War Lords in the Republic of Letters:
Empson and Richards among the
Mandarins
Helen THAVENTHIRAN
A Chinese Student
‘I REMEMBER A CHINESE STUDENT’, William Empson opens one anecdote
towards the end of The Structure of Complex Words, ‘who put in an essay on
the Scotch ballads: “The ballad must be simple and vulgar” … he knew
the word had two meanings, and wanted to use it to drop an insinuation’1
between its two meanings, ‘of the common people’ and ‘coarse’. The insinuation the student intends is that, while his political opinions are
aligned with the ballad form, his literary sympathies are not. But some
types of adjective have their own destructive logic: nothing proves more
‘vulgar’ than calling something vulgar. So the student makes ‘a definite
mistake’, and, Empson concludes, ‘whatever the political or literary views
of the reader, he will feel that there has been a ridiculous collapse of an
attempt at tact’.2 Verbal tact, as Empson’s fellow traveller in China,
I. A. Richards, defines it, is a trained capacity for choosing words firmly
and well: when we speak the language in which we feel most at home,
‘Our definiteness comes from our tact in deciding when we may and
when we may not use the word and our tact comes from the prolonged
social drill we have been through.’3 To this he adds: ‘The very conditions
1
The Structure of Complex Words, 2nd edn. (1951; London 1958) pp. 403–4.
References are to this edition.
2
Ibid., p. 404. See Matthew Creasy on ‘tact’ and tactic in Empson’s criticism;
‘Empson’s Tact’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), Some Versions of Empson (Oxford 2008)
pp. 182–200.
3
I. A. Richards, Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (London
1932) pp. 110–11. Unless otherwise stated, references are to this edition.
doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfr041
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T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY
which make tact successful are absent when’, as for the student here, ‘we
study a strange language or a remote author.’4 What, then, of the ‘tact’ of
methods of criticism that aim to sharpen capacities for decision about
words yet remove ‘the very conditions which make tact successful’?
To present a student with a poem that is not cushioned by familiar contexts, to note the errors in his response, and then to convict him of indelicate or bad reading was the basic experimental methodology of reading
that Richards established in Practical Criticism (1929). Although the particular classroom scene of misreading that Empson recounts takes place far
away from the lecture halls of Cambridge, his ‘Chinese student’ joins
Richards’s inept protocolists within the genealogy of practical criticism as
a method for reading built from the reductive humour of occasions when
words about words fail to be complex enough. So the anecdote teaches
more than its immediate lesson that slogans translate poorly into the whispers or nuances of particular judgements. It also suggests what experiences of teaching in China may have taught Empson about forms of
verbal analysis, in particular those he learnt from Richards; about how
(badly) practical criticism travels and whether, beyond a point, it may
become impracticable. It is, this anecdote hints, the Chinese example that
clarifies where, between these two critics, significant influence turns to
substantial disagreement.
Yet for all the compressed interest of an anecdote such as this, its
promise goes largely unfulfilled within Complex Words. Empson’s third book
of criticism offers very little explicit meditation on the country that was
his frequent home and main point of return during the fifteen-year period
of its composition (1936–51). During this time, China was where Empson
lectured, first with the refugee university in 1937–9, then in the early days
of the Cultural Revolution; between this, during the war, his role was
Chinese editor for propaganda at the BBC. But Empson refrained from
producing even the kind of swift digest of Chinese experiences, the travel
book or war dispatch that had such commercial success in the interwar
years.5 He did contemplate a contribution to the genre, writing from
Yunnan Province to his editor at Chatto & Windus: ‘What do you think
about a chatty travel book? I feel it is only sensible to cash in on the travelling.’6
4
Ibid., p. 111.
Hugh Haughton, ‘Journeys to War: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and
William Empson’, in Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn (eds.), A Century of Travels in
China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong 2007)
pp. 147–62: 160.
6
To Ian Parsons, 11 Feb. 1939, in Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John
Haffenden (Oxford 2006) p. 115.
5
WA R LO R D S I N T H E R E P U B L I C O F L E T T E R S
95
Even this ‘chatty travel book’ remained unwritten, and Empson proved a
rather more laconic witness to these years in China. ‘Witnesses’, he once
wrote, ‘are exasperating for the solicitor and the historian because they remember anything except what matters’,7 and this truism seems to hold for
his own Complex Words, which remains firmly in a line of English literarycritical history, accounting for certain nuances of thought and persuasions
of vocabulary, ‘From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries’,8 by
drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary and on a set of authors prominent
in its illustrative quotations: Shakespeare, Pope, Milton, Wordsworth, and
Jane Austen.
