William Empson's Memory

William Empson’s Memory

If you read my posts about Porson and Chomsky you will know that, having a poor memory, I am interested in those who possess a good one. Empson reportedly did and it is depressing to note that he was also very smart and could have had a career in math if he had not decided to become a literary theorist.  It is additionally depressing to learn that while he was impressing everyone at Cambridge he was still able to have enough fun to get kicked out.

Since the academic doors were closed in England he left for Japan and for a while taught in China. While there, the Japanese invaded China, and Empson and other teachers at northern universities had to flee to the south where they ended up teaching English without any books. The story goes that the lack of resources was not a problem for Empson since he could recall most of what he had read and reproduce it.  Of course, I could not remember the details, but I did have a reference and tracked it down.

In a review of a book by Empson that is edited by John Haffenden there is mention of the fact that there were no books in China from which to teach and “the story reported by Haffenden is that Empson brought cheer to the staff-room by typing out the whole of Shakespeare’s Othello from memory. On another occasion, persuaded by his students, he recited long passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost. His typewriter provided us, totally out of ‘nothing’, with Swift’s A Modest Proposal. In addition, he was very good at providing long verse passages and many people attest to the power of his memory."
This can all be found in the following source: ”The Learning of Strangeness,” The Royal Beasts and Other Works , Empson, William; Haffenden, John. The Times Literary Supplement, Friday,  November 14, 1986; pg. 1272; Issue 4363.

Given that 30 years have passed since that was written, I looked a little further and found that, while Empson did have a phenomenal memory, the tale is not as tall as told. Haffenden has since that time written a biography of Empson and in Vol. I, Among the Mandarins, Chapter 15 has the title ,“Camping Out: China, 1937-1938. It is reported there that “The students were in fact staggered by his [Empson’s] ability to reproduce on his typewriter enormous quantities of poetry, including Shakespeare and Milton, and it is certainly true that he had an extraordinary facility for remembering lyric poetry in particular. His feats of memorial reconstruction are themselves remembered to this day; they have become part of the folklore of the refugee universities.” Haffenden notes, however, that it is likely that Empson did have access to a copy of Othello. Empson never bragged about such things and even said that the Chinese were not greatly impressed with his abilities since they have a tradition of memorizing long texts.

Empson is an unusual  character and if you are more interested in his Cambridge problem than his memory, see the Wikipedia entry. For those who are not fans of literary criticism and prefer scandals, skip Seven Types of Ambiguity and go straight to “Empson and His Several Types of Infidelity,” by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, Oct. 29, 2006. Like our friend Porson described below, he was rather fond of the drink and often unkempt. His ‘neck beard’ is proof of his eccentric nature.

C.S. Lewis’s Memory

While searching for the information above about Empson, I learned that Lewis also was reported to have had a great memory since Empson supposedly said  “he  [Lewis] was the best-read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” That quotation appears frequently in the books about Lewis and recently someone pulled them all together and went in search of the original source from Empson. In the course of collecting them, here are some of the remarks discovered about Lewis’s memory:

His anonymous obituarist in the Cambridge Review wrote,‘There seemed to be nothing he had not read—and everything that he had read seemed to be within his reach, ready to be recalled and put to use.

Lewis’s one-time student Derek Brewer, later a Cambridge medievalist and academic publisher, recalled that given any lines from Paradise Lost, Lewis could continue reciting from that point until asked to stop.

Two other eminent students of his, Canadian English professor John Leyerle and the writer and theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, recalled separate occasions on which Lewis allowed himself to be tested by readings from books selected at random from his own library, after which he would he would go on to quote the rest of the page.

While Lewis clearly did have a good memory, the origin of the Empson quotation could not be located. See: “Reader’s Query: William Empson on C.S. Lewis’s Memory,” Paul Tankard, Notes & Queries, Vol. 61, No.4, p.614 Dec. 2014.