The great professor.

William Empson: Volume II: Against the Christians, by John Haffenden (Oxford, 824 pp., $65)

FORTY years ago, when the United States was embroiled in an unpopular war and President Lyndon Baines Johnson was being savagely and wittily caricatured in the pages of the upstart New York Review of Books, I stood in a college bookstore hungrily eyeing the section then quaintly known as "Literary Criticism." I had enough money for one book only, and I settled on a New Directions paperback, Seven Types of Ambiguity. I knew nothing about the author, William Empson, but the insolent intelligence of the title (and the cover design with its large numeral 7) drew me like a magnet.

"I believe it is the most imaginative account of reading ever printed," John Crowe Ransom said, and Empson "the closest and most resourceful reader that poetry has yet publicly had." High praise indeed for a book published when the author was only 24, but not altogether hyperbolic. And if--like the Cambridge examiners who gave Empson the highest possible marks on his English Tripos--I wasn't always sure what he was driving at, I was dazzled. At the moment I turned the last page, a life spent explicating poems and novels and plays seemed entirely plausible.

Born to a landowning Yorkshire family in 1906, Empson came of age just as the academic study of English literature had begun to flourish. Intellectual energies that had once been devoted exclusively to the interpretation of Scripture or to the texts that had survived from ancient Greece and Rome were now brought to bear on the vernacular. Gifted in mathematics, Empson could easily have gone in that direction or to the neighboring precincts of science, but he chose English. He was awarded a fellowship after completing his undergraduate studies and appeared to be headed for a brilliant academic career.

Seven weeks later, however, he was dismissed. He'd had a lover in his rooms, a German woman--like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries, Empson had sexual relations with men as well as women--and, more scandalously still, was found to have condoms in his possession. Stripped of his academic standing, he spent some time in London writing Seven Types of Ambiguity before taking up a three-year appointment to teach in Japan. After an interval back in England, he taught in China for two years, drawing on that experience for his wartime stint with the BBC Overseas Service in London. He spent another five years in China after the war, before settling at the University of Sheffield, where he taught until his retirement in 1971. A series of visiting professorships followed, in Canada and the U.S. He died in 1984.

Very well. An unusually distinguished literary critic, with a stack of posthumously published volumes in addition to the ones that came out during his lifetime (Some Versions of Pastoral in 1935, The Structure of Complex Words in 1951, and Milton's God in 1961), and himself a good poet. Still, with that said, Empson seems a marginal candidate for a biography, let alone the double-decker life-and-works that John Haffenden has produced, along with an edition of Empson's Selected Letters, all three volumes handsomely and sturdily bound in the old Oxford style.

And yet with the biography complete, a fair-minded reader must acknowledge that Haffenden needed every single chapter. The second volume picks up the narrative at the BBC in World War II, and though it runs to almost 700 pages (not counting notes), the pace never flags.

Empson is an irresistible protagonist. With his weird beard, his cigarette holder, his customary squalor, his sexual proclivities (he wanted to be cuckolded, so to speak), his drunken follies and his contagious high spirits, his public persona alternating between shyness and ferocious intellectual combat, and above all his light-speed intelligence, he makes the standard-model absent-minded professor look like the man in the gray flannel suit.

In 1997, speaking at the funeral of Empson's wife, Hetta, an unforgettable character in her own right, the novelist Fay Weldon recalled Empson as well:

   And William, awesome in a different way:
   Seven Types of Ambiguity reckoned just
   about the cleverest man in the world, there
   in the flesh, at Studio House. When you
   first met him he'd look at you hopefully,
   and engage you in conversation; and then
   his face would fall, he'd look disappointed,
   somehow or other one had failed intellectually;
   it happened to everyone, they
   said. After that it would be just down to the
   Roebuck for shove-halfpenny, and a talk
   about the merits of Heinz v. Campbell
   chicken soup.

Ah, intellectuals. Twenty years ago, Paul Johnson published a bestselling book simply called Intellectuals. Penetrating, compulsively readable, and often wickedly funny, the book nevertheless was marred by a serious flaw. Like many conservative commentators who write about intellectuals (most of them, by the way, patently intellectuals themselves), Johnson treated the breed as if they were somehow distinct from the common run of humanity, as if they had been given an extra portion of Original Sin. Did you know, for example, that intellectuals are particularly vulnerable to the seductions of violence? No good to object that some are and some aren't, that the thugs who attacked my son and a female companion in Chicago last year weren't carrying the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, and so on.

No, don't bother to protest: Johnson & Co. aren't listening--they're proceeding with the indictment. Intellectuals are snobs, they want to meddle in other people's lives (ever spend time in a small town?), all leading to the conclusion: "Beware intellectuals." By all means. And beware rednecks. Beware people who sneer at "book-learning," who contrast "head knowledge" with "heart knowledge," who don't like questions. Beware intellectuals who tell you that intellectuals are the root of all evil and who trumpet the virtues of "ordinary people."

What makes the foibles of intellectuals legitimately worthy of note is the ironic contrast between their knowledge and their performance, a contrast that--far from distinguishing them from everyone else--highlights the universal human condition as described by St. Paul: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do."

And that leads us to the subtitle of this second volume of Haffenden's biography, "Against the Christians," which rightly homes in on the idee fixe of Empson's maturity: his loathing for Christianity and his conviction that a mafia of "neo-Christian torture-worshippers" (for so he regarded the prevailing understanding of Christ's death on the cross) was taking over his profession. That is why, as Haffenden puts it, Empson "became so intent on rescuing literature from Christian readings."

The ironies here are thick indeed. Even as Empson was railing against the hegemony of the "neo-Christians," England was fast becoming a post-Christian nation, while the newly reigning fashions in literary study (fashions that swept Empson's brilliant work aside) were programmatically hostile to Christianity. And it is painful to watch a critic as acute as Empson betraying his own gifts, "rescuing" some of his favorite writers--Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, et al.--from the stain of Christian piety by insisting that, in some instances without conscious awareness, they were writing against the grain of belief, a line of argument that reached its culmination in Milton's God.

But not all the ironies cut back against Empson. Many Christians--not just those on the fringe with John Shelby Spong--have been rethinking the doctrine of atonement in the light of the full Christian tradition, in the process rejecting some of the distorted images of the Christian God that had repelled Empson.

Haffenden himself is sympathetic to his subject, sympathetic to a fault, but he is also an honorable scholar, and his scrupulous account of Empson's life provides ample evidence for readings contrary to his own. Thus, while he praises Empson's independence and his "rage against all modes of reactionary authoritarianism," Haffenden quotes enough from his subject and others who knew him for the reader to conclude that, like most of us, he was a tangle of contradictions, quite capable, for instance, of complacently uttering rubbishy generalizations about "the Japanese mind" or "the Chinese mind," in some ways snobbish, yes--his comments about the profession of journalism are telling!--but in other ways not at all, a teacher who loved what he taught. In the idiom of the religion he hated, a sinner in need of grace.

The result is one of the finest literary biographies in recent memory, a fit epigraph for which might read: "What strange creature is man."