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Lunching on Olympus

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We were met at the door by Empson himself, unkempt white hair and beard prominent. His shirt and pants were a faded gray and looked to have been worn unwashed for several days. The sitting room itself was strewn with newspapers and was visibly dusty; it looked as unkempt as Empson. Almost at once I could tell I was going to have a very hard time understanding him. I had to listen for key words. He said his wife was away, so we would have to put up with him.
In honor of “our American guest,” he would make bloody marys. He was a skinny man whose clothes hung on him, and as he walked about he continually hooked his thumbs in the front of his pants, and stretched them forward. Ricks and I had to avoid one another’s eyes.
Empson picked out of the kitchen sink three large glasses that may have been washed within the week. On the counter was a large open can of tomato juice with a rusted top. He poured juice into each glass and, after that, generous amounts of something that could have been either gin or vodka—I couldn’t see. Then he sprinkled on something that might have been Worcestershire sauce and from a bin dredged up browned celery stalks. And then he stood back to admire his work and repeatedly stretched and fanned his pants.

He bade us to keep our seats and served his magic drink, which I knew I was meant to praise as thoroughly authentic, if not hygienic. The real challenge was to drink some of this warm slop—no ice cube ever was evident—without spluttering. We toasted Empson and set to work. It had to be done in slow sips; every chance for him to offer a second one had to be eliminated.

Ricks and Empson had a few things to talk about, and they laughed together. I was concentrating on getting enough of the drink down to be neither insulting nor sick. By now, Ricks and I were having a harder time with the drinks and pants stretching—it was just so outrageously funny, but we contained ourselves. I tell my classes that I believe America has weird and idiosyncratic people, but only England has naturally, fully formed eccentrics. Empson is the paradigm. (Recently Ricks remarked of Auden, Forster, Empson, and Larkin that because they were centric in so many ways, their eccentricities were all the more interesting.)

I told him about meeting Auden and being astonished by his wrinkled face. “It was all those sailors,” said Empson, who had written of Auden and Dylan Thomas that they were the only contemporaries “you could call poets of genius.”

After a time, Empson said he wanted to make us lunch, and we would eat in the garden as it was such a fine day. Glancing again at the kitchen, I almost pleaded that he let us take him out to the closest place he enjoyed. Ricks added his solicitation. Empson wouldn’t hear of it.

He went into the kitchen. I asked if I could help. He said I could set the table outside. I began a search for silverware, plates, and glasses. We were to switch to beer, warm of course. He provided no direction, so I had to look in cabinets and drawers. It gave me the chance to rinse and towel everything as unobtrusively as possible. He said we needed soup bowls and spoons and knives for cheese. I found three rolls, butter, and cheese. The rolls had seen a better day, but I hoped they could be buttered into edibility.

Ricks was ordered to stay seated, and then the soup making began. First, Empson produced a large, dirty pot, which I had no chance to rinse. He ran water into it and set it to boil. From strange corners he found an onion, leeks, parsley, and some of the browned celery. He threw in some other things, but by then I couldn’t look. At least it was all floating in hot water.

After a time Empson told me to bring the bowls to him, and he ladled out full portions for each of us, stopping between scoops to make pants adjustments. We sat outside in the lovely air and quiet garden, which did not have much beyond grass and some shrubbery. We were at a wooden table, with Empson at its head. He was obviously proud of his culinary work. There was no choice but to get it all down.
I tasted it and was shocked to find it was good. I didn’t know what it was, but I was so relieved that I would be able to eat it at all that I blurted out my compliments.

“My boy,” Empson said, “it is just like a symphony. You get the right instruments together—here, the ingredients—and the conductor then blends it all together.” We laughed at his delight.

He told us that when he had taught for a semester in America at a small college, he was assigned to teach Shakespeare to a class full of engineers (perhaps because he had taken the first part of his Cambridge degree in Maths). Without slighting them, he said they knew nothing, not even what the Avon was. But what he liked best about them was that they were so well disciplined by their engineering training that they looked up every word they didn’t know—so they met the first test of close reading.

I left with his voice even clearer in my head than on my old Caedmon recording of him reading his poems, my favorite being a Gertrude Stein pastiche, “Poem About a Ball in the Nineteenth Century”:

Feather, feather, if it was a feather, feathers for fair, or to be fair, aroused. Round to be airy, feather, if it was airy, very, aviary, fairy, peacock to be well surrounded. Well-aired, amoving, to peacock, cared for, share dancing inner to be among aware.

THERE THEN: VISITS TO FOUR MEN who lived and died by, with, and for the English language. What most remains for me, beyond their words and genius, is their generosity. Today Christopher Ricks is the Oxford Professor of Poetry, just as Auden was over a half century ago, finishing his five-year appointment in 1961, the year before our luncheon.

As I have grown older, read more, and now teach, becoming what J. D. Salinger called a “lifetime English major,” how many times I’ve wished for another meeting with each of them, because I have so much more to ask. And to hear again how each was so indelibly himself, to say some thanks to them for their part in making my teaching years full, to show them how much these meetings meant to me.

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Steven L. Isenberg is a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the publisher of New York Newsday.

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