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发表于 2007-10-26 15:12:50
rint this page</a> </li></ul></div><div class="hide-from-print border-top-d9d9d9 padding-bottom-10"></div><div class="padding-bottom-15"></div><div class="padding-bottom-5"></div><div class="float-right text-right position-relative margin-top-minus-20"><p class="x-small color-999"></p></div><div><div class="float-left position-relative margin-top-minus-22"><span class="small">From </span><span class="byline">The Times Literary Supplement</span></div><div class="small color-666">October 24, 2007<br /></div><div class="clear-simple"></div><h1 class="heading">William Empson's fixated faith</h1><h2 class="sub-heading padding-top-5 padding-bottom-15">What Empson’s anti-Christian crusade owed to childhood loyalties, drinking and his unusual marriage</h2><div id="main-article"><div class="article-author"><span class="small"></span><span class="byline">Eric Griffiths </span><div class="clear"></div></div></div><p>John Haffenden<br />WILLIAM EMPSON: A LIFE<br />Volume Two: Against the Christians<br />824pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $65).<br />978 0 19 927660 8 </p><p>The first time John Haffenden saw William Empson he was reading his poetry not very aloud in Trinity College, Dublin. A “woman cried out with exasperation from the back of the hall, ‘Speak up, you silly old fool’”. For some who then cringed, the embarrassment was later relieved by discovering that the woman was the poet’s wife, Hetta, eventually Lady, Empson. (Others may have curled further in on themselves when they realized they had been admitted without warning into the family circle and its lively ways.) Her bravura intimacy at this moment, her carelessness of what other people thought, shared in his own cordially unbuttoned manner amid the “farcically rigid convention” of academic exchange. For Empson usually required no encouragement to speak up. He had been answering the call “to speak up against the dead weight of the fashions of two generations” since his Winchester College days when, as Haffenden puts it, he was “not loth to blazon his opinions” in the school debating society, impelled by “a natural scepticism . . . to speak up for unorthodoxy and subversion”. </p><p>Empson’s declamations of independence stir his biographer. In the introduction to the first volume of this superlative work (reviewed in the TLS, July 1, 2005), which saw Empson through Cambridge and on to Japan and China, the years in which he wrote most of his incisive, singing poetry and the matchless Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, Haffenden quoted a statement by Empson which “seems to me so true of the man and his career that I think of it as a motto for his literary and cultural endeavours”: “To become morally independent of one’s formative society . . . is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept”. </p><p>A literary theme, however grand, is probably an extravagant guide for “cultural endeavours”, unless you suppose literature is the sum total of culture, a foolish thing to suppose for many reasons, the plainest of which is that literacy rates did not reach 50 per cent in Britain until the nineteenth century. The significance of differential literacy has been so regularly ignored, for the sake of smoothing inferences from documents to states of society and mind, that the neglect now constitutes not a blind spot but a badge of pride among spotters of mentalit�s. Haffenden acutely notices a shortcoming in the sweep of Empson’s masterpiece, The Structure of Complex Words (1951), where most of the examples “are taken not from ordinary social discourse but from sophisticated literary texts”. But he doesn’t pursue the implications of this insight about that book’s reliance on literary evidence. For all its tousled detail, The Structure of Complex Words suffers from that “pureminded intellectualism which ignores the facts in view” which Empson worried over. Haffenden makes no similar observation about Empson’s next book, though he might well have done so, for in Milton’s God (1961), Paradise Lost, a single English poem by a learned, cranky writer, serves as the test case for an assessment of Christianity across its millennial and global disparities. </p><p>Haffenden has a heart too easily impressed by this “motto” which merely descants on the angelism it was an element of Empson’s genuine strength to resist, as when he identified “the idea that the theorist is not part of the world he examines” as “one of the deepest sources of error”. One depth of the error arises from the encouragement it gives to our tendency to mistake oblivion for liberation, to imagine that ideals such as “moral progress”, because they imply a distance between us and our formative pasts, have themselves no past to speak of but spring fully armed from our own splendidly unique heads. Whereas it is more likely that, after Empson had been, as he remembered, “taught The Lancers