William Empson

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After his banishment from Cambridge, Empson supported himself for a brief period as a freelance critic and journalist, living in Bloomsbury until 1930, when he signed a three-year contract to teach in Japan after his tutor had failed to find him a post teaching in China. He returned to England in the mid-1930s only to depart again after receiving a three-year contract to teach at Peking University. Upon his arrival he discovered that, because of the Japanese invasion of China, he no longer had a post. He joined the exodus of the university's staff, with little more than a typewriter and a suitcase, and ended up in Kunming in China, with Lianda (Southwest Associated University), the school created there by students and professors who were refugees from the war in the North. He arrived back in England in January 1939. In 1941 he met and married the South African sculptor, broadcaster and journalist Hetta Crouse; they were to have two sons.

Empson worked for a year on the daily digest of foreign broadcasts and in 1941 met George Orwell, at that time the Indian editor of the BBC Eastern Service, on a six-week course at what was called the Liars' School of the BBC. They remained friends, but Empson recalled one clash: "At that time the Government had put into action a scheme for keeping up the birth-rate during the war by making it in various ways convenient to have babies, for mothers going out to work; government nurseries were available after the first month, I think, and there were extra eggs and other goodies on the rations. My wife and I took advantage of this plan to have two children. I was saying to George one evening after dinner what a pleasure it was to cooperate with so enlightened a plan when, to my horror, I saw the familiar look of settled loathing come over his face. Rich swine boasting over our privileges, that was what we had become ...".

Just after the war Empson returned to China. He taught at Peking University, befriending a young David Hawkes, who later became a noted sinologist and chair of Chinese at Oxford University. Then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he taught a summer course for the intensive study of literature at the Kenyon School of English at Kenyon College in Ohio. According to Newsweek, "The roster of instructors was enough to pop the eyes of any major in English." In addition to Empson the fellows included John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, Arthur Mizener, Allen Tate and Yvor Winters.

In 1953 Empson was professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London, for a year. He then became head of the English Department at the University of Sheffield until his retirement in 1972. In 1974 Empson accepted an offer of distinguished professorship at York University in Toronto. He was knighted in 1979, the same year his old college, Magdalene, awarded him an honorary fellowship some 50 years after his expulsion.

Professor Sir William Empson died in 1984.

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