William Empson: Volume II: Against the Christians: 2 - Hardcover

Haffenden, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199276609 ISBN 13: 9780199276608

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2006

Synopsis

Following the acclaimed first volume, Among the Mandarins, this is the second and concluding volume of the authorized biography of William Empson, one of the foremost poets and literary critics of the twentieth century.

Against the Christians begins during the Second World War and follows Empson's turbulent years of writing wartime propaganda for the BBC. As Chinese Editor, he organised broadcasts to China and propaganda programmes for the Home Service, during which time his friends and colleagues included the prickly George Orwell. The effectiveness of Empson's work for the BBC provoked the Nazi propagandist Hans Fritzsche to call him a 'curly-headed Jew' ― a charge which gave him enormous satisfaction.

In 1947 he returned to China, where he was caught up in the Communist siege of the Peking and witnessed Mao Tse-tung's triumphant entry. 'I was there for the honeymoon between the universities and the communists; we were being kept up to the mark rather firmly.' He saw 'the dragooning of independent thought and the hysteria of the confession meetings'. In the late 1940s he also taught in the USA, where he relished the irony of his situation. 'My position here really seems to me very dramatic; there can be few other people in the world who are receiving pay simultaneously and without secrecy from the Chinese Communists, the British Socialists, and the capitalist Rockefeller machine.'

From 1953 to 1971 he held the Chair of English Literature at Sheffield, where he engaged more vigorously than ever before in public controversy, being driven by a desire to correct the wrong-headed orthodoxies of modern literary criticism ― most notably 'neo-Christianity'. He acquired massive publicity for his views on the wickedness of Christianity when he published Milton's God in 1961: 'The poem is wonderful because it is an awful warning. The effort of reconsidering Milton's God, who makes the poem so good just because he is so sickeningly bad, is a basic one for the European mind.' Haffenden presents a full account of the work on Milton, along with analyses of Empson's many other writings on subjects including Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, and Coleridge, and The Structure ofComplex Words (1951).

In a full and candid study of the public and private Empson, John Haffenden enables the reader to understand one of the most gifted, eccentric, witty, and controversial figures of our age ― a giant of modern literature and criticism.

About this title

Review:

John Haffenden is calm and accepting in his account of Empson's private life. (John Batchelor, Modern Language Review)

John Haffenden's monumental two-volume biography leaves us in no doubt of the importance of Empson's upbringing as a scion of Yorkshire gentry...One of the big achievements of Haffenden's narrative is the painstaking account of Empson's gradual maturation as a critic. (Jason Harding, Essays in Criticism)

Haffenden's narrative is driven along with such gusto, such alert intelligence, such obvious pleasure in the task, that no one could reasonably grumble at the story's inordinate length. It is a virtuoso feat of scholarship: a telling demonstration of what biography, as it finest, can actually achieve. (Ian Donaldson Australian Book Review)

This is scholarship in the grand style (Contemporary Poetry Review)

Biography is a dominant form these days, and Haffenden's is one of the best. (Fred Inglis, The Independent (Review))

The culmination of a majestic achievement (Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday)

This is a definitive work, brimming with dry humour, acute political and literary analysis and a quiet respect for Empson's defining idiosyncrasies. (Tim Martin, Telegraph)

His two-volume Empson now ranks, with say, Holmes on Coleridge. McCarthy on Morris, Bellos on Perec, Ellman on Joyce and Wilde: it is one of the great literary biographies. (Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times Culture)

It would be high enough praise to say that Haffenden has equalled the achievement of his first volume; the reality is that he has excelled it. (Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times Culture)

Haffenden has given us an Empson we should be arguing about, and arguing with, well into the future. (Peter McDonald, Literary Review)

About the Author:

John Haffenden is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His books include The Life of John Berryman, W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, and Novelists in Interview; and he has edited Berryman's Shakespeare and several collections by William Empson including Complete Poems. The first volume of this biography, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, was published in 2005. Haffenden is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association, and has been a British Academy Research Reader and a Leverhulme Research Fellow.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0199276609
• ISBN 13: 9780199276608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 836