when . . . a little boy”, he was shepherded through to another Georgian classroom to learn the basics of how to pursue “some higher ethical concept”. Styles of aspiration, like styles of dancing, have a period charm. What is notable about Empson is his sturdy dependence on “the opinions I was taught at school”; whenever he checked the evidence for them, he found “they stand up like a rock”, and he stood up for them, like a brick. </p><p>“Scepticism” may have been, as Haffenden thinks, “natural” to Empson, but it was also acquired, and, in some senses of the complex word, he was never a “sceptic”. He did not hold “that there are no adequate grounds for certainty as to the truth of any proposition whatsoever”, nor was he “habitually inclined rather to doubt than to believe any assertion or fact that comes before him”; he sometimes behaved like “an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite convictions”; he was, from an early age, “loosely, an unbeliever in Christianity” (the definitions are all from the OED). Empson himself most often uses the term in this last sense alone, as in his assurance that “the Enlightenment is the only hope for civilisation” because the constant efforts of “enlightened sceptics” are required to keep Christianity, “that loathsome system of torture-worship” from “reviv[ing] its standard techniques” and “burning people alive”. He credited Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857–61) with containing the “best examination” of how the “decisive swing of public opinion against the Christian use of torture” came about as a result of “a growth of tacit scepticism”: “I read the book as an undergraduate . . . and was much impressed by the ample detail”. Buckle’s details are indeed ample and include many surprises for anyone mildly informed about the history of religions, such as the claim that China, like India, had never undergone change in cult or teachings. </p><p>When Buckle praises scepticism, he means the habit of doubting, or questioning received opinion, in all domains, not just Empson’s specialized incredulity. Empson was liable, when roused by polemic, to betray his own insights and pare a complex word down to the snug dimensions handy for point-scoring. (He was also prone to suppose that others did the same. He was outraged when T. S. Eliot in 1931 “screamed out and cried ‘Donne was, I insist, no sceptic’”, though Eliot had quietly specified he meant the word “in the modern sense” and had left ample room for a rangy, questioning Donne, one who was “the anti-thesis of the scholastic, of the mystic and of the philosophical system maker”.) This slimming of a word’s senses is one trick in “argufying” – “the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our own way” – which he studied brilliantly and engaged in vehemently. Empson’s way with “sceptic” reduces Buckle’s history of the changed cultural status of religion to the platitude that the fewer people who believe in Christianity, the fewer will try to put its tenets into incendiary effect. </p><p>Our evidence as to who and how many, then as now, believe or believed what, with which reservations and from which motives, is ambiguous and patchy, though the print-centred pass unperturbed over the gaps. Maybe “Christendom” never exercised the pervasive control some pine for and some execrate; by the same token, “secularization” may not have uniformly caused it to melt away. Buckle himself says little about how the habit of doubting actually spread; it doesn’t seem to have spread to him, if his constant resort to phrases such as “there can be no doubt” and “it is an undoubted fact” is anything to go by. He had shifted his trust from scriptures to statistics (compiled by officials who have “no interest in distorting the truth of the reports”), and felt confident that the positive knowledge of mankind they enshrine had outstripped previous wisdoms and was mounting up so fast “that I entertain little doubt that before another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete” and we would have figured ourselves out. But he doesn’t always explain how he took the measurements to support the hope which was in him, as when he assures his reader that “whatever theologians may assert, it is certain that mankind has far more virtue than vice”. </p><p>He shares here what John Haffenden calls Empson’s “really extraordinary faith in human nature”, a likeable outlook but one a methodical doubter might need to deny himself. A sceptic who raises his eyebrows only over selected religious doctrines is not a searcher after remote truth but a rollicking partisan of the unexamined life, a gay dog of the breed whose essential points Empson recognized with fond inwardness: “religion is not necessary because man is naturally good” and can, therefore, like a dog, be counted on – “Dog, it is absurd but half-true to say, became to the eighteenth-century sceptic what God had been to his ancestors, the last security behind