One of our November releases, A C.H. Sisson Reader, edited by Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness was featured as Nicholas Lezard's Choice in the Guardian last week. Here, we've posted a sample from the 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.
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 xii introduction 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.
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 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-first-century reader's expectations and discontents.
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