Selected Letters of William Empson by John Haffenden

Author:John Haffenden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Sir,—What Mr Burgess says about ‘the penultimate episode of Finnegans Wake’ is very interesting, and one day if I am spared I will try to decide what the episode means. Joyce might (just) be saying that the world needed God, but not that it needed the Roman Catholic Church. Surely, the story that he was secretly in favour of that was exploded by the Ellmann biography [James Joyce, 1959]. However, it is a side-issue here.

The main point of my little preface to John Harrison’s Reactionaries was to say that one of their main tenets was not standard Christian doctrine, as they supposed. It is the idea, mostly explicitly supported by T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis, that the human should be kept rigidly distinct from the divine, whereas the Athanasian Creed, a work not usually thought to be worm-eaten with liberalism, recommends ‘the taking of the manhood into God.’ This (I think) is why they can fairly be called Unnaturalists. Mr Burgess might well have answered that, instead of telling us he despises the Cambridge School of Theology.

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