human values”. Empson always had that idol, the lolloping “security behind human values” of his ancestors, to fall back on; this was the variety of scepticism “natural” to him. He was not, however, as placidly devoted to the value of the human as Haffenden’s cheerleading for “Empson’s humanist faith” makes out. He had bad dreams from which he awoke to dark mutterings about “the black heart of man”. Even in the East, where he spent half his time between 1932 and 1952, and where he luxuriated in a relaxed sense of sexual opportunity and indulged “a diffused homosexual feeling” which “the power of Christianity” inhibited, his fellow feeling had its limits. He thought the Japanese “uncomfortable bogus people” , the only ones with “some emotional life” were “the Christian converts who look at you with great liquid crucified eyes like spaniels with indigestion”. </p><p>Yet it was Christianity which made Empson think specially ill of the human heart, though his description of how that rot set in is lurid and sketchy. Haffenden looks on at Empson’s protracted anti-Christian spat with the tense flush of a man at the ringside, relishing “his onslaught against Christianity”, his “undifferentiated attack”, the moments when “he hits the faith hard in the solar plexus”. He tells us that Empson both regarded Christianity as “a religion which served only to damage a decent sense of life and literature” and believed it to be “at once the root and the ruin of European culture”. Even the agile Empson would find it hard to get his mind round a “root” which “served only to damage” its offshoot. There is an argument to be had about whether we can draw up a reliable credit-and-debit account of what Christianity has done to and for us; it is hard to keep the religion’s fingers out of any scales we might use to weigh it up. As with all transvaluations of values, the birth as well as the death of God, how to value the transvaluation becomes itself an element in process of being changed. In the 1930s, some of Empson’s deepest and spriteliest writing, in prose and in poetry, turned on this crux; but it is not a thought he dwelled on once he had returned to England from China in 1952 to take up the Chair of English Literature at Sheffield University and “felt forced to take up arms against what he contemptuously dubbed ‘neo-Christian’ readings of literary texts”. </p><p>The crusading Empson, applauded in Against the Christians, found it easy to identify and calculate the effects of Christianity. This task was made simpler for him, because he thought the faith powerless for good (“I can’t feel that belief in a religion has much bearing on the way people stand up to a real moral decision”) but reliably potent when it came to stirring up a “storm of terror and craving for blood”: “the effects of Christianity must always be expected to be . . . bad”. The Spanish Inquisition has enjoyed spectacular success in the role of most dastardly Christian deed. Buckle wheels it on to illustrate his view that religious persecution is “the greatest evil men have ever inflicted on their own species”, and Empson follows at his heels with tales of how “even the devoted” and “slavering” Spaniards were, towards the end of the siècle des lumières, “almost deprived of the pleasure of burning people alive” by the spread of quizzicality. His joke light-heartedly relies on the serious mistake of identifying a culture with its regime, as if all Spaniards had been of one official mind, though at least three faiths had coexisted in the peninsula for centuries, and there were many who believed, even as the Reconquista neared completion, that “the Muslim can be saved in his faith just as the Christian can in his”. Empson was keen to dispel top-down nonsense about people's beliefs and conduct when spouted by “neo-Christian” literary scholars with their assurance that, say, Shakespeare’s audience had been homogenized by the 1551 Act of Uniformity, but repeatedly collapsed into the same nonsense himself when cartooning the horrid effects of orthodoxy. </p><p>Empson often touched on the constitutive double standards of the West – “The web of European civilization seems to have been slung between the ideas of Christianity and those of a half-secret rival, centring perhaps (if you made it a system) round honour; one that stresses pride rather than humility, self-realization rather than self-denial” – but when totting up the wrongs chargeable to Christianity, he rarely factored in the influence of Christ’s rival milord; as in the case of the Inquisition, where he seems unaware that it was, as Henry Kamen says, “a bureaucracy not of the Church but of the state”, and that its main purpose was to defend, against the growing influence of Jewish conversos, the “honour” of a particular “caste”, the racial purity (limpieza) of the squirearchy, Hispanic counterparts to the Empsons of Yokefleet Hall. The impious as well as the pious faithful give up their cherished fetishes with