson is another clarifier, and in his Literary Detection “even ‘Hover throught the fog and filthy air’ is called a ‘vacuous tag-line’, though it establishes from the start the theme of fog that Robertson always ignores” (Shakespeare, p. 157). The critique of Dover Wilson calls attention to the sort of “sublimity” Empson decidedly does not encourage, for reasons that will carry us to the next chapter. Wilson’s error in wanting to “throw away the whole impression of ‘fog’” has a striking result: “The play that Dover Wilson is imag ining, or rather not imagining, would be like a ‘debate’ by Racine” (ibid., p. 149). What the clarity of the French drama produces is a moral sublime, not indistinct but absolute, and sometimes the classically-trained Milton produces this as well, though never with Empson’s approval. Milton is made to sound most like Racine, or rather a Racinian character, in Complex Words, where there exists, as we have seen, an unresolved tension between seeing Milton as clear but bad or confused but good. The word “all,” says Empson, “seems to be suited to his temperament because he is an absolutist, an all-ornone man. All else is unimportant beside one thing, he is continually deciding” (p. 101). In this, the atmosphere of the Racinian débat, we can find Milton’s characters entrapped, but not Milton himself, in Milton’s God. That “it seems inevitable for Adam to do the most sublime thing available, so that there is a Greek fatality about the tragedy” (p. 189) is a correct way of viewing the plot, but not the meaning, of Paradise Lost. Where Milton’s classicism does serve, though, placing him on the border between the two types of sublimity, is to evoke the sublime of moral failing, built on casuistical confusions to which even saints might succumb, rather than the moral decisiveness of having gotten something obsessively clear. Hence Delilah in Samson Agonistes is no mere siren: “it seems to me that critics of Milton become cross and puzzled each time they do not realize that the temptations are meant to be pitched staggeringly high” (ibid., p. 228). Once again, clarification follows critical resistance, but what gets clarified is the universally meaningful relevance of confusion, which in moral terms saves us from the inhuman and pharisaical temptations of the sadist and the masochist: clearsighted spiritual tyrant and clearsighted voluntary martyr. I have thus far treated 86

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Empson’s acceptance of this confusion, which in the long run he sees not merely as a necessity but as a humanizing influence, as the key to understanding his view of critical method and literary theory; and I have emphasized this acceptance as the breakthrough which is actually required in order to bring the implications of his casual principles of organization (both of his reading and of the text read) into line with his sense of realities, both literary and actual. 69 In the next chapter, no less sympathetically but more clearly from the outside looking in, I shall see the acceptance of indistinctness as a contingent phase,70 as a mask or psychic defense adopted at the point when Empson’s personal “resistance to a false identity” and its attendant clarities becomes too irritating and insoluble to be borne.

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4 Toward late Empson: the failure of pastoral

The Golden Bough, you needn’t doubt, “Are crucifixions what they were?”… (“Autumn on Nan-Yueh,” Collected Poems, p. 80) In previous chapters I have remarked from time to time on what I take to be the key shifts of thought and focus in Empson’s career. Insofar as value can or need be attached to such shadowy chronologies, my sense of this career would place the pinnacle of his achievement rather later than has been suggested by others. Unlike those who see the fireworks of Seven Types never again equalled in brilliance (contemporaries like Bradbrook or near-contemporaries like Barbara Hardy are apt to take this view), or those who find the strongest argument and the most rigorous sense of social purpose in Pastoral (a view widespread among American critics, for example, Burke, Hyman, Sale, and Alpers), or those who emphasize the linguistic sophistication of Complex Words (which appeals to many recent commentators who are themselves theorists, like Norris, Wihl, and Culler), I am inclined for my part to vote for Milton’s God. But, having expressed this relatively novel opinion, 1 I must confess right away that among Empson’s books Milton’s God is neither the most enjoyable read nor likeliest to have had and to have immediate influence (the first two books are pre-eminent for these reasons) nor the most massive and hard-won achievement (obviously the “great aeroplane” Complex Words is that).2 Nor is it imperative to prefer the books to other work. Late essays like “Tom Jones” and “Donne the Space Man” have admirers (but always as if to say, “Look! Empson could still be generous-spirited!”); and I too would place “Basic English and Wordsworth” and the 1955 radio lecture called “Reading a Poem: Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’” (a 88

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wonderful example of what can be done reading lyric “for the story”; under Empson’s tutelage we realize that this poem could scarcely be read any other way), together with much of the unpolished but strikingly new cultural criticism gathered in Argufying which draws on his knowledge of the East, well ahead of a good deal that is in the books. It is hard to admire, for example, the borrowed and commonplace view of literary history which artificially pre-packages the judgments of Seven Types;3 “pastoral” homogenizes its material too easily (as Empson himself soon perceives, I shall argue); the multiple-definition method applied to poetry, especially to short poems like Shakespeare’s sonnets, not infrequently spins its wheels beyond bearing; Joyce is not well served by the late Empson’s careless memory4 or his militant indifference to technique—and this last criticism might also be made, to some degree, of the other investigative labors collected in the books of the 1980s, which could be labelled “Hunt the Reference” in reply to his “Hunt the Symbol” (Shakespeare, pp. 231–43). As for the value of Complex Words, there I would differ most from the ablest students of Empson, for reasons that it is one purpose of this book taken as a whole to elucidate. I find the bits of machinery uneconomical and the results of the chapters on keywords—despite countless sparks of local insight—to be overestimated somewhat by common opinion as achievements in sociolectical history (though freer from presupposition than comparable work by C.S.Lewis and Raymond Williams), perhaps simply because discrete words can never be quite as interesting, as ideologically pivotal, as persons trained to mistrust words more than they mistrust their users imagine them to be. Logical positivists, general semanticists, and propagandists and anti-propagandists in church or politics all shared this overdetermination of language at the time of Complex Words, when the printed and broadcast word made “the prison-house of language” seem inescapable even and especially to those who campaigned against it. But all these crusaders, including Empson, at least had the excuse that the circumstances of their “radio days” —as Woody Allen calls them—did indeed make language seem incalculably important, and no doubt as these days were drawing to a close one greeted the call to adjust one’s sights with resentment: No reason is ever given for thinking the Telly Age will be pleasanter, more interesting or better in any way than the one we are to lose; pretty strong reasons would be required, but Mr 89

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McLuhan seems to feel no need to recommend the future, which he eyes with an invariable spry brassy readiness.5 Historically speaking, the most anachronistic thing about the criticism of our own time (including all those historicist revisions of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis which make a parade of returning to real social circumstances but are still dependent on verbal documents) is its obsession with language—with language understood, that is, as words bearing “effects of power.” The unusual stridency with which yesterday’s idols are abused at the moment is an evasive tactic used to conceal the inability of criticism to change at all. The hermeneutics of verbal suspicion has always been worthwhile, and always will be, as long as it is still deemed permissible to do something else; but as we have clearly outlived the historical apogee of verbal language, it becomes increasingly odd that we cannot envision what criticism would be if it is not the thing we have inherited, hence can only rename old categories in conformance with various blueprints for acquiring academic power, leaving the structure of the critical endeavor just as we found it. The result of this impasse is to distort the priorities of consciousness as one finds them both before and after the seventyfive years or so which ended around 1955. What the electronic and audio-visual revolutions have done is to show us something much more accurate about the place of language than theorists trained in a word-centered culture could do: namely, that communication both past and future is fundamentally semiotic, not fundamentally linguistic, and furthermore that there are perils as well as advantages in taking verbal language, with Saussure, as a paradigmatic signsystem. Film and media criticism have of course recognized the problem I am touching on here, but they have also contributed to it insofar as their effort to work out an independent semiotic has been reined in by the paradigms of Saussure and Lacan. The same semiautonomy confuses the “mythologies” of Roland Barthes, but because they are not wholly language-bound these are nevertheless more suggestive and comprehensive diagnoses, both historically and contemporaneously, than the multiple definitions of Richards or the complex words of Empson, Lewis, and Williams—all of whom have a great deal more in common, by the way, with less well-respected analysts of loaded words like Stuart Chase, S.I.Hayakawa, or the wranglers over sexist language in the education quarterlies than is commonly acknowledged, just insofar as they really are, to their discredit, “verbal critics.” 90

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Empson himself recognizes in Complex Words, with an amazingly candid willingness to subvert his own project, that when it comes to thinking long and hard about sustained cultural expressions, even expressions in language, the play of keywords like “fool” or “honest” actually leads us away from what most needs to be said. I have insisted that he is not a verbal critic because I think it is true, of course, but also as a matter of tactics, in order not to “date” him as a creature of the radio and newsweekly propaganda boom (the apologist for Paul de Man, by the way, must release him from the blinkers of this same historical moment) and to show what it is about him that makes him what so many readers instinctively know him to be, one of the four or five most dazzling commentators on culture and literature this century has produced, figures who are permanently interesting because at their best they are as nearly theory-independent as possible. I have mentioned Burke with Empson, and to this duumvir I would add, no doubt unsurprisingly, Barthes, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and the Theodor Adorno of the Minima Moralia. To return then to the weaknesses to be found in Empson’s books, the trouble with Milton’s God, in turn (justifiable however in a context I shall try to develop later), was pointed out by Helen Gardner in a wonderfully kind-hearted review: Empson was growing obsessed with the Incarnation and the Atonement, and he was welcome to do so except that these are subjects on which the Milton of Paradise Lost does not lavish a great deal of attention, so that there is a poor fit between the reading of the poem and the polemical last chapter on Christianity—not because, as everyone else says, Empson has distorted the poem to fuel his hatred, but rather because he has not distorted it, only digressed from it. 6 Be this as it may, Milton’s God remains the book in which, again, Empson revises the programmatic expectations entailed in his own rationalism, rejecting the thesis that all verbal phenomena are intelligible, like other phenomena, if we explore them fully enough, overcoming their resistances and our own; and accepting indistinctness, rather, as what actually results from the keenest efforts of rational analysis to overcome resistance. In the last chapter I set this argument forth in theoretical terms, and I shall now try to show that the principle of indistinctness supplanting resistance, which I take to represent his most secure insight, takes the form of a psychic defense against the nihilistic implications of growing disenchantment with the symbolic, unifying power of language—a defense which g ives way in its turn to the 91

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reintroduction, in the late work, of a universe full of definite but wildly fanciful forms. Milton makes his God better than the received idea of God, Empson argues, because Milton’s God is not eternal in his distinct form as a tyrant but proposes as it were to abdicate at the Millenium, merging his being with the cosmos; and if this is so, then his savage treatment of man and devil cannot be motivated by personal considerations (he will not exist to take sadistic pleasure in our eternal torment, and in any case the future is the Son’s problem, not his) but must simply be carried out dispassionately in accordance with the expediencies of providence. It is just for this reason, being interested in the disembodiment of the Father rather than the Incarnation of the Son, that Milton remains obliquely connected at most to Empson’s anti-Christian polemic no matter how often his Arianism gets mentioned. Yet all of this, which has been greeted with derision but which only requires that we take the hints surrounding “Myself uncircumscrib’d retire” seriously and is based on researches into Milton’s Gnostic and cabbalistic lore by Denis Saurat, Phelps Morand, and others—all of this is argued with the aim of making God “sublime,” a mystically obscure being of alterable substance more easily assimilable to the divine principles of other religions than the all-too-human patriarch of the Hebrew Bible or the transcendental Absolute of modern theology. That this is the most important point Empson thinks he has to make about Paradise Lost is presumably reflected in his title: “Milton’s God” rather than the Christian God. This probability, if understood and granted, would wholly disarm most of the criticism the book has received by making the critics’ joviality about “Empson’s God” irrelevant. Not only would Empson then be acknowledging that his asides and his final chapter on Christianity are digressive, he would also be saying that they are warranted in the book, nevertheless, as a benchmark against which to measure Milton’s independence, in this instance, from the raw materials of his epic, and in other instances to show that not even Milton can escape the malevolent logic of the received story. “God” in other words is the “complex word” of Milton’s God, treated as a cultural object with a “head meaning” in the attacks on Christianity, but assigned a new head meaning by Milton and occasionally, within Milton’s practice, given “chief meanings” such as demiurge, pagan deity, diabolical creator, Omnipresence, and so on. No chapter title is reserved for Milton’s God, meaning on the one hand that he is everywhere, the true subject not to be forgotten, but on the other 92

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hand that the deepest insight of Complex Words, the paradoxical inadequacy of words to meaning, is everywhere simply taken for granted in Milton’s God. You can put the names of Satan, Heaven, Eve, and Adam in titles because no one will be tricked into thinking that the words designating these referents are the whole story. None of this is meant to suggest, though, that Milton’s God is not about Christianity. It is indeed, but it needs a complex refractive structure of this kind in order to station itself securely athwart a crisis in Empson’s thought: Christian belief is no longer plausible, but it is not negligible or merely funny either; it is horrible and we are still under its influence, constantly threatening to embrace it anew at moments of historical despair about the character and future of the world’s inhabitants, moments like the post-war period with its appalling new knowledge of human cruelty. How then are we to escape this tempting influence? Perhaps we can escape, as Milton tried to do and as we can do if we are clearer about our motives than Milton could afford to be about his (that is, if we spell out the polemic against Christianity he could only hint at); perhaps we can escape through the side door of vagueness about final things, henceforth living without teleological convictions. This means throwing out not only the hard-edged imposition of limits on mankind by supernatural law (the “unnaturalism” of Empson’s High Modernist contemporaries), but also the scientific explanations of the it’s-all-justchemistry kind made current by Haldane, Eddington, and Jeans (But what is? And what is “chemistry”?) which serve to confirm the early Empson’s assumption that scientific positivism can arrive at a final and complete solution of all mysteries. This is to put the framework of Empson’s convictions in historical terms, and may suffice to show the way in which nearly anyone educated when and as he was would change during the thirty years in question. What I hope to do, though, is to focus the change more narrowly and to show, within Empson’s specific linguistic, psychological, and social concerns—still without pretending I know exactly why—that what changes for him is his attitude toward symbolic identification, the logological incarnation of the many in the one variously called the Hanged God, “nature,” fusion metaphor— and pastoral. In Milton’s God he tries to write dispassionately about the problem, as though it were not in any specific way his own and indeed as though it only gets to be a problem in the wrong hands: our minds have a wonderful readiness to satisfy themselves with false identities, but any ordinary schooling needs to drive 93

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the process into the background of its area of practical work. I tried in my book Complex Words to show how very fundamental it is; the baby could not learn to talk without it, and the learned man still needs to fall back upon it whenever he gets an obscure feeling that his work has been missing some essential point. Regarded simply as a bit of our mental equipment, it carries within itself a kind of recognition that the matter would bear looking into, or an impulse to do that later, though enough is settled for the immediate decision. Thus we should make terms with the process rather than struggle to renounce it; but educated people rightly suspect it, so that they recognize a familiar type of error, systematically misused, when they read an anthropologist’s account of “primitive thought”. (p. 245) Here is the Richards-Ayer-Korzybski anxiety lest we all be seduced by words, actually kept at bay in this case with all the bravado of common sense, the same bravado which sometimes led Empson to insist that 1984 (which he could never stop mentioning) was “a silly prophecy” because “the human mind…is not irredeemably lunatic and cannot be made so” by false identities like War is Peace (ibid., p. 236; Complex Words, p. 83n.). What this passage from Milton’s God masks, however, is its rather more pressing relevance to the intellectual development of Empson himself; it is his “Intimations Ode,” with the “child” and the “primitive” representing his own youthful reliance on the “trick” of false identity in the period 1927–35 which witnessed his first two books and nearly all of his poetry, and the “obscure feeling” of the “learned man” (warily using false identity to feel his way forward) on the other hand representing the acceptance of inequivalence which allows him to yearn less intensely for lost unity. “We should make terms with the process,” yes, and this in itself is a heroic concession to irrationality for any logical positivist (long ago Richards had comparably admitted that much of the time we are best off falling back on stock response, just as it is harmless, not to say democratic, to save time and money buying ready-made suits off the rack); but it must be clear that if Empson himself had made terms with the process Milton’s God would never have been written and Empson would have been a far less interesting, belatedly Arnoldian cultural figure—not unlike the later Richards—telling us that sometimes we arboreal creatures with prehensile paws do feel the need for a little Latin and Greek, unscientific as they may be. For Empson man is both more than his Darwinian origin and less than his Platonic 94

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end, and the equipoise between these reductions unfortunately requires the kind of false identity he once lived comfortably with and now scorns with all the passion of a rejected lover. In early Empson the ritual human sacrifice described by Frazer and Lord Raglan is a barbarically but splendidly suggestive symbolic expression standing behind what is still strongest and most powerfully unifying in human art. It is not troubling, for example, that Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway “is the sacrificial hero and his tragedy reconciles [Clarissa] to the world.”7 By 1962, in contrast, Frazer merely offers another dreary determinism, sighed over if not quite denied, which makes the artist’s mind “hag-ridden by a group memory of human sacrifice”8 —the word “hag-ridden” alluding, no doubt, to Robert Graves’s White Goddess, who had rounded out the sacrificial myth in 1948. There is no mention in early Empson of torture or sadism, even though the sadism of Swinburne (in “Before a Crucifix” neither more nor less than elsewhere) and the “brave pages” of Bertrand Russell making sadism a legitimate Benthamite Good (see, inter alia, Milton’s God, p. 260) were much on his mind from the beginning. Vicarious sacrifice is at least as prominent a theme in Pastoral as it is in Milton’s God—and of course it was “The Sacrifice” which had brought down the curtain on Seven Types. In Pastoral, as Paul Alpers writes, Christ is “the one hero who fully takes on the conflicts of other men and experiences them as his own.”9 Here Empson can speak with confidence of “the supreme process of seeing the Many as One” (Pastoral, p. 144), where the many stand for the Complex and the one for the Simple into which pastoral resolves the complex, with redemptive results both in politics and religion that can be summarized as “the ‘tragic kingcomic people’ convention” (ibid., p. 43; note that in this formula there is no hostility, as there will be later, toward the flattening effects of “convention” as such). But there is one complication in Pastoral, fraught with foreboding in retrospect, which is here best put in theoretical terms. In the compression of pastoral the complex gets sacrificed to the simple, the manifold to the unitary, rather than the other way around, and this is just the opposite of what happens when kings are sacrificed. Evidently, then, it takes a certain amount of decent pretence to maintain that the pastoral synthesis yields a net gain rather than a net loss. This is what Empson is saying in the moving passage which concludes the chapter on Sonnet 94, a passage which Roger Sale has made out to be one of the loftiest pinnacles of “modern heroism”: 95

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The feeling that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, and yet that a good life must avoid saying so, is naturally at home with most versions of pastoral; in pastoral you take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one, and a suggestion that one must do this with all life, because the normal is itself limited, is easily put into the trick though not necessary to its power. (ibid., p. 115) Put in terms of multiple persons rather than richness of consciousness, the pastoral formula is not so obviously a “trick” because the social purgation involved seems genuine, but the fact that a simple person is made merely representative rather than being a figure who is evidently capable of embracing multitudes still unavoidably suggests impoverishment, most notoriously when Elizabeth Drury is made “the worlds soule” in Donne’s Anniversaries, prompting Empson to say, “[i]f you choose an important member [of society] the result is heroic; if you choose an unimportant one it is pastoral” (ibid., p. 81; see also p. 140). Here “pastoral” comes dangerously close to synonymity with “fustian” or “mock-heroic,” and the question arises why Empson’s apparent confidence in false identity did not lead him to concentrate on “versions of heroic,” with its tradition—from Aristotle to Bradley— of yielding a net gain. If we think of vicarage as synecdoche, then pastoral remains merely the part for the whole, the value-neutral textbook example with no symbolic or expansive power (“twenty sail” merely fixes in a trope an accurate report of what is seen on the horizon), while heroic readily enters into synecdoches enlivened by the concept of the organic polis which could be generalized as “the head for the body” and which obviously have great emotive force. But Empson in the 1930s did not make this choice, we know, quite consciously for political reasons; and he always shied away from the Herculean type, viewing Gilgamesh for instance as a great nuisance to his subjects, who pray to have “the weight of a hero king…taken off their backs.”10 Wishing only to replace the partisanship of proletarian literature with a bifocal view, but not at all to invert the proletarian and view society from the top, Empson in Pastoral needed a device that would amplify the voice of the underdog, giving this voice full scope for redemptive exaggeration, until the rogue Macheath can stand forth in the full regalia of the sacrificial tragic hero. Thus we get the shepherd-king, Christ or Tamburlaine, or the valleys being raised and the mountains made low in Isaiah: to choose an “unimportant one” is 96

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pastoral, to be sure, but the choice is sometimes confirmed by history, and the energies of the compression, the more far-fetched the more resplendent, make pastoral in itself heroic. Indeed, it is the magical verticality of pastoral, transforming foot to head, which makes its naturalistic horizontality, with one person or state giving us a tolerably adequate idea of many others, seem redemptive and not merely a kind of plausible pop sociology. Macheath really does represent a class broadly prevalent in Walpole’s England, and if you think of Walpole himself as at once Macheath-like and Peachum-like, then the impression that nearly everyone has been taken into account remains merely realistic; but if to this mixture is added one of the great paradoxes or inversions on which moral revolutions are potentially based, the fool as sage in Complex Words or in this case the paradox of the criminal as saint still prevalent in Dostoevsky (see Pastoral, p. 17) —one of the common denominators being martyrdom: “he is now half divine because fated to sacrifice” (ibid., p. 230) —then society is no longer represented mimetically or democratically but instead represented sacrificially and thus redeemed:

Macheath is a “captain”: it is the military hero’s chariot of triumph. (When the cart is driven away he is left hanging.) And we cry, There dies an Adonis! —Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer’s day— —Whose tragic sacrifice, every spring, like Christ, makes the crops grow. It is a rare case of the full use of the myth. (ibid., pp. 225–6) Thus too “the swain of pastoral is half Man half ‘natural.’ The corresponding idea in religion is that Christ is the scapegoat” (ibid., p. 200);11 and the upward sweep from animal to god has an even deeper point of origin when the vegetable world itself, the archaic phusis or “life-blood of the tribe” featured in F.M.Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy (note to “High Dive” in Collected Poems, p. 98) participates in its own sacrificial refertilization by the hero’s sprinkled blood: Christ’s hanging-tree merges at once with Christ himself and with “the Globes 97

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frame” (as in Donne’s “Crosse”: “the Meridians crossing Parallels”), and “[s]pace itself, the type of explanation, is shown to hold dissolved throughout it, as the differential equation of its structure, the impenetrable tangle of ideas about the sacrifice of the scapegoat and the hero” (ibid., pp. 78–9). All this is put to work, in a startlingly different redemptive context and with far greater allowance for attendant ironies, in Empson’s poem, “Note on Local Flora,” where “a tree native in Turkestan” —but scarcely “local” there— takes the apocalyptic moment upon itself: “So Semele desired her deity/As this in Kew thirsts for the Red Dawn” (Collected Poems, p. 36). With the emphasis of ritual turned toward the natural order, there comes a measure of vagueness—of saving vagueness, indeed, in that it begins to blot out the sharply human lineaments of sacrifice, pointing forward at least intermittently to the evasions of false identity in Milton’s God. Simply getting away from the Christian tradition is helpful. Without suggestion of sacrifice, “the dignity of the heroes in the Mahabarata is based on puzzles about the One and the Many” (Pastoral, p. 142). But in fact where it is not positively suppressed or forfeited, as in Christianity, nature is always involved, and the Chinese Emperor who can no longer control natural catastrophes supplies the key instance: The Golden Bough makes a clear distinction between [the sacrificial hero as dying god] and the Sincere Man as One with Nature, who is also sacrificial so far as national calamity [including flood and famine] proves that the emperor is not sincere. (ibid., p. 21)12 There is really an alternative, then, to the explosive dismemberment of human sacrifice resulting from the compression of false identity, envisioned most clearly in the chapter on that topic (“A is B”) in Complex Words: it is most happily present in Buddhism and Confucianism, where a vague rather than a symbolic Oneness is simply given as the nature of things with relatively little struggle; but it also governs dialectics, the “deep philosophical assertions…obviously prominent among the Germans,” and the “‘That art Thou’ of Hindu mysticism”: “Boston was taking a special interest in transcendentalism during the thirty years or so up to the American Civil War,” and “The relations of Marx to Hegel” suggest “that the One might be taken to imply either that the whole world should be communist [viz. “Note on Local Flora”] or that no activity can be independent of the class struggle” (Complex Words, p. 362). 98

