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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer scope of Sisson's writings on literature, culture and politics (he was a senior civil servant before retirement). The editors declare, No poet has written with anything like his intimate knowledge of the workings of government, and few have had a clearer sense of the role of literature in participating in civic life.' An heir to Marvell, Hardy and Edward Thomas, Sisson brings to this essential Englishness the disruptive energies of modernism. Never a comfortable or comforting writer, he is an incisive intelligence and speaks with clarity to the twenty-firstcentury reader's expectations and discontents. This book, first published in 1993, collects Spark's essays on the Brontës, her selection of their letters and of Emily's poetry. Evident throughout are Spark's critical intelligence, dry wit, and refusal to sentimentalise - qualities that gave her own novels their particular appeal. At the same time, The Essence of the Brontës is Muriel Spark's tribute to the sisters whose talents placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity'.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
AC. H. Sisson Reader
Edited with an introduction by
Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness
Contents
Introduction
‘For about a year (circa 1932) I must have been contemporary’, wrote C.H. Sisson in his autobiographical essay, ‘Natural History’: ‘How I got over this is mysterious, but it was not all done by literature’. The essay, which falls into the ‘making of a writer’ genre, has a characteristic Sissonian emphasis on the writer’s unmaking, which is usually also his real making. If we wanted a brief insight into Sisson the poet, thinker and cultural critic, we could do worse than start here. In an essay on Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Sisson recalls being drawn to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a poem he encounters first in piecemeal, quoted form while still living with his parents. ‘For three years, out of key with his time…’, it begins. The power of that line, and something one suspects Sisson responded to, lies in the enticing perfection of its rhythm even as it speaks of something, of someone, out of ‘rhythm’ with his time. There is also the possibility, the probability even, that there is no better sign of being of one’s time than advertising one’s estrangement from it. Certainly that modernist passion for locating oneself on either side of the present, and, if possible (Pound, Eliot…), on both sides at once, is something Sisson understands and stays attuned to throughout his long career. In Two Minds is the title of one of his books of literary criticism, and in a review of a book on the Leavises he jokes that two minds is ‘surely the minimum number for any reflection of any interest’. It is a witty, penetrating comment, and one that goes to the heart of Sisson’s own work, which is authoritative but never comfortable, articulate but always suspicious of articulacy.
Sisson began as a mostly urban poet:
I was born in Bristol, and it is possible
To live harshly in that city
Quiet voices possess it, but the boy
Torn from the womb, cowers
Under a ceiling of cloud. Tramcars
Crash by or enter the mind
A barred room bore him, the backyard
Smooth as a snake-skin, yielded nothing
In the fringes of the town parsley and honey-suckle
Drenched the hedges.
(‘Family Fortunes I’)
There are quiet voices there, but they are drowned out by the crash of tramcars, and the smooth surface of the yard stifles the life of the land beneath that only emerges elsewhere, an erotic drenching that does not touch the centre. Sisson’s direct experience of modern bureaucracy, as a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, prepared also by an early reading of Kafka while in Berlin in 1934–35, sharpened his sense of humans as trapped animals estranged from their instinctual life by a system of regulatory structures. But at the same time, he had a clear idea of how the history of those structures had for better or worse shaped us into what we are. ‘A person becomes, not what he thinks he is, but what he is, or at any rate what is’, he writes in ‘Le roi soleil’. Becoming what you are consists for Sisson not in inhabiting the interstices, which might be thought to be one way of enjoying some freedom from the control of the state (or the state’s failure to limit the profit motive), but, as he spells it out in the 1939 essay ‘Order and Anarchy’ – and also thirty years later in an editorial for PN Review – to ‘understand’ government and ‘our inherited institutions’ (Avoidance, p. 555). This leads him to align himself with cultural and political order, and yet, because his version of that order, rooted in the seventeenth century, was so against the times, and the reality he saw such a counter-reality, his work is always radical and oppositional, critical and sceptical, an irritant. ‘Good writing alone may be described as independent of government’, he says in ‘Order and Anarchy’ – ‘alone’, that is, in contradistinction to bad writing – and part of what makes his writing good is its independence not just from government but from literary fashion and consensus, its unwillingness to swallow the orthodoxies of the day.
Being in or of one’s time matters little to Sisson, if by that is meant being fashionable, or courting an existing readership, or being part of a group or generation with an identifiable collective ethos. Yet ideas of continuity and community are central to his work. An English poet first and foremost, he is also one of English poetry’s most European-minded, and his sense of a specifically English (as distinct from British) cultural inheritance is matched by his understanding of the European traditions it partakes of and diverges from. The translator of Virgil, Catullus, Lucretius, Dante, Du Bellay, Racine, La Fontaine in bulk, he also assayed a range of writers including, among others, Ovid, Horace, Petrarch, Labé, Gryphius, Boileau, Heine, Corbière and Valéry. ‘Fishing in other men’s waters’, he called translation, though as a poet, and despite his self-avowed short spell as ‘contemporary’, he fishes almost entirely in his own.
There must have been a time when Sisson was young, and perhaps that was when he was contemporary too. But ‘late style’ came early to him. We are struck, as we read him, by how weathered and disabused Sisson’s writing can be, how ambiguously freighted it is by the past, by history, and by a sense of community that often constrains as much as it enhances us. His preoccupations with the relations between Church and State, literature and national life, his special understanding of conservatism, which is civic and pragmatic as well as something more numinous, are hardly fashionable. His writings on administration and governance are so far from the sort of cultural interventions we are used to seeing from poets that it would be tempting to set them apart from the body of his properly literary work (the term ‘properly literary’ is one Sisson would have rejected). But they are not; they are part of it, part of its informing vision.
