William Empson Remembered on Marchmont Street

Dear old Bloomsbury…I was there last week and noticed a blue plaque I never had before on Marchmont Street (walked by maybe 3 or 4,000 times!) to William Empson (1906-84), the English literary critic, poet and China Hand. In fact the plaque was only unveiled in June 2011 by Empson’s family, I found out on the internet, so I needn’t feel too foolish. If you don’t know Empson then do look him up (his Wikipedia entry here in probably as good a place as any to start). Or there’s a good essay on Empson by Frank Kermode form the London Review of Books here.

He was an odd sort and I’ve never got very far with his poetry but he pops up regularly in memoirs of 1930s ex-pat China, usually doing or saying something charmingly bonkers. He moved around teaching but his posts were always being disrupted by the Japanese invasion – he’s mostly associated with Peking and Peking University but then taught at the relocated universities in Kunming after the full-scale Japanese invasion.