reluctance if at all. Empson fiercely defended the Whig interpretation of history as progress and equally fiercely resisted any suggestion that the study of history had itself made progress since the smattering he had picked up when young, and to which he fondly clung. </p><p>John Haffenden regards “contempt for Christianity” as “one of the most deep-rooted convictions of Empson’s life”. It was certainly a long-standing attitude of his, but not everything long-standing is deep-rooted, and “contempt” is not a “conviction” at all but an emotion, or even a corrosion of the spirit. Being as richly supplied with foregone conclusions as Empson was did not help him to a patient inquisitiveness when he came to write about the God of the Christians, for he already knew this was “a God who, as soon as you are told the basic story about him, is evidently the Devil”. Empson entrenched himself further in contempt because the intellectual atmosphere of the Cold War was poisonous with “the quarrel between Christians and Communists”, who, as he observed, “egg each other on to exactly the same disastrous results” of snap judgement, scant attention and pseudo-speciation. He might have held off from these brawls, but he was attracted to the energies displayed in a quarrel. Already in 1939, Dorothea Richards was remembering, “Bill got very drunk & shouted & became quarrelsome . . . . Kind of hatred & contempt coming up”; bloody-minded, Bloody Mary-ed controversy became a staple of his home life with Hetta – “Empson spilling stuff on table, rowing with Hetta, each shouting [the] other down” (I. A. Richards’s diary, 1950). </p><p>Haffenden meticulously records these and other gruelling details, but he plays down the synergies between Empson’s domestic and public quarrelsomeness, evident though these are, as when he writes to Christopher Ricks while preparing the second edition of Milton’s God: “How dismal quarrelling is, and pretending careless ease drives me to drink”. It was wrong of him not also to notice with what dismal ease drinking drove him to carelessness in his quarrels. The exquisite gift for paraphrase, which made Seven Types of Ambiguity a classic, coarsened into travesty. The effects of polemical exuberance on his literary criticism were worse still. The finesse of ear which elicited such a range of implications from the “tone of melancholy” in Gray’s “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen” (Some Versions of Pastoral) abandoned Empson, or he abandoned it for the sake of “bluntly and caustically reductive” gibes which he exulted to deliver because “he felt so righteous”, as Haffenden squarely puts it, though he shies away from recognizing that this self-righteousness, mirroring what Empson detested in the “neo-Christians”, came largely out of a bottle. </p><p>Throughout both volumes of William Empson: A Life, John Haffenden is irreproachably and unreproachfully honest about Empson’s drinking, though he winces over the facts, shuffling between “habitually drank to excess”, “occasional over-indulgence in drink” and the prim, implausible quibble that Empson was “never an alcoholic”. Empson seems at times to have suffered from Korsakoff’s syndrome, an amnesic disorder in heavy drinkers, which results in the victim’s finding it difficult to learn new things, and also in confabulation. Several pet theories on which Empson lavished his energies in later years required a deal of confabulation – sometimes open, as when he invented a hilarious scene to make the sense he wanted of The Spanish Tragedy (“It would be a hit produced with that tiny addition. O.K. W.E.”); sometimes contorted with special pleading, as in the notion that Bloom in Ulysses “has a quite specific neurosis about his wife which is going to be cured by his homosexual feelings about Stephen”, a notion which led Empson to describe the book, within the space of one paragraph, as both “a bold treatment of a subject which nobody else has dared to handle” and as having “a ‘point’ which Joyce apparently was shy about and succeeded in hiding from his readers”. And he could be sheerly addled. Here is his account of Beckett’s All That Fall, which he declined to read because the “basic plot”, as he claimed to have been told it, struck him as “artificially horrible”: </p><p>"An almost impotent blind man is put onto a train, to be taken out by his loving relations when he reaches the right station, but he exposes his sex and tries to masturbate before a female whose voice sounds to him sympathetic, not realising that this is a child, who throws herself in horror out of the window of the train and somehow manages to get under its wheels, so that she is killed . . . . I think that Beckett was just trying to think of something really nasty to foist on the BBC." </p><p>The foisting is all Empson’s: the impotence, the exposure, the masturbation, the presence of a child in Mr Rooney’s compartment, the sex of that child, the cause of the fall from the train – he