A master of ambiguities

School reports can be remarkably prescient. William Empson’s headmaster noted, ‘He has a good deal of originality and enterprise: I hope he is learning also to discipline his vagaries.’ It’s a judgment which could serve as an epigraph for this massive first volume of John Haffenden’s long-awaited, long-meditated biography, in which the great literary critic and poet indeed shows ‘a good deal of originality and enterprise’, but rather heroically fails ‘to discipline his vagaries’.

I remember Empson only as an old man, when he came to Cambridge to deliver the Clark Lectures in 1974. They were not considered a success, though at the opening he made everyone laugh by slyly announcing that ‘the cloud cast over literature by T. S. Eliot has finally begun to pass’, and then running his eyes across the roof of the hall as though this enlightening event was actually visible to him. But much of what he said about spirits of Middle Earth seemed incoherent verging on bonkers, giving credibility to the gossip about his heavy consumption of other sorts of spirits.