Even when Sisson’s conservatism might have been fashionable, it was rendered inaudible by noisier simplifications – notably the amnesiac, historically illiterate conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s, and the softly sentimental attachments to tradition and history that accompanied it, often as ways of distracting from its ravages. Where the easier forms of conservatism look to history and tradition for comfort, Sisson tends to look to them for something harder and more testing. In this he resembles another poet-critic, Donald Davie, and both writers, despite differences, were conscious of their common ground: an attraction to modernism (notably Pound) that often seemed at odds with a specifically British literary and cultural inheritance. And the word ‘inheritance’ seems more apposite than mere ‘tradition’, because one cannot choose one’s inheritance, though traditions can always be managed in ways that suit us. In this respect, Sisson is perhaps the true heir of T.E. Hulme, a poet and thinker about whom he writes perceptively and with sympathy. Those Hulmean ideas he responds to – a belief in order and continuity, support for democracy that understands its imperfections, a sense of what Hulme called ‘the religious attitude’ that is independent of a belief in God and by no means implies it – are the least glamorous attachments a writer can admit to. After all, they are forms of self-denial, retreats from the grandiloquent statement or the vertiginous insight. But they are what Sisson values and what he stands by. Sisson, who was a witness to German developments before the war, who admired the French nationalist Charles Maurras, and who saw through Pound’s attraction to fascism and Yeats’s Celtic essentialism, resists, in his own work, exactly that tendency certain writers have – poets especially – to become drawn into politics of the extreme. The gesture of his entire work is against this, and against, too, the temptations of the very poets he most values. ‘Maurras founded his politics on his esthetics, and that is a lunacy’, he writes. That ability to divorce politics from aesthetics while registering the temptation to conflate them, is what makes his lifelong engagement with Maurras so revealing of Sisson’s own mind.
A good place to approach Sisson is the three pamphlets, all privately printed, of 1967–68: ‘Essays’, the long poem ‘The Discarnation’, and ‘Roman Poems’, five poems derived out of Virgil and Horace. The ‘Essays’ are a kind of fundamental Sisson text, though more enigmatic and even gnomic than his usual prose: they are perhaps best read as long aphorisms, like Nietzsche’s. They are fundamental in the sense that they try to get down to what really matters, to ‘what is’, what he elsewhere calls the ‘sensible realities’ that are continually in danger of being covered up and forgotten. The ‘Essays’, eight short texts with an introduction, begin by asking what politicians are here for, but since ‘the conduct of government rests upon the same foundations and encounters the same difficulties as the conduct of private persons’ also what we are here for. And they then ask how we are here, and answer that it’s by virtue of the past: ‘Words are not ours but the words of a myriad, having point only because of their history, ultimately of their prehistory’ (‘A Possible Anglicanism’). ‘If we are selves,’ Sisson goes on, ‘it is by virtue of other selves that we are so. And our speaking is that of a race, of a tribe, of a time. There is no speech which is not of a here and now and it is nothing except in terms of other times and elsewhere’. We are born into particular circumstances and cannot remove ourselves from them by adopting an outside perspective ‘like Kant’s, trying to elevate our thinking above the world of sense’. In Sisson’s view there simply is no such place, it is a nothing. When it comes to religion, the situation is the same: ‘I am of a religion,’ he writes in a later essay on Coleridge’s Church and State, ‘in which – to adapt Coleridge’s phrase – Christianity is an accident; the religion of our fathers, or the mère patrie, of the spirits buried in the ground, of the religion of England, I cannot help it’ (‘Coleridge Revisited’: Avoidance, p. 553). This is a pagan Christianity, and a helpless one. The uncertain syntax reflects a kind of willing self-abandon, a settling into what is felt to be there. The Anglican Church is the native church, the inherited one: ‘The starting-point cannot be justified; it can only be loved’ (‘A Word of Apology’: Anglican Essays, p. 138). But the historical church ‘is a congregation of meaning and there is no meaning without congregation’ (‘A Possible Anglicanism’).
This congregation is focused on the incarnation, which was a ‘re-affirmation of the kind’, but the present is characterised by ‘discarnation’, the flight of meaning, the loss of the realities. We are becoming, as the poem telling ‘how the Flesh became Word and dwelt among us’ puts it, ‘the heirs of an emptiness’, detached from tradition, ‘The crowd / Soothed as it never was’. ‘The Discarnation’ is a deeply unfashionable poem, but one fixed unhesitantly on the present, using its strict and awkward stanzas to peel back the layers of illusion and trying, like the ‘Essays’, to ‘restore our minds to a perception of the sensible realities’ (‘Helps to a New World’: Avoidance, p. 29). Of these, an important one is place:
Places have names because a thought
Lives in them, changing like our own
And grown
Wily with years, not to be caught,
So meant
Only by words we don’t invent.
Place-names are part of our inheritance, they remind us of a past and of the dead we have grown from. They are the opposite of ‘emptiness’: rather, they are a kind of embodiment, where the place is contained in the name and the name gives texture to the place. Named places – some from Dorset and Somerset follow in the poem – offer the possibility of correspondence between humans and nature in which no diminishing occurs. They are traces of such ancient correspondence that reach through the present into the future, loci of meaning to set against abstraction and distraction.