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As soon as one moves away, however, from the neutralizing of subject-object consciousness by Buddhist meditation or the Confucian submergence of individuality in the rituals of conduct, then the scattered examples of possible Oneness given in this passage are all governed by palpable ironies. This is partly because it is always a “trick” to be “metaphysical” (of this more later), but also because there is a real danger that the hero as cosmos will be confused in practice with the hero as sacrifice, the latter tainting the former and making Frazer’s distinction nugatory. It is essentially this problem with which Empson sees Milton struggling in his effort to put the best possible face on the history of Western thought in Paradise Lost. And, in cognizance of the danger, Empson rejects the inference from his choice of the “Fire Sermon” as epigraph for his Collected Poems that he must be a convert to Buddhism, pointing out the violence of the text and voicing the fear that “my book might be used to support the current religious revival” —that is, the resurgence of the violence in Christianity.13 This then is the backdrop of “solemn interest” (see below) not unmixed with discomfort from the outset, against which we can now trace the change in Empson’s attitude toward the sacrifice of the one for the many, a change well summarized by Roger Sale, writing in 1973: “In his early work it is the heroism of Jesus that is stressed, but increasingly in the last twenty years that has given way to its corollary: God was wicked to accept his son as fit sacrifice” (Modern Heroism, p. 184). This is always the issue which drives Empson in embarrassment to lead us astray about his early writings, most notably in the opening remarks of Milton’s God (p. 10): I think the traditional God of Christianity very wicked, and have done since I was at school, where all my little playmates thought the same [“little” notwithstanding, Empson recalls Winchester here]. I did not say this in my earlier literary criticism because I thought it could be taken for granted, and that to fuss about it would do no good (like anyone else, I have sometimes expressed a solemn interest in the ancient craving for human sacrifice and its protean reappearances, but this does not imply Christian belief). “Like anyone else,” that is, in the generation of The Waste Land. Empson once believed that the One could stand for the Many because he believed in “metaphysics,” but for him of course this had very little to do with German philosophy and a great deal to do with the taste of T.S.Eliot for the Metaphysical poets. However knowingly he may speak 99

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of “the tricks of the metaphysical” (Pastoral, p. 82), he is drawn to them incessantly in his poems, which he could only write during this period, and it is these tricks likewise which form the Eliot canon in Seven Types. In Pastoral (the passage just cited), we find his taste already beginning to shift toward writing in which one-making is avoided rather than cultivated: “it was because Milton refused to play the tricks of the metaphysical and made God merely one of the persons of his story that Satan had so strong a case.” There is a pun involving card-playing here, with tricks “played” as points legitimately to be gained within the rules, which offsets the notion of rhetoric as an illicit prank, and this ambiguity very nicely shows the transitional state of Empson’s feelings. In 1949, while explaining that in Donne “the individual praised is the Logos of the virtues he or she typifies,” Empson can still express the wish that the young nowadays did not find Donne so “remote,”14 ironically reminding us that the decline of the vogue for Donne, which was just then beginning, exactly parallels the erosion—here still barely visible—of his own trust in Metaphysical wit. But what is it, after all, which can sustain the trust of an unblinking rationalist, even for a time, in something that anyone can recognize to be a gross verbal illusion? The belief, presumably, that there is something in actuality to which “A is B” does faithfully correspond, against all appearances. One cannot say for sure what Empson might have supposed this to be, but I would offer the following hypothesis, subsequently to be explained: in linguistics the ambiguity which resides in what can be called, following Freud and his source, Karl Abel, the “antithetical word” (“trick” as interpreted above is such a word, at once the paradigm and the violation of a rule), with its unresolvable opposite meanings, finds its scientific parallel in the curving involution of space suggested by relativity—the bridge between the linguistic and the scientific being, perhaps, the diagram of the Möbius strip in mathematics. In its packed form this hypothesis appears in poems such as George Barker’s “Narcissus” (“he could only see to drive, through the dazzled windscreen, within the shadow of his own head”)15 and also in Empson’s own poems (which include, as well, the rejection of the hypothesis in “Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics”: mere linearity made to seem structural is “all philosophers’ disease”: Collected Poems, p. 9):

Space is like earth, rounded, a padded cell; Plumb the stars’ depth, your lead bumps you behind; (“The World’s End,” ibid., p. 6) 100

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Celestial sphere, an acid green canvas hollow, His circus that exhibits him, the juggler Tosses, an apple… (“Value is an Activity,” ibid., p. 4) This apple (not eaten in the poem) turns up again, with no less complexity, in Pastoral, when Milton’s Eve resolves the principle of pastoral into herself as “the bitter apple of her own crime” (p. 177); she is innocent of bad intentions as an individual, a Simple like Christ the person, yet like Christ or Oedipus she becomes what she does (eats, in this case): a Complex called “Woman,” Lilith, and so on. This same sort of conceit, the dew-drop in Marvell as interpreted by Christopher Ricks, could only arouse Empson’s suspicion in 1979 (“I feared the sad cult of solipsism was going to crop up”),16 and even though the suspicion is allayed by the political turn of Ricks’s argument, what will pass in early Empson for a Möbius strip or miniature will typically seem to the late Empson, or indeed to the Empson of any period when dissatisfied with metaphysics, unpleasantly like what the French call a mise-en-abîme: “Two mirrors with Infinity to dine/Drink him below the table when they please” (Collected Poems, p. 9).17 In this frame of mind the fundamental agent of semantic configuration, the hermeneutic circle—which Empson approaches not through metaphysics but through Eddington on uncertainty in the scientific method—will become a vicious circle, obviating any and all acts of thought, even simple description, as false identities of the type “Theory is Practice”: “If you describe things with the right tensors,/All law becomes the fact that they can be described with them” (“Doctrinal Point,” ibid., p. 39). 18 But in early Empson there is the sense that if the abîme effect can be confined to an indivisible unit, isolated and self-contradictory, then the sham elements of metaphysics can be avoided and one can speak not in terms of undecidabil-ity or infinite regression but rather of a suspension between points, of the “standing up” between opposed doctrines which we have seen Empson declare to be the ethical responsibility of skeptical thought. It is by sustaining this equipoise that the basis of metaphysical wit in actuality can be confirmed by antithetical words. Bent on other matters, Freud does not really stress what is “Freudian” about antithetical words, which is that each word Freud takes up, either as a unit (Lat. altus) or the vestige of a unit in etymological changes (Lat. clamare/Ger. clam), phonemic reversals 101

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(Ger. Balken/ Ger. Kloben), or both (Ger. Ruhe/Eng. hurry)19 expresses what is in effect one and the same opposition between convergence and division. In Freudian terms, that is, each antithetical word quite plainly expresses that Oedipal anxiety whereby identification with the father engenders the threat of castration by the father. Freud was evidently unaware, in contrasting the German kleben (to cling to) with the English “to cleave (divide)” (ibid., p. 60), that in fact the English word contains the whole conflict in itself; but that word is only the pure essence of the same behavior in all antithetical words. Empson seems to recognize this. He sees in antithetical words the tidiest form of seventh-type ambiguity, which I have called ambivalence, and cites Freud’s article to that effect (Seven Types, pp. 193–4), stressing the connection brought out by Freud in his first paragraph between antithetical words and the undoing of negation in the dreamwork by “condensation.”20 Again, the ambivalence in question always concerns the Oedipal tension between fusion and disjunction implicit in false identity, a tension which superimposes itself readily on the figure of the hanged god, or at least did so when Empson could still take a “solemn interest” in finding a cultural rationale, if not justification, for such myths.21 The most striking antithetical words in Seven Types all take this form. Because Chaucer’s Criseyde advising herself—as she thinks —not to fall in love is “unteyed in lusty lese,” where “lusty” can mean either carefree or lustful and “lese” can mean either a binding agreement or freedom, then “to be in lusty lese may be part of the condition of being unteyed or being teyed” (Seven Types, p. 66). This is only the most perfect example. In Pope’s “Essay on Women,” “charmed” in “Oh, if to dance all night, and dress all day,/Charmed the small pox, and chased old age away” means either “fascinated,” mesmerized in place, or (aided by “chased,” a teaser Empson passes over) “charmed away” (ibid., p. 72). The meaning is not quite antithetical, unless we agree that the power of avoidance common to both senses is so absurd as to remind us that avoidance cannot be voluntary, at least not for anyone constantly in society; and in any case the meanings as they stand do still give the contrast of fixing in place and sundering. Both these examples express ambivalences about women and sex, as does, much more remotely, the case of “wast” (“waist” the tight-lacing of a black void, “waste” and “vastness” floating in nothingness) in Hamlet’s “In the dead wast and middle of the night” (ibid., p. 96). “Waist and middle” is a hendiadys suggesting that Hamlet’s womb fixation has sexualized the very heavens, while “dead waste (or vastness) and middle of the 102

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night” (making “middle” antithetical as well, a midpoint which is not a midpoint, there being no boundaries) shows the life-denying morbidity of that same arrested development. “The pun on ‘waist’ is not so much a meaning as a force holding together wast and middle; it may perhaps personify the night as one of the terrible women of destiny” (ibid., p. 97). In Pastoral we can see that the Frazerian ideas have their strongest hold on Empson when he says that antithetical words, here roughly defined as “puns,” “insist on relics of primitive thought in civilised language, and thereby force the language to break down its later distinctions and return to ideas natural to the human mind” (p. 136). It is the very unwariness of Empson’s equation of the “primitive” with the “natural” (he scrupulously avoids it elsewhere, especially in the chapter on “The Primitive Mind” in Complex Words) which shows our hypothesis about the confirmation of metaphysical language by nature in the early Empson here at its peak value. The first case of an antithetical word in Pastoral, “general” (all the people or the chief among the people), again involves Cressida, this time Shakespeare’s, of whom Ulysses says, after Nestor’s “Our general doth salute you with a kiss,” “’Twere better she were kissed in general” (p. 41). Nothing could more neatly tie together the themes of the representative individual and of patriarchal jealousy, while gesturing toward Empson’s macroscopic version of the antithetical word, the double plot, with one plot ruling-class, one popular: “Nor is it only the puns and the double plot which make this comparison between a person and the state…” (ibid., p. 42). Later two words involving the oath of a suitor perform the same pastoral function: “feign,” the hypocritical hence self-centered b ehavior of one who nevertheless truly does desire self-merger with another (“fains”), behavior which takes the form of “swearing”—producing both the oath of the aristocrat, promising fealty, and the oath of the outcast, sowing division (pp. 137–8). And this same contrast between binding and release is played out even at the level of double “sentiment” (normally uncoupled in the double plot, Empson says), where rhetoric pitched at a certain level becomes its own satire. In this example from Dryden’s Aurengzebe, the concentrated intensity of the “sentiment” in combination with the release of emotional misrule, “‘pseudo-parody to disarm criticism,’” echoes the contrast between constraint and violence in the passage itself: “What am I, that you dare to bind my hand?/So low, I’ve not a murder at command” (ibid., p. 57). 103

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By the time of Complex Words Empson still has an eye for the antithetical word, as the brilliant recognition of the opposite senses in Wordsworth’s “goes out” (contracts to nothing, expands through space), discussed earlier, would indicate. But the erosion of his trust in the metaphysical corroboration given by such words was by then well under way. Perhaps indeed there never was a time when there was no erosion (we are tracing inclinations, not convictions): it is in Seven Types, just where Freud’s article comes in for comment, that Empson first sounds a warning about perceived correspondences between the symmetries of language and the nature of actuality: “One might say…that the idea of ‘opposite’ is a comparatively late human invention, admits of great variety of interpretation (having been introduced wherever there was an intellectual difficulty), and corresponds to nothing in the real world” (p. 192). Indeed it is possible to see even in the key readings of the chapter on seventhtype ambiguity a strain that is too great for the tricks of the metaphysical to bear. (Philip Hobsbaum reacts accordingly to Empson’s reading of “The Sacrifice”: “The sinister implication is that one cannot take on sin vicariously.”22) And in the 1935 note to a poem, “Letter I,” Empson explains that in actual life the common bond making vicarage possible can scarcely be expected: “Lacking a common life-blood shared from one totem (showman because tragic hero) [people without ideas or society in common] are connected by no idea whose name is derived from ‘physics’” (Collected Poems, pp. 99–100). In Pastoral the strain is felt chiefly as a division (determined by the historical lateness of the examples: but then that is Empson’s own predicament) between the spiritual and the aesthetic value of unifying symbols. “Swinburne’s Before a Crucifix gets all its beauty of metaphor from the Christian ideas it sets out to destroy” (p. 57); and the same sadism, the same relish for cruelty which alone seems capable of rationalizing sacrifice, already permeates the arrest of Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera. Jenny Diver says “I must and will have a kiss to give my wine a zest,” and when Macheath kisses her the constables rush in, prompting this response from Empson: “It is the kiss of Judas, an expression of love with a parallel to hanging in it, like Polly’s [who says she wouldn’t mind Macheath hanging if he “had been kind to me till death”], that gives zest” (p. 229). To say that Empson never lost his taste for Swinburne is not to say that he was a sadist, as some who quizzed him about it tried to imply, but on the contrary that when his quasi-scientific belief that sacrificial cruelty is fundamental to the collective unconscious died away what 104

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lingered behind it was an ineradicable horror, the more vivid perhaps in being tied to a lost value. The result is the keenness to stumble away from the light he records in his controversy with Tuve. Even though the doctrine of the Father’s consubstantiality with the Son would make the crucifixion far less wicked, Empson is now so leery of any sort of symbolic identification that he makes his key authors similarly cautious, insisting that they are either Arians, denying consubstantiality (Milton, and the Dryden of Religio Laici23), or proponents, like Donne, of the Athanasian creed in its heretical implications: because Christ was a man any other person must have something of the divine in him and can become Christ. Coleridge is now said to have written a parody of the Atonement in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with the mariner to be understood as a study in neurotic guilt. The first version of the poem says the ship’s biscuits were full of worms, so Empson speculates that the mariner shot the albatross and made a nice thin soup out of it—a crime only an anti-humanist antivivisectionist would condemn, as even a Christian ought to see: The young Coleridge who wrote the poem, I don’t deny, had strong impulses to agree with the Spirit; probably if he had heard about the extermination of the Dodo he too would have recommended the yard-arm. The orthodox Coleridge who made comments long after was inclined [however] to laugh off this flouting of the rights of man over animals.24 The mariner is a type of Christ, to be sure, but only in that he is condemned to great suffering for little reason, like Christ, who did not sin at all, and like the lovers in Wieland’s Oberon (which Empson thinks influenced Coleridge in conception as well as in detail), who are condemned to suffer hardships at sea for breaking a vow of chastity.25 What is perhaps most interesting about Empson’s flight from all forms of vicarious atonement is his new attitude toward the “primitive,” the locus of sacrificial ritual in Frazer and still in Lord Raglan, which in Pastoral he had considered the repository of the “natural.” His later view, which is much more rigorous and aligns him with the revolution in anthropological relativism that began with Lévi-Strauss, finds its target in the condescension of a linguist, W.J. Entwistle, who still assumed in 1953 that primitive thought is “prelogical.” The attack is Empson at his caustic best, and one might ascribe its vehemence, again, to the proximity of a lost value: 105

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The language of the Australian Arunta, to plunge deeper, is pre-grammatical; he is too dull to invent genders…. He cannot have a future tense because he “makes no provision for the future” (I would not believe this of a duck-billed platypus). There is an entrancing proof that he has no notion of self: “An Arunta, when shown his photograph, recognised in it HIMSELF, his brother, and his totemic animal. His life was entirely that of his clan and he had no notion of self.” This is to show that he couldn’t have a first personal pronoun. I hope they pinched him to see if he rubbed one of his sibs.26 The platypus is aboriginally Australian, like the Arunta, and perhaps it is also Plato, hence an Empsonian parody of the “totemic animal” as (by the vicarage of Socrates) a hanged god. The joke about the photograph rejects as firmly as possible the idea that anyone at any time could ever have believed either in incarnation or atonement without a deliberate effort, symbolic identification being no more reflexive in the savage mind than it is in the mind of the linguist— which is padlocked, incidentally, by the overdetermination of language (specifically by the so-called Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) just as ours is when we call Empson a verbal critic, and as Empson’s was, in some measure, when he accepted the tricks of the metaphysical. Whereas Empson faults Lord Raglan in 1937 for attempting, in The Hero, to historicize his materials, positing local rituals springing up here and there for brief periods to produce the Frazerian hero-type, when “one could more easily say that it is in the human mind,” 27 we find him saying in 1950 (in the response to Tuve cited earlier), quite differently and much more warily, that “the most primeval of sins” was something that “Freud had made the foundation of human society,” 28 a supposition read into—even constituting—the primitive as nothing other than the state of mind we keep handy in order to define ourselves as its sublimation. This is an important change, more drastic in scope and implications than any other change in Empson. What the later view challenges, among other things, is the early essentialism which is the basis of his quarrel with relentless historicizing—and which stands revealed in this light as an aspect of his trust in unitary symbols. What had seemed the origin of historical consciousness becomes the product of consciousness reflecting on history in Complex Words, to which we now turn, arguing once again, from yet another standpoint, that its intensification of analysis is therapeutic, a sign of self-analysis. 106

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In place of a fusion metaphor like “pastoral” Empson here proposes, at the outset, “a process not unlike allegory, which I shall call Mutual Metaphor, by which you extract the common element of the things compared and make that the topic” (Complex Words, p. 4) — in which the referent, in other words, is a tertium quid safely distinct from the tenor and the vehicle, which in turn are safely distinct, as in Richards, from each other. Unlike Richards, though, Empson had earlier said, in a 1937 review of The Philosophy of Rhetoric, that he wants “to keep the term Metaphor narrow,”29 confined indeed to those cases where likeness predominates (thus excluding the extreme cases of what Richards calls “disparity action”), not however to encourage metaphysical fusion but rather, quite the contrary, to delimit the importance of likeness, to show it operative as one trope among many others and not at all as a characteristic of language in general. The word “metaphor,” that is, is not a metaphor, not a synthetic gesture absorbing the individuality of other tropes into itself. Hence the multiplicity of the ways in which meaning should be discussed. None of the bits of machinery in Complex Words is called a “symbol” (or rather they all are, but only when encoded as mathematical symbols) and the word is generally avoided, while in the meantime poets like Housman and Donne (in the Anniversaries) whose arguments entail absolute states are admired but skeptically treated as purveyors of “untruths” (p. 13). All the codifications express modes of narrowing, of one sense among others, except the five “A is B” equations, and these are insistently presented as the forms of false identity—which have value, we have seen, only insofar as they are self-consciously heuristic: “I take it that the relation of false identity is one which we are always first imputing and then interpreting; it is a fundamental tool in the process by which we classify things” (ibid., p. 42). In the process, that is, by which we contrive to remember that things may be like each other but are not the same—and by which we also remember that we ourselves are individuals: “Surely people can approve quite heartily of a martyr without having any tendency to get themselves tortured to death in their turn” (ibid., p. 416). I would suggest that earlier in his career Empson on such an occasion would have faulted the independence of motive exhibited by these “people” as an anti-pastoral sentiment, which is to say, an antisocial one; whereas still later in his career no hearty approval of martyrdom on any terms would be allowable, even in a purportedly value-neutral paradigm for linguistic discussion. (There could only have been, at 107

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the very most, an expression of horrified commiseration.) The emphasis in Complex Words, though, falls neither on the social bonding enforced by equation nor on the grave dangers attending its imprecision, but on the sophistication, the conscious artistry, of equation viewed as a “fundamental tool,” with the notion of an efficaciously totemic basis carefully set aside. The equation “‘the specimen is the class’” is “the main device of metaphysical poetry,” and “made the Nightingale of Keats immortal,” but, Empson is now at pains to say, “[s]o permanent a device need not be tied to the origins of any thing; you certainly do not have to be ignorant of the idea of a concept before you can make the trick work” (ibid., p. 387). Note that “permanent” here does not carry the sense of “immemorial,” which would still evoke the Frazer emphasis, but has the opposite sense of perpetual up-to-dateness: somewhat controversially bridging the alleged gap between the “two cultures,” hence carrying forward his friendly quarrel with the early Richards, Empson insists, slyly pillaging the vocabulary of primitivism for his terms, that there is nothing “lunatic or savage” (ibid., p. 43) about a trick that can still appeal to the scientific mind. Thus he argues earlier: It is not found to be true, I maintain, that a covert assertion has to invoke the feeling of inherence before it can carry a general doctrine felt to be important. The importance of the doctrine is a matter for the opinion of the speakers, not a matter of how completely they are deluded by the false identity; they may recognize the trope as a simple metaphor and still think the meaning profound; and on the other hand they may feel that “something is inherent in something else” on quite trivial occasions. (ibid., p. 268) To revert to the argument of the previous chapter: what the rational detachment of this survey of verbal exchange allows for, with its two examples of the undeluded use of equation, are the experiences, respectively, of the sublime (profound meaning) and the uncanny (unaccountable feeling): of those aspects of actuality, that is, which can be admitted only from the standpoint of a fully achieved repudiation of rationalized magical thinking. Empson’s discussion of “all” in Milton, again, disappoints most critics on just the grounds I find most promising. Empson cannot yet decide, despite strong intimations, whether Milton’s use of the 108

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equation “each is all” is psychotic or a special mark of genius, an absolutist neo-classical sublime or a cosmic sense of the sublime anticipating the mysteries of modern physics. Or rather he can decide: “all” entails “Combativeness (claiming all, arguing all else away, etc.) pride (ruling all, disdaining all, etc.) love (offering all, disvaluing all but…) and self-sacrifice (standing as representative of all, giving up all for them)” (ibid., p. 102). These senses are all Racinian hyperbole, every sense an antithetical word torn between possession and renunciation, and the fact that Empson prior to Milton’s God leans on the whole toward that way of reading Milton means simply that he is still smarting from the embarrassment of having learned something about himself. As I have suggested, with the repudiation of the notion that there are—or ought to be—psychologically efficacious symbols comes a new tendency to mistrust the appeal to the unconscious as a blanket causal explanation. Mistrust never swells to negative certainty, though; Empson does not consider the Freudian Hamlet, for example, a negligible figure, but accepts the relevance of the Oedipus complex with his familiar late tone of stoical endurance. “I would always sympathise with anyone who says, with Hugh Kingsmill, that he can’t put up with Hamlet at all. But I am afraid it is within hail of the more painful question whether you can put up with yourself and the race of man” (Shakespeare, p. 118). The newly mistrustful position is entailed in the discussion of The Ancient Mariner, for example, because disapproval of “neurotic guilt” is an almost necessary corollary to Empson’s growing distaste for martyrdom. It interests him that his friend Dylan Thomas often spoke of his own “neurotic guilt” simply as a matter of being oppressed by the incompatibility between his own moral code and that of his peasant aunt at Fern Hill; Thomas’s nervous system was certainly affected, yet no oppressive symbolism was involved: “it is the most prominent cause of mental upset among present-day educated people, and I think psychologists belittle it because they dislike admitting that there can be genuine rational disagreement about a moral question.” 30 The mind is “hag-ridden” by symbols, as Empson came more and more often to say, rather unpleasantly, just insofar as it displaces anxiety about reasonable things back on to the old obscure guilts. Thus in 1968 Brigid Brophy on Aubrey Beardsley is “very strong on psychology. Beardsley was the polyperverse infant later described by Freud,” but even so, the reason why he made drawings about penis-envy when he was dying is that he needed money to support his mother 109

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and sister: “One way or another, the ‘psychological comment’ of Brigid Brophy, though very sympathetic here for once, seems likely to be irrelevant.” 31 Empson will always be found wishing to emphasize the apparent paradox that individuality, not collectivity, is what is common to all human experience. This point has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of what is called—lately with much contempt—“lyric subjectivity”; the point is made brilliantly by Adorno, and even though it seems anti-Hegelian it can be derived even from the discussion of lyric in the Aesthetics.32 Empson, however, borrows it directly from Herbert Read in The True Voice of Feeling (who takes it from Schelling): “The paradox of the artist is…the opposite of the Christian one,” writes Empson, summarizing Read’s argument with approval: “he must say ruthlessly what he himself likes or wants, and only by this selfishness can he help his fellows.”33 In other words, what is common to all humanity in the later Empson no longer appears in primordial symbols but in the vagaries of the individual will, asserting its very selfishness not as a sign of Hobbesian determinism but as a Benthamite expression of desire by each stubbornly independent person conducing somehow to the greatest good of the greatest number. As always, the poems say it first, in this case paraphrasing Piaget: a Ba Cordial in more than one direction Can speak well to itself and still please Pa. (“Your Teeth are Ivory Towers,” Collected Poems, p. 46) Plot and argument, then, not “the loathsome theory of imagism”:34 to “hunt the symbol” invites the determination of meaning by vague universals while losing sight of actuality, whereas attention to “argufying” confirms the value and integrity of human intentions, finding true community in eccentricity. The late Empson simply assumes that image-clustering is a vice of modern criticism (fostered, he fears, by Seven Types), and not a weakness one would ever find in any sensible author before the present criticism-infested century. It is interesting, though, to find him in mid-career alreading mistrusting “the technique of reiterative imagery” but still recognizing that it can be discovered in literature. He finds Shakespeare “letting his machine run away with him” in Hamlet, for example, when Fortinbras orders that four captains “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage”: “he was content because he was weaving in another reference to the theatre, 110