The diffidence of this testimony to Chinese contexts appears all the
more striking against the example of Richards, who, in 1932, published
Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition, his ‘big enquiry into
Chinese mentality, by means of a blend of literary criticism and psychology’.9 Here, Richards participates in the tradition – from Leibniz to
Lacan10 – of taking his Chinese experiences ‘for example’.11 He explores
‘Chinese modes of meaning’, addressed through the ‘condensed poetry’
of the characters and concepts of the moralist and philosopher Mencius,
with an appendix composed of transliterated passages, at which
Richards had worked during seminars with, as the book’s dedication
reads, ‘my collaborators L. T. Hwang, Lucius Porter, A. C. Li’ at
Yenching University.12 In this, Richards’s competence in Chinese
appears to be, as his wife, Dorothy, described her own, at least ‘up to domestic needs’.13 The situation seems clear: Richards was an eager
7
From ‘Pei-Ta before the Siege’ (1959), repr. in The Strengths of Shakespeare’s
Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield 1992) p. 197.
Pei-Ta was the contracted name then in use for Beijing University.
8
The Structure of Complex Words, p. 158.
9
Letter to Tillyard, quoted in the introduction to Mencius on the Mind:
Experiments in Multiple Definition, ed. John Constable (London 2001) p. xiv.
10
See e.g. Richard Serrano, ‘Lacan’s Oriental Language of the Unconscious’,
SubStance, 26/3 (1997) pp. 90–106, or Lidan Lin, ‘The Legacy and Future of
Orientalism’, in Silvia Nagy-Zekmi (ed.), Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said
(Lanham, Md. 2006) p. 137.
11
R. D. Jameson, review of Mencius, Chinese Social and Political Science Review, 17/4
(Jan. 1934), repr. in I. A. Richards, Selected Works, 1919–1938, vol. x: I. A. Richards
and His Critics: Selected Reviews and Critical Articles, ed. John Constable (London 2001)
p. 296. Jameson was a folklore scholar working in Peking when Richards visited in
1929–30.
12
Mencius, pp. xii, 7.
13
D. E. Richards’s diary for 3 March 1930, quoted in John Constable’s
introduction to Mencius (2001 edn.) p. xi.
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T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY
Sinologist; Empson chose to be largely impervious, instead using his
China years as ‘a useful burial to get my beastly little linguistic book
pulled into some order’.14
Looking again, however, a rather more uncertain picture emerges.
For all that Richards may seem ‘at home’ in what he called ‘Chinese
thinking’, this is perhaps better figured as Corbusian domesticity:
Chinese, for Richards, was another ‘machine for thinking with’,15 an
unhomely home for his familiar enquiries, and Mencius might have the
caption, ‘Richards Abroad, on Meaning in Poetry’. He profits from
the strangeness of the material to discover some new techniques of
thought – so China represents another fertile place for the study of
misreading. Such continuities Richards emphasises almost to the point
of overstatement: rather than finding the Mencian material an unexpectedly useful supplement to his thinking, he claims it offers ‘the best
exercise I have ever had in multiple definition and imagining possible
meanings’,16 and, from the ‘condensed poetry’ of the fragments from
Mencius, he claims to make some of his clearest discoveries about the
division of language into the categories he labels symbolic and
emotive. What is surprising about Mencius on the Mind may, then, not
be how much but rather how little it is, in the end, a book about
‘Chinese thinking’ – and how much it is a book that matters for
Richards’s familiar concerns.
For his part, Empson was more thoroughly engaged with these experiences of ‘Chinese thinking’ than the surface Englishness of Complex Words
betrays. (Even his metaphor of the ‘useful burial’ is quiet testimony to this;
burial or entombment was, for Empson, a motif in his poetry and prose
on the subject of China – commonly in tension with that of flight.17) One
of the most significant forms this took was his struggle with the lessons for
critical thinking he found in Mencius. If few critics have ever turned to
Mencius in order to make sense of Richards’s reflections on making sense,
Empson was an exception. He announces a general debt to
Richards in his Complex Words, for which the dedication reads:
14
Letter to Michael Roberts (22 Feb. 1939), quoted in John Haffenden, William
Empson: Against the Christians (Oxford 2005) p. 273.
15
Richards adapted Le Corbusier’s saying ‘A house is a machine for living in’
as the opening sentence of his Principles of Literary Criticism (1925): ‘A book is a
machine to think with.’
16
Letter to T. S. Eliot (19 Oct. 1930), quoted in Constable’s introduction to
Mencius (2001 edn.) p. xiv.
17
See Deborah Bowman, ‘William Empson’s Foreign Bodies’, unpublished ms.
WA R LO R D S I N T H E R E P U B L I C O F L E T T E R S
97
For
I. A. RICHARDS
Who is the source of all the ideas in
this book, even the minor ones arrived
at by disagreeing with him.
Behind this dedication, critics tend to assume, lie not only the early works
but also, more immediately, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. But Empson’s second
chapter, ‘Statements in Words’, ties his influence-by-disagreement directly
to Richards’s adventures in semantics through Sinology:
Here I am running up against views expressed some while ago by
Professor Richards, especially in Mencius on the Mind; I am not sure
how far he would still maintain them, or indeed how far my difference from him is only a verbal one; but the point as he puts it there
seems to me actively misleading, and I need to try to get the point of
difference clear. He has been arguing that the Gesture of a word (in
which he includes its emotion, tone and intention) may be wholly
separate from its Sense.18
Empson’s theoretical concern, in Complex Words, is to present what he
might call a ‘smack’ at some of these theories of the relation of gestures
and senses within words that Richards elaborates by way of his Chinese
examples, and the ‘machinery’ of intraverbal equations he develops for
the purpose is a response to, and attempted refinement of, the Ricardian
techniques of multiple definition.