‘Roman Poems’, the final part of the triptych, are all in different ways poems of decline. The much-admired imitation of Horace’s ‘Carmen Saeculare’ surveys the unreal city of London; in ‘Palinurus’, the first of two ventures into the Aeneid, Aeneas loses his friend and helmsman, and in ‘The Descent’ he goes down into the underworld to discover ‘the whole kingdom was empty’. ‘Age falls’, the other poems say, and ‘this is over’: they all contemplate a world in which a process of attenuation is at work everywhere. Virgil, Sisson says in his introduction to his translation of the Aeneid, ‘had, to an exceptional degree, the gift of seeing the present as streaming out of the past and moving into the future’. The formulation is equivocal perhaps, the streaming out is a kind of emptying as well as a sustaining flow. The ‘Roman Poems’ remember the past in the form of Horace and Virgil in order to get an angle on the present, and the way they part company with their originals (especially in ‘The Descent’ and ‘Hactenus arvorum cultus’) is an acknowledgement of the loss they discern. It is because we are estranged from these texts that we go back to them, that we can go back to them.
As Sisson writes in ‘A Possible Anglicanism’: ‘There is no speech which is not of a here and now and it is nothing except in terms of other times and elsewhere’. These Roman poems are of course English poems, but their Englishness involves a retracing of the historical and linguistic threads that make up the here-and-now, threads which extend far beyond England and so extend England far beyond itself. Englishness, for Sisson, is a consequence of where and when he was born and brought up, part of the necessary inheritance, but it doesn’t preclude a deep engagement with other times and places and modes: this is visible above all in his enormous and various work of translation, which few poets in the twentieth century, even poet-translators like Pound or Hughes, have as much to set beside. It enriched and pointed his poetry, affecting its movements and its preoccupations.
Sisson’s idea of what it was to be English was anything but unexamined, just as his conservatism, if that’s the best word for it, was never unexamined. Both were influenced by his stays in Berlin, Freiburg and Paris in 1934–36, the time he spent in India during the war, and by much reading in foreign literatures, especially French, throughout his life. Although his sense of the ‘English inheritance’ (Avoidance, p. 558) and its roots in the constitutional quarrels of the seventeenth century was strong, he didn’t believe that ‘the national character should be encouraged. It is the fund of vitality from which the conscious life of a nation springs, and if one exploits it one debauches the source of life’ (‘English Liberalism’). This slightly mystical notion recalls the parsley and honeysuckle drenching the hedges ‘in the fringes of the town’ in ‘Family Fortunes’ and is probably also related to his belief that poems ‘just happen’ and should not be too consciously pursued (see ‘Natural History’). Despite all the analysis, the historical knowledge, the insistence on the value of knowing where you come from, and the immense amount of learning which he absorbed from diverse sources, there is never just a resigned acceptance of things as they are, but a holding to the fact that what really matters eludes definition and happens somewhere round the edges of consciousness.
The preface to the second edition of The Spirit of British Administration points out that ‘the real inventiveness of the human race is usually to be found not at the centre but at the periphery, and in a democracy it can hardly be otherwise’. Sisson’s main argument with contemporary culture, put most forcefully in The Case of Walter Bagehot and even more apposite now than it was then, is that ‘number has replaced intent’ (‘The Discarnation’): the obsession with counting and accounting for everything leads to a neglect or, worse, a perversion, of anything that cannot be quantified. The diagnosis in the Bagehot book is unerring: ‘The central object of Bagehot’s writing – and it is a destructive one – was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive excitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void’ (Avoidance, pp. 423–24). While one might not regret ‘the ancient feeling of rank and ancestry’ (Coleridge) or even the ‘hold and intellectuality of religion’ which Sisson includes among the ‘checks’ operative in the past, it is hard not to accept the justness of this as a view of the present.
It is because he believed in the necessity of these checks that he remained attached to the Church, the monarchy, and the civil service at a time when their hold on society was becoming visibly weaker. For him they were all forms of order imposed on chaos, but regulating democracy and not, as Maurras or Pound would have wanted, replacing it. This is a specifically English suspicion of the grand scheme, the total plan, a willingness to work with what is fallen and imperfect (namely: us, as we are, in the world we have made and has made us). It is a version of what Hulme called ‘Original Sin’, and writers such as Chesterton less dramatically saw as the unexciting conservatism of liberal democracy. These imperfect and imperfectly regulating systems are also greater than the sum of their imperfections – the banality of the monarchy in person is made up for by the binding nature of its pageantry, the dullness of the civil service is its strength, because if it were not dull it might not be either civil or a service, the Church of England, a pragmatic melding of religion and state, and the only church designed for agnostics, is an expression of spirituality rather than its home. It is the tired, already-disappointed way in which Sisson treats these, yet still holds out for them, that makes him so English. These allegiances, moreover, are not chosen but inherited, and our links to the past, to our own collective history, cannot simply be ignored. We are more than what we are, though there is often little comfort to be drawn from this.
The scrupulously downbeat way in which Sisson defends the institutions he values often contrasts with the tension and struggle in his poems as they wrestle with desire, old age, loss and cultural oblivion. Those barely enthusiastic, pre-emptively jaded essays about politics and governance are more conservative than they are reactionary, though they are frequently written against a prevailing leftism Sisson feels has become the bien pensant orthodoxy of the literary class. It is hard to think of a poet or critic less suited than Sisson either to the materialist right of post-Thatcher Britain or to the slippery pseudo-inclusive left of Blairism and since. And hard to imagine a less appropriate poet laureate than C.H. Sisson, despite the probability that he alone among his contemporaries really believed (spiritually, institutionally, culturally) in the post.