conjured them all up by force of preconceptions about Beckett. Instances like this do not boost confidence in Empson as an interpreter of the “basic story” of Christianity. </p><p>One of his more remarkable memorial corruptions comes in Milton’s God, where, while relying on Buckle’s data about how Christianity ebbed, he produces an explanation of why the religion is “so very predisposed to enter phases of great evil” that runs counter to the hypothesis with which Buckle sought to marshal the same data. Haffenden mistakenly supposes Empson’s “thesis” in Milton’s God is “following in the footsteps of . . . H. T. Buckle”. Buckle actually repudiated attempts such as Empson’s to track the history of “Europe and her pains” back to the doctrine of vicarious atonement: “the truth . . . is that the actions of men are governed, not by dogmas, and text-books, and rubrics, but by the opinions and habits of their contemporaries . . . . how idle, then, it is to ascribe the civilization to the creed”. The “thesis” Haffenden means is probably the following “extremely basic objection to the Christian God”: </p><p>The origin of the problem is obvious enough, given a knowledge of history which anybody can find in a public library; it came from trying to patch the ancient Neolithic craving for human sacrifice on to the new transcendental God of all mankind. Because this could never be admitted, the horrible doctrine has gone on doing great harm for two thousand years . . . . </p><p>“Obvious enough” to whom and for what? Empson ought to have wondered how helpful “knowledge of history” can be for an understanding of the prehistoric course of hominization, about which we still know less than he imagined in his chatter about “Neolithic craving”. The distinctive “great harm” done was that “great cruelties”, such as public torture, “were practised . . . as an admitted pleasure for a crowd” in Christendom, whereas “there seem to be no such records from the parallel civilisations of India and China”. Such cruelties were happening in China as he wrote, and there are such records from other elsewheres untainted by Christianity, Meso-America most notably (as Empson knew); but let that pass. These atrocities “happened in Europe because the Christian Father, though satisfied by the crucifixion of his Son, arranged infinitely greater tortures for almost everyone else; the moral effect of worshipping him was sure to be disgustingly bad”. </p><p>Empson wobbled about how “sure” the disgusting effects were. At times, he called them “logical consequences” of the “doctrine”; at other times, they were empirical probabilities, no more than “plainly likely” to happen. “Redemption by torment” may or may not be “the central tradition of Christianity”, but the Crucifixion could not have the significance it has for the orthodox without the Incarnation, and, according to St Paul, Christian faith would be “vain” without the Resurrection. Empson was fixated on the Cross to the exclusion of all else, a fanatical concentration rarely kept up for long among even the most gruesomely devout. There are other ways of telling the “basic story”, as Empson knew from his occasional dip into Aquinas, where he was intrigued but unimpressed to find that “he seems to feel that only barbarians or children could interpret the story \[of Christ’s death\] so crudely” as Empson was sure it had to be interpreted. He could have found in Athanasius’ De Incarnatione Verbi Dei the view that the Incarnation itself healed the rift between God and man, or if Athanasius was too out of the way, he could have gone to a carol service and reflected on why Christ’s birth is greeted with Wesley’s words “Peace on earth, and mercy mild, / God and sinners reconciled”. Understanding a religion, though, for Empson, did not involve acquaintance with liturgy: an odd stance for a man with an interest in poetry and drama. </p><p>Empson and Haffenden insist there is nothing to understand in the deeds and sayings of Trinitarians because the doctrine of the Trinity is merely “a set of verbal contradictions”, so empty a set that claiming to hold this belief is, as Haffenden slinkily puts it, “nothing but an article of evasion, so to speak”. Empson was up to his old argufying tricks again, simplifying the complex word “contradiction” so as to get his own way in a quarrel. Not all “verbal contradictions” are logical contradictions, and only a logical contradiction would evacuate the creed of believable sense. Using the “same” word in two senses within one sentence is, no doubt, a tiresome habit, common among theologians, poets and other untidy-minded folk, but is not in itself inane or sheerly malign. In 1928, Empson had accounted for the contrariness intrinsic to our talk as follows: “Extremely often, in dealing with the world, one arrives at two ideas or ways of dealing with things which both work and are needed, but which entirely contradict one another”. He thought the phenomenon perfectly normal, and