Most of Empson’s best poetry had been written in the 1930s. In China, he had worked on his most substantial contribution to literary criticism, The Structure of Complex Words, a development of the insights he had precociously expressed in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Back in England, the latter part of his literary career was dominated by attacks on what he saw as the sadistic and authoritarian nature of the Christian mystery of Crucifixion and Redemption.
Milton’s God is an exploration of Blake’s idea that in Paradise Lost the poet was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Essays on Marlowe, Donne, Marvell and Coleridge similarly sought to liberate their verse from any taint of Protestant orthodoxy, much to the ire of pious Helen Gardner, with whom he conducted a bitter professional feud. ‘Mankind should seek not for transcendence but for reconciliation with a secular universe’ is how Haffenden summarises Empson’s position.
In his last mellow, if sozzled, years, Empson was royally knighted and internationally feted. His sons gave him joy, his bond with Hetta proved astonishingly resilient, and his kind-heartedness and humility remained shining through all the booze and battiness until his death in 1984 at the age of 78. As one friend remarked, he was ‘utterly without guile or meanness or self-importance’, and Haffenden’s long-gestated, beautifully written and consistently enthralling book is the finest possible tribute to a touchingly good man as well as a unique literary genius.
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