It’s great to change your mind
Christopher Ricks
- Using Biography by William Empson
Chatto, 259 pp, £12.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7011 2889 5 - Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson
Hogarth, 258 pp, £4.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7012 0556 3 - Collected Poems by William Empson
Hogarth, 119 pp, £3.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7012 0555 5
Of books darkened by being posthumous, this one of Empson’s, Using Biography, is among the most illuminatingly vital. Every page is alive with his incomparable mind, his great heart, and his unique accents. Profoundly comic and yet incandescent with convictions, Using Biography is so rammed with life that it shall gather strength of life with being. Inevitably his death, nine months ago when two years short of eighty, casts its shadow over all of a book which has as its poignant first words: ‘I am reaching an age when I had better collect the essays which I hope to preserve.’ There is the small accidental shock upon now meeting such innocent words as ‘She wanted to have no more bother,’ given that Empson came drily to relish as his own epitaph ‘No more bother.’ There is the resilience – down-to-earth, though – which acknowledges the arbitrariness of things, among them dying: ‘As so often, some bug happened to intrude.’ There is the gruffly laconic parenthetical annotation which now in retrospect has become half-elegiac, when he remembers seeing a clockwork-bird à la Byzantium:
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