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exactly like Joyce weaving in the name of another river or what not,” even though he is thus mistakenly giving us the impression, in this our last glimpse of the hero, that the enigmatic Hamlet was no soldier but a mere play-actor (Complex Words, p. 68). The error of symbolism is always irrealism, as Shakespeare’s life’s-a-stage symbolism itself here affirms. (In the Hamlet essay of only a few years later Empson is converted to the idea that theatricality is the key to the play, but he would not have admitted that the symbolism had converted him: see Shakespeare, pp. 85, 89, 99.) Not accidentally it is also in Complex Words that Empson discovers the potential distortion of meaning in his own chosen emphasis on keywords. You will be positively misled if you pay too much attention to “fool” in Lear. Not only is Lear not an Erasmean fool, but it is unrealistic, dramatically implausible, to think of anyone else in these terms either: when the Fool “labours to out-jest [Lear’s] heart-struck injuries,” Empson says, “[h]ere is the picture of the Fool struggling to save his master’s sanity which critics have admired, but the actual words only say that he is trying to make jokes adequate to so big an occasion” (Complex Words, p. 135). A keyword, after all, would seem to function very similarly to a reiterative image—although, as Hugh Kenner pointed out, most of Empson’s complex words are not images.35 This limitation Empson apparently acknowledges in remarking on several occasions that however other people may delude themselves neither poetic thinking nor any other kind is dependent on visual images. 3 6 But misunderstanding here can obscure the important issue. Empson does not say, and it is certainly not the case, that he is uninterested in visual things. We know that he believed his best work to be a contribution to art history, the lost manuscript on the faces of Buddha, and impressive fragments of his thinking in this field do exist; 37 both Rintaro Fukuhara and Janet Adam Smith remark in their memoirs that Empson liked to draw heads (for Fukuhara it was a head of Donne, drawn almost unconsciously, and for Smith it was a Buddha’s head: see William Empson, pp. 31, 36); and Ronald Bottrall mentions that Empson actually took painting lessons in Japan (ibid., p. 50). Empson shies away from images in literature not because he cannot appreciate them but because he sees the formalism of their patterning luring the mind away from the embodiment of actuality—which may prove in itself, quite properly and attractively, to be visual. Not the fact that an image is an image, then, but the use of the image as a formal correlative of something other than itself from which it tends to distract us—and which may be sacrificed altogether to the growing interest of reiteration—is what discredits it. The device 111

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of reiterative imagery is one credo in what Empson calls “the cult of unnaturalism,”38 and he locates the device chiefly in modern art and criticism (where one also finds “pure sound,” the early foe in Seven Types,39 and “convention,” the excuse as he sees it for finding as little meaning as possible in literature). This expression appears in the Preface Empson wrote to a book about the right-wing politics of the Modernists, and he uses it in the course of chiding the author, John R. Harrison, for isolating politics as the key issue, when it is more important, he says, to understand the underlying mental disposition of which politics is only a symptom: “The cult of unnaturalism, I think, is the real trouble with the whole school” of Yeats, Pound, Lewis, Eliot, and Lawrence, writers for whom Empson’s admiration was too sincere and complex to admit of dismissing them solely on political grounds, but whom he could and did fault for this one vice in common—a vice to which a politics attaches itself rather than the other way around. The hostility to nature expressed most programmatically as an aesthetic by Hulme in Speculations, recurring in the Imagism of Pound, the attack on sex in The Waste Land, and the attack on time and western man in Time and Western Man, is, at bottom, Empson feels, contempt for people (for specific groups in each writer; but they also share a more fundamental contempt for the humanist concept of man’s unlimited self-actualizing power). From this contempt, or, more precisely, from the feelings of queasy disgust which seem to have affected this generation of writers, come strategies for the repression of everything distastefully processual and self-deluding in human nature by religious abasement, Führer cult—and the denial, on putatively aesthetic grounds, that works of literature are the expressions of human authors and address real conflicts experienced by responsible ethical agents. These observations, hackneyed but in some measure true, Empson is very far from denying; but what should give us pause, adding a final complication to the role played by symbolic identification in his work, is the question why the politics entailed in Modernism does not distress him more than it does, and why he so clearly feels that political indictment of any kind is likely to be cant. There are various ways of answering this question, which it seems to me that those who rightly emphasize Empson’s interest in politics and his socialism have failed to ask. A paradox will take us quickly to the heart of the matter. To Empson it was so obvious and important that man is a political animal that it may have seemed to him that anyone who took the trouble to say so in so many words could be 112

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suspected of not believing it: “A resistance to the style [of John WrenLewis] may be making me stupid; it always makes me echo the Negro Spiritual and think, ‘Everybody talks about “values” ain’t got any.”40 Thus he is always at greater pains to praise people for taking politics seriously, for living their politics, than for holding correct political views. He finds extenuating excuses for Fascism quite readily, liking Pound simply for the fact that he “was such a clever man, and had such natural good feelings”41 and threw himself into his politics (in this Empson is rather like Keats admiring a quarrel in the street); sympathizing with Yeats’s impatience with parliamentary process;42 finding Lawrence more clearsighted than his detractors about what the herd does to exceptional people; 43 and, while he fully acknowledges the signs of racism in Orwell,44 the anti-Semitism of Belloc,45 and the virulent misogyny in Lawrence,46 these writers are not spoiled for him by such defects, which he is inclined to explain away as critical oversimplifications of deeper and more acceptable meanings. He is moved especially by Dylan Thomas’s “refusal to mourn” the death of a child in an air-raid by subordinating the political indifference of spontaneous grief even to the most legitimate political outrage,47 and while he always wished he had learned how to write political verse like the Oxford poets (“the pylon poets,” he called them),48 he nevertheless approved of Auden’s refusal to become Churchill’s laureate during the war. Perhaps we must say of all these forms of special pleading that they betray secret sympathies; many would do so, and the argument would be impossible to disprove. Empson grants the likelihood of this freely enough: “Probably,” he writes in response to a question about the literary value of morally repugnant poems, “if these works appeal to you, they are recalling some truth which your conventions made you ignore.”49 It might be argued that for all his show of pluralism Empson is loyal in earnest only to the administrative classes of his own country, and is fraternally forgiving, almost fond, of even their ugliest prejudices wherever these peep through: failure to disapprove of Hitler except on nationalist grounds, lukewarmth about democracy, after-dinner coarseness about women, even the smug provincialism from which Empson in exotic climes seems wholly free but which colors his view of neighboring cultures like France and the United States. Empson obviously thinks through and around all these prejudices and treats anyone who holds them unselfconsciously with acid disdain,50 but it does not follow, as he would no doubt agree, that he was necessarily free of them. He would argue that ambiguity, the ambivalence of the pastoral attitude, and the volatility of complex 113

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words are things impossible to control and fascinating just for that reason. And being peculiarly susceptible to the distaste we all feel in some degree for seeing our own opinions expressed by someone else and standing revealed in all their canting tawdriness, Empson was perhaps more than most a connoisseur of opinions cleverly defended, sometimes even to the peril of the intellectual integrity which remains his hallmark. At this point I would want to say of the present study, in fact, that it takes its cue from Empson on the High Modernists: it is an effort to separate those opinions in Empson which are determinate and underlying from those which are governed by argumentative context or by the allowances made for friendship and enmity. Among the latter I would include “Empson’s politics,” which I shall now attempt to explain in terms of the more stably pervasive theme which I am calling “the failure of pastoral.” We have seen that Empson’s support of the pastoral “trick” required a vertical component, making the embodiment of the complex in the simple transformative, in order to reinforce the horizontal sense in which pastoral is merely, in the democratic sense, representative; and at that time we mentioned the “tragic king” who is “head” of the body politic, yet decidedly not the representative of the people. Pastoral is monarchist; and while it would be unwise to assume that Empson revealed that he was a monarchist in writing a masque at Sheffield pretending that the modern Queen Elizabeth had inspired the invention of steel (“The Birth of Steel,” 1954, Collected Poems, pp. 85–9; “Why don’t they laugh?” Empson was delighted to hear the Queen say), yet in the ceremonial extravagance of this event there must have been a feeling more definite than mere civility and amused tolerance. At least atavistically present there may have been the feeling, lingering indeed beyond the rejection of other unities, that the state requires a living symbol if it is not to fall into fragments. The vertical drag keeping this symbol tied to its body is the class system, which Empson also supports, in full knowledge that it has made for an increasingly problematic polity since the eighteenth century, and always with the air of “blow-the-gaff” skepticism he shares with the frankness of pastoral itself: “Both [heroic and pastoral] when in their full form assume or preach what the parody need not laugh at, a proper and beautiful relation between rich and poor” (Pastoral, p. 196), so proper and beautiful that no subversion need be implied in remarks like “Falstaff is the first major joke by the English against their class system; he is a picture of how badly you can behave, and still get away with it” (Shakespeare, p. 46). There is a strong tension, perhaps unresolved, between Empson’s socialism, tending to eliminate the 114

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underclass, and his preference for local magistracy among supervisory institutions, tending to support a neighborly reciprocity among existing classes, especially when it is seen that both preferences, though incompatible, have the common aim of gaining secure independence for all citizens. Empson might accuse me here, as he accused Richard Ellmann, of an “American” inability to distinguish between socialism and communism,51 but he could scarcely argue that socialism in any form is meant to leave the class system intact. In short, Empson’s linguistic and ethical conversion away from unitary symbols simply does not flow along with the natural drift of his politics. His politics is confused by it, in fact, or in any case complicated by what we may see precisely as a defense against the blandishments of the pastoral reduction. The confusion, in which he rightly feels he is not alone, can permeate even the learned reconstruction of the seating in Shakespeare’s Globe, leaving Leslie Hotson “caught up in a peculiarly intense conflict between democracy and the leadership principle” (Shakespeare, p. 160). Of the three traditional resolutions of social hierarchy, two are unitary (monarchy and socialist democracy, which are not incompatible if the monarch is, in the precise pastoral sense of the term, a figurehead), while one, oligarchy, is multiple and incompatible with the other two; yet Empson’s allegiances are obviously torn between the multiple and unitary resolutions, given that any of them have been and can be successful in preserving the sense of community. This last point is what matters most to Empson, and prompts him to sputter, in Milton’s God (p. 81): “our modern reactionary critics tend to assume that nobody could be such a fool as to be a democrat, way back in early times; but a certain amount of democratic sentiment is inherently part of the cost of enjoying a nationalist sentiment.” A parallel conflict appears when we turn to the horizontal problem of international relations. On occasion he enters a plea for world government, “a reasonable attempt to take the world as one place and use the best things in it,” 52 which was common in Empson’s generation and which wholly absorbed the later Richards; but more commonly there is a sturdy nationalism, deepened in the long run of course by the experience of war, but also a considered political philosophy leading him to discuss global politics, not just England’s, in terms of irreducibly conflicting national interests. Here again the one and the many are not reconciled but opposed. One is tempted to say that Empson holds incompatible views in politics to prevent, within his own psyche, the unitary fusions made possible by statesponsored Christianity, by Nazism, or by communism, the 115

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interchangeable menaces to independence in Orwell’s allegory. We can cut through the knot easily enough, after all, by saying that the important thing, undermining all specious unities except that of selfhood, is the secure independence of the individual, which will be swept away by any disorder, however much the disorder may be welcome in breaking up an existing political tyranny—the execution of Cordelia in Lear thus being “just the kind of thing which happens in the confusion of a ‘liberation’” (Complex Words, p. 154). Two kinds of division, one horrifying and one healthy, can be quite neatly distinguished in Empson’s politics. What is horrifying, more so to Empson even than to most people (I am not sure why), is civil war, which Empson takes to be an obsession of Shakespeare, showing all the while that it is at least as much his own. The theme is everywhere in Shakespeare, but it is already in Pastoral (see p. 35: even Troilus and Cressida depicts a civil war because Hector fights his first cousin, Ajax) and Complex Words (p. 126: in support of Lois Winstanley’s thesis that King Lear was inspired by the civil war in France). Empson too may have been inspired, like Shakespeare, by current events resembling the Essex uprising: he lived in China during the mounting tensions that would lead, as he always put it, to a “north-v.-south civil war.”53 Mao was already in the North, to be sure, and this could thus be taken to mean northern rebels vs. Peking establishment; but Empson seems curiously haunted by the geographical aspect of the conflict, and was in any case so greatly distressed by the prospect of any civil disorder that even though he was to write journalism bordering on proPeople’s Republic propaganda once the new regime was established he could write, in the meantime, a startlingly sympathetic review of Madame Chiang’s China in Peace and War.54 Satan’s, after all, were the “legions of the north,” and it is in the discussion of Satan’s politics in Milton’s God that we find the most interesting account, by strong implication, of Empson’s own, which I am tempted to accord a label: aristocratic republicanism. Empson’s social views were very old-fashioned, really, and to find something similar to them one may have to go back more than a hundred years to the Holland House Whigs, and to the one figure among them whose politics and whose global itinerary, mixing insular prejudice with a rare cosmopolitanism, most closely resemble Empson’s—the most Satanic of the Romantics (not so much a Yorkshireman, though that has been proposed, as a Scotsman), Lord Byron. On the one hand, to return to Milton, Satan foments civil war, something Milton was an old hand at, and this fact strains Empson’s sympathies for both of them. (Even though he saw Milton as a fellow-propagandist 116

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and defended the integrity of stretching honesty in times of political crisis, it was arguably his having imagined the pathetic plight of the king which drew Empson into the controversy about whether Milton had planted “Pamela’s Prayer” in the Eikon Basilike: “Appendix,” Milton’s God, pp. 288–318). But on the other hand, knowing no time when he was not as now, Satan is simply leading a movement away from centralized government and back to the feudal decentralization which—on earth if not in heaven—preceded it. It is in this that Satan is most like Macbeth, and most like the Yorkshireman Empson, whose nostalgia for the autonomy of local magistracies (in Fielding, in Shelley, in his own family), is palpable. Just as Empson stands up between opposed doctrines to preserve himself from their unitary claims, so here one can say that the feudal order keeps its brightness for Empson as a trope for a saving plurality, a defense against the danger of resolving any polity into an allabsorbing symbol—though the local community itself remains a symbol, to be sure, of individual independence: “The striking thing is,” he writes in quite another context, “that the main work of man was done before central government was thought of,” the main work being the achievement of “a settled village culture.”55 And here, too, the village seems to be doing double duty: as itself and also as a type of the sturdy individual, like Mosca and Volpone in Ben Jonson, who are right “to cheat the grandees of Venice” because “[t]o become morally independent of one’s formative society in this way is the grandest theme of literature,…because it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept.” 56 “Higher”: here again is the vertical element, not introduced however for the purpose of resolving all into itself, but as a principle of independence, higher in being stubbornly itself, resolving and resolved into nothing else. I am painfully aware, in concluding this chapter, that I have not explained why Empson changed his mind about the efficacy of pastoral symbols, including the symbol of pastoral, and I must say it feels very odd not knowing why. The rather Geneva School-like “phenomenology of consciousness” I have fallen back on in my ignorance will serve the purpose, I hope, at least of raising the issue and of showing, as rigorously as possible, how it lends coherence to Empson’s thought and changes of opinion. But the key to the puzzle is in the hands of the critical biographer, who will know just which experiences gave rise to his later passions. Empson himself keeps pointing to lessons learned from living in the East, and to the culture shock of his return home, and I would say of this that it was not so 117

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much the contrast of East and West that opened his eyes as the fact that his exotic sojourn had made him feel more intensely than most the magnitude of changes within his own culture. One feels this strongly when he says things like “As I spent some time teaching in the Far East, and left England in 1931, the literary tastes of the twenties are still encapsulated within me.”57 He is Rip Van Winkle, a time capsule. He resents the exile from paradise in Milton, seeing no reason for it; just so, he feels, in his youth people thought clearly and the world seemed promising, but then for no reason he was exiled from Cambridge, where “Sleeping out in a College Cloister,” under the “bell-calm of trees” (Collected Poems, p. 27), had already seemed like an elegy. I cannot help thinking that his exotic sojourns at once buffered and delayed his reaction to this event, of which his work after 1950 is the record. But the truth, I am sure, cannot yet be known.

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5 Middle Spirits and Empson’s chain of being

The later Empson tires of the sublime, which had never been very securely at home in his mental climate. The neo-classical moral sublime he had always considered a funhouse display of the mind warped into unnatural attitudes, while the sublime of indistinctness, with its thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, appealed to him only as a kind of imaginative consolation for his loss of confidence in the “tricks of the metaphysical.” But the argufying Empson really did hate muddles. He liked things clear and definite, and while he continued to mistrust the doxological pull of obvious solutions and received ideas, there is no doubt that the later Empson preferred his answers to scholarly riddles to have a hammering directness and simplicity. Although he had embraced difficulty in his poems, he had never tolerated the kind of obscurity that bespeaks mental bureaucracy, even in the atmosphere of Macbeth, as the poems themselves attest (“The creeping fog, the civil traps,/These are what force you into fear”: “Autumn on Nan-Yueh,” Collected Poems, p. 79). In the ivied cloister the equivalent of administrative dehumanization was “the high Mandarin guff of Eng. Lit.,” which Empson suspected of laboring obscurely, like a regional official, in the service of Christian dehumanization while keeping “the kids” from “going Red.”1 The funniest sentence in Empson is unfair, as most funny sentences are, but it cannot ring completely false to anyone who recalls reading, say, Artforum about twenty-five years ago: The catalogue of a picture exhibition is often very intimidating; a steady iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense, as if under great pressure from a hose, and recalling among human utterances only the speech of Lucky in Waiting 119

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for Godot, is what they play upon the spectator to make sure of keeping him cowed.2 The end of the sentence is lame, losing momentum and cadence after the amusing but ill-timed highbrow reference (he could have found it in the catalogue), but it does tell us something about Empson’s dislike of imprecision. Woolly prose has nothing to wrap itself around, and the reason art criticism is even worse than literary criticism (“We literary critics may talk a lot of nonsense, but we have been scolded out of talking like they do long ago”: ibid.) is that without words to consider it cannot refer, there being no Peircian “interpretant” in view; hence it is not to be classed “among human utterances.” Instead of referring, it can only aim like a hose, a performative without the slightest constative pretext, at the only verbal animal (not quite a cow) in the vicinity, whose attention is distracted in having been composed to be a spectator, not a listener. All this could be said too of the fog we found Empson admiring two chapters ago, and indeed it could not have been long after Milton’s God before his taste for clarity reasserted itself. If life imitates art, then art has large responsibilities, and the fog brought to London by the Impressionists and Whistler (Empson knew his Wilde) had better lift, to reveal “the world [which] is glorious beyond all telling”3 —yet tellable, certainly, up to a point. The “world” of this explanation is more wonderful than we can know, that is, but it is still this substantial and mutable world, not some other. Empson’s expression, which some readers have overexcitedly called religious, is made in response to a would-be ally against the Christians who mistakenly shares their alleged gloom about earthly things, hence abets the longing for transcendence. Empson became more and more interested in ontologically mixed states, dating especially from the time of Milton’s God, in hopes of counteracting this tendency, which he had long seen entering Western thought even earlier than Paradise Lost, and which founded the radical dualism required by orthodox Christianity on the difference between apes and men, viewed as body and spirit: “The time would have to be earlier than Descartes, whose assertion that animals are machines but men are not was important mainly because it gave great publicity to the question, together with an evidently wrong answer” (Complex Words, p. 172). The right answer, which may now seem to us almost more old-fashioned, is Darwin’s, and it allows for the gradations of being which will be the subject of this chapter. The alternative, the Cartesian aftermath, was the 120

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unnaturalism leading to “art-works,” like Hulme’s beloved Byzantine mosaics, “which can be viewed as glorifying deathwishes” (ibid., p. 12), implying “disgust for all human experience”4 just insofar as man is not elevated by symbolic identification with the divine. The trouble with dualism, in other words, was that the abyss it opened encouraged the dangerous extravagances of metaphysics, with its “heterogeneous ideas…yoked by violence together” (the mixed feelings of Johnson were easily converted to unqualified praise by Eliot under Hulme’s influence, “the direct sensuous apprehension of thought” yoking body and mind, animal and spirit, becoming the explicit heterogeneity in question). In saying, then, as we have, that in later years Empson returned to the taste of his youth, we must recognize that in dispelling the mist of the Miltonic sublime he became interested (this time exclusively, having always maintained the interest among others) in quite a new and different sort of “metaphysics,” namely, the violent yoking of mag ic with experiment and superstition with observation which marked the emergence of Renaissance science and which shaped, or so Empson insisted for fifty years, the poetic personality of Donne. Rather than simplifying the world and stripping it of all lustre by contrasting it with the deus absconditus, this application of metaphysics enriches everything by revealing an infinite sublunary variety. The weakness of Milton, at least from this viewpoint (which at any time was easy enough for Empson to ignore in the interest of finding what is important in Milton), is brought out in Complex Words when Empson reflects on his penchant for extremes: “The self-centred man, in his turn, is not much interested in the variety of the world, and readily lumps it together as ‘all’” (p. 101). Eliot’s attacks on Milton stand behind this judgment (which however is aimed at Milton only by implication), but those attacks in turn belong to a tradition of Words-worth-baiting begun by Hazlitt (and carried forward by Keats on “the egotistical sublime”), which in its original form could only be averted from Milton by a species of epideictic sophistry: “[Milton’s] imagination,” wrote Hazlitt in “On Shakespeare and Milton,” “‘nigh sphered in Heaven,’ claimed kindred only with what he saw from that height, and could raise to the same elevation with itself.” Eliot was not fooled, and called this, in Milton as in all others after Donne, the dissociation of sensibility. Far from disagreeing with Eliot’s historical diagnosis, Empson could only recover Milton by claiming, later than Complex Words, that he 121

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was a Gnostic, a cabbalist —and, like Donne, a Renaissance scientist, delighted with the world and everything in it, snakes, sex, and astronomical theories included. We can begin with the Donne itinerary as Empson saw it before embarking on a circuitous route that will lead us back to it in due course. Horrified by Eliot’s apostasy from the view of Donne that had shaped his own secular aesthetic (“Donne, I insist, was no sceptic,” intoned Eliot in 1931), Empson retorted: “The Donne he wanted to obliterate was obviously not a skeptic but believed in too much; for example, life on other planets, each with its own avatar of the Redeemer, and a relation between soul and body so intimate as to make them inseparable.”5 Empson’s interest in plurality and reduplication seems to have increased in the aftermath of Pastoral, with its opposite emphasis on putting the complex in the simple. Thus it is in 1936 that we find him eager to point out that Bruno died believing that there were multiple worlds, suggesting many redeemers and the possibility that everyone can be Christ: in the recorded trial at Venice he is clearly connecting his belief in the infinity of worlds with his doubt of the divinity of Christ…. If there are many worlds, either Christianity is intolerably unjust or Christ went to all of them; if there are many Christs there may be a bit of Christ in everybody, and you can write as Donne did about Elizabeth Drury.6 What I want to bring out now is the immense dignity and strength which Empson’s mind gains from his fascination with plurality, which is always simultaneously scientific, aesthetic, moral, and political. If Other Worlds were what chiefly fascinated the late Empson, that may be because his increasing hostility toward his intellectual climate put a strain on his tolerance for what Christopher Norris writing on Empson has called, following the Cambridge philosophers and Stanley Cavell, “other minds.” I want to stop well short of saying Empson replaced a sane pluralism with a cranky provincialism complemented by a cranky pluralism, although others have said such things; one reason for keeping an open mind on the subject is that Empson’s quasi-scientific fascination with other worlds itself has a moral and political dimension, quite apart from the theological crux about redemption, which we ought to find appreciably familiar. Empson frequently points out that the Renaissance interest in the possibility of life on other planets was inspired not just by the new astronomy but by the discovery of life on other continents during the 122

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first wave of European empire-building.7 The complexity of this parallel as Empson reads it is that just as the heresy about other worlds fuelled the geocentrism of the Inquisition, so the discovery of other continents brought Eurocentrism into being. Thus, following Auden’s thesis in The Enchafed Flood that the prominence of ocean imagery in Romanticism is a belated generation’s expression of political pride mixed with remorse for Europe’s maritime expansion, Empson reads the voyage of the Ancient Mariner as a lesson in global laissez-faire rather than as atonement for all things, great and small things (see Argufying, pp. 304–5, and Coleridge’s Verse, p. 28). And if The Ancient Mariner reflects on the triumph of Western Europe, Coleridge turns in his next poem, “Kubla Khan,” to consider “the immediately previous world conquest, of the land mass by the Mongols” (Argufying, p. 318), which missed pre-empting the European conquest by a hair’s breadth (ibid.: “when they came westwards again, it was known that the rich loot was all in the south, so the Hounds of God destroyed the great civilisation of the Moslems”).8 In all of this, and in the general outlook we need only infer in one whose world-wide experience was gained in public service rather than in colonial administration, there was a keen early awareness of what Edward Said has brought us to think of, with irony, as the “Orientalism” of western intellectuals. Just how full Empson’s anticipation of the recent upsurge of interest in the “discourse of colonialism” was, and how insurpassably subtle his ear was for transgression in this arena, may be learned from a fairly lengthy citation. In Coleridge’s Verse, the version of the passage I have just quoted from Argufying continues: The reason why the modern literary expert cannot look at [“Kubla Khan”] in this simple way, I am afraid, is that he cannot imagine a poet being directly interested in Kubla Khan. The theme is “exotic”, he will say, meaning “I won’t be bothered.” Thus a recent scholar argued that the poem must have been written before the trip to Germany, because Dorothy remarks in her Journal that at one German village she had to go and fill Kubla at the pump on the green. The little joke tells us that they pronounced Khan as “can”, which provides a rhyme, and I hope no one supposes the poem was written after the trip. But you see the extraordinary assumption here; that Kubla must have been quite unknown until Coleridge read him up for some highly sophisticated “aesthetic effect”…. 123

