Biography and criticism 75

No critic ever wrote more positively in support of his own position than Empson. He is distanced from Leavis - the precision of that mathematically trained mind is in marked contrast to Leavis's more general note of assertion. But like Leavis he was part of Cambridge English, and was powerfully influenced by I. A. Richards, and in very simple terms he is like Leavis in that he devoted his career to arguing the case for 'life' against the kind of uncontrolled cerebra- tion whose only responsibility is to the defence of its own interest. That really is what Using Biography is about. As with Leavis, this made him an outsider, but in his case never one who could be accused of simply defending his own status quo. Of all the great critics of this century he was the least governed by either cultural or theoretical presupposition; his major works - Seven Types and Complex Words most notably - perfectly illustrate Eliot's dictum that 'the free intelligence is that which is wholly devoted to enquiry'. Using Biography is of a more casual order of achievement, but the Empson spirit shines through it still.

PAUL MILLS

Catania Market Waking at six across the skyline's eaves mist is white as sheet-linen to cool us and from the balcony guard a low mob shout, as though we are waking as Tiberians once in this strange coastal town.

Shouts going on all dawn across the houses, sun thirty degrees, and through streets whose dry gutters run with sound to the narrow well of the square, cries bring us leaning from our balcony to stare at serried rainbows, valves of shells, smithereens of light, as if a wave

76 Critical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1

at night had crawled inshore with all its shoals. Coming out too quick in the powerful sun our eyes wade through fishmongers and fish and heron-women, spines and wavered knives, tongues of abyss, the sea’s multiple glint or one of its limbs this shark-wrist sharp-cut like a corm. On trestled boards in cornered shade creels of needle-silver shine from the wave, vertebra cords, lathery-firm squid-purses, everything here is progeny, eyes and hands in textures of what they touch seem to feel the sea’s flexuous currents, Agrippa’s boats hauled. I stand about among the gathering hands. Flags are paved with bloodfilm from the straits our plane will cross this evening before dusk three hours from London. A man splits out of its skin a raw flounder that gloats in its ice pail as mild as silt. Above his head the city is arranged against a fold of Etna and from a sky that seems to hold horizon as a fantasy of the sea waves are drawn in lengths of heat or steel melting there without a break of sound.