Intimate Dialogues
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers &Writing INTIMATE DIALOGUES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL william Empson was working on the manuscript of Using Biography (Harvard, 265 pp., $17.95) when he died in 1984 at the age of 78. It comes...
...Even Empson's different types of ambiguity act less as tools to be used by readers than as occasions for him to demonstrate his grasp of poetry...
...Unfortunately, it remained unfinished at his death...
...Those familiar with Empson will remember that with him everything comes by sevens, and in fact, he planned a concluding essay on irony...
...a school of Empsonians once briefly tried to systematize and apply his methods...
...Yeats, T.S...
...Empson further recalls one of his great-aunts, who used to show him toys "of an antiquity rivaling her own...
...He wants you to argue back if your reasoning is truly yours, not based on notions handed down by ecclesiastical or academic authorities...
...Actually, it clarifies the symbol's incongruity and tells us why the poet wished to become a bird "of hammered gold and gold enameling" that would "sit upon a golden bough and sing I To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come...
...Yeats must have loved such a toy when he was about 10 years old in 1875, before he had developed any crotchets against the machine age...
...I remember being struck to hear my mother say, by way of praising the great age of the toy, that she remembered being shown it herself when she was a child...
...Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) took on the literary cult of simplicity—examining its social implications as well as its potential for ironic statements...
...His examination of "Sailing to Byzantium," for example, illuminates a paradox most of us prefer to slough over: Yeats' ode to medieval artifice ends by praising a gimcrack mechanical bird, an unlikely esthetic trope for "art...
...Some will dismiss the passage as an extraneous autobiographical digression...
...No understanding is possible, he maintains, unless the author, his state of mind and associations are taken into account...
...Chief among these was the bird of Yeats in its great cage, wound up to sing by a massive key...
...The conflicts generated by this creed, Empson insisted, explain much of Western civilization's sickness...
...To those bewildered by Fielding's commenting ironically on the irony of his character, Empson scoldingly observes: "It strikes me that modern critics, whether as a result of the neo-Christian movement or not, have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of morals in the world, whereas the central purpose of reading imaginative literature is to accustom yourself to this basic fact...
...After he died, his housekeeper claimed that he had married her but was discredited in the courts...
...Empson has frequently been patronized as a real-life character along the lines of Lewis Carroll's eccentric White Knight, who offered his strangejumble of thoughts as "all my own invention...
...Eliot, and James Joyce—six essays in all...
...These essays are an intimate dialogue between William Empson and his individual subjects...
...Empson faces the problem squarely and offers "one [possible] explanation...
...But his modus operandi, revealed explicitly for the first timein Using Biography, was intense identification with whomever he happened to be reading...
...That, in turn, inspired Milton's God( 1961), an attack on the notion of a deity capable of torturing his Son to death and then making believers guilty by telling them he did so to expiate their sins...
...1 look forward to rereading Using Biography many times...
...No one, for instance, can read Alice in Wonderland in quite the same way after having come upon his loving tribute to the upper-class little girl whose self-assurance triumphs over the strangest of creatures and predicaments...
...As a polemic the work is hard to swallow, but the brilliant readings shakequiteafew prejudices to their foundations...
...In a sense they were right, although Empson's socialism was original, like everything else about him...
...To unravel other literary riddles, Empson delves into his personal recollections of mores before and during World War I. Among his insights is the suggestion that the money-grubbing Jewsin The Waste Landfor Eliot's family of Unitarian industrialists: "Now if you are hating a purse-proud business man who denies that Jesus is God, into what stereotype does he best fit ? " He also presents a solution to the question of how Leopold Bloom hopes to father a son by letting Stephen Dedalus sleep with Molly...
...Its underlying theme is the proposition that a " student of literature ought to be trying all the time to empathize with the author (and of course the assumptions and conventions by which the author felt himself bound...
...and she and Yeats were born in the same year, 1865...
...Whatever your reactions to Empson's arguments, they provoke you to examine the text more closely...
...In any event, Empson did not aspire to win readers over to his opinions...
...It comes as a surprise to realize that a critic of his stature wrote only four books in a career lasting half a century...