Empson does, however, respond in order to disagree – and to disagree
radically – with the basic premise of Mencius, its use of the Chinese
example. Complex Words we might consider as a responsive pun on two
possible senses of the term ‘Mandarin’: first, the simple sense of taking the
Chinese example; second, a certain bureaucratic emptiness of prose style
and address to language. The second sense was one Empson often used
with disdain. Take, for example this later remark: ‘I have had to read so
much Mandarin English Prose now, especially in literary criticism, and
am so accustomed to being shocked by its emptiness, that I feel I must do
otherwise at all costs.’19 This implied equation of these two senses of
‘Mandarin’ may be far from fair, and could even be considered one of the
18
The Structure of Complex Words, p. 56.
Letter to Janet Adam Smith (18 May 1954), in Selected Letters, p. 222. See
comments on the various senses of ‘Mandarin’ in David Fuller’s review of
Haffenden’s biography in The Review of English Studies, 57 (2006) pp. 112–15.
19
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T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY
compacted doctrines of Complex Words, yet for all its problems it does bring
into focus the outlines of how Empson might have understood himself to
be differing from Richards and how this clarifies some of the more puzzling aspects of the book Empson called his ‘mighty raspberry’.20 Such
clarification is necessary: Complex Words has proved no more readable than
Mencius, both of which were scantily reviewed on first appearance and still
tend to play only a minor part in literary-critical histories. Critics remain
uncertain about how to read the miscellaneous forms of Empson’s book:
the ‘malignantly stiff ’ detailing of analytical technique in the opening
chapters, the curiously recondite rhetorical concerns that unfold in the appendices, and, in the intervening chapters, the parade of semantic histories for some ‘types’ of the truth-teller (the rogue, the fool, the wit, the dog,
the honest man). Yet Empson considered the book to soar: ‘A certain
amount of noisy taxi-ing round the field at the start may be admitted, and
the landing at the end is bumpy though I think without causing damage;
but the power of the thing and the view during its flight I consider magnificent.’21 How this generally unreadable book may in fact soar is, I will
argue here, in part a measure of its resistance to being ‘among the
Mandarins’.
Tact and Tactic
‘Always rather embarrassing,’ Empson reflected from Peking, ‘to wonder
what one gets from travel to make up for its privations; except that it
requires so much imagination to stay at home.’22 Richards is not without
some of his own doubts about how far the tactic of working from the
Mencian example, with all its privations, could take him towards a theory
of comprehending. These are doubts that he airs in a correspondence on
the subject with T. S. Eliot. If the motto Richards desired to promote for
Mencius was ‘understanding through estrangement’, Eliot’s own preference
was more for resisting the privations of unfamiliarity – and not just in the
quip with which he responded to Richards’s invitation to visit China: ‘I
do not care to visit any land which has no native cheese.’23 Rather more
20
Letter to Ian Parsons (29 Feb. 1948), quoted in Haffenden, William Empson:
Against the Christians, p. 299.
21
Empson gave this defence in response to a review of The Structure of Complex
Words by Geoffrey Strickland: ‘The Criticism of William Empson’, Mandrake, 2
(Autumn/Winter 1954–5), quoted in Haffenden, William Empson: Against the
Christians, pp. 297–8.
22
Letter from Empson to John Hayward (7 Mar. 1933), in Selected Letters, p. 57.
23
Quoted in Rodney Koeneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English
in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford, Calif. 2004) p. 76.
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in earnest, Eliot’s letters detail how his intellectual wariness about this
venture into ‘Chinese modes of meaning’ arose from his own struggles
with Sanskrit translation. ‘The conclusion,’ of his own experiments had
been, Eliot wrote, ‘that it seemed impossible to be on both sides of the
looking-glass at once’.
I came to wonder how much understanding anything (a term, a
system etc.) meant merely being used to it. And it seemed to me that
all I was trying to do and that any of the pundits had succeeded in
doing, was to attempt to translate one terminology with a long tradition into another; and that however cleverly one did it, one would
never produce anything better than an ingenious deformation; … I
thought that the only way I could ever come to understand Indian
thought would be to erase not only my own education in European
philosophy, but the traditions and mental habits of Europe for two
thousand years – and that if one did that, one would be no better off
for ‘translating’, and even if such a feat could be accomplished, it
didn’t seem worth the trouble.24
In his reply to Eliot’s splendid crescendo of defeatism, his vast, if ironised, world-weariness, Richards reduces this view to the rather slick
formula, ‘understanding = familiarity’. But in the text of Mencius he performs a still bolder version of his paraphrasing of Eliot’s letter: he takes
up these statements of scepticism and, while preserving their words
almost exactly, adapts them into rhetorical questions, which he presents
in a digression on method.25 The effect of this rhetorical adaptation is
already to affirm what Eliot denies: that there are possibilities to be
explored in this field of radical translation, new formations of thought
rather than merely deformations. To the question forms Richards presents, his own answer is always a tentative ‘Yes’. This turn from negative
description to action or pledge can be found everywhere in Richards’s
prose. To take only one example from his comments on his experiences
of Chinese students, Richards moves, between two sentences, from a
litany of classroom disaster to a vow for reform: ‘unknown, unrecognized failures of understanding and on such a scale, always hitting you.