Sisson represents what Hulme would have called ‘a certain kind of Tory’, something that means pretty much nothing these days, but which played its role in the development of a conservative cultural politics that tends to be forgotten in the crude binarism of the left/right narrative, as well as the corporatist post-ideological culture we have today. What is interesting and valuable about this brand of conservative cultural politics is that it is essentially modernist, not just in its poetics but in its ideological and cultural bearings. It does not tarry with the radical right. It is not the conservatism of, say, Larkin or Betjeman, and it is barely part of the ‘native tradition’ of British poetry (whatever we mean by that). It represents a sort of lost or marooned tradition, and Sisson’s essays exemplify it in its purest, as well as its most isolated, form. The political essays are among the most deep-reaching engagements any British poet has shown with the world of politics in the twentieth century – not just political theory or political ideology, but politics in all its mess and slop and chaos. They have a remarkable degree of political literacy too, and attain this early on. Those essays and reviews Sisson wrote for New English Weekly in the 1930s seem like the work of a much older man, and have an extraordinary range for a writer then in his early twenties, with reviews and articles on Maurras, Weber, Curtius, Federalism, English Liberalism, Péguy and a great deal more besides.
In one of the 1967 ‘Essays’ already referred to (later called ‘Sevenoaks Essays’ and then ‘Native Ruminations’), Sisson writes (in the brief but capaciously titled ‘An Essay on Identity’): ‘It is, indeed, very hard to understand what makes up “I”. And the mere existence of the pronoun should not at once persuade us of the existence of the thing’. There is something metaphysical about Sisson’s treatment of the self, however drily and undramatically he writes about it:
consciousness […] flows, but its contents are historical rather than individual. It is a matter of ‘culture’ what we are conscious of. The ‘thought’ is a common thought; only so could it be understood. A stream loaded with old bottles, the vegetation of several countries, rags of clothing perhaps, flows around the world. It makes no sense to talk of the individual mind. The individual body, perhaps.
It is clear that notions like this go somewhat against the prevailing current: in a time of confessional poetry, a political emphasis on the individual as locus of truth, and a cultural premium on self-fulfilment, Sisson’s writing was never going to be consensus-building stuff. ‘Out of key with his time’ as he was, he was also expressing a Hulmean world-view, the sort of conservatism that emphasised limits and limitation, that resisted the lure of idealism, and never believed in perfectibility, on either the individual or the collective level.
His poetry, likewise, situates itself on the margins of the fashionable, emphasises the boundedness of our experience and the uncertainty of our projections:
The future has not lasted yet
Even the second that it can
And so is good for any bet:
It is the guessing makes the man.
(‘Uncertainty’)
The ‘guessing’ is his characteristic mode, something we can sometimes overlook in the face of the weary confidence of so much of his writing. In his engagement with Maurras, Sisson shows how a mid-century English writer with interests that go beyond writing can be drawn to the great totalising projects of someone like Maurras, and yet still see through them. It is partly the failure of Maurras that attracts, and we can sense that Maurras was to Sisson what Péguy was to Geoffrey Hill in ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy’: an exemplary failure but perhaps a necessary one. And when, in a review of Hill’s ‘Péguy’ in PN Review 33, Sisson writes
All this raises the question how far the ‘mystic’ who – with whatever disclaimers – dabbles in the matter of politics, has a right to dissociate himself from the practical consequences of his actions. Péguy had an invincible conviction of his own rightness. […] Such a man was hardly made for success.
he could as easily be talking about Maurras, to whom he quickly compares Péguy, himself the subject of an essay first published in 1946. A few lines on, Sisson quotes Daniel Halévy imagining a polemic between the two, born a few years apart, on opposing sides of the Dreyfus affair (Péguy, the socialist, a Dreyfusard, Maurras a lifelong anti-Dreyfusard) and each becoming a symbol for a particular kind of French nationalism in the midst of historical turmoil.
There is a place for the mystical in Sisson, though we sense him resisting it too, fending off its allure, something he captures in his poetry with its refusal of grand style or high lyric, and by the mattness of his language and diction. This mattness extends to his translations too. Perhaps surprisingly, Sisson’s work is often extremely personal, even in its way confessional, though always undercut by a sense of the self’s dispersal, its unbelonging in relation to the ‘I’ that speaks it. His view of the self, and of the poet’s point of voice – many of his poems are spoken by an ‘I’ – is one that calls the self into question as a stable, sufficient thing:
What is the person? Is it hope?
If so, there is no I in me.
Is it a trope
Or paraphrase of deity?
If so,
I may be what I do not know.
(‘The Person’)
There is nothing of the mystic in Sisson when it comes to culture and politics, however, and yet in his way he believes that writers should engage with political reality. ‘Scarcely any writer since Hulme has formulated a precise political idea. Inevitably, both poetry and political analyses are the worse for the lack of political doctrine.’ His interest in Bolingbroke, Bagehot, Keynes, Montesquieu and others, in T.S. Eliot as critic of culture and Marvell as poet-politician, and his writings on administration, government and economics (‘Economics used to be called Political Economy, and has lost the adjective in the search for scientific status. But political it remains…’) mark Sisson out as the most politically literate poet of his time. He is certainly more politically literate, if by ‘literate’ we mean coming to the subject with a grasp of detail as well as overlooking sweep, and pronounces on culture from a less high place, than Eliot. This is in part because of his own dual career as poet and civil servant; or perhaps it is the other way around: that he came to practise both because he was always intellectually invested in both.