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[The Mongols destroyed the Moslems instead of us, by a fluke,] Hence our present superiority to the Moslems, which we find so natural. (pp. 84–5) This, and a great deal more, is all in one paragraph. What is curious about the attack on the scholar, closely resembling in this so many of Empson’s other late flights of empathetic fancy, is the way it derives its power of being brilliantly half-right from being quite inattentively half-wrong. The scholar’s proof is in fact a relevant one (though unnecessary, as Empson says) because it is based on a much clearer understanding of Dorothy Wordsworth than Empson’s. However much she may always have known about Kubla Khan from hearing Coleridge talk about him (or—you chaps! —from reading about him herself ), any such knowledge would not have inspired her “little joke.” She had a way of making cosy familiars out of the poems written by anyone in her circle; they became characters, children in effect, and she recorded their adventures in a kind of nursery slang. Hence to anyone who knows much about her it is reasonably certain that she would only have called a can Kubla if someone she cared for had recently written a poem on the subject. And yet this very impercipience is what allows Empson to see so clearly that the scholar stands guilty of Orientalism as charged. There was recently an article in PMLA about the colonialist discourse of Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” which one can find quite sufficiently anticipated by a few—presumably early— brisk remarks in Empson: And one must remember, even at the time, not merely the cat (Persian) but the tub (Chinese) and the fish (Pacific) were all painfully expensive and high life. Well might the Tyrian purple be called upon, and the gods of the learned; it is a very snob little poem.9 But on this earlier occasion Empson gauges the Orientalism of his subject as a corollary of its anti-feminism (ibid.: “this is a joke about women: the same, the too modish, joke about women”), and not, as in the later instance, at the expense of an insensitivity to an Other— woman’s—Mind. In this contrast there is an emblem, then, of the difference between a pluralism in which other minds and other worlds are alike independent and the residual versatility of viewpoint in the 124

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later period when other worlds have become, if anything, an escape from other minds. His sympathetic discrimination of outlooks, when active, was indeed remarkable. In the last chapter I mentioned the amazing breadth of tolerance in his attitude, in 1940, toward Madame Chiang. Even more amazing is a propaganda piece for The Listener (1 Jan. 1942, p. 9), at the height of the war, on “How a Japanese Student Thinks.” It is about a class of Empson’s, conscripted to fight the Chinese, which always thought in lockstep (“We think that…,” one or another student would say) and which darkly suspected a political impropriety in being asked to write about “irony” in Mrs Dalloway; and of course, as the occasion demands, the tale is a cautionary one. Yet even here there is a fondness, a capacity to be charmed and forgiving, which Empson was never able to reserve for what he hated in the West after the war— largely, I think, because he came to feel that his own penchant for discrimination (still visible in the ensuing passage) had completely atrophied in the world around him: unable to see, he says for example, that Webster was a forerunner of Monk Lewis and Ann Radcliffe in being “sensational” about “the wickedness of Roman Catholic Southern Europeans,” Neo-Christian critics “have to pretend that everybody has always been an Anglo-Catholic.”10 “And I a twister love what I abhor,” he wrote of the Japanese in a poem from the period described in the Listener article (“The Beautiful Train,” Collected Poems, p. 64): “So firm, so burdened, on such light gay feet.” This makes his accommodation to other minds almost too easy, he seems to say, and his lack of principle spineless. Certainly in any case it is not common to humanity, but places Empson in the rare position of Keats’s Chameleon Poet (the Man of Genius) admiring the strong definite personality of anyone who holds practical views (the Man of Power) or is simply the embodiment of unembarrassed desire (Keats’s “infant in its cradle”). What is common to humanity, rather, is partisanship itself—as Romantic subjectivity was the first to reveal (again, Empson here follows Herbert Read) in proving its very infantilism to be constitutive of fashion, of a Zeitgeist, a revolutionary universality. Before The True Voice of Feeling appeared, Empson conceived this as a “pastoral” idea, with figures like Marvell’s mower (“I am the Mower Damon, known/Through all the Meadows I have mown”: quoted in Pastoral, p. 128) confronting each other in the mutuality of their exuberant egoism, hence mirroring each other’s partiality and thereby creating the double plot we might now call “cultural criticism.” 125

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The empathy of the “twister” is not, Empson writes defensively (this line had drawn the attention of his critics), a matter of disinterested human connoisseurship. If we are to solve the “Problem of Belief” disputed by Eliot and Richards (can I admire, or even understand, a poem expressing a doctrine I do not accept?), it will not be by preserving exotic viewpoints in amber: encountering “beliefs which we don’t hold,” we do not “separate them from their consequences,” but “imagine some other person who holds them, an author or a character, and thus get a kind of experience of what their consequences (for a given sort of person) really are” (Complex Words, p. 9). In deliberately naïve defiance of a central problem of modern philosophy (especially in Wittgenstein—though Empson may have encountered the problem in G.E.Moore), the immense difficulty of imagining another consciousness even as existent, let alone as reflecting, Empson specializes in the vivid and circumstantial reconstruction of alien thought processes. This is the essence of his work, of the “verbal criticism” as well as “using biography.” He is so confident in his powers of divination that he “moves,” one critic has exclaimed, “from possibility to probability to certainty with a shameless ease that would horrify the professional biographer.”11 Not quite: in his defense, he is never certain, at least not of his own hypotheses (his rivals he does always consider fairly vanquished, though), and I would hope no one assumes that the professional biographer, whether horrified or (as is more likely) gently patronizing, has nothing to learn from him. I borrowed the word “divination” above specifically from Schleiermacher, who held that interpretation is half philology and half divination, in order to suggest that Empson supplies a real deficiency in most professional biographers. We only grow impatient with him (as on the two comparable occasions we have noted in the 1930s) when he pulls a long face and plays his own critic (here rejecting an undoubtedly silly circumstantial argument that Hamlet was written in 1588–9): “really there is so much complaisance about conjecture in this field that competent men are encouraged to waste their time.”12 Well, come, now (as Empson would say) —and perhaps he might not have sniffed at Dover Wilson’s “mountain of conjecture” about Falstaff either (Shakespeare, p. 32). Certainly his biographical sallies are wild enough, especially the late ones, in which, having become less patient with minds unlike his own, he was tempted to make his subjects over in his own image. But who can regret the incredible fantasy about Donne at a country house altering a line in “To His Mistress on Going to Bed” to read “Here is 126

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no penance, much less innocence” (as it stands in the Gardner edition) in order to make the poem suitable for reading aloud as salacious but prudently disapproving pornography to the gentlemen in their cups after dinner?13 Or his last great flight: Marlowe believed in Middle Spirits; there are no Middle Spirits in Doctor Faustus (unless we prove, as Empson strains to do, that “Meph” is himself one); therefore, there is a lost manuscript of Doctor Faustus, and this is what it contains…. It comes as no surprise to be introduced by Christopher Ricks to lines in blank verse actually supplied by Empson to fill a gap of this kind in the play (“I have written a bit more for the chorus introducing Act II”).14 Empson strains hard to think within the minds of the characters in his drama as the evidence presents them, and the denial that there is insight in this work has often been spitefully territorial, as one might expect. Yet it is true, as he always cheerfully admits, that he generally lets existing research, spot-checked at random, suffice for evidence— and that this research has usually been carried out by the very scholar whose case he means to discredit. His usual line, “I don’t doubt your facts, I only doubt your ability to make sense of them,” proves valid as often as not, it should be admitted, but in Empson’s later career it becomes a considerably more naïve position than the Kuhnian paradigm (presupposition constitutes facts) with which I implicitly compared it in chapter 3. Despite the keenness of his eye for the daily abuses of the claim to objectivity (and for the human and collegial harm that comes of positivistic arrogance), the later Empson at divination was a hermeneutic optimist, and never entertained any doubts in theory about the scientific method and its veridical goals in scholarship, however casual his own use of it may have been. But again, certainly there are limits (never, I think, wilfully drawn ones) to his own negative capability even within the boundary of his research. Suspiciously recurrent scenarios get reconstructed, magnetizing circumstances into a pattern with all the power of myth. “[I]t is a scene from Dickens,” he says of a moment of legal farce in “The Marriage of Marvell” (Biography, p. 61), but the truth is that the whole essay is a Dickens story, with Marvell’s housekeeper and secret spouse (as Empson insists) a wonderfully vivid creation and not at all an implausible one (I think Empson wins his argument, in a close decision, against Fred C.Tupper, he of Dickensian name who “disproved” the marriage in 1939), except that she is after all nothing but a few tatters of legal parchment galvanized into eternal life by the spirit of Mrs Gamp. Tupper thinks she stole the volume of the register in which her marriage would not have been found recorded (it was not stolen but almost certainly lost, Empson for once took the trouble 127

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to discover by inquiry, but if it had been stolen it is much more likely that someone else would have taken it, during the legal wrangle, to avoid revealing that it was recorded); and here Empson gives his technique away by suddenly imagining Tupper’s version of “Mrs. Palmer” even more comically than he imagines his own: “Tupper is very arch about it. Taking care to avoid assertion, he insinuates that the housekeeper herself carried the massy tome out of the church, using her other arm to scatter bribes among the vergers” (ibid., p. 66). “It is fair to remember that 1939 was the high summer of the detective story,” writes Empson archly (ibid., p. 67), and for us it is fair to remember that J.I.M.Stewart, who is still writing them in the 1939 manner, could not better “The Marriage of Marvell.” (I would say that any biographical sketch by Empson is more authentically sleuthlike than Josephine Tey’s celebrated The Daughter of Time, rehabilitating the Richard III besmirched by More and Shakespeare, which is based on information, very possibly false information, which anyone can find in the open stacks.) Such dramas as these frequently turn on situations that belong pretty clearly to an ur-plot. Repeatedly, for instance, we find the quasierotic patronage of a young man by an older one. With Shakespeare’s W.H., Empson was of course merely taking his turn at a parlor game (his candidate was Southampton), extending the sonnet situation however to the relationship of Falstaff and Hal; but he reconstructs this relationship more controversially in two other cases, divining an attachment on Marvell’s part to Mrs Palmer’s son Tom (and to a real mower at Appleton House: see Biography, p. 14), which he supposes to have inspired the greasy lines on the martyrdom of the young Douglas in “Last Instructions to a Painter,” and a comparable fascination on Dryden’s part with the young Deist Charles Blount. In a third case, struck by the attitude of Bloom to Stephen, Empson at one stage (he modified the idea after reading Ellmann’s biography)15 inferred a comparable attachment of Joyce to an older man who reinvigorated his sense of purpose by offering him his wife. (Empson is fascinated, as he claims Joyce was, by the idea that the perfect friendship between men can be sealed on the body of a woman.) And of course, speaking of Stephen, the Essays on Shakespeare in many places strikingly resemble the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter in Ulysses. But with all this said, the advantages of Empson’s biographical technique are very great, and I think they have been much undervalued, owing to the condescension of the professional biographers and the literary Formalists alike, and—most recently—to the Foucauldian dissolution of the self as an agent, a triple alliance 128

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which has never produced agreement on anything else and which comprises, after all, very nearly the whole of Empson’s readership. I shall confine myself to two examples in Empson’s defense, the first of them the best interpretation we have of the crux which concludes the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: It seems clear that we have to imagine what went on in the mind of Keats, as he wondered what the pot can have meant— we, it is understood, being those who have lost our innocence by reading the contradictory babble of the critics. Nor need this be done with a tacit contempt, as for a man puzzling over questions which are soluble; and here I think the comparison to a drama is relevant; if Keats’ life were an imaginary one in a play, and these phrases were put into his mouth, nobody would complain about the aphorism or find it anything but an impressive tragic (Complex Words, p. 371)16 There is perhaps nothing remarkable at first sight, or even fully distinguishable from other readings, in the ensuing paraphrase, rather banal as Empsonian paraphrase goes (“The beauty of the pot presumably tells truth so far as it is a sound guide to the poet, and what it tells him is how to digest his sufferings and turn them into beauty”: ibid., p. 372), which is so situated in Complex Words as to show that “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” is not a fusion metaphor but a mutual metaphor obliging the reader to repeat the poet’s thought process, learning by this means that beauty and truth are unlike but are mutually beneficial nonetheless in lending each other a kind of therapeutic utility they would both otherwise lack. Yet what Empson accomplishes here is a minor miracle to anyone who has read the small library of commentaries on this poem written before and after 1951. He rescues the lines from philology (which gets lost wondering which text gives the right punctuation, hence has no idea what the lines mean), from Formalism (which refuses to consider what sort of meditation a suffering poet might attempt to prove restorative by example, hence quite rightly declares the lines on intrinsic grounds to be philosophically callow), and, in advance, from “culture studies” inscribing itself on the corpse of the author (and finding that the lines are the discourse of a frivolous cultural elite asserting its hegemony through the voice of a “Cockney” aspirant to its privileges). With all these obstacles removed, we are left with the amazed feeling (after reading “the babble of the critics”) that Empson’s reading, which was 129

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not after all so very far to seek, is almost certainly the correct one. The biography he “uses” is of the simplest. Keats in May 1819, with Tom recently dead, his own sore throat waxing and waning, and Fanny Brawne tormenting his imagination, was not likely to care overmuch about the presumed advantages of being an elitist aesthete. Cowper’s “The Castaway” is not well known today, and it will be difficult to explain in small compass why Empson’s reading of the poem is so impressive. Here his task is to show why a poem seemingly much in the shadow of the “formal patriotic ode”17 and other set pieces, has a “riddling” quality which keeps unsettling its firmness of outline even after we realize it is meant to dramatize the poet’s morbid certainty of damnation. Empson is able to show, first that there are indeed cruces in what seems transparent (this is the “verbal analysis”), and then that the cruces can be solved by an appeal to biography and only that way. Noting the strange rhythmic emphasis on the femininity of the ship, conventional in itself but reinforced in the lines “he lov’d them both, but both in vain,/Nor him [the captain] beheld, nor her again,” he says “Cowper is thinking about one of his own failures to marry, presumably.” That does solve what an ear for nuance will indeed have found to be a problem. Again, Empson finds a strangeness in the emphasis on a unit of time, strange both in exactness and in brevity, in “He long survives, who lives an hour/In ocean, self-upheld,” especially in that Cowper’s first bout of madness had been years earlier and he could not know at the time of writing that he was in the last year of his life. Empson’s solution to this slight but ineffacable hint of a riddle is elegant, complex in this instance (it is reminiscent of his well-known reading of Arthur Waley’s translation, “Swiftly the years, beyond recall./Solemn the stillness of this spring morning,” in Seven Types, pp. 23–4), and wholly convincing: “He had quite clearly in his mind that he was now just short of seventy years, and that’s given as the days of a man’s life in the Psalms; and it’s been a regular poetical paradox, that this three score years and ten is in one way very long to suffer in, but in another way very short to enjoy” (Argufying, p. 292). I am not sure the snail-like pace of our fleeting life has ever been more arrestingly realized than in this collaborative statement by Cowper, with his hour-long struggle to stay afloat in the ocean, and Empson. Empson’s faith in the presence of other minds is justified very simply: it takes one to have one. “Among the first things a baby has to learn, and if it can’t it’s mad, is that other people really exist; if it couldn’t feel ‘Mum’s cross’ and so forth before it learned to speak, then it couldn’t learn to speak.”18 This is not certain, actually, even 130

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though speechlessness in extreme cases of autism would seem to bear Empson out. Any theory founding speech in desire (viewing the human species’ coming to consciousness as the evolution of radical individuation) rather than communication (viewing the coming to consciousness as a facilitation of social development) would rank the criteria which enable speech a little differently. It may have required a Christian critic (Denis Donoghue) to point out that Empson’s view is possibly symptomatic of an underlying loneliness, a fear that speech merely names desire in a void, which is repressed by the overdetermination of speech as conversation. Donoghue finds this crisis reflected in the most relaxed thing about Empson, his conversational tone: “I am describing a situation in which the speaker suspects that he is talking into a void and keeps the talk going in the hopes of conjuring a companion into existence,” with prayer given as an extreme instance of not expecting an answer; hence “faith takes the place of the hope-against-hope I’ve been considering in Empson and Richards.”19 Empson, whose work is alive with pub conversations, exchanges with students, and colleagues’ responses to his queries, assuredly does strike the reader as a man by whom companionship is as desperately sought as it was by Dr Johnson, and this can be assigned as one of his motives in insisting with Wordsworth, as Paul Alpers says, that a poet is “a man speaking to men,”20 the emphasis on the masculine in this case being perhaps not wholly incidental to common usage. Arguably then it is not too much as individuals, as solipsists in isolation, that Empson presents other minds as individuals. It is not, that is, that he wants to think of them as originals or inimitable eccentrics; at least that is not what he wants to emphasize. He wants to insist that what they think, whatever it may be, however banal, is directed outward from within, hence cannot be accounted for by the “behaviourist” —a label he justifiably pastes on the American New Critics, who judge mentality as an unreliable inference from the thought embodied in and inseparable from the verbal record: “it is enough to refute the behaviourist, on this issue, if he admits that we can make anybody into a personal acquaintance; that we can ever get any ‘insight’ into another’s feelings” (Complex Words, p. 271). The position of Wimsatt and Beardsley is only coherent, in other words (understood as Empson understands it), if they refuse to judge the motives of their closest friends—of each other, for example, while collaborating on “The Intentional Fallacy.” Still and all, now that the “self” has been so thoroughly dismembered by current theory, there seems no way to avoid dating Empson by repeating that for him the 131

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individual remains the key unit of analysis; viewed minimally as a discrete entity with autonomy and volition the individual remains the vehicle of Empson’s pluralism and his main defense against the “metaphysical tricks” of symbolic identification. Thus he is alert to the implications of “ideology” in Raymond Williams’s Keywords: “Part of the gloom, I think, comes from a theory which makes our minds feebler than they are—than they have to be, if they are to go through their usual performance with language.”21 In other words, even our weakest commonplaces involve more choice, more idiolectical shaping, than any sort of argument from “verbal fictions” like “‘the spirit of the age’” (see Complex Words, p. 423) gives them credit for. “I suspect there is an unwary reverence for ‘history’ going on,” Empson wrote while reviewing a book of miscellaneous critical essays, “an idea that, at any given date, everybody in England had the same opinion.”22 “[V]iz., the official or fashionable one,” he goes on (ibid.), but it would have made no difference in theory had he been criticizing the new historicism, which finds everyone at a given date thinking subversively in just the same way. The vanity of unwary historicism (which the new historicism in this regard identifies precisely as the old historicism23) is its objectification of what it cultivates: “‘I have placed him; I am an individual and he is a type’” (Complex Words, p. 85). Empson had witnessed a good deal of this sort of typification in Shakespeare critics like E.E.Stoll and L.L.Schucking, who were not at all unwary, in fact (Empson knows there is intellectual cachet in the “profound theory that all characters ought to be undeveloped”24), but very self-consciously indebted to the fiercest of all judges of the true-to-type, the Restoration critic Thomas Rymer; and he criticized “the view [mainly of Professor Schucking] that what a character in an Elizabethan play says about himself ought to be accepted flatly, without wondering why he says it, because it is a ‘convention’” (ibid., p. 238). “Iago calls his own behaviour knavery,” he continues sardonically, “and a real person who did that would be a cynic, but Iago is not a cynic, only a conventional villain” (ibid.). Here again Empson seems exactly half right. Characters do step forward and say—out of character—I am the villain or the vice, as if to make up for not wearing signboards, and it is pointless to say they do not, or that Iago in any case should be given a different kind of hearing when he does; yet we feel, contrary to Stoll and Schucking, that Iago really is different, that it is his attitude toward the moral background of the convention itself which is cynical even as he participates in it; and since in that case he would think us naïve to greet his self-indictment with solemn horror 132

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(why should it disturb anyone that he is a knave?), he is indeed cynical, and we end by agreeing with Empson, but on slightly more convention-oriented grounds. Empson’s skirmishes with Tuve and others had set his teeth against convention, as against the study of literary borrowing; he tolerates the use of convention just insofar as it hypostasizes what remains, in a given instance, an immediately applicable facet of reality: “What is needed is for the student to think: ‘What kind of reality, or natural truth, does the remote convention we have now to consider enshrine?’”25 But I am not sure this concession to the enemy justifies Alpers in saying that in Pastoral Empson lays stress on conventions “which are larger than the writer himself”— except insofar as all would agree that these are obviously unavoidable in any genre.26 Roger Sale points out that Empson came into his own during a period of philological consolidation which produced the founding texts of modern “intellectual history,” or history of standard ideas, like those of Arthur Lovejoy and Empson’s Cambridge contemporaries Basil Willey and E.M.W.Tillyard; and he sees Complex Words, with its evermore subtle elaborations of context and its respect for “chief meanings,” as a reaction to all this.27 It is indeed, I agree; yet it is important that we see something of a Lovejoy or a Tillyard in Empson himself. Never the elaborator of an ironclad World Picture or Chain of Being, Empson nonetheless does see the coherence of the individual as a coherence of outlook, a body of opinions grounded in reading and contemporary experience, and all he wants to say against the chroniclers of world views is that they too readily suppress all conflicting views. “The basis of the theory [of Middle Spirits] is a philosophical one,” he writes in Faustus, “It is the principle of Plenitude, which caused the Great Chain of Being” (p. 99), and although the editor cites Tillyard and Lovejoy in a footnote at this point, it is doubtful that Empson would have done so. His choice of words rather than sentences in Complex Words is motivated by this sense of plenitude, by a vision of the happy atomistic overcrowding of ideas in any healthy period which cannot be subdued by generalization and is best reflected at “the point at which statistics break down, in face of individual forces that must be at work behind single words.”28 Words, though, as we have seen, can become too discrete; that is the countervailing risk Empson runs in making them his focus. Having once established the integrity of the individual, he must then have available a principle of continuity for the gradation and interconnection of differences, and it is interesting to witness a 133

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principle of this kind at work even among words: “jammed stress,” he writes in a 1960 letter to The Times Literary Supplement, or the virtual elision of syllables notable in the spoken word (especially in the Oxbridge spoken word), is the overlooked principle which ought to govern the scansion of English verse.29 He elaborates the point in the following year, giving as his example the slurring of a line which, interestingly, he had slurred semantically in Seven Types, thus doing now for varied stress what he had done for polysemousness thirty years before: BEARRU ined-choirs where-late the sweet birds sang.30 Needless to say in Empson’s case, scansion and meaning are themselves continuous, and the jammed stress here brings out the “emotive” subtext (whereas the didum-didum iambic reading is “prosy”): “‘Why, but I can’t be friends with an exciting young lord, like you; I’m a shambling old man, with no teeth’” (ibid.). From this point of scansion we can take an emblem of Empson’s preferred configuration of diversity, which I shall call, not by chance alluding to Lovejoy, a chain of being, plural and richly diverse, yet contiguously “jammed.” The kind of intellectual excitement Empson likes best, optimally on display in the Renaissance, is the ferment which arises at the meeting-place of an emergent and paradigmatically unstable science with magic and folklore: “for any study of nature, at the start of the sciences, it was essential to be allowed a belief in spirits who were neutral” (Faustus, p. 100). In modern science the category of magic is replaced by speculation, but the points of interest remain the same, as the very titles of the books which influenced Empson make clear: Possible Worlds (Haldane), The Universe Around Us (Jeans), Space Time and Gravitation and The Nature of the Physical World (Eddington). The reason for this love of the heterocosmic is a deeply personal one, a need to witness a merger between materiality (the scientific realm of matter, bodily existence, the pleasures of sense) and the hypothesis of pervasive spirit (animism) which ensures that there are no ontological leaps, no gaping abysses between states of being, especially between the state of being alive and the state of being dead. I speak quite deliberately as though this were a matter of personal credence, even though Empson is usually careful to maintain an avuncular detachment from his historical exhibits—to grant cheerfully, for instance, that Donne “believed too much.” Within the “history of ideas” (and Empson does not doubt that this creature of his generation was worth nurturing), there are plainly 134

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currents of thought which are so prominent in his work and handled with such fascination that we cannot dismiss them as simple reminders that it takes all kinds or that other minds exist. I do not say that he “believed in” Middle Spirits any more than he “believed in” Buddhism; the vocabulary of belief and disbelief is much too crude for the purpose, which is to describe his enthusiasm for all ideas tending to show that “the world is glorious beyond all telling, and far too good for any of us” (because no one person can comprehend the scope and scale of its animation), and his enmity toward any hint of contemptus mundi. “Donne the Space Man” may have felt contempt for this world because it was priest-ridden, but the “world” for him, especially as Empson reads him, is b oth smaller, “a little world made cunningly,” and larger, the Copernican universe of “spheres”; and he saw the chance for escape in the emergence, in his day, of two related spurs to the imagination: global exploration, discovering “other worlds,” and the new astronomy, holding out the possibility of many more. 31 Escape to these distinct, individual places offered a haven to those who were themselves too individual to be browbeaten into orthodoxy: “The pair of lovers at odds with their own society are presented as living on a new planet, like Adam and Eve.” 32 “Melancthon, as soon as Copernicus published, had denounced him for implying an argument against Christianity,” this passage continues: “‘Does Jesus Christ get crucified on each of the planets in turn? Or is the Father totally unjust to Martians?’” Multiple Atonements make for such obviously farcical theology that it softens the sting of moral horror Empson finds in the single one. (In Pastoral, not surprisingly, the redoubling of incarnations is still seen as an appealing variant of the potent Frazer formula: see p. 75.) 33 This dissemination of the savior principle is visible in several heresies, all equally attractive to Empson: there is the idea of the same savior going to be crucified on each planet in turn, in various guises, thus re-incarnated almost in Buddhist fashion (ibid.); there is also the idea that each planet produces its own savior (the fun of this is its parody element, making a mystery mechanical or formulaic). And then there is the idea promoted by the “Family of Love” in Donne’s time, which “believed that any man might become Christ, because Christ is the name of a function and a state of being, rare but ‘begotten before all worlds.’”34 This last notion is closest to Empson, in part because it can be interpreted in so many ways; it has a Plotinian cast which is reassuring to anyone who is only capable of 135

