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Among the Mandarins
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The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and The Sunday Times Christmas Picks 2006
William Empson, Volume II
Against the Christians
John Haffenden
824 pages
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16 pages of black-and-white plates
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234x156mm
978-0-19-953992-5
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Paperback
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22 January 2009
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- The definitive biography of William Empson
- A candid study of one of the most gifted, eccentric, witty, and controversial figures of twentieth-century culture
- An important contribution to the history of some of the most notable international events of the twentieth century, including the struggles and machinations of the BBC during the Second World War and the Maoist Revolution in China
- Rich biographical narrative, with full evaluation of Empson's criticism and poetry
- Uninhibited quotation of Empson's remarkable letters on a huge range of subjects - from bisexuality to the atom bomb
- Based on primary sources, including the rich resource of the Empson Papers held at Harvard University
- Empson's friends, colleagues, contemporaries, and students interviewed for this biography include Dame Muriel Bradbrook, Sir Frank Kermode, L. C. Knights, and Christopher Ricks
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 of Complex 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. Readership: General readers of literature and biography. Students and scholars of English literature and criticism, literary theory and twentieth-century literary history, and anyone interested in British or Chinese history of the period.
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John Haffenden, Professor of English Literature, University of Sheffield
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"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
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1: The BBC War
2: The War within the BBC
3: Chinabound
4: Sounding the South: Kenyon College, Summer 1948
5: Siege and Liberation
6: The New China
7: Changes in China; and Kenyon Again
8: Quitting Communist china
9: Final Reckoning: The Affair of Fei Hsiao-t'ung
10: 'A Mighty Raspberry': iThe Structure of Complex Words/i
11: Homing to Yorkshire
12: From Poetry to the Queen
13: Ménage a Trois
14: The Anti-Christian: iMilton's God/i
15: 'They think good literature is a tremendous scolding': From Sheffield to Legon
16: The Road to Retirement
17: Rescuing Donne and Coleridge
18: Roamings in Retirement
19: iFaustus/i: Finale
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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