‘Personally,’ the young William Empson wrote in 1930, ‘I am attracted to the notion of a hearty indifference to one’s own and other people’s feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question.’ That particular ‘notion’ is, of course, easier to formulate in youth than it is to maintain in the course of a full life; yet Empson did manage to live up to the principle until his death in 1984. By then, he was acknowledged internationally as the most brilliant literary critic of his generation, as well as one of its best poets, cherished by his friends and admirers, and respected (or feared) by those all too numerous lesser writers and critics who had had occasion to experience the force of his hearty indifference to their feelings.

And no one could – no one can – convey intellectual scorn like Empson. In a sense, this is simply because he was a one-off; but it is also true that the rules about ‘fighting for the truth’ in matters of intellectual or cultural discussion have changed since his time. Imagine, for example, any prominent literary academic today undertaking the task Empson set himself when he came to Oxford to deliver – in his victim’s home University – an entire series of lectures dedicated to the utter demolition of Dame Helen Gardner’s life-work on the texts of John Donne. (Dame Helen was reportedly reduced to tears, though she did not attend; and Empson, characteristically, was puzzled to hear this.) Or imagine, in the solidly conservative ambience of Cold War America, a literary critic addressing his audience while wearing Chairman Mao overalls, and informing them that, although their literature had given them the impression that they were loved by the rest of the world, the world in fact was far from in love with the USA. Such things have become inconceivable, principally because we have accepted that ‘truth’ has to answer to ‘people’s feelings’. Here, as elsewhere, Empsonian scorn is sorely needed.

It is our lack of an Empson that makes the knowledge of his life so fascinating. In this second, concluding volume of his enormous authorised biography, John Haffenden reveals an individual of tremendous complexity, who passed through different kinds of professional life without any serious compromise of the principles by which he lived and thought. The book picks up Empson in his thirties, working for the BBC during the War alongside the likes of George Orwell, and follows him to Peking, where he teaches his way through the Communist revolution and into the early years of the new regime, then to the University of Sheffield and long years of dedicated (if from some angles eccentric) devotion to academic duty. At the same time, it tracks the evolution of his critical thinking and the composition of works like The Structure of Complex Words and Milton’s God, as well as the ever-deepening preoccupation with poets such as Shakespeare, Donne and Coleridge. Alongside all this, Haffenden unfolds a detailed narrative of Empson’s personal life, by turns chaotic, shocking, and hilarious.

Empson’s marriage to the South African sculptor Hetta Crouse was not by any measure an orthodox one, yet it was undoubtedly the mainstay of his life, and facilitated, more than it hindered, his intellectual work. The happiness of the union includes, remarkably, the fact of both partners’ open and deliberate infidelity: Hetta had several very serious relationships, and an illegitimate child, while Empson himself maintained a long-running liaison with the eminent scientist Alice Stewart. Studio House, the Empsons’ London home, was the scene of wildly bohemian existence: the amount of booze, sex and violence involved might make the most hardened of contemporary partygoers blanch. The Empsons’ children, too, were brought up the hard way. Two infant sons were transported to China without a second thought, and later, in London, had to make their way through the (often literal) debris of their parents’ lives. Haffenden concludes that ‘the spectacle [the children] had to witness must be reckoned to amount to a form of childhood abuse’, and reports the ‘shocked and desperate’ outburst of Empson’s elder son, ‘Why can’t you just be normal?!’

There were many reasons, and Haffenden’s book is big enough, both in its conception and its detail, to account for them. That ‘abuse’, for example, is only part of the picture, and both William and Hetta Empson emerge from the book as parents in many ways deserving of the love which their children had for them; as often, the fuller picture gives the more complicated, and truer, results. Here we are close to one of Empson’s own principles as a literary critic: that we should know, and indeed have a duty to find out, as much as we can about a writer’s intentions when we try to assess the detailed and sometimes tension-bearing evidence of the writing itself. This flew in the face of the modish and tediously self-preening school of professional ‘theory’ which was starting to dominate literary studies late in Empson’s life, but also went against the cherished dogmas of the so-called ‘New Criticism’ of the 1940s and 1950s; and it was one ‘fragment of the truth’ with which Empson liked to outrage the lesser, and less open mind of his Cambridge bête noire, F R Leavis.

This is not to suggest that Empson himself was always able to see past his own intense, and intensely local, perceptions. He was good at seeing through other people’s idiocies, and it is good to know of his pursuing Stephen Spender around the room at one party, at a time when everyone except apparently Spender himself knew that as co-editor of Encounter he was in the pay of the CIA, chanting ‘Stephen’s a cheat!’ Yet in politics Empson was more naïve than he had any right to be, and his defence of Communist China, for example, soon passed from the excusable to the embarrassing: the silence he maintained on the subject from the late 1950s onwards, when he became aware of some things he should have known already, ought to have been more than just silence. The pro-Communist survivor of the siege of Peking went on to be a devoted fan of the Queen, from whom he eventually received his knighthood.

Haffenden subtitles this volume Against the Christians, and in so doing represents fairly an Empsonian perception which went from initial brilliance into longer-term predictability and (perhaps) banality. ‘I am not myself a Christian,’ Empson wrote, ‘because the belief in a Supreme God who takes pleasure in giving torture seems to me ineradicable from the religion, and I find difficulty in imagining the minds of good men who accept it.’ It was not a profound insight, but this instinct, at its best, gave Empson some of his finest literary criticism and most effective polemic: the ‘Neo-Christian’ literary critics he attacked were well worth attacking, but their deeper habits – of insisting on literature’s essential orthodoxy in terms of a cultural consensus – outlived the specificity of their faith. The heirs of Empson’s detested critical-religious drones have ditched the jargon of Christianity in favour of the soundbites of humanism and cultural correctness, but they are still vulnerable to Empson’s strictures. In how many departments of English today could anyone hoping for advancement (or survival) dare to endorse Empson’s statement (in Milton’s God) that ‘the essential function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own’?

Empson’s obstinacy in matters of truth is not, then, very much in fashion. However, as he wrote in 1950, ‘The advantage or perhaps the limitation of being an obstinate man is that you don’t have moral problems, only risks.’ John Haffenden’s devoted work on Empson needs to be applauded, not least in its patient unravelling of the many risks taken by its subject, as well as the ‘moral problems’ which were the background against which they were taken. Above all, at a time when real argument is generally frowned upon, Haffenden has given us an Empson we should be arguing about, and arguing with, well into the future.