In the flyleaf to the first and only edition of Art and Action (1965), his first collection of essays, we may read what we assume to be Sisson’s own words: ‘At present he is an Under Secretary at the Ministry of Labour […] Although he is very hard-worked, not to say over-worked, he still finds writing difficult to avoid.’ The Avoidance of Literature (1978) reiterates this theme: a sort of reluctant weakness for what the French, in exactly these decades, were calling engagement, which we could roughly translate as commitment to a cause, usually an eye-catching one, and always involving plenty of publicity. Sisson’s cause, however, could not be further from the radical postures of his contemporaries. As John Peck writes in an essay on Sisson, ‘what makes for a lively mind in truly urgent political situations is not a posse comitatus of like views, but of unlike views converging upon limited, principled grounds’.1 It is in that spirit that Sisson, as a cultural critic, engages: offering a critique, or a set of critiques, of commodity capitalism, not from the left but drawing on the older forms of conservatism.
Walter Bagehot, his most polemical and urgent intervention, was published in 1972, an important time for Sisson, who took early retirement in 1973, moved to Somerset, and saw the publication of In the Trojan Ditch in 1974, the Collected Poems that established his presence in English poetry. The new poems in that book, those written since Metamorphoses (1968), and the following two collections, Anchises (1976) and Exactions (1980), probably concentrate his best work. As several readers have pointed out, ‘The Discarnation’ is in some ways subject to its own strictures in that it is ruled by number and by a severely reductive take on human nature. Although it is of course an over-simplification, there is at around this time an observable shift – a movement, nothing more – away from a poetry of analysis, very often with a satirical edge and always an edge of some sort, towards a poetry of association. In the Foreword to the poems in In the Trojan Ditch there are some interesting remarks which perhaps relate to this shift. ‘The writing of poetry’, he says, ‘is, in a sense, the opposite of writing what one wants to write’, and translation is seen as one of several ‘enabling distractions’ which can let the ‘unwanted impulses free themselves’. When they do, it is as a rhythm that they make themselves felt, and it is rhythm – ‘that unarguable perception’ – that holds the otherwise unreckonable impulses together. If the earlier poetry is too much bound up in the world it criticises, the later tries to escape it by finding ways of suggesting or even entering the life that subsists beneath the grid of meaning we order it by. In doing so, it is also seeking to escape the vigilance of the conscious mind, which in Sisson’s case, as poem after poem shows, is tormented by its own interfering intelligence. What Rilke called ‘the interpreted world’ (‘die gedeutete Welt’) is necessary for our living in it but also impedes or forces our apprehension of what it might be. The glimpses through it follow the injunction of ‘The Red Admiral’:
Its fingers lighter than spiders, the red admiral
Considers, as I do, with little movement;
With little of anything that is meant:
Let the meaning go, movement is all.
Some of the best poems are those that let the meaning go, that give the over-inquisitive mind the slip and embrace a movement, a rhythm, that of course belongs to consciousness too but at a deeper, more instinctive level. Sisson’s own description is best, talking of Hardy in words that apply as truly to himself: ‘less awkwardnesses than aspects of his speaking mind, like a particular lurch or other movement which is habitual to some bodies. The rhythm of the verse, with its hesitations, sudden speeds, and pauses which are almost silences, is the very rhythm of thought’. Thought, that is, that resembles the way we think, with its false starts, interruptions, leaps, slidings and empty patches, rather than the philosophical moves and reasonings which plague the mind elsewhere. Compared to the earlier poems the later are less governed by argument, they are more of the body, and thus have that incontrovertible quality that Sisson identifies in ‘Natural History’: ‘the poem exists as a natural object exists, so that you can look at it, hear it, smell it, as you can wind, waves or trees, without asking why you are doing so’:
And so with the natural surfaces,
Like comfrey gone to waste, there is no loss,
Only the passage of time. And the singing mind,
Like a telegraph wire in the waste, recording time:
Intervals, sounds, rustling, there is no peace
Where the wind is, and no identity
Clapping with herb or tree…
This is from a poem called ‘The Surfaces’ and many of the later poems seem able to abandon the distinction between surface and depth, or to assume that surface is the only depth, and take readings of the Somerset landscape as earlier they scrutinised the life of the commuter-belt. It is always a landscape inhabited by the past, a version of England both imaginary and real:
Do you know it? It is Arthur’s territory
– Agravaine, Mordred, Guinevere and Igraine –
Do you hear them? Or see them in the distant sparkle?
Likely not, but they are there all the same.
(‘In Flood’)
In poems like this, and the major and most challenging example is probably ‘In insula Avalonia’, an extended meditation on the known landscape which is inevitable and elusive in equal measure, Sisson is speaking as one who has fully absorbed the modernist moment but is at the same time instinct with the English tradition. He is not the only modernist to have read Malory, but perhaps he is the only one for whom Malory had such real presence, so that we witness a fusing of the language and the landscape in which the movement of the mind, as it is embodied in words both inconsequential and unanswerable, finds its exact correspondence in details of the observable world, the river, the willows, the geese ‘in a careless skein / Sliding between the mort plain and the sky’ (‘In insula Avalonia’). The modernism is not attenuated by its Englishness but fuelled by it, and it is an Englishness in which Dante and Virgil play as much a part as Hardy or Vaughan. The result is ‘durable speech’ – to quote Sisson’s own words for literature that matters – which has a savour and accent quite its own.
In a very late poem, ‘Tristia’, contemplating a version of the same landscape, the often-flooded Levels spread out south of the house in Langport, he stands ‘at this far tip of the world’, a metaphor above all for old age as a last ‘promontory’ of life. But in a sense it was where he had always been, late and ‘lost’, an ‘exile’ from the world he loved and so from his own life. The poems are nearly all written from that place, avoiding literature, giving little consolation, and leading us into territory quite different from that of most modern poetry.
