An Interview with William Empson

Abstract In the autumn of 1970 I was temporarily over from Finland. I had been commissioned by my publishers to produce a language course for Finnish schools based on authentic recordings of English teenagers. For this purpose I had been provided with a state-of-the-art portable tape recorder. It was also my intention, whilst in London, to collect material for a study of William Empson as a poet-critic. At that time I was rather pleased with myself as I had just had accepted for publication a piece on John Donne which began, with Empsonian insouciance, ‘Anyone who has read John Donne’s “The Flea” in a French translation will have noticed . . . ’ It went on to argue, quite wrong-headedly, that Donne’s poem was a nexus of occluded French puns (puce, pucelle, pucelage, dépuceler , and the subjunctive puisse ), clearly derived from the poems collected as La Puce de Mme Desroches (1583). I had originally entitled the article ‘Donne the Puce Man’, but for some reason the editor wouldn’t allow this. I didn’t go quite so far as to suggest that Donne had been secretly and bigamously married to Mme Desroches’s beautiful daughter, Catherine, between whose breasts a flea had been seen rapturously parquée . But that was only because Empson had not yet shown the way with the example of his Marvell essays in Using Biography . (I later learned thatmy piece had been accepted for publication, not because of its Empsonian cleverness, but because it was thought to be the work of a certain elderly and respected Ronsard scholar who had to be humoured and happened to have the same name as myself.)