150
PARTISAN REVIEW
whimsy, like the best ofSwir, as in his poem, "Myness":
"My
parents, my husband, my brolher, my sisler."
I am listening in a cafeteria al breakfast.
The women's voices rustle, fullill themselves
In a rilualno doubt necessary.
I glance sidelong at their moving lips
And I delighl in being here on earlh
For one more moment, with them. here on earth,
To celebrate ollr tiny, tiny my-ness.
MADELINE G. LEVINE
EMPSON'S RAGBAG
ARGUFYING: ESSAYS IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE. By
William Empson, edited
by
John Haffenden. U. of Iowa Press. $19.95.
[n premature retrospect, William Empson looks like the only
literary critic of genius in the English-speaking world in this century, and he
was working on three books when he died in 1984 -
Using Biography,
which
instantly appeared;
Essays
on
Shakespeare
(1986); and a book of Renais–
sance essays.
He also left a vast pile of reviews and other articles dating back to the
1920s - he was born in 1906 - which he used to refer to cheerfully as his
ragbag.
Argufying
is that ragbag. It consists of 119 prose pieces starting with
an undergraduate review of 1928, some of them unpublished and almost all
uncollected, mainly on "botherheaded" theoretical critics, as he called them, as
well as a handful of Renaissance and seventeenth-century authors, and then
- his relative indifference to the eighteenth century being highly characteristic
of a Cambridge nurture in the 1920s - W.B. Yeats,
T.
S. Eliot, W. H.
Auden, Dylan Thomas, some twentieth-century novelists and a famous
witty-malicious piece on George Orwell, who was his wartime colleague in
BBC propaganda.
This is an enormous arena of debate, and the book is so rich in points
that it will take years for the critical world to digest it, if it ever does. John
Haffenden has done us a large service. He was a young colleague at
Sheflield University, in Empson's native Yorkshire, and he has used the
