William Empson: When do you clap?

I was listening to a performance by PK Page in Toronto. After each poem the audience clapped. When she said something especially funny they clapped again. She said she’d wanted to be an actor so was undoubtedly pleased. But even in Canada these days people don’t clap when famous actors appear on stage or a scene ends. Only in opera.

When I went back to Sheffield University in 1967 to do an English Honours degree, I restarted the Arts Society. Francis Berry had taken me aside to say he and Professor Empson would like to see it going again, thinking that bringing in outside speakers was an important aspect of undergraduate life. So I did. Following tradition and to get funds was the first task, the committee decided the first meeting would have Empson reading his poems, and anyone attending the first meeting must be a paid up member, membership being available at the door. 

He agreed, and the arrangement was that on the Thursday I would wait for him in the Students Union building, and we would walk down to a Chinese restaurant, have a leisurely meal with some of the committee, and then go to a small room in the new Arts Tower, the old Junior Common Room where the Arts Society had met for years no longer being available. We allowed plenty of time.

But he didn’t arrive. There were always plenty of rumours about his practical sense, especially about his problems with getting to places on time. But they were just rumours – no one I knew had ever been close enough to him to know the truth. So I wondered, was I late? Had he gone to the wrong place? If I went looking for him would I miss him? I walked all around the building inside and out to see if there’d been a mix up in arrangements. But no sign of him.

An hour and a half later, at the time when he should have been reading to the newly formed society, he arrived from somewhere in the basement, staggering and unshaven, in scruffy clothes. I walked towards him. He held out his hand “My name’s Empson,” he said.

Of course he didn’t recognize me, although I’d walked him, drunkish, to the Burrow one evening, the room where he lived. He'd given me a bar of nougat for my wife when he heard, somehow, she'd wasn’t well.

I’ve always had a belief that at times of crisis the rules of the universe wouldn’t apply to me. The obvious decision was to say we don’t have time for a meal but what would he say to that? Would he, offended, walk home?. So I tried to avoid thinking of the chaos on the other side of Western Bank, where he should have been, and where no one would know what was happening this side of the road . (This was 40 years before the cell phone and I had no dispatch riders). I escorted him down to the nearby Chinese restaurant where the rest of the committee was very restlessly waiting. (We assumed he’d want Chinese.) They had been trying to avoid ordering for the time I had been waiting, but they too hadn’t known what was happening. We ordered and ate, and the meal continued. We made attempts to draw him into conversation but this was 1967, before the student revolution. Students were still a little afraid of great men; they were still pretty modest. I've no idea what he thought of our discussion, but other students at other times wondered the same. He was always apart, they said; you couldn’t get close to him. While I was worrying about the time, I also wondered, what did he make small talk about? Did he make small talk?

I was trying to be natural but get him to hurry up. We were over an hour and half late. The meal was ending. Would he like a cigarette (one of a packet I'd especially bought to appear sophisticated) I asked. “No,” he said, “I don’t.” Thoroughly befuddled at the following dead air (no one had ever before refused a cigarette to my knowledge) I wondered how to move on. Knowing what good manners were, I said , “Are you sure?”. “Of course I’m sure. I ought to know” he said crossly. How do you keep a conversation going with famous people, especially those known to be famous, but whose work you don’t understand at all? Then I remembered how his beard had disappeared one day, a month or two after someone had reported someone else having reported they had seen him coming down the stairs from Student Health saying Doctor Gifford had saved his life. He was supposed to have had cancer of the throat. Why hadn’t I thought?

We walked across the road to the room but long before we got there, I could see a problem. A queue of some sort trailed right along the corridor and down the stairs of the new arts building. I hoped a play was being produced somewhere in the French department, and defied chance to associate those dozens of mature, professional looking people disappearing up the stairwell (the Pater Noster was apparently packed) with anything I was doing.

When we reached the doorwell the membership people were worried. What to do? The room was jam packed, certainly breaking all fire regulations. The people in the corridor were apparently optimistic enough to expect those sitting in the room to faint and be replaced six times over, allowing them to enter.

Their good-natured optimism made me feel guilty. Couldn’t they see they’d never get in. And they’d been standing here for over an hour hoping.

One of the committee (one who been denied a chance to eat with Empson) had foreseen problems and had already checked for alternatives with building authorities.

In my previous life at Sheffield, William Empson had spoken once a year in the Junior Common Room in the redbrick building. Forty university people would turn up and Empson would read, introduced by Phillip Hobsbaum, a graduate student with tons of confidence. He’d read one, and explain that when his mother saw it she said “That was nice of you to write a poem about your granny, William” –it was actually about her. He’d make a joke about missing dates having nothing to do with the modern meaning of not turning up for a boy-girl meeting. Another one with lots of “f”s in it. We'd ask him to read a certain poem that he hadn’t read that evening, not knowing what else to say, certainly not daring to ask him about the meaning of any of his poems. One grey-haired chap with a yellow shirt and a limp asked about life at the BBC in the war. “We were as happy as singing birds in a cage” Empson replied, I think he saw an implied criticism in the question: that man was a Leavisite at the Institute of Education, and consequently an enemy. One Thursday evening, Empson, drunk, read a letter from John Wain, full of swearing and invective. Everyone was embarrassed.

We'd advertized the meeting all over the town because we’d wanted a good financial base for the society. Oh why? Here were literally hundreds of people -- unimaginable. We had to walk the length of the university to find the new room, those with the foresight to come early, who had paid to join, were last and the careful monitoring system we'd developed to get funds, ruined. In any case we'd long ago run out of membership cards.

I don’t remember what Empson was doing all this while. I think some pushy people were engaging him in types of conversation. I know I'd lost any of my very tenuous control.

The room we ended up in was a massive banked lecture hall. Empson and I walked down the aisle and waited for everyone to sit down. And this was what I'd dreaded. I had always been embarrassingly bad at public speaking, always happy with sitting back and enjoying other people’s efforts. Here I was in an electrically charged room as people who had come from all over Yorkshire buzzed, waiting to hear one of the world’s great poets. But me first. I would have been able to mumble in a room of forty students, but in a room of hundreds of serious adults, sitting in the aisles, along the front, across the back and crowding the doorways. I had notes but knew I couldn’t read from them in a situation which had become so unformal. I knew eye contact was important, but that as soon as I looked people in the eye I'd forget what I had to say. If I just started speaking aloud, by the end of the sentence I’d forget how I’d begun.

I must have made a small speech –do you have to give details of the career and work of a man as famous as this? and thanked William Empson for coming . But would he be able to speak? I’d heard tales of a disastrous summer just before in New York, when he was drunken and belligerent and his readings had been failures. But most important, was I to start the clapping as I sat or before I sat down, or not at all? Did one clap at the performances of a poet? I knew you didn’t clap after every poem. Too much clapping made poetry show biz, and Empson was not that, I thought. Would the hall be absolutely silent all the time he was there, as the audience wondered whether to clap or not? If so, would silence be all right for a poet like this?.

In the end I started clapping half way to sitting down and everything went well and nobody seemed the least bit anxious about whether they should or not.

He read his poems, eye balls disappearing into the top of his eyes waving his full body with the sweeping rhythm of poem, his body was the poem, chanting ,the patrician accent. It didn’t matter that I still didn’t know what they were about. I experienced the poems once again. Indeed, as I write this, I can feel the rhythm and the sounds of the poems.

At the end everyone clapped. And I drove home to my wife who was already asleep, getting ready for her next day’s work as an infants’ teacher. She had given up offers of professional acting work to pay for me to return to Sheffield University, including my fees.