operative in “the practice of scientists, recent mathematical logic, primitive languages, the doctrine of the Trinity, the corresponding Eastern ideas, and, in fact . . . anything of any importance”. Things had changed by the time of Milton’s God, in which the doctrine of the Trinity has shrivelled into a “staggeringm isuse” of this “fundamental” “bit of our mental equipment”, mere “double-talk” which serves only as “a means of deceiving good men into accepting evil”. </p><p>At one point in The Structure of Complex Words, Empson remarked “ it would be convenient to have a simple rule by which corrupt language could be recognised”, adding with dispassionate aplomb, “However I do not think we can get it”. He never gave a rule, simple or otherwise, to distinguish the “corruption” of the doctrine of the Trinity from paradoxical utterances such as his own piercing description of the Buddha’s face as “at once blind and all-seeing”. The Trinity just needed to be ruled out of consideration so that “Milton’s Arianism” would not stand in the way of treating the God of Paradise Lost as “the traditional Christian God”. </p><p>There is much else about that “horrible and wonderful” poem to suggest that Milton is an unreliable narrator of Christianity’s “basic story”, not least the cumbersome and misleading baggage of epic convention which Milton piled into his narrative. Empson recognized that the stylistic hybridity of the poem had shady results: “the effect of dramatising [God’s] foreknowledge in this Homeric way is to present him as a trickster”, though it is God not Homer who gets Empson’s blame for this. His conclusions might have been different had he taken the Commedia as his proof-text, for Dante had more tact in storytelling than Milton; the persons of his Trinity neither act nor speak in Milton’s stagey way. As it happens, one of God’s better moments in Milton arises from an allusion to Dante. Empson rightly warmed to “the best pair of lines” in “God’s speech on Christ’s sacrifice”: </p><p>Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt<br />With thee thy manhood also to this throne . . . . </p><p>“where”, as he wrote in 1951, “a breath of Christianity seems to creep in for once” and “the rhythm around the word humiliation is like taking off in an aeroplane”. Dante breathed that uplift into Milton’s line, which is one of the rare hendecasyllables in the poem, for the glide of “thy humiliation” into “exalt” comes from St Bernard’s hymn to the Virgin as “umile e alta” in Paradiso 33, which in turn came to Dante from Mary’s own “exaltavit humiles” in the Vulgate (Luke 1: 52). God seems magnanimous here, not jealous but delighted that his son will be so like his mother. When Empson praised the lines again, ten years later, in Milton's God, the bit about “a breath of Christianity” dropped away into “much the best moment of God in the poem, morally as well as poetically”. </p><p>Empson could not let on that Christianity had the sociopolitical dimensions which sound out from the Magnificat, with uneven, transforming consequences for the styles of both literature and conduct. Characteristically, he avoids mention of the words and events of the gospels, preferring to concentrate instead on the formulations which later theologians have glossed over the scriptures.This is bizarre method, voids the religion of its history, and results in the collapse of all variant states of the faith into a straw bogeyman. It is not primarily his conclusions but this abeyance of method as regards evidence and argument which dismays in Empson’s anti-Christian writing, and which leaves him open to the objection Ren� Girard levelled at many critiques of the faith: “Modern anti-Christianity is merely the reversal of sacrificial Christianity and as a result helps perpetuate it. On no occasion does this anti-Christian movement return to the text in any real sense and seek to expose it to radical re-thinking. It remains piously in awe of the sacrificial reading, and it cannot operate in any other way . . . .” (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). </p><p>Empson’s development, from the many-minded sceptic who wrote inquiringly in 1930 of the “pathos not far from the central sentiment of Christianity: ‘Pleasure is exhausting and fleeting . . . nothing is to be valued more than mutual forbearance’” into the comical scold of the 1960s, with his incantations against “torture” and “sadism”, deserves more attention than Haffenden spares it. Against the Christians follows Empson home after his days amid the tumult of Mao’s nascent republic to the comparative quiet of Sheffield (though even there the air was disputatious, if Empson’s deeply plausible sketch of a departmental meeting as “an insane scene of decorously suppressed fury” is to be believed), through his years as a globe-tottering �minence grise in Ghana, Buffalo and Miami, to his last decade of honorary doctorates and knighthood. Haffenden regards Empson’s transformation