I felt I must do something’.26 A later letter to Eliot, describing his progress with the kinds of comparative work Eliot had feared barren, finds
24
Letter from Eliot to Richards (9 Aug. 1930), quoted in Empires of the Mind,
p. 76.
25
Mencius, pp. 86–7.
26
Quoted in Constable’s introduction to Mencius (2001 edn.) p. xiii.
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only interest even in its difficulty: ‘Mencius has gone fairly well, and
though perhaps we can’t quite understand what he said, the reasons for
our failure keep on bringing up interesting considerations bearing on all
acts of interpretation.’27 For Richards, tact is a quality well lost where
the gain is a new angle or method.
Empson, however, sustains some even more radical objections to this
method than Eliot: what Richards finds an opportunity for greater clarity,
Empson only sees as the rather perverse opacity by which Richards’s
‘most thorough-going speculations about the Emotive functions of language were made in connection with texts by Mencius which have
remained obscure even to the Chinese’.28 Rejecting this method, Empson
takes the one case where Richards turns away from the Chinese example,
his analysis of the last lines of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, as the
place to plunge in for his ‘smack’ at the fundamental confusions of
Richards’s theory of language. The end to this particular poem had, as a
subject of debate between them, been long in preparation. Richards, for
example, writes of the lines, ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, that is all |
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’, in an essay of 1931,
‘Between Truth and Truth’: ‘I do not know whether Mr. Empson in his
remarkable studies of ambiguity in poetry has touched upon this passage.
I hope he has or will – for it would be hard to beat as a meeting point of
possible senses.’29 In fact, when Empson did turn to the passage, and to
Richards’s reading, it proved ‘hard to beat’ as a point of divergence for
possible ways to handle complex words.
Richards calmly detaches the final lines of the ode and presents an analysis of their key words, ‘beauty’, ‘truth’, and ‘knowledge’, by way of numbered lists for ‘Senses’ and ‘Gestures’. So ‘beauty’ multiply defined, has
ten senses and six gestures (by which term he covers intention, feeling,
tone). The former are presented in the form of statements, for example:
1) X has Beauty – an ultimate, unanalysable quality.
4) X represents something as it should be (The Typical or The
Ideal).30
27
Letter to Eliot (30 Nov. 1930), in Selected Letters of I. A. Richards, ed. John
Constable (Oxford 1990) p. 60.
28
The Structure of Complex Words, pp. 6–7.
29
‘Between Truth and Truth’, Symposium, 2/2 (Apr. 1931) 226–41, repr. in
Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)
p. 47.
30
Mencius, p. 100.
WA R LO R D S I N T H E R E P U B L I C O F L E T T E R S
101
The latter are presented as direct speech exclamations, including:
1) ‘Something here worth while!’
4) Tone gestures as in ‘What a beautiful baby!’ With or without ironic
complications.31
Drawing these lists for ‘Beauty’ together with their equivalents for ‘Truth’,
Richards can offer some neat formulae for the line. So, for example: ‘the
ranges of Beauty and Truth overlap at three points (B5 = T2b; B8 = T5;
B9 = T4b)’. This, he calculates, accounts for the line’s ‘peculiarly strong
suasive force’.32 Richards also puts his numbered lists to work to produce
neatly compact translations of past critical opinions, in order to expose
their logic (or its absence). So he quotes from Arthur Quiller-Couch this
bracing description of the line: ‘a vague observation – to anyone whom
life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated
conclusion’. Richards demolishes this by an application of his formulae to
reveal that Quiller-Couch’s description is in fact just an improbable sum:
that of taking ‘Beauty 7 with Truth 1 and 5 combined or confused’.33 But
it is not only Quiller-Couch who appears vulnerable to parody here:
Richards also seems to risk it by straining quite so far to combine ‘literary
judgment’ with pseudo-scientific ‘experiment’ in rational method.
Certainly, for Empson, the result is too ‘Mandarin’. When Empson
returns twice in Complex Words to this Mencian reading of what Richards
calls ‘the celebrated equivalence’ of Keats’s Urn, and what Empson
prefers to call the ‘somewhat hag-ridden phrase’ from ‘the pot’, his
manner makes his opposition to Richards clear. Empson is energetic,
perhaps to the point of rough handling, in his concern to grasp the richness of possible meanings of the last line of ‘the pot’ by means of multiple
paraphrases. Rather than lists of senses, we find vigorous grappling with
‘what went on in the mind of Keats’ in writing the line, and the ‘various
subsidiary ideas at work, to give the thing body’, as well as with ‘the
mechanics of the thing’ as an equation, including its logical entailment.34
Across several dense pages of close reading, Empson sets tenacity of detail
against the ‘complacent’35 reading by multiple definition that Richards
offers for the lines. In the end, some of his conclusions ‘may seem hardly
31
32
33
34
35
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., p. 116.
