Frank Kermode on William Empson
In 1941 [William] Empson met Hetta Crouse, an Afrikaans-speaking South African artist who was working in the African Service, and they married at the end of the year. Two sons were born within the next three years – nothing unusual there, but for other reasons this marriage might well have been thought peculiar. Haffenden does full justice to the extraordinary Hetta, tall, beautiful, funny, a hard drinker, and no more than her husband a lover of domestic peace, cleanliness and conventional morality. The marriage was ‘open’ and Hetta set the pace by having lots of lovers. The poet encouraged her in this, believing in the virtues of the ‘Consenting Triangle’. In a long and curious poem called ‘The Wife Is Praised’, here printed for the first time, he explains this preference:
Did I love you as mine for possessing?
Absurd as it seems, I forget;
For the vision of love that was pressing
And time has not falsified yet
Was always a love with three corners
I loved you in bed with young men,
Your arousers and foils and adorers
Who would yield to me then.
And so on, for 25 stanzas, unambiguous about the preferences of the parties, but also firm that the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise of her freedom may have caused Empson some pain; he missed her badly when she went off to Hong Kong for a year with a lover, and seems to have been a little unhappy when she added illegitimately to the family (possibly, as Haffenden suggests, more because of his sense of obligation to his brother as head of the family than to common or garden jealousy). And it may have hurt that while he worked at Sheffield University, as he did for 18 years, living in conditions of squalor that amazed all who saw them, Hetta rarely paid him a visit. Not that conditions in their Hampstead house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’ – but of course it was much larger, and the company tended to be noisy and numerous, whereas in Sheffield he depended on his middle-class academic colleagues for talk and drinking company and even for baths, and nursing when he was unwell. More comfort was provided by Alice Stewart, a distinguished Oxford doctor and almost a Nobel Prize winner, with whom he had a long, intermittent and affectionate affair.
The Consenting Triangle was not a passing fancy but a serious preoccupation. An important aspect of Empson’s character was his bulldog unwillingness to give up an idea, and he was always ingenious in discovering in favoured works of literature evidence in support of his own theories, literary, social or psychological. For him sexual freedom was an ethical imperative even if the consequences might sometimes be painful. His belief that artists and people of intellect must break with social convention in order to bring about beneficial change naturally applied to sex as well as everything else.
These leading ideas would spread and colour his thinking about matters that might have been thought independent of them. One such instance is his view of the story Joyce tells in Ulysses. It was in 1948 that he first outlined the theory in a letter to his wife: Bloom would like to make love to Molly but hasn’t done so for ten years, since his first son died, though he is keen to have another child. If he could get Molly away from Boylan and ‘get her to bed with Stephen’ he thinks he could manage it provided Stephen preceded him – perhaps when Stephen returned to Eccles Street, as he promised. Joyce was apparently ‘shy’ about this bit of narrative, and hid the point from his readers. Not from Empson, however, who expounded it several times adding more and more detail in evidence: for example, in two successive issues of this journal in August and September 1982, and finally in the posthumous collection Using Biography. He reached a point where he could not believe an unprejudiced reader could help finding what Joyce had rather cravenly hidden; and in any case he would presumably have given up the hope of a triangular arrangement by the time he started Finnegans Wake. But we are to understand that his desire for it had been urgent, and Empson studies it with appropriate intensity: the triangular outcome is ‘amply foretold’.