...Indeed, many people have noticed this and promptly forgotten it because they were taught to consider that kind of nagging detail irrelevant...
...Empson's principles lack the comprehensiveness of Kenneth Burke's theory of "Symbolic Action," or of the ideas advanced in I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism a.ndJrlaTo\d~B\oom's Anxiety of Influence tetralogy...
...Conservative reviewers detected Marxist undertones here...
...We come away from each with a sharper image of both writers...
...To be sure, this pluralism has become more obvious since the 1930s...
...for him, Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost...
...His attraction to China strengthened his perception of Christianity as narrow-minded and sadomasochistic...
...Empson does, and his reconstruction of these shadowy figures almost persuades us of his case...
...Who cares...
...The section on Tom Jones, "a book which at the time was believed to be so wicked that it had caused earthquakes," portrays the novelist as a relativist in an age of moral absolutism, and Tom as Huck Finn's great-grandfather...
...Empson's most deeply felt arguments concern Marvell, that enigmatic 17th-century poet who served the Royalists as well as their Parliamentary opponents...
...We should not forget, though, that Alice considered theKnight the sole truthful and sympathetic man she had met among the grotesque prigs of the looking-glass world, and felt she would never forget him...
...Most theoretical critics invent a general system to interpret the workings of art...
...To tell a reader that he cannot even partially succeed in uncovering motivations, says Empson, "is about the most harmful thing you could do...
...If many of his opinions were quirky, his methods and ideas nevertheless reshaped literary criticism...
...For years 1 have returned to Empson's books to refresh my own perceptions of literature...
...It seems appropriate that a man facing old age, feeling out of place i n the company of young lovers and wild courting birds, should recall a childhood fantasy of immortality...
...Few, however, have loved literature as passionately as he did, or possessed it as personally...
...Empson is convinced the woman told the truth, and believes "the marriage saves Marvell from a scandal"—that of misogyny, possibly homosexuality...
...Empson identifies most strongly in Using Biography with Henry Fielding and Andrew Marvell...
...Entering a writer's head and thereby explaining precisely how his poem or novel was composed and what it means may appear presumptuous, yet we eventually realize that all great critical readers must rely on their powers of empathy to avoid mouthing platitudes...
...He wanted them to read for themselves, despite his aw areness that generally they were too shackled by second-hand judgments to see any text afresh...
...Still, his own poetry reveals that Marvell has been the closest influence, so the apparent special pleading in the essay may have a hidden significance...
...A song of praise to the richness of English—as opposed to unambiguous Romantic languages, where a word has just one definition—the study was too iconoclastic for the bullheaded academic establishment, which continued to charge at Empson blindly until the end of his days...
...Using Biography is more diffuse than Empson's previous books because the pieces it comprises were written for magazines between 1958-82...
...a darkish green tree, as I remember, occupied most of the cage, and a quite small shimmering bird whose beak would open and shut while the music box in the basement was playing, perched carelessly upon a branch at one side...
...And to stimulate our sympathies for 18th-century rhetoric, he intimates that in certain passages Fielding's prose " is like an archangel brooding over mankind, and I suppose, is actually imitating similar effects in Handel"—Fielding's favorite composer...
...Empson's first landmark, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), published when he was in his 20s, revolutionized the reading of poetry by creating a vocabulary to discuss contradictory yet simultaneous meanings within a single passage...
...In his Introduction Empson therefore attacks the New Critics' belief that literature should stand on its own, independent of the writer's personality or life...
...Using Biography is more honest about the way critics work than anything I have ever read—probably more honest than the majority of us are with ourselves—but it manages to hold back a few secrets...
...During the late 1930s Empson spent several years in the Orient, returning there as a lecturer at Peking University from 1947-52...
...This hardly troubled him...
...he delighted in being provocative...
...Having thus made his position clear, he goes on to reconstruct the attitudes of Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Joseph Fielding, W.B...
...Moreover, ultimately what we require of a new theory is that it clear up something that has been baffling, and Empson's does so repeatedly...
Vol. 68 • July 1985 • No. 9