*
The span and variety of Sisson’s work is so great that any selection is bound to leave out not just particular texts but whole aspects. The poetry from all periods is well represented, but a few essential poems apart – some of them would be ‘A Letter to John Donne’, ‘On my Fifty-first Birthday’, ‘The Usk’, ‘In insula Avalonia’, ‘Troia’, ‘The Herb-garden’, ‘The Red Admiral’, ‘In Flood’ and ‘Burrington Combe’ – an almost equally good choice could have been made of other poems, which says something interesting about the kind of poems Sisson wrote and the nature of his achievement. Nothing has been included from the two novels, An Asiatic Romance (1953) and Christopher Homm (1965, but written in the mid-50s), though the last is a masterpiece in its way, like the poems radically different from other novels being written at the time. In the end they represent a mode he abandoned. Also left out is On the Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography (1989), though this is made up for by the inclusion of the essays ‘Autobiographical Reflections on Politics’ and ‘Natural History’. A greater omission given its importance for the poetry is the great body of translation, but we felt that in a book of this kind it made little sense to draw from large works such as the versions of the Divine Comedy and the Aeneid which are in any case easily available, and that this might be the place to draw attention to (a very few) smaller things otherwise liable to be overlooked. It is a distortion nevertheless. The Spirit of British Administration (1959), Sisson’s book on the civil service, is also absent, but a couple of essays which formed earlier versions of chapters there are included instead. The short study DavidHume (1976) is entirely absent, and only one chapter is taken from The Case of Walter Bagehot (1972), despite its importance and readability; and only two and half from English Poetry 1900–1950: An Assessment (1971). From among the essays proper we have included all that we really wanted in, but there is a great deal more that could also have been included. Sisson wrote essays and reviews all his life, and together they are a fascinating education in the sources of his thinking, as well as being lucid, thought-provoking, and often very witty. There is in the end little from the ecclesiastical essays (only one from Anglican Essays (1983)) – the writing there is often more polemical and context-bound. What we wanted to bring out is Sisson’s close engagement with the times and with politics throughout his writing life, and the independence, intelligence and civility of his opinions. No poet has written with anything like his intimate knowledge of the workings of government, and few have had a clearer sense of the role of literature in participating in civic life.
The poems themselves are uncompromising, contradictory, afflicted, savage, sometimes abrasive, and pursue disquieting truths. Much of the time, they seem to invite dissent, and their positions, though growing out of a clearly recognisable English tradition, have never been those of the mainstream, not even the mainstream which likes to see itself as marginal. Yet his work has a certain centrality too. Civically, in that it is concerned with the public sphere and with keeping channels open to the past; with maintaining clear-sightedness and countering a world where ‘the denial of the sources of our thinking’ has become ‘an indispensable preliminary to any intervention on the public stage’ (The Case of Walter Bagehot). And then poetically, in its crossing of a tradition that flows out of Edward Thomas, Hardy and Barnes with the nervous energies and disruptions of Eliot and Pound:
There is one God we do not know
Stretched on Orion for a cross
And we below
In several sorts of lesser loss
Are we
In number not identity.
(‘The Person’)
1 John Peck, ‘Charles Sisson and the Distantly Raised Voice’, in Agenda, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Spring 2010), C.H. Sisson Special Issue, pp. 28–36 (p. 32).
POEMS
From The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems
On a Troopship
They are already made
Why should they go
Into boring society
Among the soldiery?
But I, whose imperfection
Is evident and admitted
Needing further assurance
Must year-long be pitted
Against fool and trooper
Practising my integrity
In awkward places,
Walking till I walk easily
Among uncomprehended faces
Extracting the root
Of the matter from the diverse engines
That in an oath, a gesture or a song
Inadequately approximate to the human norm.
In Time of Famine: Bengal
I do not say this child
This child with grey mud
Plastering her rounded body
I do not say this child
For she walks poised and happy
But I say this
Who looks in at the carriage window
Her eyes are big
Too big
Her hair is touzled and her mouth is doubtful
And I say this
Who lies with open eyes upon the pavement
Can you hurt her?
Tread on those frightened eyes
Why should it frighten her to die?
This is a fault
This is a fault in which I have a part.
The Body in Asia
Despite the mountains at my doorstep
This is a hollow, hollow life.
The mist blows clear and shows the snow
Among the dark green firs, but here
Upon the cold, scorched, dusty grass
The camels looped together raise
Their supercilious noses.
Upon the road the donkeys trot
And mule-teams with their muleteers pace.
The country lies before me like
A map I carry in my mind –
A wall built by the Hindu Kush
A plain that falls away to sea
I on the foothills here between
Sniffing the cold and dusty air.
Too long of longing makes me cold
The heart a tight and burning fistful
Hangs like a cold sun in my chest
A hollow kind of firmament.
I can imagine my exterior
The body, and the limbs that run off from it
But there is nothing in it I am sure
Except the ball of heart that weighs one side
Like the lead ballast in a celluloid duck.
And in my head a quarter-incher’s brain
Looks out as best it can from my two eyes:
It can imagine how the country lies
To left and right, extensions of the limbs
But has no thoughts that I can understand.
Not only in this land I have felt it so
But on the Brahmaputra where
Bits of the jungle floated down
Black heaps upon the coloured river
When night fell and the sun
A red and geometric disk
Above its square reflection stood
For half a moment and then dipped:
I heard it sizzle in the water.
The flat and muddy banks, remote
Beyond the miles of plashing water
Diminished me
Till, smaller than the skin I stood in
I leaned against the rails and watched
The searchlights on the licking water.
The secret of diminishment
Is in this sad peninsula
Where the inflated body struts
Shouting its wants, but lacks conviction.
Conviction joins the muscles up
But here the body flaps and flutters
A flapping sail in a fitful wind.
