ABSTRACT
Michael Roberts and William Empson first met at Cambridge in the late 1920S; then, after Michael came down from Newcastle in 1931 to teach mathematics at Mercer's School, they saw a good deal of each other in London. Michael had read William's poems in Experiment and the Cambridge RevielJJ, and chose six of them for his anthology New Signatures, published by the Hogarth Press in 1932. For its successor, New Country, which had prose as weIl as poetry, he was keen to have an essay by William; and the earliest letters of William's I have found are on this matter. The first is from Tokyo, on 12 November 1932:
I should like to write 3-5,000 words about Richards's pragmatism as opposed to the offensive covert pragmatism of people like Wyndham Lewis and Chesterton; also about Richards's theory of value by addition, and how far it is valuable when you have left out the simpler fallacies in it which Richards now admits. Or rather to boil down my scrabbly notes to that length. Is this the sort of thing you want, and when do you want it?