The Structure of Complex Words, pp. 371, 373, 372.
Ibid., p. 6.
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worth distinguishing from Professor Richards’; … yet I feel there is some
difference here so real that it decides whether the experience of reading
the poem is a good or a bad one.’36
Perhaps this charge of a ‘complacent’ technique of reading that fails in
its aim of literary judgement is just, as one critic has suggested, ‘an odd
misreading’ of Richards from ‘an Empson-eye-view’.37 Certainly, the two
critics seem to be tilting at different windmills in their treatment of the
ode. But there is more at stake here: however little their respective readings of Keats may satisfy, the differences they betray over the ode present
in miniature many of their significant differences as elucidators of
complex language. Richards both opens and concludes his Mencius with
long quotations from Coleridge on the subject of an ideal dictionary, the
final one of which is this:
Not only in individual instances but to the enlightening of the public
mind with and by the improvement of the general language, were I
asked what the most effective means would be, I should answer as I
have already done, a Dictionary constructed on the only one philosophical principle; … The realization of this scheme lies in the far distance, but in the meantime, it cannot but beseem every individual
competent to its furtherance to contribute a small portion of the
materials for the future temple, from a polished column to a hewn
stone, or a plank for the scaffolding; and as they come in, to erect
with them sheds for the workmen, and temporary structures for
present use.38
Both Empson and Richards, as their readings of the ode make clear, consider their modes of analysis to engage with the question of what makes
an ideal dictionary, ‘constructed on the only one philosophical principle’;
both arrive at distinctly different models of this ‘future temple’. Richards,
on the verge of his experiments with international dictionaries, seeks a
grand, echoing construction, while Empson is happier among the ‘temporary structures for present use’, making sense of some minor English
36
Ibid., p. 371.
W. H. N. Hotopf, Language, Thought and Comprehension: A Case Study of the
Writings of I. A. Richards (London 1965) p. 171. Hotopf details Empson’s
‘misreadings’ of Richards in the section ‘An Empson-Eye View’ ( pp. 169–76). For
Richards’s response to this book, see his letter to William and Hetta Empson (10
Apr. 1956) in Selected Letters of I. A. Richards, pp. 168–9.
38
Mencius, p. 131. The quotation is from Coleridge’s ‘Outline of a History of
the Art of Reasoning’.
37
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103
words from the sixteenth century onwards, with substantial attention to
‘slang’ uses whose short life-span and ‘strong “period” feeling’ he finds
particularly revealing, ‘because a man tends finally to make up his mind,
in a practical question of human relations, much more in terms of these
vague rich intimate words than in the clear words of his official language’.39 His own colloquial ease, in his analytical prose, also sets itself
defiantly against the Ricardian ideal of an internationalist, Mandarin
prose.
For a fuller sense of their difference, we can find an illuminating
comment in the prose of Ezra Pound as he reflects on his own adventures
with Mencian ideograms. Pound argued that, with the Mencian characters, we should concentrate on what he called ‘the feel of their forms, the
twisted as evil, the stunted, the radiant’.40 This concentration, he urged,
required ‘not being distracted or led off into the mazes of the dictionary
with its infinite (i.e. unbounded) interest and interests’.41 Richards has no
interest in the Chinese example for its ideogrammatic vibrancy yet, like
Pound, his concern is also to take the Mencian material as a model for
verbal analysis that is undistracted by ‘the mazes of the dictionary’ – or at
least the dictionary on the model of the OED, with its rich-textured illustrative material. Instead, he learns an undistracted method of multiple definition from his Mencian experiments, profiting from the clarity of his
comparatively limited material, of working ‘without learning a normal
span of Chinese’.42 Here, there can be no risk of losing analytical clarity
in the vast storehouse of unconscious knowledge ‘lying dormant in the
dictionary’.43 Richards’s experiments with the Chinese characters are,
however, also preliminary to the analysis of some complex English words,
in order to compose a partial ‘dictionary’ of definitions for what he calls
‘our chief pivotal terms’: ‘The English equivalents of the Confucian
virtues; Love, Benevolence, Charity, Righteousness, Justice, Honour,
Propriety; … Feeling, Instinct, Will, Belief ’44 – and, drawing on Keats’s
ode, ‘Beauty’, ‘Truth’, and ‘Knowledge’. In this application, Richards’s
deliberate embrace of the ‘privations’ of travel, of the possibilities it
39
The Structure of Complex Words, p. 158.
Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London 1973) p. 107.
41
Ibid., p. 99.
42
Richards commented, in a letter to Dr A. W. Hummel (6 Nov. 1933), that
‘Mencius was an experiment to see whether a limited, tentative sort of lexicology
was possible’. Selected Letters of I. A. Richards, p. 67.
43
Practical Criticism: A Study in Literary Judgement (1929; London 1970) p. 218.
44
Mencius, pp. 123–4.