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being soothed metaphysically by a chain of being (the residually dualistic—Platonic—idealism of the conception would be less appealing, though Empson would probably have admired it in a poem like Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character”), but there is also an element of self-help in it, replacing vicarious help, in which a sturdy Benthamism can actually be discerned, finding the greatest good of the greatest number in the greatest good of each individual. Empson claims to find the idea surviving in Dylan Thomas as a rationalization of egoism: “he tends to present himself as the representative of mankind, but merely because any man would do as a specimen. Donne does the same thing.”35 Most attractive of all among the heresies of Donne’s love poems as Empson reads them is the idea of human flight itself (and “Marlowe,” too, “is always enthusiastic about soaring”: Faustus, p. 180). Mental flight and the erotic “flight” of bodies are never transcendental but focus, rather, the space adventure of movement among worlds, as in the most Donne-like of Empson’s poems: No, it is we soaring explore galaxies, Our bullet boat light’s speed by thousands flies. Who moves so among stars their frame unties; See where they blur, and die, and are outsoared. (“Camping Out,” Collected Poems, p. 18) There is always the seeming paradox in Empson that to fly is to penetrate substance more deeply, and this notion is what lends precision to the well-known description of Complex Words in Empson’s response to Geoffrey Strickland: I think it is wonderful; I think it goes up like a great aeroplane. A certain amount of noisy taxi-ing round the field at the start may be admitted, and the landing at the end is bumpy though I think without causing damage; but the power of the thing and the view during its flight I consider magnificent…. When it was done I felt Nunc Dimittis; I was free, I was ready to die. I was to fly with the text from Peking to Ohio, where some final checking in libraries might well be done, and it was reasonable to leave in Peking a fully corrected spare text in case of accident.36 In the first place, the book flies, not Empson (“it goes up,” “its flight”), but it maintains contacts of all sorts with the ground, first through the excellent quiet wordplay of “field,” then in the bumpy 136

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landing (the solid, specifically dense materials on ethics and linguistics making the landing “hard,” one might say), and then above all because it is flying not to escape or transcend but to gain a richer and broader view of the world, which is glorious beyond all telling. Then in the second place, Empson flies, not the book, a copy of which he leaves, almost in full perfection, on the ground. The range of his flight, from the exotic (Peking) to the prosaic (Ohio: this is just the encyclo-pedic itinerary of the copy which still flies with him, both in subject matter and in geography, Peking representing the cosmopolitan and political scope of his effort, Gambier his in-fighting with the New Critics), stations a text at each end of the parabola, one in a far-flung world, the other present to the close-up texture of complex words in a library. The way up, then, is the way down, in what is perhaps Empson’s most striking revision of a traditional symbol: we fly above material objects to know them better, to get them into clear focus, and also to avail ourselves of vertical transportation upwards and down-wards along Empson’s chain of being—which is all present, as we shall see, in his description of “Stephen’s ecstasy” in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: “here he has a vision of earthly beauty, and I suspect of progress too (the angel seems to be flying one of the new aeroplanes)” (Biography, p. 208). The word “progress” here will serve to remind us that the chain of Plotinus is a kind of ontogeny (our intermediate being is drawn downward to stones and upward to angels) recapitu-lated by the philogeny of Darwinian evolution. The angel and the airplane bridge this connection as a magical and a scientific horizon, respectively, for human perfectibility. From bottom to top, the links of the chain are arranged as follows. The elements of sheer somatic matter, such as atoms and stones, may be imbued with a trace of spirit. Empson enthusiastically greeted the appearance in 1963 of a book by H.W.Piper, The Active Universe, arguing that the Romantics, especially Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, were sincere believers in the doctrine of animism, “‘[t]he belief that inanimate matter is in a literal sense alive’”: The doctrine that Nature is a spirit peopled by spirits was a return to the science of the Renaissance, which made real discoveries by using it…. The mysterious beings who crowd the “Ancient Mariner” are the same as the elegant personifications of Electricity and suchlike in Erasmus Darwin.37 A constant in Empson’s historiography is the belief that science at all stages of development (except perhaps the grim, Huxleyan nineteenth 137

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century with its denomination of selfhood as “a pile of billiard balls”) has been able to accommodate some form of animism. The “metaphysics of modern science,” to cite the title of a book he reviewed in 1930, remains as persistently as ever in a muddle about determinism and freedom in the organic world, so much so that “the sceptical biologist” (Joseph Needham in this case) simply waives the question, leaving speculation free to roam: “All things are alike determined, all things are alike free.”38 Spirits, on the other hand, are a subtle matter, as in Lucretius. Hence the sexual interpenetration of the angels in Milton, the feeling that “the sex life of the spirits” must be an important topic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the appropriateness, in staging the same play, for the “exploring fingers” of Bottom to find out whether Titania is “solid enough for the purpose” (Shakespeare, p. 230). Luther, Calvin, and the Counter-Reformation agreed in making intermediary, anthropomorphic spirits of this kind a heretical topic (see ibid., p. 224, and Faustus, passim), but the Lucretian doctrine of the material tincture of spirits, which modern anthropologists like Lévy-Bruhl consider a “primitive” belief, was not even heretical in the Renaissance, but was “still respectable for Donne to expound in sermons” (Complex Words, p. 384), as in the passage cited in Pastoral: “‘The spirits…are the thin and active part of the blood, and are of a kind of middle nature, between soul and body’” (p. 133). Although I would say that Donne seems at least in this late passage to have exempted the soul from the tincture the Greek had found even there (psuche, the seat of the passions), Empson seems not to have noticed this exemption, and evidently feels that Donne here agrees with the Marvell who believes, in “The Garden,” that “the soul is as solid as the green thought,” hence flies into the tree like a bird (ibid., p. 127; see Biography, p. 9). This sort of “jammed stress” between body and spirit has various implications for human consciousness. It allows for paranormal phenomena without seeming wholly unscientific: Geoffrey Gorer’s enthusiasm for “M.E.,” the mental or mystical energy gained through meditation in Balinese culture, should not be taken lightly; 39 and Empson reviewing a book called Confessions of a Ghosthunter seems an even stronger believer in ghosts, especially poltergeists, than the author, Harry Price.40 It also makes Empson sensitive to the variety of hermetic traditions concerning magic; he is alert to the distinction, for example, between spirit magic and the cabbalistic notion of “earth magic” in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (“‘I tell thee, German, magic haunts the ground’”), from which he 138

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concludes, following Denis Saurat in thinking this “the essential novelty of the Renaissance”: “Matter is not evil and made from nothing but part of God from which God willingly removed his will; one can therefore put more trust in the flesh, the sciences, the natural man, and so on” (Pastoral, p. 33).41 The most important advantage in the intermingling of body and spirit is the possibility of reducing traditional contrasts between life and death almost to nil. As usual, Empson’s authors were there before him: putting Satan’s attitude toward Adam and Eve in the best possible light, he admits that Satan said “he must bring upon them ‘death’ and ‘long woes,’” but hastens to add that “in Milton’s world death is a very subtle or almost meaningless term” (Milton’s God, p. 68). We hear of him teaching his Japanese students that when Gray says “Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires,” he means that the ashes are animate.42 He thinks it not unreasonable that Nature in The Epic of Gilgamesh would mourn Enkidu and perhaps even mediate to restore his life: “a man, we know, cannot call his brother from death by ‘stretching it out’, but in this case Nature might be able to. It is sensible [for Gilgamesh] to invoke her.”43 Not only is the spatial, instantaneous linkage of matter and spirit reassuring, but the temporal oscillation between the body and disembodiment in reincarnation is equally so; critics dismiss the doctrine in Yeats as “pokey and lowermiddle-class,” but it ought to be respected: “it is less unjust and narrow than Christian immortality, and more ancient, and still believed by the majority of the inhabitants of the Eurasian land mass.”44 In Empson’s poem, “Ignorance of Death,” it seems plain that what he is actually hoping for is a condition similar to the twilit state of animated atoms or substantial spirits in the blood, a nirvana endowed with just enough consciousness to be happy in the release from all the perturbations, all the literary themes, whose transience it conditions: Because we have neither hereditary nor direct knowledge of death It is the trigger of the literary man’s biggest gun And we are happy to equate it with any conceived calm. (Collected Poems, p. 58) Within the confines of human life, to climb higher, the gradations of being appear—as in Plotinus and in the Renaissance political science still vital in Hobbes—in the ascent from slave to master through the social classes. This we have discussed 139

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elsewhere, with special attention to the way the hero, king, or savior functions by synecdoche as “head” in Pastoral (see above, pp. 96–7). Here we need only add the subtlety and undisguised snobb ery with which Empson observes such g radations— everywhere, really, but especially in an essay on Shakespeare’s narrative poems (see Shakespeare, p. 14) and in a cluster of reviews on the identity of W.H. in the sonnets, all written in the early 1960s. Empson favors the most aristocratic candidate, the Earl of Southampton, but sees the objections from class disparity very clearly nonetheless. Shakespeare himself, he feels, was able to muddy the distinction with sheer bravado and parvenu eagerness: “I expect he did scold the Earl as an equal, because Francis Berry has shown that the confusion between thou and you in the sonnets marks a lasting confusion in his social tone; he can never get clear how intimate he is supposed to be.” 45 This is the way the class system works best for Empson’s ontology (setting his politics apart): there is a rich variety of distinctions on the one hand, which you can only fathom with a Burke’s Peerage, a Domesday Book, and a Guildhall manual open before you, together with a good deal of first-hand experience (the process is very similar to the Faustian stockpiling and deployment of hermetic science), while on the other hand there is no question of caste, of fixed markers that would prevent any individual of sufficient energy from moving up and down—from stone to god and back— along the whole chain of being. Class distinctions can be jumped over or confused, existing mainly to inspire a cosily gradated impression of human being. The human faculties are interwoven and rather indistinct for the same reason. The therapeutic benefit of this muddle, at least from Empson’s point of view, comes out fully in a startling evocation of the conclusion of a Chinese dinner party: Bowls of plain rice are then carried round, and if you start on one it is rude not to finish it (out of reverence for the Staff of Life) but what the incident means is that no more drink will be served. The party then stops abruptly; the old gentlemen are put into rickshaws, or carried to them if necessary, and taken straight home at once. They will wake up in excellent health and temper. How much quarrelling would have been avoided, how much in future would be avoided, if this rational custom could be introduced among ourselves.46 140

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The rice is alive, while the spirits, in a pun that would never be far from Empson’s mind, are cut off. The abruptness of the ending is like a deep anaesthetic, imitating the coming of death to “the old gentlemen” (those who are “put into” the rickshaws seem no more ambulatory than those who are carried), from which they “wake up” rubbing their eyes as in a science fiction movie (“Where am I?”), reincarnated and with no hangover from their previous life. For this purification to work, there seems to be a need for a chiasmus attaching body-sentiment to spirit and spirit-sentiment to the body (as in the inversion of matter and spirit in rice and drink). In “Donne the Space Man,” Empson achieves this effect rather impressively through the simple inversion of commonplaces associated with sex and virginity: Donne, upon the sexual conquest of Elegy XIX, “feels proud, he feels liberated, he feels purified (the effects of unsatisfied desire excite disgust, so that release from them can excite a keen sense of purity)” (p. 363). Empson’s expression, “unsatisfied desire,” may allude to Blake, who might well be brought in to reinforce these paradoxes. He continues (ibid.): “What have any of these feelings to do with ‘materialism’? What can be meant by calling the pleasure ‘merely physical’”? No answer is intended, or deemed possible, as the muddling of terms in such cases shows the irrelevance of the usual dualities to the occasion. Even more pervasively than words like “sense”, as Wordsworth uses it, the word “feeling” forms a bridge between body and spirit, mixing the faculties together. Borrowing Eliot’s somewhat mysterious delimitation of the term in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Empson in Complex Words says that in order to avoid the semantic emptiness of an emotive language theory you need “to give symbols of their own to some elements often called ‘feelings’ in a word, which are not Emotions or even necessarily connected with emotions” (p. 15). The common synonymity of emotion and feeling is here dissolved, as in Eliot, to reserve for the unified sensibility the trick of experiencing thought with sensuous vividness. “Feeling,” together with “sense” and “sensation” in Wordsworth, is “concerned with both knowledge and emotion” (ibid., p. 301); but the prominent example of Wordsworth itself shows that while Empson agrees with Eliot’s faculty psychology he does not confine it to a remote epoch, seeing it rather to be a continuous feature not only of literature but of ordinary language use. As in the class system and in the orders of being in nature, the faculties in being thus nearly merged are also more subtly differentiated than is common; hence they actually proliferate, as in the “new ‘sense’” which appears at times in The Prelude (“‘an obscure 141

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sense/Of possible sublimity,”’ “‘a sense/By which he is enabled to perceive/ Something unseen before’”: ibid., pp. 290, 292). This identification of a sixth sense, a tertium quid if there ever was one, makes me wonder why, at the last moment in “Sense in the Prelude,” Empson reverts to the carping of Seven Types about “equations” in Wordsworth making a claim which “was false, because they did not really erect a third concept as they pretended to” (ibid., p. 305). This is apparently the tough-mindedness of the early arch-rationalist very belatedly dragged in for protective coloring against the anti-Romantic sentiment then still widespread. Rising yet higher, we come then to angels, local spirits, demigods, and the like, anything but God plain and absolute, although the purpose of the gradation is to get as close as possible to that state without actually arriving at it: “The angels feel that their act of love, being a unification of only two divine natures, is a step away from making ‘one individual soul’ with God” (Milton’s God, p. 107). Thus Milton chose Bacchus during his comparison of Eden with classical paradises (“not that fair field/Of Enna”) because “[h]e wanted a mixed notion for a demigod of the glory and fertility of the earth, because of his pagan feelings about Paradise, and yet for a sky-god” (Pastoral, p. 174). The longest vertical stretch uniting earth and god takes us back to the inspiriting of the mineral, which can appear as the genius loci. The invocation of such beings is a sign of happy unorthodoxy, “a slip often corrected in later editions” by Wordsworth, for example (Pastoral, p. 188). The sex (and gender) of angels in Milton is an enticing issue at all times, and allows Empson at least one good joke in response to God’s offer of the day off (“‘Meanwhile inhabit lax, ye powers of Heav’n’”): “They need not watch him creating the world, which they are expected to resent, but can go off for some cosy interpenetration” (Milton’s God, p. 107). Divine beings betray substance not only in being sexual but in being mortal. “Ceres will decay like the other pagan gods when Christianity comes” (Pastoral, p. 185), Milton of course insists on that; but when God in his turn in Milton’s God is made to abdicate, both becoming and entering a kind of nirvana state, then the defense against the absolute grows absolute. In a conceit from Empson’s poems, the disappearance of gods is conceived as astronomical aging: “Gods cool in turn, by the sun long out-lasted” (“To an Old Lady,” Collected Poems, p. 15). There are also ways of splitting the divine principle at the top of the chain of being so that there is no unique tyrant. One is to feminize authority: “a matrilineal society is likely to ‘dissociate’ the Freudian father into two people [the father 142

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and the mother’s brother], and is, therefore, a wise plan for making the Oedipus-complex less pressing.”47 The other is to give authority a subtly feudal, decentralized cast by addressing it, medieval style, as “the Lord God,” whose very title leads to an odd inversion: “on a Miracle Play wagon even the Lord God had presumably to appear from below” (Shakespeare, p. 195). As I have tried to emphasize, the whole of this vertical order requires mediation between body and spirit; indeed the very existence of this order as a spontaneous machinery in Empson’s mind serves to call the separation of body and spirit, hence of life and death, into question. The chief agents of this mediation, as their name indicates, are the beings I passed over in order to conclude with them, as Empson did in his last literary projects: the Middle Spirits. I have said that Doctor Faustus and the Censor is a meditation on last things, and I will say boldly that I think Empson found Middle Spirits consoling, and inferred from the possibility of their existence the possibility that death may be a middle condition, a radioactive half-life or perhaps— who knows? —an apprenticeship as what he calls, referring to Titania’s attendants in the amazingly dotty “Fairy Flight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a “working fairy” (Shakespeare, p. 226). Middle Spirits, which Empson found either present or censored out of existence in the entire canon which interested him from Marlowe to Yeats, are neither from heaven nor hell but come in many guises because in fact, to suit various orthodoxies, they are disguised as devils (Doctor Faustus); angels (The Ancient Mariner—and Empson suspects they may be the legion of neutral angels Dante mentions at the beginning of the Inferno: see Faustus, p. 88); classical gods or demigods like Helen (see ibid., pp. 104, 116); or, within the conservatism of folklore, as fairies. Identified as Middle Spirits, in the ontologically rich hermetic tradition made available by Frances Yates which Empson wished upon his authors as often as he could, they descend from Hermes Trismegistus to the De Nymphis of Paracelsus (“saying that the Middle Spirits are not spirits at all, as they have bodies”: ibid., p. 104) and the summaries of Cornelius Agrippa (“who names authors who believe that all spirits die”: ibid., p. 101), which were driven underground by officialdom but were still held in Shakespeare’s time, says Empson, in ten of the Cambridge libraries (see ibid., p. 102, and Shakespeare, p. 224). Middle Spirits recuperate “metaphysics,” explaining why Empson never needs to give the term up in discussing Donne. “[W]hat Byron called ‘metaphysics’ [in explaining the 143

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“Wordsworth physic” Shelley had “dosed” him with for the third Canto of Childe Harold]” was “an attempt to revive certain magical beliefs,” 48 and in this guise, with the One made safely plural, the old flame burns brightly for Empson again. Of the heretical animism suppressed in deference to “gentle Sara” in “The Eolian Harp,” Empson writes, “Coleridge had arrived at this position because he needed to believe in a God who was not wicked” (Coleridge’s Verse, p. 19)—who was not the sort of being, that is, whose unique metaphysical status would corrupt absolutely and breed tyranny. At their least personified, even the spirits which “had the names of pagan gods, like Mars or Venus,” evoke yet another pun on “spirits” in propelling the celestial sphere round at a constant speed, so that they may properly be regarded as a high-grade derivative of petroleum suitable to aeroplane engines—the modern pun would be tiresome if it did not come to us directly from the theoretical confusion which Donne was satirizing.49 These “spirits which underlie the operations of Nature” (in Marvell: Biography, p. 7) furnish materials for what becomes a kind of theology by the time of the Romantic doctrines surveyed by Piper, who says “‘the world-soul would be found in each material object.’”50 It is a particularized pantheism animating even death and replete with “local spirits” of the kind featured in Gothic (“the spirit of the moor in Emily Brontë,” Coleridge’s Verse, p. 21) and in elegies like Adonais: “the sunsets in north Italy were much better because Keats had decided to die there.”51 Verging on the opposite extreme of full personhood, there are the fairies. It is not just a convenience for the actors that the “working fairies” in Shakespeare can be tiny and capable of blinding speed when they “control Nature over the whole globe,” then “panting against a tree-trunk, having a short rest at human size” (Shakespeare, p. 225). In Yeats fairies are reported to be unexotic, not what crazed artists see but what ordinary people like farmers “‘have borne witness a thousand times to’” (Empson cites the account of Yeats lecturing in G.K.Chesterton’s Autobiography, Biography, p. 169); and Yeats in Empson’s view never took a worshipful or supplicating view of the spirits he encountered because they were “far too much like people.”52 Finally, in the ultimate approach of spirit to personhood, there is the barely subdued pun on “fairies” which governs even the title of “Natural Magic and Populism in Marvell’s Poetry” (the connection 144

Middle Spirits and Empson’s chain of being

between the former and the latter would not be apparent without the pun, which is never insisted upon) and can still be felt in Empson’s speculation about Marvell’s involvement with Tom Palmer in “The Marriage of Marvell.” Turning from his discussion of substantial spirits in “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House” to the mower poems, Empson says roundly: “I think he fell in love with the Mower” (Biography, p. 14; he is thinking of lines like “‘The Sun himself licks off my Sweat’” in “Damon the Mower”: p. 15). In other words, via the theme of similarity, the resemblance of one fairy to another, Marvell’s mind is shown to move easily from the populous spiritual order to the Whitmanesque “populism” which encourages the brotherhood of man through the longing for erotic union with laborers. The populist fairy is yet another pastoral hero. But Middle Spirits in their most important role, again a pastoral role, are nothing other than the spirit of subversion. Mephistophilis is not really a devil in Doctor Faustus, and it should not be considered surprising that Faustus at the outset knew this perfectly well, just as Satan might well have believed God coeval with himself in Paradise Lost; but massive historical forces were and are ranged against our seeing the cogency of their views. Empson came increasingly to feel that the great plots of the Renaissance are not only censored but are themselves allegories of censorship, of the quashing of rational dissent by an authority too arrogant even to bother proving the legitimacy of its claim; and Middle Spirits in such plots are the energy of Dissent. Where censorship is evaded and an Archbishop hoodwinked into licensing something scandalous, the sublimations of a Christianized Neoplatonism rather than the vitality of animism are brought into play,53 making the licentious seem pious, as in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis in 1593 (see Shakespeare, p. 2). But in these cases the “plots” remain much the same, as Empson frequently implies in stressing that the interests his Renaissance authors take in Cambridge Platonism and in the darker aspects of the hermetic tradition are closely interrelated. The plots themselves, their publishing histories, and the belated— as it were pre-programmed—interpretive censorship of the NeoChristians, all speak the same message: argufying is the most important activity of the rational mind, not in defense of truth against falsehood, if only because truth remains indistinct, but in defense of freedom against tyranny; and the great atheists, from Marlowe to Empson, so far from being mechanist or materialist, had better be called antitheists, alive and speculating among what experience never prevents them from calling elemental spirits.54 It seems doubtful that 145

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there was one Logos, but there may be a million, that is never denied; so Empson may have hoped to become a spirit in the woods, no doubt needling his fellow spirits: “after Punctuality Smith has died, nobody can ever catch a train again” (Shakespeare, p. 6).

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1. Introduction: the scapegoat and the word 1. Empson, “Still the Strange Necessity,” Sewanee Review (1955), Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1987), p. 121. Like many non-Aristotelians, Empson seems still to have admired the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, and he named one of his early poems “Value is an Activity” (Collected Poems, p. 4; and see “The Ideal of the Good,” Argufying, p. 502). 2. Empson, “The Horrors of King Lear” review of R.B.Heilman, This Great Stage, Kenyon Review 11 (1949). He also considered that the tragic flaw— however interpreted—is too readily invoked in inappropriate circumstances (see “Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh,” Journal of General Education (1976), Argufying, p. 511). Even Aristotle gets it wrong, as there is no flaw of either kind in the title character of the Oedipus (see Shakespeare, p. 113). 3. Empson, “Foundations of Despair,” review of Housman’s More Poems, Poetry (1937), Argufying, p. 419. 4. Empson, “Death and its Desires” (1933), Argufying, p. 550. 5. See Burke, “On Catharsis, or Resolution, with a Postscript,” Kenyon Review 21 (1959), pp. 337–75, and “Catharsis—Second View,” Centennial Review of the Arts 5 (1961), pp. 107–32. W.H.Auden, in a book reviewed by Empson, had made the same point in a more neutral spirit, implying that the reading of detective fiction is “a guilty vicarage”; see The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (Vintage Books, New York, 1968), pp. 146–58. That Burke expressly criticized Empson’s emphasis on “‘torture’” in ritual sacrifice marks a moment of self-distancing which makes this parallel all the more striking (see Burke, “Invective Against the Father,” The Nation 16 June 1962, p. 541). Burke’s favorable 1937 review of Pastoral (which he may not have read beyond the first chapter, judging from several wild misstatements about its contents) already faults Empson for “self-indulgence” (“Exceptional Improvisation,” Poetry 49 (March 1937), p. 347). Of the many critics who have stressed the affinity between Empson and Burke, perhaps the first was Marshall (H.M.) McLuhan, in “Poetic vs. Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis Against Richards and Empson,” Sewanee Review 52 (1944), p. 269, a negative but extremely

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clearsighted assessment; and the most influential was Stanley Edgar Hyman in The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948; Vintage, New York, 1955), pp. 266–7. 6. Empson, “Herbert’s Quaintness,” review of T.S.Eliot’s George Herbert, New Statesman (1963), Argufying, p. 257. Empson is only prepared to acknowledge a change of heart when he finds that his early work was itself “Neo-Christian,” as when he says of the reading of Donne’s “Valediction: Of Weeping” in Seven Types that it was too cynical and “made the wrong deduction from the ‘irony’ in the poem” (“Donne the Space Man,” Kenyon Review 19 (1957), p. 373). See also Faustus, p. 162, where he regrets the bittersweet Neo-Christianity of having seen the dying Faustus “‘falling to the devil like a tired child’” in Seven Types. 7. Empson, “Donne in the New Edition,” Critical Quarterly 7–8 (1965–6), p. 259. See also “The Alchemist,” Hudson Review 22 (1969–70), p. 595. Ironically enough, Empson as we shall see had often been criticized for his very lack of convictions, especially in the responses to the poem called “This Last Pain” (Collected Poems, pp. 32–3), which was thought to argue, Empson complained, that “it was like Oscar Wilde saying that you ought to wear a mask and then you’ll grow into your mask” (“William Empson in Conversation with Christopher Ricks,” The Modern Poet: Essays from “The Review”, ed. Ian Hamilton (Macdonald, London, 1968), p. 178). 8. The exception is Jonathan Culler, whose review of Using Biography, “A Critic Against the Christians,” The Times Literary Supplement 23 Nov. 1984, pp. 1327–8, uses the late Empson as a stalking horse against what he takes to be the religious agenda of much contemporary criticism. 9. Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets (Little, Brown, Boston, 1981), p. 75. 10. Graham Hough is evidently so conscious of this that for his contribution to William Empson he devises, with due modesty and appreciation, an eighth type of ambiguity with a “structure special to literature” (p. 94). 11. Quoted in Seven Types, p. xii. The point was still being pursued by F.W. Bateson in the important essay called “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (Essays in Criticism 3 (1953), pp. 3–27) which inspired the dispute with Empson about the “bare ruined choirs” example with which Empson begins his discussion of ambiguity. Empson, cried Bateson in exasperation, “has little or no natural contextual sense!” (Bateson, “‘Bare Ruined Choirs,’” ibid., p. 358.) 12. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer of Pastoral (Nov. 1935, p. 798) singled out just this passage as a sign of Empson’s disingenuousness about selecting meanings. 13. Quoted by Haffenden, “Introduction,” Argufying, p. 13. 14. Empson, review of V. de S.Pinto’s edition of Rochester, New Statesman and Nation (1953), Argufying, p. 276. 15. See Olson, “William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction,” in Critics and Criticism, ed. R.S.Crane (Phoenix Books, Chicago, 1957), esp. p. 34. But the linguists can make the same mistake. Thus Roger Fowler and Peter Mercer insist that “the central insight [of Seven Types] is that the language of poetry is language” (“Critique of the Language of Literature: Some Traditions and Trends in Great Britain,” Style 3 (1969), p. 58).