as “unerringly” or “impeccably” “logical” in direction and so does not imagine there is anything to be explained, but, as Quentin Skinner has pointed out, “even if we can show that it was rational for some particular historical actor to espouse a certain belief, the explanation of why he or she espoused it may always be independent of that fact”. Empson had worked solo for so long in the East that the institutional realities of professionalized literary study shocked him; it was less disturbing to put the blame for the “sordidity of modern Eng. Lit” on “the sick new literary orthodoxy of neo-Christianity” – stressing the “orthodoxy” and “neo-Christianity”, acquitting the “literary” – than to allow doubts to intrude on his faith in his own profession. But the “craving to scold”, which Empson identified as “one great bit of misteaching” in English studies, was F. R. Leavis’s speciality, and Dr Leavis was quite as “humanist” as Empson, though less humane. </p><p>Much, diverse fuel stoked Empson’s fiery denunciations, but his vision of Christianity narrowed and blurred most drastically because it became focused on his wife, Hetta. She described herself as a “lapsed Lutheran” (the South African Dutch Reformed Church in which she was brought up was actually Calvinist) and recalled the sabbatarian tedium and other suffocation which emanated from “The tyrant, my father . . . . Not a totally silly man, I suppose. He did what he did according to his beliefs. But I never did like him . . .”. Hetta shares her husband’s thin, incurious sense of what it is to act “according to” a belief, let alone “in imitation of” so vivid an example as Christ’s. It was a broadly Calvinist telling of the “basic story” of Christianity, with highlights on penal satisfaction, unearned love incomprehensibly deflecting infinite wrath, which Empson identified as the whole of Christianity. This picture absorbed him because it reflected back to him his own life with Hetta. Her care enfolded him; she became, as Haffenden finely puts it, “his fond brusque manager and forceful minder”. They maintained for decades a m�nage à trois, with the third parties of Hetta’s election changing at her will. Empson was often fond of the other men involved; he took pleasure in their pleasuring her and, when he could, took his pleasure with them as well: “I loved you in bed with young men, / Your arousers and foils and adorners / Who would yield to me then”. Their marriage aspired to an unpossessive, overflowing reciprocity of love, where desire was mollified by camaraderie but affection kept a sexy edge. It was to be a Trinity in miniature, a married promiscuity along Shakespearean lines : “So they loved as love in twain, / Had the essence but in one . . .”. You can hear in Empson’s later prose what he himself heard in the “gaiety” of “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: “a wide valley brimful of an unspecified sorrow”. </p><p>For, in John Haffenden’s words, “Hetta chose rough, cruel lovers, and she would rough them up even as she was roughed up by them”. Empson too caught the occasional blow to his ulcerated stomach in scenes of “such terrible violence that blood flew from faces, and limbs would be broken”. They had a lot of knockabout fun amid this havoc, which doesn’t mean the whole thing wasn’t also very costly for all concerned, including their sons. They became between them the God in whom neither believed, an abyss of sustenance and threat who exacts pain as the proof of his love. William Empson contemplated his marriage when he wrestled with the deity whom he encountered in her image and at her hands. The effect of this contemplation was, as he himself said of Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana, “that of a powerful mind thrashing about in exasperation”, abraded and dizzied by the praise he could not refuse Hetta’s appalling splendour, her blend of generosity and sadism, which seized and troubled his mild, rational soul. It is to her that Milton’s God is dedicated. </p><p></p><p><br /><br /><br /><b>Eric Griffiths</b> is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the author of The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, 1989. </p><br /><div class="clear"></div><div class="padding-top-5"></div></div><div class="bg-666"><div class="padding-top-2"></div></div><div class="padding-bottom-10"></div><p class="x-small color-666"><a class="color-06c" href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/">Contact our advertising team</a> for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times.</p><p class="x-small color-666">© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.</p><p class="x-small color-666">This service is provided on Times Newspapers' <a class="color-06c" href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/">standard Terms and Conditions</a>. Please read our <a class="color-06c" href="http://www.nidp.com/">
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