40
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T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY
presents for schematic clarity in the absence of textured detail, comes to
look rather less satisfying.
It remains then for Empson to fulfil what Richards promises in an
apology for one ‘bout of abstractions’ within The Philosophy of Rhetoric:
‘the promise that we shall come out again to practical problems in the
everyday conduct of words’.45 Empson is firmly against the model of a
keywords dictionary, which sets out a minimal international language of
significant conceptual counters in order to ensure the greatest cooperation possible between meanings. His focus is not on the separated
senses and gestures of obvious keywords but rather on the complex
co-ordinations of sense we find in what he calls ‘the shrubbery’ around
the ‘organized opinion’ of a person’s society and the ‘clear words of his
official language’.46 Although to some extent concerned with the
shadowy discursive formations around particular clusters of words (the
sense cluster, for example), Empson’s main preoccupation is with the capacities of words as they play a role in some of the ordinary argufying
by which we make moral assessments, or by which we position ourselves in conversation. He gives a memorable formulation for this principle in an article on linguistic theory from 1935, the year in which
Complex Words first began to take shape: ‘This whole notion of the scientist viewing language from outside and above is a fallacy’, Empson
writes; ‘we would have no hope of dealing with the subject if we had
not a rich obscure practical knowledge from which to extract the theoretical.’47 So, for all the faults he notes in it, Empson’s ideal dictionary
remains the OED. Drawing on its model of verbal analysis by illustrative
quotations from literary and ‘actual’ usage, Empson tunes his prose to
the pitch of messy, everyday verbal decision-making – to, for example,
the different insinuations of ‘miserly’ and ‘thrifty’, or to the shades of
social judgement that might be implicit in describing a character as
‘sensible’. This, for Empson, is above all what it means to refuse to be
‘among the Mandarins’.
How strong Empson’s alternative is, and even how fair his judgement,
remains open to question – Richards is at best an inconsistent Mandarin.
While his work in the multiple definition of Mencian phrases might seem
to fit characterisations of his prose as ‘a highly managerial scientific
model, one that is born in the laboratory or is sustained by the ideal of
45
The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York 1936) p. 27.
The Structure of Complex Words, p. 158.
47
Empson, ‘The Need for “Translation” Theory in Linguistics’ (1935),
included as Appendix III in The Structure of Complex Words, p. 438.
46
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48
controlled experimentation’, it in fact oscillates between this mode and
another, equally characteristic; the ‘prophetic’.49 Writing of his experiences in translating the ideograms, Richards certainly seems more in tune
with this prophetic key: ‘We compared different translations of them in a
kind of rapture.’50 Yet even where Richards is writing in this mode that
Empson calls ‘a flash of poetry’, the outline of this difference remains
firm. Empson draws attention, in his review of The Philosophy of Rhetoric, to
such a moment – an analogy for how meanings work as a contextual
system: ‘as the movement of my hand uses nearly the whole skeletal
system of muscles and is supported by them, so a phrase may take its
powers from an immense system of supporting uses of other words in
other contexts’.51 Empson paraphrases this – ‘(You don’t know what a
word sounds like in a foreign language till you know all its words.)’ – then
comments, ‘It is a great flash of poetry. The trouble is, if you take it seriously, there is no longer much hope of talking about a particular case.’52
Talking about a particular case is, for Empson, the main hope for verbal
analysis and he remains alert to Richards’s very different preference – for
more categorical, principled thinking – however briefly his prophetic tone
may obscure it.
Another ‘particular case’, a further anecdote from Empson’s experiences in the Chinese classroom, can give point to some of these differences from Richards’s ‘Chinese thinking’. On this occasion, the slip is
with another single yet complex word, ‘material’. Empson catches his students using this word in a way that crosses the line from being a neat pun
towards being a compacted doctrine. He recalls this:
I had a large composition class in communist Peking, soon after the
liberation, and tried to set essay subjects which were politically
neutral, but the ruling interest could not be kept out, and students
would often write down (well, three times, I remember):
The Americans are very wicked because they are so material, and the
Russians are very good because they are so material.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘The Dream of Communication’, in Reuben Brower,
Helen Vendler, and John Hollander (eds.), I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honour
(New York 1973) p. 164.
49
‘Richards was much more a prophet than a scientist’: Frank Kermode,
‘Educating the Planet’, in Bury Place Papers (London 2009) pp. 23–36: 24.
50
Quoted in Constable’s introduction to Mencius (2001 edn), p. vii.
51
The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 65.
52
Criterion, 17/66 (Oct. 1937), repr. in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture,
ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City 1987) pp. 207–10: 208.