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16. On this point see, among others, William Righter, Logic and Criticism (Chilmark Press, New York, 1963), p. 106n., who lists Type Five as well as Type Seven. James Jensen rightly calls Types Four through Six “psychological” (not “grammatical”), and points out that the definition of Type Two was more psychological in the reading of Sonnet 16 in Experiment than it was when revised for Seven Types (see “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966), pp. 251– 3). 17. Tuve herself gave him plenty of evidence. See her major published critique of the Seven Types reading in “On Herbert’s ‘Sacrifice,’” Kenyon Review 12 (1950), esp. p. 73: “it would be…hard to find a modern reader who suddenly felt the true importance and overwhelmingness of the guilt he had been freed from,” with “true” carrying rather tremendous implications. Plainly—as is nearly always the case when emotions run high in literary controversy—Tuve too is distressed by critical fashion, but sees it moving in an altogether different direction. 18. Empson, “Herbert’s Quaintness,” p. 257. 19. Norris, review of William Empson, Critical Quarterly 18 (1976), p. 93. 20. For accounts of this episode, see the poem by Ronald Bottrall, “William Empson,” in William Empson, p. 49, and John Haffenden’s Introduction to Empson, The Royal Beasts and Other Works, ed. Haffenden (Chatto & Windus, London, 1986), p. 11. 21. See especially Martin Dodsworth, “Empson of Yokefleet,” Sewanee Review 93 (1985), pp. 428–34. 22. See Haffenden, “Introduction,” The Royal Beasts, p. 11, and the poem, ibid., pp. 115–17. 23. There are fleeting returns: “the first stirrings of capitalism” explain Kastril being “bowled over” by Lovewit in Jonson’s play (“The Alchemist,” pp. 602–3); neo-conservative appropriations of Darwin are—in 1949 — “capitalist folklore” (“The Horrors of King Lear,” p. 344). It should also be noted that all of Empson’s occasional pieces of political and cultural criticism, especially the pieces on China after 1949, are more continuously and overtly left-leaning than his literary criticism. 24. Roger Sale sees dissociation setting in much earlier (its first signs being the subject, he says, of the chapter on “Double Plots” in the Renaissance) because he thinks the main topic of Pastoral is, as in Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets,” the history of the divided self, not the division of classes (Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H.Lawrence, William Empson, and J.R.R. Tolkien (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973), pp. 155, 165). He does acknowledge the importance of class relations in a sentence on pp. 167–8. 25. The Arnoldian Sale, for whom Pastoral is Empson’s masterpiece, is exceptional in admiring his gestures toward permanence more than anything else (see Modern Heroism, p. 167). 26. Empson, “The Horrors of King Lear,” p. 346. Elsewhere, though, he does write that “[a]n awareness of social change had been arising” in the 1590s (Shakespeare, p. 99). 27. Hobsbaum, “Empson as Critical Practitioner,” The Review 6 & 7 (1963), p. 16. See also G.S.Fraser’s memoir in William Empson, p. 54. But then, as Empson himself saw in the long run, Tuve reads Herbert that way too.

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28. Empson, “There is No Penance Due to Innocence,” New York Review of Books, 3 Dec. 1981, p. 42. In 1930 we find him saying the same thing: the critic’s “only possible atemporality…is to have lit up a previous generation from the point of view of his own” (review of Elizabeth Holmes, Studies in Elizabethan Imagery, The Criterion 9, 37 (July 1930), p. 774). 29. Empson, review of The Wilderness of Zin (C.L.Woolley and T.E. Lawrence), and Abraham (Woolley), The Spectator 150 (17 April 1937), p. 714. 30. Empson, “Answers to Comments,” Essays in Criticism 3 (1953), p. 115. 31. Empson, letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 14 July 1972, p. 819. 32. Even within the analysis of the imperialist use of the word, Empson characteristically finds “liberal rather than illiberal motives” in the generalization of the word to fit all colonized peoples equally: “It seemed rather more civil to take ‘non-European’ as all the word really meant” (Complex Words, p. 76). 33. Culler, “A Critic Against the Christians,” p. 1327. 34. Norris, “The Importance of Empson (II): The Criticism,” Essays in Criticism 35 (1985), p. 33. 35. Empson, letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 6 Oct. 1961, p. 663. On the first page of Milton’s God he had stated (p. 9) that “the subject cannot be viewed in a purely aesthetic manner, as Milton himself would be the first to claim.” 36. See Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979), pp. 58–75. 37. Of Empson’s reading of Gray’s “Elegy” in Pastoral, Brooks had said in The Well-Wrought Urn “that I ignored the rest of the poem” (“Thy Darling in an Urn,” review of The Well-Wrought Urn, Sewanee Review (1947), Argufying, p. 283), as Empson no doubt remembers here and elsewhere. 38. Empson, “Still the Strange Necessity,” Argufying, p. 122. 39. His indifference to metaphysics, specifically here to Kant, depends perhaps on a sketchy acquaintance. It is telling, I think, that in “Donne the Space Man” he quite misses, in W.K.Wimsatt’s “‘to prefer private evidence to public, external to internal,’” the knowingly Kantian play on the paradoxes involved in these terms, and thinks he has found a solecism (p. 392). 40. As Richard Sleight remarked, “Complex words and key-words incline to represent the unofficial view” (“Mr. Empson’s Complex Words,” Essays in Criticism 2 (1952), p. 325). That Empson’s interest in the subversive aspects of characterology in Complex Words was longstanding can be seen in the 1930 review of a book, The Elizabethan Underworld (ed. A.V. Judges), entitled “Elizabethan Rogues” (The Nation & Athenaeum, 5 July 1930, p. 444). 41. The hero of this covert anti-verbalism, presenting himself to Empson five years after Complex Words was published, is a Japanese prisoner of war named Hirota who alone among a group of fellow-prisoners resisted the well-meaning therapeutic advice, given by a Buddhist monk, that he write down his feelings: “His last recorded words are: ‘No, I haven’t written anything. There doesn’t seem to be anything to write about. Thank you very much.’ Long may he be revered as a saint of Zen”

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42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

(“Bushido,” review of S.Hanayama, The Way of Deliverance, The New “Empson’s method is to study the word as a still-shot, as a detachable Statesman and Nation 17 Sept. 1955, p. 338). entity” (Lee T.Lemon, The Partial Critics (Oxford University Press, New York, 1965), p. 131). The 1952 New Statesman review of Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in English Verse called “Monks and Commissars” (Argufying, pp. 110–12) is a case in point. In this last particular, to which I shall return in a later chapter, Empson tacitly rejects the assertion in Complex Words (p. 68) that the ending of Hamlet is marred by the merely formalistic recurrence of the stage metaphor. In an early review, John N.Morris pointed out that this belief on Empson’s part is the “keystone” of his argument (“Empson’s Milton,” Sewanee Review 70 (1962), p. 676). Christopher Ricks cited this passage as a sounder view than that of Milton’s God in his review, “The Ways of God,” New Statesman 27 Aug. 1965, p. 293. “Blind Satan. Blind like his author Milton,” wrote Empson in a note to Collected Poems (p. 90) reflecting the earlier view. See Empson, “Mr. Empson and the Fire Sermon,” response to Allen Rodway’s review of Collected Poems, Essays in Criticism 6 (1956), p. 481. Empson, “Death and its Desires” (1933), Argufying, p. 537.

2. Satanic criticism: Empson and the Romantic tradition 1. Mizener, “The Truest Poetrie” (review of Pastoral), Partisan Review 5 (1938), p. 58. 2. Donoghue remarks interestingly that this talk involves the pretence “that communication…has been going on for some time and that Empson is merely picking up a point he should have made already” (Ferocious Alphabets, Little, Brown, Boston, 1981, p. 73). 3. Bradbrook, “Sir William Empson (1906–1984): A Memoir,” Kenyon Review N.S. 7 (1985), p. 115. See also her memoir, “The Ambiguity of William Empson,” in William Empson, pp. 9–10, and that of Kathleen Raine, “Extracts from Unpublished Memoirs,” ibid., p. 19. 4. Grigson, letter to Poetry 50 (1937), p. 115. 5. Eagleton, “The Critic as Clown,” in Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (Verso, London, 1986), p. 150. Paul Alpers likewise says, “his critical manner…can itself be seen as a version of pastoral” (“Empson on Pastoral,” New Literary History 10 (1978), p. 102). 6. Empson, “Rochester,” Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1987), p. 275. 7. Empson, “The Hammer’s Ring” (1973), Argufying, p. 221. 8. See Empson, “Restoration Comedy Again,” Essays in Criticism 7 (1957), p. 318. 9. For a good summary of this tension expressed differently, see Alpers, “Empson on Pastoral,” p. 106. 10. This is why I disagree with G.S.Fraser’s contention that “Empson often says brief, gruff things, which you must pick up at once if at all, for expansion and elaboration would destroy that” (“The Man

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

Within the Name,” William Empson, p. 70). In one whose special talent, as Roger Sale has argued, is “uncovering hidden sources of power in words that submerge their strengths in flat statements” (Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J.R.R.Tolkien, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973, p. 171), such expressions are just what elaborate best. A.Alvarez for one was so far fooled by the Empson tone that he said of Milton’s God, of all books, “He is no longer bothered by the Romantic need to be on the side of the rebel against authority” (“Empson’s God,” New Statesman, 29 Sept. 1961, p. 442). See “The Voice of the Underdog” (review of Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, New York Review of Books, 1975), Argufying, p. 178. Empson first develops the idea in Pastoral, p. 214. “Double irony” as it is elaborated in “Tom Jones” (Kenyon Review 20 (1958), p. 218) would seem a different idea, but it is not really, as it simply presents the case where C is in the know but dares not admit it. 1954 letter to Janet Adam Smith, cited in Argufying, p. 395n. See Empson, “Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition,” Kenyon Review 2 (1949), p. 575. Empson, “Rochester,” Argufying, p. 277. Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Critical Quarterly (1964), Argufying, p. 298. This set of generalizations is meant in part to challenge what I take to be the oversimplification of Sale’s alignment of the “myth of lost unity” in Empson’s historiography with Eliot’s Dissociation of Sensibility (see Modern Heroism, pp. 107–19). Sale acknowledges elsewhere (pp. 167–8) that he has in mind loss of unity with nature, not of social unity, but I am not sure it is safe to separate the two. “In the twenties, when I was a student, it was usual to despise the Romantics for expressing insincerely optimistic views about the universe” (Empson, review of H.W.Piper, The Active Universe, Critical Quarterly (1963), Argufying, p. 320). Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, p. 312. See Martin Dodsworth, “Empson of Yokefleet,” Sewanee Review 93 (1985), pp. 428–34. See Empson, “Tom Jones,” esp. pp. 246–7. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford University Press, New York, 1973), p. 23. We are not to be misled by Empson’s scattered arch comments on Shelley’s style, especially early on, or by his having had to defend himself in 1930 against Edmund Blunden, one of the few who would then have brought such a charge, for not taking Shelley seriously enough (see Empson, letter to The Nation and Athenaeum 48 (29 Nov. 1930), p. 291). The foundation of respect and fellow-feeling was always there. Both the Scrutiny reviews and the mixed reviews by such American critics as Ransom and Brooks had this caveat in common. Cleanth Brooks interestingly qualifies the complaint in imagining that between Ambiguity and Complex Words Empson loses track of the distinction James Smith had drawn between a noumenon and a phenomenon: “an equation has its origin in the history of the language whereas an

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

ambiguity is the result of the stylizing of language by an individual writer” (Brooks, “Hits and Misses,” Kenyon Review 14 (1952), p. 670; but then, as we shall see in the next chapter, there is more to Complex Words than equations). Censure becomes approval in, for example, Jonathan Culler: “for Empson ambiguities derive precisely from the continuity between language in poems and language in other situations” (Culler, “A Critic Against the Christians,” The Times Literary Supplement, 23 Nov. 1984, p. 1327). Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” William Empson, p. 145. For Empson’s interest in the Theophrastean “thumbnail sketch,” see Faustus, p. 144. Empson, “Rochester,” Argufying, p. 275. Kenner, “Alice in Empsonland,” in Gnomon (McDowell, Obolensky, New York, 1958), p. 256. Paul de Man finds that Hegel’s task is already being explored in Seven Types (see “The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, revised 2nd edn, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983, pp. 237–8). One of the things which has confused critics about Empson’s view of Romanticism is his reading of Wordsworth in Complex Words. Some think it negative, some positive. Richard Sleight inferred from it in 1952 that Empson had become a confirmed anti-Romantic (“Mr. Empson’s Complex Words,” Essays in Criticism 2 (1952), p. 332), while Hugh Kenner was writing, “His real focus of interest has always been the nineteenth century [being a subjectivist]” (Gnomon, p. 258). Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, p. 311. John Paul Russo is right to identify the God of Milton’s God with Blake’s Urizen (review of Sale, Modern Heroism, Modern Philology 73 (1975), p. 103). See Empson, “The Spanish Tragedy,” Nimbus 3 (1956), pp. 28–9. He argues here that by the time of Hamlet the humaneness of Kyd and his contemporaries had been supplanted by a fashion for the revenger as scourge of God with which Shakespeare conformed; hence his Hamlet spares Claudius at prayer to assure his damnation. Empson, “The Pride of Othello,” review of G.R.Elliott, Flaming Minister, Kenyon Review 16 (1954), p. 163. In a fine review essay, Michael Wood before me has paid close attention to this passage (see Wood, “Incomparable Empson,” New York Review of Books, 23 Jan. 1975, p. 30). Empson, “The Verbal Analysis,” Kenyon Review (1950), Argufying, p. 105. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Riverside, Boston, 1965), p. 447. The phrase reverberates in Empson’s poem on his mother, “To an Old Lady” (Collected Poems, p. 15). See Philip and Averil Gardner, The God Approached: A Commentary on the Poems of William Empson (Chatto & Windus, London, 1978), p. 74. His preoccupation with Milton actually shows up earlier in his poetry, as R.E.Pritchard has very astutely said in a note on “To an Old Lady”: “almost every poem of [1928–30] has an echo of or allusion to Milton, particularly Paradise Lost and its vast cosmic structure of immense distances and powers, and uncertain observers, seeking, like Empson, to

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find their place” (Pritchard, “Milton’s Satan and Empson’s Old Lady,” Notes & Queries 232 (1987), p. 60). 37. Empson’s pride in his regional identity has been remarked by Bradbrook, who sees that it is Marvell, “the Yorkshire M.P.”, who interests him most in Biography (“Sir William Empson,” p. 114), and by Frank Kermode, who reminds us that Empson’s decision to teach at Sheffield was influenced by its location (“William Empson: The Critic as Genius,” An Appetite for Poetry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, p. 117). 38. The density of emotion involved here may explain the silence about Bush which William Riley Parker took for ignorance (see Parker, “Paradox Lost,” review of Milton’s God, Virginia Quarterly Review 38 (1962), p. 333). 39. Empson writes about this trip in an article, “Passing Through U.S.A.” (Horizon 1 (1940)), which views pacifism as an instrument of tyranny: “there is a dangerous amount of sub-Nazi propaganda disguised as pacifist and anti-imperialist” (p. 430). It could not have softened his mood when thinking about this trip to recall that he had been robbed in Chicago (see Empson, reply to Jensen, “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966), p. 257). 40. It may come as a surprise that John Crowe Ransom reviewing Pastoral (“Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” Southern Review 4 (1938–9)) and Cleanth Brooks reviewing Complex Words (see “Hits and Misses,” p. 674) both second Empson’s view of Satan as a heroic “champion of progress” (Ransom, p. 327), dissenting only from the view that Satan’s author shares his sentiments. 41. “[I]t did not occur to me that fairness demanded my recalling the qualifications of tone in Professor Lewis’s position; though I readily agree he put them in” (Empson, writing on his Paradise Lost broadcasts in a letter to The Listener, 28 July 1969, p. 157). There is praise in passing for Lewis’s treatment of Satan in Milton’s God, p. 88. 42. Bayley, “…The Ways of Man to Man” (review of the revised edition of Milton’s God), Spectator (30 July 1965), p. 154. 43. Before he published Milton’s God Empson put this in another way, commenting in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement (3 Oct. 1958, p. 561) on some remarks by F.R.Leavis: “I had understood his position to be that the poem is bad because it makes God bad…, whereas I think, like Blake and Shelley, and surely in concurrence, however reticent, with the main Victorian tradition, that that is precisely why the poem is so good.” 44. Empson, letter to The Listener, 28 July 1960, p. 157. 45. Empson seems to have garbled the information he takes from Grant McColley about Milton’s source for this argument, which is the De Victoria Verbi Dei of Rupert, not of “Tuitensis” (see Milton’s God, p. 84, and McColley, Paradise Lost: An Account of its Growth and Major Origins, Packard, Chicago, 1940, p. 9). Not until Faustus, p. 114n., does Empson mention Avitus, the other main hexameral source given by McColley (p. 10). 46. His interest in Gnosticism is much livelier, however, than his contemporaries’, and it certainly includes the doctrine of diabolic creation. In

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Milton’s God he follows the research of Denis Saurat on this topic, which gives him non-hexameral sources for Satan’s doubting that God created him. See also Empson, “Not Like a Novel,” review of Helen Gardner, A Reading of Paradise Lost, New Statesman, 24 Dec. 1965, p. 1004. 47. Empson, “George Herbert and Miss Tuve,” letter to Kenyon Review 12 (1960), p. 736. 48. The point has also been made by J.H.Willis, Jr, William Empson (Columbia University Press, New York, 1969), p. 22. 49. Empson, “Donne the Space Man,” Kenyon Review 19 (1957), pp. 384, 388. See also the attack on John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, “There Is No Penance Due to Innocence,” New York Review of Books, 3 Dec. 1981, p. 42): Even when a cad, Donne “has a merit which a feminist ought to recognize: he always regards a woman, even a low-class woman, as an equal power, even a potential danger.” 50. Empson, “Shakespeare and Dover Wilson” (review of Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies), New Statesman (7 Dec. 1962), p. 827—apropos, of course, of The Taming of the Shrew. 51. I possess copies of the correspondence which passed between Empson and Tuve, kindly given me by David Bromwich, and I can report that the letters read simply like continuations of the public exchange, framed by pleasantries and assurances. In one letter Empson does chide Tuve for her inelegant prose, but there is no implication that she writes poorly because she is a woman. 52. See Gardner’s generous review of Milton’s God, “Empson’s Milton,” Listener 66 (5 Oct. 1961), esp. p. 522. 53. See Laura Jackson (Riding), “Some Autobiographical Corrections of Literary History,” Denver Quarterly 8 (1974), pp. 12–14. Our independent printed information about this appears in an article by James Jensen, “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,” with replies by Richards, Graves, and Empson. Jensen acknowledges (p. 244) that Riding is not mentioned in the first edition, but thinks it is because Empson’s theoretical debt, apart from the Graves-Riding reading of Sonnet 129, is to Graves’s earlier books, On English Poetry (1922) and Poetic Unreason (1925). Graves in reply speaks of “the unchivalrousness of William Empson and other critics” toward Riding (p. 256); and Empson in his reply says that at the time “Graves rightly insisted on the publishers adding an erratum sheet, to give Miss Riding the credit of co-authorship,” which gave him the chance also to correct some other errors. He bears out Jensen’s thesis about the influence of Graves’s earlier work by saying he committed the oversight “merely by quoting the wrong book” (p. 258). 54. One of Raine’s books of essays, Defending Ancient Springs (Oxford University Press, London, 1967), is unified by her attack on the soulless rationalism of Cambridge in the 1920s, viewed from the standpoint of her own Platonist devotion to Blake and Shelley, and while she is not concerned to put the matter in terms of gender, it is easy to read it that way today, especially when she says, of hearing her tastes ridiculed: “I attributed it to my ignorance, and kept very quiet” (p. 106). Empson, as he would say, comes in for some of the rough stuff, tempered by Raine’s very great respect for his work. As to Bradbrook, it is difficult to tell for

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sure, but in her cogent critique of Empson’s reading of “untented” in Lear (see Seven Types, p. 89n.), which presumably caused Empson to cut the sentence from the second edition, the detection of misogyny may be involved (see Bradbrook, “The Criticism of William Empson,” Scrutiny 2 (1933–4), pp. 255–6). 55. See Empson, “Volpone,” Hudson Review 21 (1968–9), p. 660: Volpone “offers Celia classical charades in expensive fancy dress,” of which Empson says “I expect [Jonson] could hardly imagine wooing a lady in any other way.”

3. Advancing logical disorder: Empson on method 1. This last notion is attributed to A.E.Malloch by Gary Wihl, “Empson’s Generalized Ambiguities,” in Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch, ed. Wihl and David Williams (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston, 1988), p. 5. 2. For a clearsighted effort to get the most from this passage, see William Righter, Logic and Literature (Chilmark Press, New York, 1963), pp. 102–3. 3. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, revised 2nd edn (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983), p. 235. Geoffrey Hartman echoes de Man in seeing Empson as an apostate from Ricardian Formalism who shows “how precarious this unity was, or how rebellious language” (“Toward Literary History,” in In Search of Literary Theory, ed. Morton Bloomfield, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1972, p. 208). 4. See also de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Nature Image,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1984), p. 2. 5. De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 235. 6. Note that the term “fusion metaphor” is itself from Richards’s Interpretation in Teaching (1938), which Empson quotes in Complex Words, p. 345. 7. See Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (1934; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1969), p. 181. In this book Richards offers a Multiple Definition of “nature,” and it is “Nature (Sense I),” nature as it actually is, which he judges to be inaccessible through language. Empson is aware of this, seeing it as unwise Pyrrhonism in his 1935 review of Coleridge (Criterion, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1987), pp. 203–4), but appears not to see it as a change in Richards’s thought. 8. De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 239. 9. For a general introduction to Richards bearing on these issues, see Paul H.Fry, “I.A.Richards,” in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, VII, ed. A.Walton Litz and Luke Menand, forthcoming. 10. De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 237. 11. See Norris, “Some Versions of Rhetoric: Empson and de Man,” in The Contest of Faculties. Philosophy and Theory After Deconstruction (Methuen, London, 1985). 12. See also Norris, “The Importance of Empson (II): The Criticism,” Essays in Criticism 35 (1985), pp. 31–2.

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13. See Empson’s reply appended to James Jensen, “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966), p. 257. 14. Norris may have been encouraged in this view by Empson himself saying, in a sketch of his career, that pastoral is “a form” (Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary, First Supplement, ed. Stanley Kunitz, H.W.Wilson, New York, 1955, p. 308). 15. Mason, “W.Empson’s Criticism,” review of Pastoral, Scrutiny 4 (1935–6), p. 432. 16. Wihl, “‘Resistance’ and ‘Pregnancy’ in Empsonian Metaphor,” British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986), p. 48. 17. See Wihl, “Empsonian Pregnancy and Wordsworth’s Spousal Verse,” Dalhousie Review 63 (1983), p. 555. 18. Our tendency to confuse this term with the German Schwangerschaft results in the subtle error to which I think Norris is prone (as I was until I read Wihl) of finding inflation or weight implied where what is meant is only typicality, the attributes of a class present in an individual. (See Wihl, “‘Resistance’ and ‘Pregnancy,’” p. 50, and Norris, Philosophy, p. 110.) 19. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, pp. 88–9. 20. Empson, review of Elizabeth Holmes, Studies in Elizabethan Imagery, The Criterion 9 (Oct. 1929–July 1930), pp. 769–74. 21. Empson, “Antinominalism,” The Spectator, 7 Aug. 1936, p. 246. 22. Norris here implicitly agrees with Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948; Vintage, New York, 1955), p. 246, and George Watson, The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (Barnes & Noble, New York, 1964), p. 184, whose account of Empson follows Hyman’s very closely. 23. See Seven Types, p. 81: “I believe…that I am using in a different way the material that three centuries of scholars and critics have collected.” 24. Norris, “Reason, Rhetoric, Theory: Empson and de Man,” Raritan 5 (1985–6), p. 89. 25. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 88. 26. Empson defends the practice of semantic accretion, ironically enough concerning Shakespeare’s word “trammell,” against Elder Olson, in “The Verbal Analysis,” Argufying, p. 108. 27. In corroboration of this point, see Wihl, “‘Resistance’ and ‘Pregnancy,’” p. 49. 28. Empson, “Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition,” Kenyon Review 2 (1949), p. 578. 29. Empson, review of Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Criterion (1937), Argufying, p. 208. 30. Wimsatt and Monroe C.Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954; Noonday Press, New York, 1964), p. 281. 31. Empson, “Professor Lewis on Linguistics,” review of Lewis, Studies in Words, The Times Literary Supplement, 20 Sept. 1960, Argufying, p. 143. 32. Empson, “Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition,” p. 572. 33. Empson, “Compacted Doctrines,” review of Raymond Williams, Keywords, New York Review of Books, 27 Oct. 1977, Argufying, p. 184. 34. Empson, “A Theoretical Point,” in John Crowe Ransom: A Tribute from the Community of Letters (1964), ed. D.David Long and Michael R.Burr, Argufying, p. 129.