In a Dark Wood
Now I am forty I must lick my bruises
What has been suffered cannot be repaired
I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses
A sickening garbage that could not be shared.
My errors have been written in my senses
The body is a record of the mind
My touch is crusted with my past defences
Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind.
There is no credit in a long defection
And defect and defection are the same
I have no person fit for resurrection
Destroy then rather my half-eaten frame.
But that you will not do, for that were pardon
The bodies that you pardon you replace
And that you keep for those whom you will harden
To suffer in the hard rule of your Grace.
Christians on earth may have their bodies mended
By premonition of a heavenly state
But I, by grosser flesh from Grace defended,
Can never see, never communicate.
In London
I float between the banks of Maida Vale
Where half is dark and half is yellow light
In creeks and catches flecks of flesh look pale
And over all our grief depends the night.
I turn beside the shining black canal
And tree-tops close like lids upon my eyes
A milk-maid laughs beside a coffee-stall
I pray to heaven, favour my enterprise.
But whether there is answer to my prayer
When with my host at last I redescend
After delicious talk the squalid stair
I do not know the answer in the end.
Sparrows seen from an Office Window
You should not bicker while the sparrows fall
In chasing pairs from underneath the eaves
And yet you should not let this enraged fool
Win what he will because you fear his grief.
About your table three or four who beg
Bully or trade because those are the passions
Strong enough in them to hide all other lack
Sent to corrupt your heart or try your patience.
If you are gentle, it is because you are weak
If bold, it is the courage of a clown
And your smart enemies and you both seek
Ratiocination without love or reason.
O fell like lust, birds of morality
O sparrows, sparrows, sparrows whom none regards
Where men inhabit, look in here and see
The fury and cupidity of the heart.
In Kent
Although there may be treacherous men
Who in the churchyard swing their mattocks
Within they sing the Nunc Dimittis
And villagers who find that building
A place to go to of a Sunday
May accidentally be absolved
For on a hill, upon a gibbet …
And this is Saint Augustine’s county.
Maurras Young and Old
1
Est allé à Londres
Monsieur Maurras jeune
From a land of olives, grapes and almonds
His mind full of Greek.
Under the shadow of the British Museum
He reflected on the many and foolish
Discourses of the Athenians
And on the Elgin marbles.
The fog settled
Chokingly around the Latin head
Of the eloquent scholar.
Quick like a ferret
He tore his way through
Scurrying past the red brick of Bloomsbury
To the mock antique portals.
Showed on the Mediterranean hills
A frugal culture of wine and oil.
Unobserved in their fog the British
toto divisos orbe
Propounded a mystery of steam
In France they corrected the menus
Writing for biftec: beefsteak.
Monsieur Maurras noted the linguistic symptoms
He noted, beyond the Drachenfels
The armies gathering.
2
The light fell
Across the sand-dunes and the wide étang.
In their autochthonous boats
The fishermen put out
And came back to the linear village
Among the vineyards and the olive groves
Place de la République
Rue Zola
In which names the enemy celebrated his triumphs.
Twenty-five years:
Beyond the Drachenfels
The armies gathered again
irruptio barbarorum
The boats are moored on the étang
For Monsieur Maurras
The last harvest is gathered.
A Latin scorn
For all that is not indelibly Latin
A fortiori for the Teutonic captain
Passing him on the terrace of the Chemin de Paradis
Enemy and barbarian.
Inutile, Monsieur, de me saluer
His eyes looked out towards the middle sea
He heard not even that murmur
But an interior music.
On the Way Home
Like questing hounds
The lechers run through London
From all the alley-ways
Into all the thoroughfares
Until, shoulder to shoulder, they vanish
Into the main line stations
Or the Underground traps them.
A moment of promiscuity at nightfall
Their feet go homewards but their attentions
Are on the nape of a neck or the cut of a thigh
Almost any woman
As Schopenhauer noted
Being more interesting to them than those
Who made their beds that morning.
Silence
Let not my words have meaning
And let not my bitter heart
Be expressed, like a rotten
Pomegranate. Guts full of pus
And a brain uncertain as a thunderstorm
Do not, I think, amuse the muses.
Ightham Woods
The few syllables of a horse’s scuffle at the edge of the road
Reach me in the green light of the beeches
Les seuls vrais plaisirs
Selon moy
Are those of one patch between the feet and the throat.
Maybe, but the beeches
And that half clop on the gravel
Indicate a world into which I can dissolve.
Family Fortunes
I
I was born in Bristol, and it is possible
To live harshly in that city
Quiet voices possess it, but the boy
Torn from the womb, cowers
Under a ceiling of cloud. Tramcars
Crash by or enter the mind
A barred room bore him, the backyard
Smooth as a snake-skin, yielded nothing
In the fringes of the town parsley and honey-suckle
Drenched the hedges.
II
My mother was born in West Kington
Where ford and bridge cross the river together
John Worlock farmed there, my grandfather
Within sight of the square church-tower
The rounded cart-horses shone like metal
My mother remembered their fine ribbons
She lies in the north now where the hills
Are pale green, and I
Whose hand never steadied a plough
Wish I had finished my long journey.
III
South of the march parts my father
Lies also, and the fell town
That cradles him now sheltered also
His first unconsciousness
He walked from farm to farm with a kit of tools
From clock to clock, and at the end
Only they spoke to him, he
Having tuned his youth to their hammers.
IV
I had two sisters, one I cannot speak of
For she died a child, and the sky was blue that day
The other lived to meet blindness
Groping upon the stairs, not admitting she could not see
Felled at last under a surgeon’s hammer
Then left to rot, surgically
And I have a brother who, being alive
Does not need to be put in a poem.
