How sad that Wazzoo never met Eliot

David Sexton

THE ROYAL BEASTS AND OTHER WORKS by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden

Chatto & Winclus, £12.95

By the time he was 13 William Empson had already taken against angels. A school- boy poem in this collection proves it. Anne, told about her guardian angels by Mother, flings pillows at them: 'I won't have things in white/ Chant prayers about my bed all night', she says.

No more would Empson. Defying Christianity and its God was a lifelong crusade. Since he also resisted scientific determinism, it was between contradic- tions that he strove to balance himself. `The chief dilemma is this: either the universe is merely a fortuitious concourse of atoms, or else the atoms . . . only do what was ordered by a man-like lawgiver, who is God; in either case, our minds cannot be expected to do what we want of them . .' What Empson wanted of his mind was for it to enable him to stand on his own feet.

`Life involves maintaining oneself be- tween contradictions that can't be solved by analysis', he wrote. This was not to be managed by floppily going from one thing to another. As an undergraduate he had observed that 'in the disorder of this age there is no formula that one can lose onself in expounding' and immediately pulled himself up: 'This period has, in fact, a formula, that the writer's business is to digest fads . . And how can the result avoid a certain tentative and dishevelled air, less like the eating of pastry than of the first oyster?'

Rather the contradictions had somehow to be straddled. His great critical books studied means of straddling: ambiguity, pastoral, the use of complex words. As for his poems, 'my few good ones are all on the basis of expressing an unresolved conflict', he said. At their best they achieve the objective he attributed to Donne: `to con- vey a mental state of great tension, in which conflicting impulses have no longer any barriers between them and therefore the strangeness of the world is felt very acutely.'

The Royal Beasts contains previously unpublished work from 1926 to 1942, beginning with an undergraduate play and ending with a plan for a ballet drawn up while he was Chinese editor in the BBC during the war. This was the period in which, as John Haffenden says, 'Empson took to his troubled heart the contradic- tions of the age' and wrote his poetry. Everything from this time is of interest, however flawed or unfinished.

`Three Stories', 'a one-act melodrama' played in the ADC theatre in Cambridge in 1927, is a bizarre attempt at combining different worlds, forerunning his discussion of such methods in Some Versions of Pastoral. In rhyming couplets a knight rescues a princess from an ogre; in Shavian pertnesses a young man cuckolds and kills an older man; in modern style a young man trapped by Dracula persuades himself he is being murdered by a wicked man, not an exception to the laws of science.

No doubt it was an exciting experiment at the time; the Granta reviewer enthusias- tically remarked that Empson 'had achieved an almost complete mastery of his Oedipus complex'. A curious glimpse of something else that may have been in Empson's mind is provided by a jotting from 1934 turned up by Haffenden: Puzzled to know why reading a version of Aquinas on God was so eerie and horrible thrilling as a fugue might be, that one would expect, but this was like reading Dracula or a Freudian case. The reason (which I don't remember seeing elsewhere) is that God there is point by point, in some points with much subtlety of observation, an extreme case of dementia praecox: only he is not mad but right: filling the heavens — a personal God could not be sane.

Empson was a brilliant undergraduate, whose starred first in the English Tripos won him a Bye Fellowship. As he was moving into his new rooms a college servant found contraceptives in his luggage and it emerged that he had been entertain- ing a woman. His college, Magdalene, removed his name from their books. A poem printed here, 'Warning to Under- graduates', is a remarkably controlled reaction to this catastrophe, advising friends in 'that strange cackling little town' to 'Lock up whatever it appears/ Might give a celibate Ideas.' He went out to spend three years teaching in Japan, a time referred to in another autobiographical poem, 'A Marriage'. In this epithalamion for a former lover he mentions being `deported from that virtuous and aesthetic country' for another misdemeanour: Envisioning . . . the same beauty in taxiboys And failing to recognise in one case

What with drink and the infantilism of the Japanese type The fact that it had not yet attained puberty.

Well might Geoffrey Hill have said that `Empson's interest in both poetry and criticism is fixated on the perennial prob- lems of conduct and belief.'

Other matters rotated in these new poems include the international balance of power in a tough-minded villanelle ('We must endure, and stand between two fools') and the balancing of long and short views in personal life. Using the form he invented for the famous puzzle piece, 'The Teasers' (Not but they die, the teasers and the dreams . . .'), this poem ambiguously commends short sight as 'the magnifying- glass able for the flame'. It practises what Empson called 'argufying', 'the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our own way', something rare in poetry now and little appreciated. Indeed Peter Ackroyd flatly said in a review of this book that Empson was not an artist, because he believed in ideas 'where his more creative contemporaries merely exploited them when it was necessary to do so'. The complaint that thinking in art is sordid or low-class was one with which Empson was familiar. He blamed the symbolist move- ment.

After a three year break in London Empson went out east again to Peking in 1937. The Japanese moved in and he joined the universities in exile in Hunan province as the only foreigner. Not having any books he typed out Othello and A Modest Proposal from memory. He also began writing The Royal Beasts, a strange pastoral comedy in prose. A British admin- istrator in Africa comes across a tribe of exceedingly rational but not human beings called Wurroos. They are covered in fur and have tails; they have a breeding season and so `no source of mental energy from repressed sex'. They are sitting on valuable mineral rights in disputed territory; it must be decided how they are to be treated. As men, or as better protected royal beasts?

The story takes Wuzzoo, a now English- speaking Wurroo, to England for a court case and salon appearances, before break- ing down into tantalising sketch notes (`Meeting of Wuzzoo with Eliot').

In a 1936 Spectator review Empson had noticed that 'Anybody can see that we are like animals, but the theological issue comes with the question whether the divid- ing line is sharp or blurred.' It was in the interests of blurring the line and complicat- ing the issue that he invented this story. Wurroos contradict Christianity. Wuzzoo is quite insistent that he is not human: 'I haven't anything to do with angels', he said pettishly. 'You are going to heaven and all that, and I haven't got a soul at all. Surely that's easy to get hold of.'

The situation is argued with all of Empson's confident ingenuity and good humour. The final piece in the book, a plan for a ballet called 'The Elephant and the Birds', is even more adventurously pecul- iar. It calls for a combination of European and eastern styles to tell two disparate legends, 'the Greek story of Philomel and Procne and the Indian story of what the Buddha did in his incarnation as an elephant'. Their shared element is rein- carnation; in his horror of Christianity's heaven and hell Empson was seduced by this idea. (Hailing it in Yeats he said `When the doctrine cannot be ignored, critics present it as pokey and lower- middle-class. But it is less unjust and narrow than Christian immortality, and more ancient, and still believed by the majority of the inhabitants of the Eurasian land mass.') The ballet looks so impossible to bring off — after all an elephant dance is `gymnastically the hardest sort' - that it is intriguing to watch Empson applying him- self to it. 'The real difficulty is not in making the movement but in convincing the dancer that it appears regal and does not appear a form of galumphing. I have only seen it done by the dancing girls of Angkor . . .' he admits.

The Buddha legend, he points out, has a `wilful moral splendour which does not depend for its effect on being taken solemnly.' There is no better description of his own work. To read Empson is con- tinually to be surprised, which in turn makes you realise how rare it is to have the courage always to think for yourself as he did. The Royal Beasts is a delightful book, and John Haffenden's presentation Of it has left me impatient for his forthcoming biography.