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35. See Ransom, The New Criticism (1941; New Directions, Norfolk, CT, 1966), pp. 103–14. 36. Empson, Argufying, p. 75. 37. In their excellent analytic account of ambiguity, Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan point to those passages in Seven Types (esp. p. 30) where Empson stresses the role of metre and rhyme in increasing the complexity of ambiguity in poetry, but in wishing to stress his Formalism they overestimate the degree to which these passing remarks govern readings elsewhere in the book. See Kris and Kaplan, “Aesthetic Ambiguity,” in Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952; Schocken Books, New York, 1974), p. 258. 38. No New Critic in fact did wholly ignore this refusal in Empson; hence their strongly qualified alleg iance to him. Their view is well summarized in the chapter on Richards and Empson written by Cleanth Brooks in W.K.Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957;2 vols, Phoenix Books, Chicago, 1978), II, esp. pp. 637– 41, where the term “ambiguity” is criticized because it “reflects the point of view of expository prose” (p. 637), but where it is also insisted, perhaps too firmly, that Empson values ambiguity in proportion to its “richness and complexity” (p. 640). The Formalist note is sounded from the beginning; among the reviewers of Seven Types not only James Smith but also the young Harold Rosenberg called for “some unified emotion or idea within the poem to which the spreading variety may be attached” (Rosenberg, The Symposium 2 (1931), p. 415). 39. Empson, “Recent Poetry,” The Nation & Athenaeum (1931), Argufying, p. 356. See also his praise of Auden’s later style, in contrast with “Horrified concentration,” in “A Masterly Synthesis,” review of Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Poetry (1939), ibid., p. 342; and the remark in the notes to Collected Poems (p. 105) about “the stock defence that poets have to be obscure because something has gone wrong with the public.” 40. Empson, “The Verbal Analysis,” Argufying, p. 105. 41. Empson, “Basic English and Wordsworth,” Argufying, p. 232. 42. Bayley, “…The Ways of Man to Man,” (review of the revised edition of Milton’s God), Spectator (30 July 1965), p. 154. 43. The memoir of Rintaro Fukuhara tells us for example that he was reading Middlemarch in 1951 (“Mr William Empson in Japan,” William Empson, p. 32). 44. See Beaver, “Tilting at Windbags,” review of Norris’s Philosophy, New Statesman, 11 Aug. 1978, p. 186. Ricks, too, in his contribution to William Empson (p. 145), declares that “he has always stuck up for story as one of the great things about literature.” 45. Empson, response to Roger Sale’s “The Achievement of William Empson,” Hudson Review 19, 3 (1966), p. 534. 46. Empson, “The Verbal Analysis,” Argufying, p. 106. 47. Denying for example that “Old Man” is irrelevant to the structure of Tom Jones, he writes: “Old Man provides the extremes of degradation and divine ecstasy which Tom has no time for; as part of the structure of ethical thought he is essential to the book, the keystone at the

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48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

middle of the arch” (“Tom Jones,” Kenyon Review 20 (1958), p. 228). One critic who remembers Empson chiefly for remarks like these (for example, that “Wuthering Heights told the same story with two different endings”) is Barbara Hardy, “The Critics Who Made Us: William Empson and Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Sewanee Review 90, 3–4 (1982), p. 430. In a letter to Christopher Norris cited by Haffenden, Empson declares that deconstruction “had won a kind of freedom” —this was in America, hence the verdict on Ransom is repeated—‘at the ghastly cost…of denying that there are any authors at all’” (“Introduction,” Argufying, p. 52). Wood, “Incomparable Empson,” New York Review of Books, 23 Jan. 1975, p. 33. Norris feels less vertigo, and speaks of “the working balance between language and style” in Complex Words (Philosophy, p. 118). Cleanth Brooks felt, on the other hand (“Hits and Misses,” Kenyon Review 14 (1952), p. 670), that Complex Words had carried Empson away from utterance toward language: “an equation has its origin in the history of the language whenever an ambiguity is the result of the stylizing of language by an individual writer.” Cain, “Marveling at Empson’s Ways,” review of Norris’s Philosophy, Virginia Quarterly 55 (1979), p. 545. He is willing to share his Benthamism with Rochester, in whom its full hedonistic implications are realized (see “Rochester,” Argufying, pp. 274– 5). The idea is put philosophically in Complex Words, p. 216: “The man who satisfies his own nature…is expected to have generous feelings,” not from principle but “from his own unobstructed nature.” Empson, “O Miselle Passer!”, Argufying, p. 198. Empson is likely to have absorbed his notion of “verbal fictions” from Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (1922), mentioned in translation (Philosophy of As If) in Complex Words, p. 423. Empson, letter to the Editor, Mandrake 2, 7–11 (1950–6), pp. 447–8. See, for example, Geoffrey Strickland, “The Criticism of William Empson,” Mandrake 2, 7–11, (1950–6), p. 327. See “William Empson in Conversation with Christopher Ricks,” in The Modern Poet: Essays from “The Review”, ed. Ian Hamilton (Macdonald, London, 1968), pp. 178–9. Empson, “An Early Romantic: Henry Vaughan,” Cambridge Review (1929), Argufying, p. 263. See Karl Miller, “Empson Agonistes,” William Empson, p. 44. Norris is right to call our attention to his critique of “‘impressive obscurantism’” in Maynard Mack’s King Lear in Our Time (“The Importance of Empson (II): The Criticism,” p. 37); but if we extrapolate from the topical reasons for that critique (it is “‘very Eng. Lit.’” he says, to maintain authority by declaring holy precincts inviolable), we are in danger of constraining Empson’s “reason.” I owe this reflection to J.Hillis Miller, who said something of this sort during a luncheon presentation at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale, some five years ago. If he has said it in print, I am sorry to say I do not know where. One finds much the same drift in Norris’s essay

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on J.L.Lowes in The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy (Methuen, New York, 1984), pp. 128–43. 60. Norris, “Derrida at Yale: The ‘Deconstructive Moment’ in Modernist Poetics,” Philosophy and Literature 4 (1980), p. 242. Emphasis in original. 61. See the conversation with Ricks, where Empson says that poetry “ought to be about a conflict: it needn’t resolve the conflict” (The Modern Poet, ed. Hamilton, p. 185); and the note to “Bacchus” (Collected Poems, p. 100), where he calls attention to “the notion…that life involves maintaining itself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.” 62. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H.Bernard (Hafner, New York, 1972), p. 83. There is now a large critical literature on the interconnections of the Kantian sublime with Wordsworth, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. For standard views still current see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976); Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey H.Hartman (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978); Paul H.Fry, The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984), p. 76, and “The Possession of the Sublime,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986), pp. 187–207. 63. Empson, “Death and its Desires,” Argufying, p. 538. 64. “Sublimity is the virtue perpetuated in Milton’s style,” writes B.Rajan in Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (1947; Ann Arbor Paperback, Ann Arbor, 1967), p. 127, speaking indeed only of style; but in fairness to Empson Rajan’s whole book argues that since Milton is bent on placing intricate doctrine on an epic scale we must not hold him too closely accountable for consistency. 65. Norris fully recognizes the importance of what he calls “Empson’s long and self-revealing debate…with Wordsworth’s philosophy of transcendance” (review of William Empson, p. 48, and “The Importance of Empson (II): The Criticism,” p. 36), but like others before him (Richard Sleight, for example), and like Wihl, he stresses Empson’s continued disapproval. In venturing to disagree with this view (always with “Basic English and Wordsworth” guiding my instincts), I must of course discount the impatient remark near the end of “Sense in the Prelude” (Complex Words, p. 304) that “the idea [of exalted Associationism] seems to me to remain pretty unintelligible,” balancing this against the keen interpretive sympathy evinced by the chapter as a whole. 66. See Empson’s letter to The Times, 25 Oct. 1966, p. 13. The whole argument had been worked out in detail by Henry N.Paul, whom Empson does not acknowledge, in 1950 (The Royal Play of Macbeth, Macmillan, New York). 67. Empson, “The Verbal Analysis,” Argufying, p. 108. 68. Empson, “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” British Journal of Aesthetics 1962 (given as a lecture in 1961), Argufying, p. 160. 69. Empson’s letter to The Times Literary Supplement on Waiting for Godot (1956, Argufying, pp. 593–4) exactly reflects the balance I have wanted to emphasize between this acceptance and his contempt for its quietistic implications: “To be sure we all ought to feel the mystery of the world, and there is bound to be a kind of literary merit in any play which

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makes us feel it so strongly; but we need not ourselves feel only exacerbated impotence about the world.” 70. Toward the end of his life a slight impatience with indistinctness reemerges, as when he compares Frank Kermode’s treatment of “the mystery of the Gospel” of Mark (in The Genesis of Secrecy) with “the way Whistler contrived to look across the Thames” (London Review of Books (1980), Argufying, p. 521).

4. Toward late Empson: the failure of pastoral 1. The late Empson, though not exclusively the Empson of Milton’s God, has been championed by Karl Miller in “Empson Agonistes” (William Empson, pp. 41–8) at least in part for reasons stemming from Miller’s own quarrel with The New Statesman in the 1960s, and by Jonathan Culler, whose enlistment of Empson’s support against the resurgence of religion in criticism is not meant to place the late work ahead of Complex Words (what he says in his recent “Introduction” to Complex Words should be weighed against “A Critic Against the Christians,” The Times Literary Supplement, 23 Nov. 1984). 2. See, for this expression, Empson’s oft-quoted response to Geoffrey Strickland, Mandrake 2, 7–11 (1950–6), p. 447. 3. An example is the failure to understand that the antithesis in Peacock’s War Song (“The heroes and the cravens,/The Spearmen and the bowmen”) is sustained through the last line by allusion to Homer, whose bow-andarrow warriors are nearly always tainted by cowardice. Assuming that Peacock’s nineteenth-century sensibility has been “dissociated” and that we need not therefore remain on the alert for intelligence in his verses, Empson thinks this is just noise: “he makes a cradle and rocks himself in it” (Seven Types, p. 22). 4. Others have gleefully exposed the slips in book after book, and in general I find the exercise unimportant, not because of the impression it wrongly gives of diligence atoning for dullness (precision has its own erratic brilliance, as Robert Martin Adams shows, for example, in his “Empson and Bentley: Something About Milton Too,” Partisan Review 21 (1954), pp. 178–89), but because I am inclined to accept Roger Sale’s apology on the grounds that it bespeaks the very oppositie of ignorance: “Misquotation is a telling sign of someone whose sense of the literary past is in his head, not in his books on shelves” (Modern Heroism, p. 125). Empson’s personal apology for his mistakes is much weaker than this, however (see his response to Adams, Partisan Review 21 (1954), p. 678), and it must be said that if a critic propounding a controversial view of Joyce’s plot and purposes cannot remember that Bloom has his lunch with a glass of burgundy in Davy Byrne’s pub in “Lestrygonians,” not the Ormond Hotel in “Sirens,” then there is a real case for discrediting his argument. (See Biography, pp. 228–9.) 5. Empson, “The Age of the Telly,” review of The Gutenberg Galaxy [Toronto] Universities Quarterly (1963), Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1987), p. 608.

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6. See Gardner, “Empson’s Milton,” Listener 66 (5 Oct. 1961), p. 522. 7. Empson, “Mrs Dalloway as a Political Satire,” Eigo Seinen (1932), Argufying, p. 451. 8. Empson “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” Argufying, p. 147. 9. Alpers, “Empson on Pastoral,” New Literary History 10 (1978), p. 118. 10. Empson, “Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh,” Argufying, p. 504. 11. Just after Pastoral appeared, the unashamedly anthropocentric Empson seems already to reject this kind of facile talk, and to point toward his later dislike of the anti-vivisectionists: “When animals are made idols they make a bad religion” (review of four anthropologically oriented books on animals, The Spectator 157, 30 Oct. 1936, p. 768). 12. For comment on this distinction and on Empson’s early preference for the latter, see Haffenden, “Introduction,” Argufying, p. 32. It is certainly incorrect to assert, as Elmer Borklund does, that “‘nature’ is unimportant in Some Versions of Pastoral’” (Contemporary Literary Critics, St James Press, London, 1977, p. 119). The distinction in question is undermined in Dylan Thomas, whose solipsistic synthesis identifying both Christ and nature with himself actually purifies the Christian influence: in “Fern Hill” “the body of the hanged man is destroyed, leaving no relics, but burying it in quicklime; but this is made from the bones of Dylan, who thus receives the criminal back into himself like an Earth-Mother” (letter to Christopher Ricks, 1962, quoted in Argufying, p. 401). 13. Empson, “Mr Empson and the Fire Sermon,” Essays in Criticism 6 (1956), p. 481. 14. Empson, “Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition,” Kenyon Review 2 (1949), p. 584. 15. Empson, “The Use of Poetry,” review of Barker’s Poems, New Statesman and Nation (1935), Argufying, p. 413. 16. Empson, “The Love of Definition,” review of two books of Marvell materials, Cambridge Review (1979), Argufying, p. 269. 17. See also the manuscript from this period (1933) called “Death and its Desires,” in which Empson worries about the illimitable odd-or-even character of self-consciousness: the “regresses” he has been discussing “are only the reflections from two mirrors got by turning the mirror of consciousness back on itself” (Argufying, p. 553)—the same image we have seen in a poem, “Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics.” 18. See Empson, review of A.J.Ayer, The Empirical Foundations of Knowledge, Criterion (1941), Argufying, p. 584: Eddington “claims to calculate all the absolute physical constants, to any degree of accuracy, starting merely from the fact that the universe is one which can be observed by the creatures it contains.” 19. Freud, “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words” (1910), in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson (Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1958), pp. 60–1. 20. Kris and Kaplan in their sympathetic discussion of Empson likewise see a connection between “conjunctive ambiguity” and irony, citing one of Freud’s examples, Lat. sacer (Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 1952; Schocken Books, New York, 1974, p. 247).

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21. “Interested in Freud and Frazer, in traces of the primitive and all that, I jumped at an idea that [in Herbert’s “The Sacrifice”] the one who has to climb for the apple seems to be a child, presumably the son of the house, and the son stealing from his father’s orchard is a symbol of incest…I too feel [with Tuve] that is rather bad writing, or rather out of place, or something…. But after granting these complaints about style I am still not sure that what I said is wrong” (Empson, letter to Kenyon Review 12 (1950), p. 737). 22. Hobsbaum, “Empson as Critical Practitioner,” The Review 6 & 7 (1963), p. 16. 23. This is first argued in Empson, “Dryden’s Apparent Scepticism,” Essays in Criticism 20, 2 (1970), pp. 172–81, revised in Biography as “Looking Back” (pp. 123–7), then in a comment responding to the criticism of this article by Philip Harth, Essays in Criticism 21, 1 (1971), then in “A Deist Tract by Dryden” (Biography, pp. 99–122). 24. Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, p. 302. 25. There is much overlap between the article “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, pp. 297–319, and the “Introduction” to Coleridge’s Verse, pp. 27–81, but only the former version (p. 316) has the Wieland material, perhaps because Empson thought better of it eight years later. (Werner Beyer’s The Enchanted Forest (1962) was fresh in Empson’s mind for the first essay.) The strength of his case is not affected by this somewhat vague parallel. 26 “Words and Techniques,” review of books by George Whalley and Entwistle, New Statesman (1953), Argufying, p. 119. 27. Empson, “Myth,” in Life and Letters (1937), Argufying, p. 454. 28. Empson, “George Herbert and Miss Tuve,” letter to Kenyon Review 12 (1950), p. 737. Emphasis mine. 29. Empson, Argufying, p. 209. He goes on to say (p. 210) that he wants to call cases of disparity action “Mutual Comparison” (“if it went on for longer everybody would recognize it as Allegory”). This is exactly what he calls mutual metaphor in Complex Words, implying that by the time he wrote “Feelings in Words” in the late 1940s he had changed his mind about confining the word “metaphor” to a narrow range, perhaps because he now realizes, in fuller agreement with Richards, that even if it is used as a blanket term metaphor will not lend itself to facile syntheses as long as disparity is emphasized. 30. Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, p. 312. 31. Empson, “Beardsley’s Mother,” review of Brophy’s Black and White: A Study of Aubrey Beardsley, Listener (1968), Argufying, pp. 610, 611. A still more notable instance, and rather an early one, of his cooling attitude toward arguments from unconscious motives is his splendid letter to Scrutiny (1940) responding to the famous article on Jane Austen by D.W. Harding called “Regulated Hatred” (see ibid., pp. 456–8). 32. See Theodor Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos 20 (1974), esp. pp. 57, 62, which I have discussed in this regard in my essay, “NonConstruction: History, Structure, and the Occasion of the Literary,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1, 2 (1988), p. 51. 33. Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, p. 317.

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34. Empson, “Volpone,” Hudson Review 21 (1968–9), p. 655. In 1931 Empson could still praise an imagist technique as long as it reinforced plot (see “Virginia Woolf,” Scrutinies, Wishart, London, 1931; Argufying, p. 448). 35. See Kenner, “Alice in Empsonland,” in Gnomon (McDowell, Obolensky, New York, 1958), p. 256. 36. See Empson, “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” Argufying, pp. 158–9, and “Argufying in Poetry,” Listener (1963), ibid., p. 169. 37. See Empson, “The Faces of Buddha,” Listener (1936), Argufying, pp. 573– 6. 38. See Empson, “Preface” to John R.Harrison, The Reactionaries (1966), Argufying, pp. 627–30. 39. See also the review of Katherine M.Wilson, Sound and Meaning in English Poetry, Criterion (1931), Argufying, esp. p. 89. 40. Empson, “Resurrection,” letter to Critical Quarterly (1964), Argufying, p. 615. 41. “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” Argufying, p. 161. 42. See “A Time of Troubles,” review of three books on Yeats, New Statesman (1965), Argufying, esp. p. 244. 43. See Empson, “D.H.Lawrence and Susan his Cow,” review of William York Tindall’s book of that name, Horizon (1940), Argufying, p. 460. 44. Not in Orwell’s writings but in his shocking way of conducting interviews as Indian Editor of the BBC Eastern Service during the war. See Empson, “Orwell at the BBC,” Listener (1971), Argufying, p. 497. 45. “The Cult of Unnaturalism,” Argufying, p. 627. 46. See Empson, “Lady Chatterley Again,” Essays in Criticism (1963), Argufying, p. 463. 47. See Empson, “To Understand a Modern Poem: ‘A Refusal to Mourn,’” Strand (1947), Argufying, pp. 382–6. 48. Empson, “Early Auden,” The Review (1963), Argufying, pp. 375–6. The irony seems heavy here, but it is used I think only because Empson thought the talents of the group to be uneven. His admiration for Auden was cheerfully envious, but he evidently disliked Spender (see the scornful anecdote in the memoir about Eliot, “The Style of the Master,” (1948), Argufying, p. 363), and one hears nothing specific about the poetry of MacNeice or Day Lewis. 49. Empson, “Criticism,” Agenda 14, 2–15, 1 (1976–7), p. 23. This has a more candid ring than his curious special pleading over the years—to which I have already said that I do not attach much significance—about his taste for Swinburne, for example: “one can appreciate the poetry without sharing the mental disease” (letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 20 Feb. 1969, p. 185). 50. While I think Bradbrook quite right to remind his newer proselytes that there were limits to Empson’s iconoclasm, the extreme self-consciousness of even his most public-school prejudices—especially of those, in fact— does not suggest that “his loyalties were unwavering and unexamined” (“Sir William Empson (1906–1984): A Memoir,” Kenyon Review N.S. 7 (1985), p. 114). 51. See Empson, “The Joyce Saga: Before Bloomsday and After,” review of Ellmann’s James Joyce, New Statesman (1959), Argufying, p. 484. 52. Empson, “Ballet of the Far East,” Listener (1937), Argufying, p. 580.

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53. Empson, “A Chinese University,” Life and Letters 25, 34 (June 1940), p. 244. 54. See Empson, “Madame Chiang,” The Spectator, 15 March 1940, p. 386. 55. Empson, “The Indus Civilisation,” review of Ernest Mackay, The Indus Civilization, The New Statesman and Nation, 27 April 1955, p. 592. 56. Empson, “Volpone,” Hudson Review 21 (1968–9), p. 657. See also “The Just Man Made Innocent,” review of Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand, New Statesman (1963), Argufying, p. 378. 57. Empson, “Literary Criticism and the Christian Revival,” Rationalist Annual (1966), Argufying, p. 633.

5. Middle Spirits and Empson’s chain of being 1. Empson, “Next Time, A Wheel of Fire,” review of Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time, Essays in Criticism 17 (1967), p. 95. 2. Empson, “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1987), p. 148. 3. Empson, “Resurrection,” Argufying, p. 615. 4. Empson, “Mr. Wilson on the Byzantium Poems,” Review of English Literature 1, 3 (1960), p. 52. 5. Empson, “There is No Penance Due to Innocence,” review of John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, New York Review of Books, 3 Dec. 1981, p. 44. 6. Empson, review of Frances Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Life and Letters 15 (1936), p. 204. 7. See Empson, “Donne the Space Man,” Kenyon Review 19 (1957), p. 340. 8. See also Coleridge’s Verse, pp. 84–5, and “Asia,” review of Michael Prawdin, The Mongol Empire, Life and Letters Today (1940), Argufying, pp. 581–2. Empson reads this book, which is evidently an encouragement to German expansionism, with remarkable placidity. 9. Empson, “Gray’s Cat” (?1940s), Argufying, p. 279. See Suvir Kuval, “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal,” PMLA 105 (1990), pp. 223–32. 10. Empson, “‘Mine Eyes Dazzle,’ A Review of Clifford Leech’s Webster: ‘The Duchess of Malfi’” (1964), in John Webster: A Critical Anthology, ed. G.K. and S.K.Hunter (Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1969), pp. 295–6. 11. Alan Shelston, “Biography and Criticism,” Critical Quarterly 27 (1985), p. 73. 12. Empson, review of A.S.Cairncross, The Problem of Hamlet, Life and Letters 15, 6 (1936), p. 211. 13. Empson, “There is No Penance Due to Innocence,” p. 45. 14. Ricks, quoting Empson from a letter of 1976, “F.W.Bateson Memorial Lecture,” Essays in Criticism 35 (1985), p. 102. 15. Empson, “The Joyce Saga: Before Bloomsday and After,” New Statesman (1959), Argufying, pp. 485–6. 16. Empson gives another version of the reading which ensues here in his review, “Thy Darling in an Urn,” of Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn, Sewanee Review (1947), Argufying, esp. p. 287.