48
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T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY
It was not my business to interfere with their propaganda, but I had
to say that this was not correct English prose. ‘How do you say it in
English, then?’ they answered, unconcerned; and I gave, of course, a
rough historical background to the conflict over the word, but what
they expected me to do was to turn the sentence into a rousing
slogan. I doubt if even Raymond Williams could have done that.53
The location of this anecdote, as its closing irony indicates, is in Empson’s
trenchant review of Williams’s Keywords,54 and the more obvious politics of
this later tussle points towards some of what is at stake in Empson’s earlier
disagreement with Mencius over how to define the potencies of sense and
feeling within difficult words. On the one hand, the difference from
Williams helps to uncover some of the buried influence of Richards on
Complex Words; on the other, the renewed attack on verbal analysis by way
of keywords underlines the strength of Empson’s doubts about the detail
of Richards’s methods. Keywords shares with Mencius the fear of ‘being distracted or led off into the mazes of the dictionary with its infinite (i.e. unbounded) interest and interests’. Any of these less schematic aspects that
could belong to a study of words might, Williams’s style suggests, lead us
to lose sight of the vital conceptual wood for the merely lexicographical
trees. The energies of his keyword entries are directed towards illustrating
a dialectical movement by which certain ‘words’ – and the culture and
society to which he considers them ‘key’ – can move from being ‘shared’
to possessing a derogatory or excluding force. The ‘prolonged social drill’
that, in Richards’s phrase, gives us verbal ‘tact’ is, for Williams, rather
more fiercely restrictive: it excludes some speakers. The role of a dictionary of key words is, then, to unlock these words and their powers for
general access. For all his approval of the premises, this form of verbal
analysis fails for Empson on the grounds of technique. Tactic replaces tact
too forcibly; if some slogans are dismantled, new ones fill their place.
Williams presents what is simultaneously too much of ‘a dark picture’55
(too deterministic a version of linguistic structures, of words as systemically
corrupt, dogmatic, harmful) and too stark an attempt to raise slogan from
insinuation to declaration (too bold a faith in the political possibilities of
words). His simultaneous despair and faith strain against each other, and
against the ‘Mandarin’ style of prose analysis that surrounds them.
‘Compacted Doctrines’, Empson’s review of Keywords (1977), repr. in Argufying,
pp. 184–9: 188.
54
Versions of this anecdote do, however, also appear elsewhere, for example in
a review of George Whalley’s Poetic Process for the New Statesman, 31 Oct. 1953.
55
Argufying, p. 184.
53
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Empson, for his part, finds words to be complex but rarely resigns himself
to finding them compacted: attention to the intricacies of their intraverbal
structures, and their richness within particular contexts, can guard against
this danger that they will be forceful carriers of dogma, merely inhibiting
their speakers.
What Empson’s strongly stated difference from Williams does help to
expose is some real accord with Richards’s Mencius as a work that argues
for ‘the habit of multiple definition’ as a technique of critical thinking by
which to ‘protect ourselves from the coercive suggestion of any one interpretation which seems for the moment to fit’.56 Empson’s doubts about
the protective capacities of Ricardian Multiple Definition, when it takes
such Mandarin forms, are still serious and severe. Yet the underlying consonance remains strong: he is less combative with Richards than with
Williams, hesitating to dismiss the Mencian method quite as forcibly as
some of his theories should lead him to do. Although Empson cannot reconcile himself to the radical error of the Mandarin style, in a situation
where style matters – to how damaging it is to the possibilities for practical criticism – he continues to struggle with, rather than against, the influence of Richards. The contrast with Williams, then, underlines the
complex truth of the dedication to Complex Words quoted earlier; the dedication that acknowledges Richards as ‘the source of all the ideas in this
book, even the minor ones arrived at by disagreeing with him’.
Journey to a War
From Peking in 1930 Richards had voiced his hope for a newly practical
form of criticism through interpretative co-operation rather than rhetorical combat:
Our task in this age is to understand, not to combat, and as we
realize this the temper and technique of criticism is changed. But to
break away from this argumentative tradition is difficult. I write in a
country (China), which well supplies an allegory, for there are still
plenty of War Lords in the Republic of Letters.57
Mencius attempts a ‘temper and technique of criticism’ that exchanges the
combative for the co-operative. ‘A controversy’, as Richards defines it, ‘is
normally an exploitation of a systematic set of misunderstandings for
56
57
Mencius, p. 90.
Richards, ‘Between Truth and Truth’, p. 38.
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58
war-like purposes’, and he is philosophically, not just temperamentally,
opposed. The philosophy of his ‘new Rhetoric’, of which Mencius is a
practical example, seeks collaborative forms: dialectics, drama, or symposium. But such hopes seem to founder even on his most immediate allies
and neighbours: his travel companion, Empson, remains a War Lord in
the Republic of Letters. One of Empson’s sharpest quarrels with Richards
seems to be about the very virtue of quarrelling, which Empson upholds
and applies in his reading of Richards, to whom he pays the homage of
argufied dissent: ‘Probably the best way to review this good book’,
Empson opens his review of The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ‘is to quarrel with it
on points of detail.’59 Empson is firmly on the side of what Richards
defines as ‘the old Rhetoric’: ‘The old Rhetoric was an offspring of
dispute; it developed as the rationale of pleadings and persuadings; it was
the theory of the battle of words and has always been itself dominated by
the combative impulse.’60
In his response to Mencius, however, this ‘combative impulse’ takes some
rather different forms. Empson is in open quarrel with Mencius at those
few points in Complex Words that address it, but the larger quarrel – that
Complex Words sets itself to forcefully challenge the entire Ricardian
method of approaching the question of complex meaning from a vantage
point ‘among the Mandarins’, in both senses of that phrase (first, by
taking the Chinese example and second, by subjecting words to precise,
administrative analysis) – remains half-buried. This burial might itself be
read as a mark of the book’s Chinese contexts. In the early stages of
Complex Words, the theoretical chapters written in the 1930s, Empson was
in explicit, if not extensive, dialogue with Richards, who adds to a letter
to Empson this postscript on the draft of ‘Feelings in Words’, to be published in the Criterion in January 1936: ‘I don’t think “Feelings in Words”
is superficial in any bad sense. It doesn’t pretend to go any deeper than it
does. And for God’s sake isn’t it time that something “superficial” was
properly done?’61 But whatever dialogue about the book may have taken
place between Empson and Richards on their shared journey in China in
1937 then largely fades out (if only, perhaps, through circumstance:
‘Writing letters here feels like bombarding the moon for all the response
58
The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 39.