In Honour of J.H. Fabre
My first trick was to clutch
At my mother and suck
Soon there was nothing to catch
But darkness and a lack.
My next trick was to know
Dividing the visible
Into shapes which now
Are no longer definable.
My third trick was to love
With the pretence of identity
Accepting without proof
The objects ‘her’ and ‘me’.
My last trick was to believe
When I have the air
Of praying I at least
Join the mantis at its prayers.
Nude Studies
They are separate as to arms and legs
Though occasionally joined in one place
As to what identity that gives
You may question the opacity of the face.
Either man is made in the image of God
Or there is no such creature, only a cluster of cells
Which of these improbabilities is the less
You cannot, by the study of nudity, tell.
Tintagel
The clear water ripples between crags
And the Atlantic reaches our island
A clout on the outer headland.
A small band gathered God into this fastness
Singing and praying men; while others
Climbed up the perilous stairway shod in iron.
In every clearing a mad hermit
Draws his stinking rags about him and smoke rises
From thatches lately hurt by rape or pillage.
Cynadoc, Gennys, names as clear as water
Each hill unfolds, and the sheep
Pass numerous through the narrow gate.
To Walter Savage Landor
No poet uses a chisel in quite the same way
You do, or lays the marble chips together
In the sunlight, chip by chip.
If you had this girl before you, you
Would make her excel in some way by mere words
But I have only my pity and little to show
For forty-five years. Memoranda
Are strictly not to be memorised. It is the fleeting moments
Sunlit leaf upon leaf, your speech
That remains.
Cranmer
Cranmer was parson of this parish
And said Our Father beside barns
Where my grandfather worked without praying.
From the valley came the ring of metal
And the horses clopped down the track by the stream
As my mother saw them.
The Wiltshire voices floated up to him
How should they not overcome his proud Latin
With We depart answering his Nunc Dimittis?
One evening he came over the hillock
To the edge of the church-yard already filled with bones
And saw in the smithy his own fire burning.
Knole
The white hill-side is prickled with antlers
And the deer wade to me through the snow.
From John Donne’s church the muffled and galoshed
Patiently to their holy dinners go.
And never do those antlered heads reflect
On the gentle flanks where in autumn they put their seed
Nor Christians on the word which, that very hour,
Their upturned faces or their hearts received.
But spring will bring the heavy doe to bed;
The fawn will wobble and soon after leap.
Those others will die at this or the next year’s turn
And find the resurrection encased in sleep.
On a Civil Servant
Here lies a civil servant. He was civil
To everyone, and servant to the devil.
Money
I was led into captivity by the bitch business
Not in love but in what seemed a physical necessity
And now I cannot even watch the spring
The itch for subsistence having become responsibility.
Money the she-devil comes to us under many veils
Tactful at first, calling herself beauty
Tear away this disguise, she proposes paternal solicitude
Assuming the dishonest face of duty.
Suddenly you are in bed with a screeching tear-sheet
This is money at last without her night-dress
Clutching you against her fallen udders and sharp bones
In an unscrupulous and deserved embrace.
Ellick Farm
The larks flew up like jack-in-the-boxes
From my moors, and the fields were edged with foxgloves.
The farm lay neatly within the hollow
The gables climbing, the barn beside the doorway.
If I had climbed into the loft I should have found a boy
Forty years back, among the bales of hay.
He would have known certainly all that I know
Seeing it in the muck-strewn cobbles below.
(Under the dark rim of the near wood
The tears gathered as under an eyelid.)
It would have surprised him to see a tall man
Who had travelled far, pretending to be him.
But that he should have been turning verses, half dumb
After half a lifetime, would least have surprised him.
The Un-Red Deer
The un-red deer
In the un-green forest
The antlers which do not appear
And are not like branches
The hounds which do not bay
With tails which do not swish
The heather beyond and the insignificant stumble
Of the horse not pulled up
By the rider who does not see all this
Nor hear nor smell it
Or does so but it does not matter
The horn sounds Gone away
Or, if it does not, is there hunter,
Hunted, or the broken tree
Swept by the wind from the channel?
The London Zoo
From one of the cages on the periphery
He is brought to London, but only for duty.
As if radio-controlled he comes without a keeper,
Without any resistance, five times in the week.
See him as he rises in his ordered household,
Docile each morning before he is expelled,
Take his bath when he is told, use the right towel,
Reliable as an ant, meticulous as an owl.
His wife, until he is gone, is anxiously protective
In case after all one morning he should resist,
But all is well each day, he hasn’t the spirit
– He is edged out of the door without even a murmur.
The road to the station is reassuring
For other black hats are doing the same thing
Some striding blithely who were never athletic,
Others, who were, now encased in Cadillacs,
Snug and still belching from their breakfast bacon,
All, halt and well, keen to be on the train.
Each sits by other whom a long acquaintance
Has made familiar as a chronic complaint,
Although the carapaces they wear are so thick
That the tender souls inside are far to seek.
First there is The Times newspaper, held before the eyes
As an outer defence and a guarantee of propriety,
Then the clothes which are not entirely uniform
So as to give the appearance of a personal epidermis,
But most resistant of all is the layer of language
Swathed around their senses like a mile of bandage;
Almost nothing gets in through that, but when something does,
The answering thought squelches out like pus.
These are agreeable companions. At this hour
The people travelling are certainly superior
To those you would have the misfortune to see
If you came up one morning by the eight fifteen
– Typists and secretaries talkative and amorous
With breasts like pears plopping out of their bodices.
Mr Axeter’s companions do not distract him:
Carefully he spreads out his copy of The Times,