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17. Empson, “Reading a Poem: Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’” (1955), Argufying, p. 290. 18 Empson, “Still the Strange Necessity,” omnibus review, Sewanee Review (1955), Argufying, p. 124. 19. Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets, (Little, Brown, Boston, 1981), p. 76. It seems unlikely that Donoghue knew Empson’s gnomic pronouncement that “poetry is written with the sort of joke you find in hymns” (Argufying, p. 69), which suggests that Donoghue’s approach would not have taken him by surprise, even in 1928. Empson never said anything against Richards’s “technique for heightening sincerity” which begins with the contemplation of “Man’s loneliness” and was loudly ridiculed by the Christian convert Eliot in The Use of Poetry. 20. See Alpers, “Empson on Pastoral,” New Literary History 10 (1978), p. 106. 21. Empson, “Compacted Doctrines,” New York Review of Books (1977), Argufying, p. 184. 22. Empson, “The Calling Trumpets,” review of Interpretations, ed. John Wain, New Statesman and Nation (1955), Argufying, p. 138. 23. See Jean Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaisssance 16 (1986), esp. p. 18. 24. Empson, “Volpone,” Hudson Review 21 (1968–9), p. 661. 25. Empson, “An Anatomy of Taste,” review of Graham Hough, An Essay on Criticism, New Statesman (1966), Argufying, p. 175. 26. Alpers, “Empson on Pastoral,” pp. 111–12. It seems to me that it is only when it starts developing this idea, making Empson resemble a critic he disliked for just this reason, Northrop Frye, that this fine essay goes wrong. 27. See Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H.Lawrence, William Empson, and J.R.R.Tolkien (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973), p. 180. 28. Empson, review of G.K.Zipf, The Psycho-biology of Language, The Spectator 156 (14 Feb. 1936), p. 270. 29. Empson, letter to The Times Literary Supplement (5 Aug. 1960), p. 497. 30. Empson, “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” p. 154. 31. See Empson, “Donne the Space Man,” p. 340. 32. Empson, “Literary Criticism and the Christian Revival,” Rationalist Annual (1966), Argufying, p. 634. 33. I do not quite know what to make of the treatment of this theme in the poem called “Earth has Shrunk in the Wash” (Collected Poems, p. 28): “One daily tortures the poor Christ anew/(On every planet moderately true).” The premise of the poem is that people’s withdrawal into themselves is like the earth shrunk to an asteroid. The ultimate expression of the trend toward selfishness being sadism would then explain the first line (we must remember that the poem was written before hatred of torture worship had become Empson’s guiding passion). The second line does not actually seem chiefly concerned with the one-savior-per-planet notion, but to say rather that whatever the state of human fellow-feeling (whatever “planet” earth itself may be at the moment, in other words), a certain amount of martyrdom is inevitable. For a reading which connects the lines more closely with the cluster of Donne’s ideas—but which does not seem to me to follow

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

from the premise of the present poem—see Philip and Averil Gardner, The God Approached: A Commentary on the Poems of William Empson (Chatto & Windus, London, 1978), p. 110. Empson. “There is No Penance Due to Innocence,” p. 49. Empson, “Dylan Thomas,” Essays in Criticism (1963), Argufying, p. 397. Empson, letter to Mandrake 2, 7–11 (1950–6), p. 447. Empson, “‘The Active Universe,’” review of Piper, Critical Quarterly (1963), Argufying, pp. 321, 322. The last two sentences contain references to reviews of Joseph Needham, The Sceptical Biologist (Nation and Athenaeum, 1930), and E.A.Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundation of Modern Science (Criterion, 1930), Argufying, pp. 528–33 (p. 528 quoted passim). See Empson, review of Gorer, Bali, Life, and Angkor, The Spectator 156 (8 May 1936), p. 844. See ibid. (10 April 1936), p. 675. Empson here distinguishes earth magic “from Black Magic like Faust’s” (ibid.), but by the end of his career he will be insisting that what Faustus draws on too is chthonic, not diabolical. Fukuhara, “Mr William Empson in Japan,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, ed. Roma Gill (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974), p. 27. Empson, “Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh,” Journal of General Education (1976), Argufying, p. 508. Empson, “A Time of Troubles,” review of three books on Yeats, New Statesman (1965), Argufying, p. 346. Empson, “Evidence for Herbert,” review of J.Dover Wilson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, New Statesman (7 Feb. 1964), p. 217. See also the reviews of Leslie Hotson, Mr. W.H., New Statesman (24 April 1964), p. 642, and Martin Seymour-Smith, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, New Statesman (4 Oct. 1963), p. 447. Empson, “Foreword” to Kenneth H.C.Lo, Peking Cookery (Faber & Faber, London, 1971), p. 12. Empson, review of J.Steward Lincoln, The Dream in Primitive Cultures, The Spectator 156 (10 Jan. 1936), p. 66. Empson, “Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh,” Argufying, p. 507. “Donne the Space Man,” p. 387. Cited by Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Argufying, p. 309. Empson, “Reading The Epic of Gilgamesh,” Argufying, p. 507. Empson, “Yeats and the Spirits,” New York Review of Books (1973), Argufying, p. 353. Empson actually bridles at the smoothing over of heresy involved in calling tropes like the Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Turtle “Neoplatonic,” preferring the term “Science Fiction” (see Shakespeare, pp. 26–7); but by “Neoplatonism” he would seem simply to mean “new Platonism,” not Plotinianism. Jonathan Culler’s defense of the later Empson is a welcome corrective to common views I too have attempted to dispel in this book, but I think it is misleading to invoke Empson against figures as diverse as Wayne Booth and Geoffrey Hartman, who have fostered, Culler asserts, “a revival of interest in the sacred” (“The Future of Criticism,” in The

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Current in Criticism, ed. Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, 1987, p. 37). Hartman’s studies of the genius loci in the eighteenth century have parallels everywhere in the late Empson; and Culler’s program for universal demystification on scientific principles will not be found endorsed by the author of “Fairy Flight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Natural Magic and Populism in Marvell’s Poetry.”

168

Index Note: Works are indexed under the name of the author, with the exception of Empson’s main critical works.

Adorno, Theodor 110; Minima Moralia 91 aestheticism 14, 16, 53 allegory 60 Alpers, Paul 88, 95, 131, 133 Ambiguity, Seven Types of, see Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson) ambivalence (seventh type of ambiguity) 3, 8–9, 32, 41, 102 anachronism 68–9 animism 137–8, 144 antithetical words 100–4, 109 Argufying (Empson’s essays, ed. Haffenden) 4, 17, 38, 89, 123, 130 Arianism 92, 105 Aristotle 1, 16, 96; Poetics 1–2 art criticism 119–20 Auden, W.H. 113; The Enchafed Flood 123 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park 13; Sense and Sensibility 50 autotelic language 4, 14 Ayer, Alfred 76

Beardsley, Monroe 131 Benjamin, Walter 91 Bentley, Richard 32, 34, 53, 79 biography 35–6, 67, 74, 126–9 Biography, Using (Empson), see Using Biography (Empson) Blake, William 47 Bloom, Harold 36 Bloomfield, Leonard 7; Language 63 Bottrall, Ronald 111 Bradbrook, M.C. 29–30, 31, 51, 77, 88 Bradley, A.C. 2, 96 Brooks, Cleanth 16, 45, 59 Brophy, Brigid 109–10 Buddhism 21, 28, 48, 98–9 Burke, Kenneth 2–3, 8, 88, 91, 147n. Byron, George Gordon, sixth Baron 36, 116–17; Childe Harold 143–4; “Vision of Judgement” 47 Cambridge 4, 9, 14, 118 Cambridge philosophers 7, 20, 122 Carey, John 12, 51 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) 33; Alice books 12, 77 catharsis 1–2 Cavell, Stanley 60, 122 censorship 145; Empson’s opposition to 25–6 Chase, Stuart 90

Barker, George, “Narcissus” 100 Barthes, Roland 90, 91 Basic English 20, 30, 38, 49, 58, 59, 60–1, 6 8, 88 Bateson, F.W. 31 Bayley, John 47, 72–3 Beardsley, Aubrey 109–10

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Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey, Troilus and Criseyde 102 Chiang, Madame 125; China in Peace and War 116 Chicago school of criticism 16, 62 child cult 33; see also Romanticism China 48, 116, 140–1; Confucianism 21, 98–9 Christianity 1, 3–4, 8, 21–3, 35, 44– 5, 56, 92–5, 120, 125 civil war 34, 44, 116 class consciousness 12, 13, 114–15, 139–40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 7–8, 16, 38, 39, 71, 137; “The Eolian Harp” 144; “Kubla Khan” 123– 4; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 44, 105, 109, 123, 137, 143 Collingwood, R.S., Philosophical Method 64 communication, semiotic nature of 90 Complex Words, The Structure of (Empson) 36, 49, 58, 67, 94 and A.C.Bradley 2; on alien beliefs 126, 131, 132; anthropological approach 1, 11– 12; antithetical words 103, 104; Appendix 7, 63–4; and Christianity 120; on emotion and statements 13–14, 15–16, 59, 141; Empson’s description of 136–7; and Empson’s other work 4, 23, 59–60, 88; and Empson’s politics 40, 116; on “head” and “chief” meanings 74–5; and historicism 13, 90, 132; on honesty 4; on human sacrifice 98; interest in character 17–19, 37; on Keats 129–30; keywords 13, 19, 21–3, 36–7, 49, 89, 91, 111; on metaphor 53, 57; on Milton 84, 86, 121; and New Criticism 14, 15–16; optimistic view of humanity 23;

overdetermination of language in 89, 91; resistance 81, 82–3; and social class 29, 30; on spirits 138; on tact 29, 31; on words as units of meaning 21–3, 133; on Wordsworth 38, 48, 53, 82–3 Cornford, F.M., From Religion to Philosophy 97 Cowper, William, “The Castaway” 88–9, 130 Culler, Jonathan 14–15, 88 cultural criticism 123–5, 129, 149n., 150n. Dante Alighieri, The Inferno 143 Darwin, Charles 35, 120 de Man, Paul 56–8, 60, 65, 91; “The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism” 56–7; “Wordsworth and the Victorians” 61 deconstruction 7, 43, 57, 60, 61, 76, 79–80 deep structures 20 Deism 26; see also Christianity Descartes, René 33, 120–1 Dodsworth, Martin 35 Donne, John 25, 27, 33, 49, 51, 100, 105, 121–2, 134–5; Anniversaries 96, 107; “Elegy XIX” 52, 141; “The Exstacie” 52; sermon on spirits 138; “To His Mistress on Going to Bed” 126–7 Donoghue, Denis 4, 131 Dover Wilson, John 23, 47, 85–6, 126 Drury, Elizabeth 96, 122 Dryden, John 26, 128; Aurengzebe 103; Religio Laici 105 dualism 120–1 Eagleton, Terry 30–1 Eliot, T.S. 1, 35, 59, 70, 99, 112, 121, 122, 126; “East Coker” 39; “The Metaphysical Poets” 71; “Tradition and the Individual

170

Index

Talent” 16, 141; The Waste Land 10, 112 Ellmann, Richard 115 emotion and statements, pseudostatements 13–15, 57–8 Empson, William: and A.C.Bradley 2; Cambridge, and influence of 1, 4–5, 7, 9, 14, 20, 37, 118, 122, 133, 155; and censorship 25–6; and Christianity 1, 3–4, 8, 21–4, 92–3; and class consciousness 9, 12–13, 29–30, 35, 114–15; and colonialism 13, 123–4; criticism, “Basic English and Wordsworth” 20, 38–9, 49, 60– 1, 68, 88; broadcasts on Paradise Lost 47; Coleridge’s Verse 44, 123– 4, 144; “Donne the Space Man” 88, 141; “An Early Romantic” 79; Essays on Shakespeare, see Shakespeare, Essays on; “Fairy Flight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 143; Faustus and the Censor, see Faustus and the Censor; “How a Japanese Student Thinks” 125; letter to The Times Literary Supplement 134; “The Marriage of Marvell” 127–8, 145; Milton’s God, see Milton’s God (Empson); “Natural Magic and Populism in Marvell’s Poetry” 144–5; “Obscurity and Annotation” 71; preface to book on Modernist politics 112; “Reading a Poem: Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’” 88–9; “Sense in ‘The Prelude’” 61, 142; Seven Types of Ambiguity, see Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson); Some Aspects of Pastoral, see Pastoral, Some Aspects of (Empson); The Structure of Complex Words, see Complex Words (Empson); “Tom Jones” 88; Using Biography 6, 25, 37, 44, 127–8, 137, 138, 144;

on emotions and statements, relation between 13, 39, 66, 141; on Herbert’s “The Sacrifice” 3, 8, 56, 95, 163n.; as historical critic 11–13, 50, 132; images of xiv–xv, 30–1; and the Kenyon Review 14; and keywords 17–18, 19, 21, 37, 89, 111; and term native” 13, 22; on “phenomenon” of poetry 5, 8, 14–15; poetry, “Autumn on NanYueh” 88, 119; “The Beautiful Train” 125; “The Birth of Steel” 114; “Camping Out” 136; Collected Poems 25, 66, 74, 97, 99; “Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics” 100; “Doctrinal Point” 101; “Ignorance of Death” 139; “Letter I” 104; “Notes on Local Flora” 98; “To an Old Lady”; Poems (1935) 4; “Reflections from Anita Loos” 51; “Sleeping out in a College Cloister” 118; “This Last Pain” 78–9; “Value is an Activity” 101; “Warning to Undergraduates” 9; “The World’s End” 100; “Your Teeth are Ivory Towers” 55, 110; and positivism 23–4; and term “pregnancy” 19, 60; prejudices of 113; reminiscences of 51; and Romanticism see Romanticism; Empson, William—cont. and Shakespearian critics 2, 132; on “tact” 31–2, 41–2, 43; and theory on Earl of Southampton (W.H.?) 140; on tragedy 2; and “verbal criticism” xiii, 4, 5, 14, 17, 23 Eng. Lit. 1, 119 Essays on Shakespeare, see Shakespeare, Essays on (Empson)

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Index

“Family of Love” 135–6 Faustus and the Censor (Empson) 1, 25, 26–8, 36–7, 133, 134, 136, 138, 143 Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones 35, 72, 88 “fool”, folly, in Erasmus 18, 21, 49; as key word 18, 21–2 Formalism 5, 42–3, 56–8, 128–9 Frazer, Sir James 10, 35, 95, 99, 105 Freud, Sigmund 3, 5, 8, 81, 100; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 82; Totem and Taboo 44 Friend, J.W. and Feibleman, J., The Unlimited Community 62 Fukuhara, Rintaro 111

hermeneutics 5, 101 Hertz, Neil 81 Hirsch, E.D. 5, 74 historicism 11–13, 68–70, 90, 132 Hobbes, Thomas 19, 139 Hobsbaum, Philip 12, 104 Holmes, Elizabeth, Studies in Elizabethan Imagery, Empson’s review of 61–2 Housman, A.E. 107 Hulme, T.E. 35, 36, 39, 40, 54, 74, 121; Speculations 112 humanism 1, 12, 58–9 Husserl, Edmund 59, 70 Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy 48

Gardner, Helen 50–1, 91 Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera 10, 34, 67, 96–7, 104 Gilgamesh, The Epic of 139, 167n. Gnosticism 48, 121; see also Middle Spirits Gorer, Geoffrey 138 Graves, Robert 51 Gray, Thomas 10–11, 139; “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” 11, 34, 59; “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” 124 Greene, R., Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 138–9 Grigson, Geoffrey 30

imagery 110–12 intentionality 5–7, 59, 68–71, 74; intentional fallacy 68–9, 131 Jakobson, Roman 42 jammed stress 134, 138 Japan, Empson in 9–10 Johnson, Samuel 7–8, 121, 131; The Vanity of Human Wishes 80 Jones, John Henry 26 Jonson, Ben 52; Volpone 117 Joyce, James 35, 89, 110; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 37, 137; Ulysses 72, 74, 77, 128 Kant, Immanuel 16, 81–2; Critique of Judgement 16 Keats, John 13, 16, 52, 113, 121, 125, 144; “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 37, 129–30; “Ode on Melancholy” 53 Kenner, Hugh 37, 74, 79, 111 Kermode, Frank 12 keywords 13, 17–18, 19, 21–3, 36–7, 49, 89, 91, 111 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 38

Haffenden, John 4; Argufying (ed.) 4, 17, 38, 123, 130 Hardy, Barbara 88 Harrison, John R. 112 Hazlitt, William, “On Shakespeare and Milton” 121 “head” meanings and “chief” meanings 74–5, 92 Hegel, Georg 33; Aesthetics 110 Herbert, George 12, 31, 32, 40–1, 69; “The Sacrifice” 3, 8, 56, 95, 104, 163n.

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Index

Lacan, Jacques 90 language, autotelic aspects of 4, 14; overdetermination of 89–90; poetic 5 Lawrence, D.H. 112, 113 Leavis, F.R. 2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 105 Lewis, C.S. 47, 69, 89, 90 Lewis, Matthew (“Monk”) 125 Lewis, Wyndham, Time and Western Man 35, 74, 112 literary criticism, and ethics 2–3; see also Empson, William, criticism Lovejoy, Arthur 133

53, 79, 82–5, 91–3, 99, 116–17, 120, 138–9, 142, 145; Samson Agonistes 86 Milton’s God (Empson), achievement of 88; and antithetical words 109; attitude to Christianity 24– 5, 91–5; and class 35–6; on conceptual influences 68; criticism of 91–5; on femininity 52, 53; and limits of language 91, 93–5; and Middle Spirits 61, 82, 120; and nationalism 9; as plot summary 73; and politics 10, 85, 115, 116–17; review of 15; on Satan 12, 29, 45–8, 116– 17, 139; on sexuality of angels 82, 142; on sublimity 83–4; symbolism 28; on tact 31 Mizener, Arthur 29, 33 Modernism 35, 40, 53, 74; Empson on politics of 112–14 Moore, G.E. 126 Murray, Gilbert 1 mutual metaphors, see metaphor(s) mutual

Marlowe, Christopher 145; Doctor Faustus 1, 26–8, 82, 127, 145 Marvell, Andrew 32, 34, 125, 144– 5; mower poems 145; “The Garden” 12–13, 59, 138, 145; “Last Instructions to a Painter” 128; “Upon Appleton House” 145 Marx, Karl 10, 35 Marxism 11, 69–70 Mason, H.A. 59 meaning, “head” and “chief 74–5, 92; hypostasis of 60; of meaning 74; pre-conscious 5 Meaning of Meaning, The, see Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. medieval period 33–4 metaphor(s) 23, 53, 57–8, 60, 66–7; fusion 57, 60, 61, 93, 107, 129; mutual 107, 129; pregnant 60–1, 81 Metaphysical poets 99–100; see also Donne; Herbert metaphysics, and Middle Spirits (q.v.) 143–4; and Milton (q.v.) 121–2 Middle Spirits 19, 26–7, 61, 82, 120, 143–5 Milton, John 21, 24, 31, 33–4, 38, 40, 45–6, 83, 86, 105; and metaphysics 121–2; Paradise Lost

nationalism 9–10, 115–16 “native”, discussion of 12–13 “nature”, natural, as keyword 21, 48 New Criticism 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 42, 68, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich 77 Norris, Christopher 9, 15, 60, 62, 64, 70, 76, 79, 88, 122; William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism 3, 58–9, 84 novel, discussion of 72–3 Oedipus complex 109, 142–3; and antithetical words 102 Ogden, C.K. 20, 57; see also Richard, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. Olson, Elder 7

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Ordinary Language philosophy 20, 60 Orientalism 123–4 Orwell, George 113, 116; 1984 94

Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur (“Q”) 14 Racine, Jean 86 Raglan, Lord 95, 105; The Hero 106 Raine, Kathleen 51 Rajan, B. 53 Ransom, John Crowe 14, 42, 70, 73; The New Criticism 14, 42, 70; The World’s Body 14 rationality 91–5; see also Middle Spirits Read, Sir Herbert 125; The True Voice of Feeling 110, 125 Renaissance literature 137 resistance, concept of 81–7; and indistinctness 60–1 Restoration literature 34 Richards, I.A. 4, 7, 13, 14–15, 20, 57, 58–9, 67, 73, 75, 76, 90, 108, 115, 126; Coleridge on Imagination 57; Mencius on the Mind 48; The Philosophy of Rhetoric 53, 57, 67, 107; Practical Criticism 42; Principles of Literary Criticism 14, 16; on stock responses 94 Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K., The Meaning of Meaning 57, 66, 74 Ricks, Christopher 36, 78, 127 Riding, Laura 51 Robertson, J.M., Literary Detection 86 Rochester, John Wilmot, second earl of 6–7, 30, 37 Romanticism 11, 31, 32–3, 35–40, 39, 40–1, 47, 76, 125, 142; and Empson’s theory of interpretation 61; and place of women 51–2 Russell, Bertrand 76, 95 Russian Formalists 42 Rylands, George, Words and Poetry, Empson’s review of 17

Paradise Lost, see under Milton, John; see also Milton’s God (Empson) pastoral 6, 93, 95–7 Pastoral, Some Versions of (Empson) 14, 45, 62, 83, 125; on antithetical words 103, 104; aspects disregarded 67–8; on double meanings 75; and Empson’s politics 116; and heroic 96–7, 139–40; on human sacrifice 1, 95, 97–8; and “intentional structure” of literature 59–60; interest in plurality 122; on Milton (q.v.) 47, 142; pastoral distinguished from folk tales 6; and period terms 33–4; and rationalism 53, 100; and social aspect of literature 10, 13, 16, 36, 43–4, 88; on spirits 138, 142; on tact 32; and theme of ambivalence 8–9; on tragedy 1, 2 Peirce, C.S. 66 period terms 33–4 Piper, H.W., The Active Universe 137, 144 Plotinus, Plotinianism 61, 139 poem as “phenomenon” 5 politics 10, 45, 85, 112–18 Pope, Alexander 37; Pastorals 67 positivism xiv, 19, 23–4, 57–8 post-structuralism 74 Pound, Ezra 16, 112, 113 pragmatism 76–7 pre-conscious knowledge 5 Price, Harry, Confessions of a Ghosthunter 138 propaganda 46 pseudo-statements 13, 15, 57–8; see also Richards, I.A.

sacrifice xiv, 1, 4, 10, 22–3, 28, 38, 44, 45, 95–9, 104–5, 147n.

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sadism 95 Said, Edward, on Orientalism 123 Sale, Roger 88, 95, 133; Modern Heroism 99 Saurat, Denis 139 Saussure, Ferdinand de 90 scapegoat(ing) 10, 22–3, 44, 97; see also Burke, Kenneth Schleiermacher, F.E. 5, 126 Schucking, L.L. 132 scientific thought 59, 75–6 sense 15–16, 19–21, 37, 50, 61, 66, 83, 141–2; and muddle 19–20; multiple meanings of, as keyword 19, 21–2, 37; schemes of 15–16, 66 sensibility, dissociation of 121 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson) 13, 59, 130; antithetical words 102; on double meanings 75; on Eliot (q.v.) 100; on emotion and meaning 13, 112; and Empson’s politics 45; and femininity of ambiguity 52–3; final type of ambiguity (ambivalence) 3, 8–9, 32, 41, 102; on homonyms 68; on human sacrifice 95; and I.A.Richards (q.v.) 4, 14; influence of 110; on meaning 65, 66; and nature 59; on organic form 70; Preface to Second Edition 29, 80; relationship with Empson’s other work 8–9, 88; and Romanticism 11, 39, 40–1, 142; on short poems 73; structure 4–5, 55–6, 61–2, 64; on tact 31, 32; value of irresolution 80; word as unit of meaning 14–15, 42 sexuality 78, 102; of spirits 53, 82 Shakespeare, Essays on (Empson) 2, 89, 146; attitude to women 50; and censorship 26, 145; on chain of being 142–3; and class system 140; on Falstaff 23, 37,

47, 114–15, 126; fear of civil war 44, 116; opposition to positivism 23–4; on spirits 138, 144; on unconscious 109 Shakespeare, William, 57, 60, 71, 85, 86; Hamlet 23, 38, 102–3, 110–11, 126; King Lear 17–18, 49, 111, 116; Macbeth 23, 41, 43– 6, 84–6, 119; Measure for Measure 17, 38, 50; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 138, 143; Othello 17, 18, 38, 132–3; The Sonnets 89, 140; Timon of Athens 17; Troilus and Cressida 103, 116; Venus and Adonis 145; see also, Shakespeare, Essays on (Empson) Shelley, Percy Bysshe 35–6, 137, 143–4; Adonais 144 Sidney, Sir Philip, Arcadia 70 sign chains (Ogden and Richards) 66, 74 Smith, James 5, 8, 59 Smith, Janet Adam, William Empson 51, 111 socialism 115; see also politics Southampton, Earl of (“W.H.”?) 140 Sparrow, John 76 Spencer, Herbert 35 spirits 143, 144–5 Middle 19, 26–7, 61, 82, 120, 143–5 Spurgeon, Caroline 18 Stern, Gustaf 60 Stock, Amy G. 51 Stoll, E.E. 132 Strickland, Geoffrey 78, 136 Structure of Complex Words, The, seeComplex Words, The Structure of (Empson) style 29–31 Swinburne, Algernon 35; “Before a Crucifix” 95, 104 Sykes-Davies, Hugh 37 symbols, mind “hag-ridden” by 109 synecdoche 45, 61, 96, 139–40

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tact 29, 31–3 Tate, Allen 70 tenor/vehicle distinction 57–8, 60, 85, 107 Tey, Josephine, The Daughter of Time 128 Thomas, Dylan 109, 113, 136 Tillyard, E.M.W. 133 tradition 16, 40, 48, 141 tragedy 2 Tupper, Fred C. 127–8 Tuve, Rosamund 8, 12, 16, 33, 41, 50–1, 69, 105, 106, 133

Wilde, Oscar 77–9; The Soul of Man Under Socialism 78 Willey, Basil 37, 133 Williams, Raymond 69–70, 74–5, 89, 90; Keywords 132 Wimsatt, W.K. 6, 70, 131; “Wimsatt Law” 5, 7 Wimsatt, W.K. and Beardsley, Monroe, “The Intentional Fallacy” 68–9, 131 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 126 women, Empson’s attitude to 49–54 Wood, Michael 75 Woolf, Virginia 91; Mrs Dalloway 91, 95, 125 Wordsworth, Dorothy, Journal 123– 4 Wordsworth, William 32–3, 35, 65, 84, 131, 137, 142; “Basic English and Wordsworth” 20, 38–9, 49, 60–1, 68, 88; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 44; The Prelude 19, 20, 38–9, 82–3, 141–2; “Tintern Abbey” 20, 37, 53, 79

unnaturalism, cult of 112, 120–1 Using Biography (Empson) 6, 25, 37, 44, 127–8, 137, 138, 144 van Tieghem, Paul 80 Vaughan, Henry 79 “verbal criticism” xiii, 4, 5, 14, 17, 23, 90 Victorian culture 35 Wain, John 31 Webster, John 125 Whorf-Sapir hypothesis 106 Wihl, Gary 60–1, 81, 88

Yates, Frances 143 Yeats, W.B. 16, 25, 73, 74, 112, 113, 139, 144

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