Argufying, p. 207.
60
The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 24.
61
Letters from Richards to Empson (Oct./Nov. 1935), in Selected Letters of
I. A. Richards, p. 93.
59
WA R LO R D S I N T H E R E P U B L I C O F L E T T E R S
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62
one gets’, Richards remarked from Tsing Hua University). In his response to the final book, Richards never pretended to go any deeper than
he did. Tenacious attention was not, perhaps, Richards’s favourite scholarly virtue – he described the ‘painful shock’ of his encounter with a
‘Golden Rule of Scholarship’ from ‘a book by Dr Bosanquet’: ‘Never to
quote or comment on anything in a book which you have not read from
cover to cover’ – and avers, ‘I cannot honestly say I either practise the
Rule or recommend it.’63 Certainly, in the case of Complex Words, his copy
is (characteristically) heavily annotated only in the early stages. The
bookend chapters receive attention, but Richards, either in annotations or
subsequent comment, does not appear to have grappled with the parts of
the book that were, for Empson, definitive – the chapters developing his
‘rich obscure practical’ methodology for verbal analysis: ‘the meat of the
sandwich’.64
For Empson’s part, there may also be an imprint from his Chinese
experiences in his distinctive manner, both tenacious and yet diffident, of
argufying against Richards. Another critic, Graham Hough, who encountered Empson during the time he taught for the exiled university, recalls
finding him in some considerable isolation from reliable correspondence,
libraries, critical quarterlies, and all the other trappings of ‘Mandarin’
Eng. Lit. prose. Hough runs through some seemingly ‘chatty’ details of
Empson’s relative solitude in China before remarking that it is ‘not pointless to recall all this, for I think it helps to account for the elusive, elliptical
nature of his conversation’.65 The mark of these China years, Hough suggests, remains on Empson’s style, in which the combative manner is persistent yet without the consistent imagination of an audience (‘the part of
the imaginary opponent being brushed aside’66). This is perhaps a suggestive story for a book that still needs them, which otherwise reads with
the puzzling quality of possessing some kind of coherence that never
comes to a point of articulation. Restoring Richards to ‘the part of the imaginary opponent’ not only helps to elucidate Complex Words and its
half-buried Chinese contexts but also casts new light on the awkward
62
Letter to Raffaello Piccoli (Nov. 1929), quoted in Constable’s introduction to
Mencius (2001 edn.) p. xi
63
The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 32.
64
The Structure of Complex Words, p. 2.
65
Quoted in John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford
2005) p. 505.
66
Haffenden disputes this: ‘Empson would not have agreed with Hough’s
estimate that he lacked the ‘necessary companions’ while in China; he believed
that his sharp, sage colleagues in the refugee university were up to the intellectual
demands of any conversation.’ Ibid., p. 505.
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relation of influence and dissent between Richards and Empson that gives
shape to the history of practical criticism – and so to the question of what
it might mean to have a truly ‘practical’ criticism of our complex, or key,
words.
From this resistant material, there can be no easy slogans about
Empson ‘among (or against) the Mandarins’. Yet, I would argue, there
remains a quiet story of influence and indifference that takes place
between Richards’s Mencius on the Mind and Empson’s The Structure of
Complex Words, and which is still markedly a story of these years in China.
Empson remains the more laconic – and often the more exasperating –
witness, but perhaps this oblique manner carries its own form of testimony: a well-travelled aversion to purposive details, exemplary examples,
chat, or slogans, and to overplaying the drama of alienation. Certainly,
tactic as well as tact determines Empson’s choice to make use of his time
in China for the undistracted pursuit of some problems of English words,
rather than for a Ricardian pursuit of some abstract questions of senses
and gestures in words, as released from the clutter of familiarity by
Chinese examples. Empson rejects the ‘privations’ of travel that Richards
prefers to embrace, but we might still experiment with the definition of
Complex Words as his otherwise unwritten ‘China book’; as an ‘elusive,
elliptical’ conversation with Richards about what certain experiences, of
travel and of ‘home’, might reveal about the tact and tactics of practical
criticism.