`A Clearing in the Forest'

Of the writers I care most about who have died during my reading life (Faulkner doesn’t count – I was 9), the one I miss most, because he probably still had the most to give had he been granted a reprieve, was the poet L.E. Sissman. Beckett was 83; Bellow, 89; Guy Davenport, 77; Nabokov, 78. Sissman was 48 when cancer killed him in 1976. He had published, in the words of his friend John Updike, four volumes of “witty, elegiac, densely actual, airily effortless, often moving and usually blank verse,” and one collection of essays and reviews, Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s. Most of the reviews are drawn from The New Yorker, and the columns from The Atlantic Monthly. It sits on my virtual “Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf,” to borrow the title of one of my favorites among Sissman’s columns:

“A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.”

As reader and writer, Sissman had an old-fashioned regard for one of Samuel Johnson’s commandments: "The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it." Enjoyment and endurance mingle in lives worth living, and in books worth rereading, and many of the writers on Sissman’s “Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf” reflect this dual purpose: “…I can return,” he writes, “not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend” to the poems of Dryden, Swift, Gay, D’Urfey, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. My immediate reaction is admiration for a poet or reader with sensibility elastic enough to cherish both Swift and Keats. He goes on:

“Among the Victorians my closest poetic acquaintances are strange bedfellows: Gilbert and Hopkins. In the twentieth century, I reread most or all of Eliot, really il miglior fabbro, most of Auden, especially the “Songs and Musical Pieces,” some of them among the greatest lyrics in the language; most of Cummings, most of Stevens, most of Ransom, much of Hart Crane, much of Robert Lowell, all of Philip Larkin, that Midlands existentialist.”

That’s a list about fifty percent in variance from my own but admirable nevertheless. I would leave out Cummings (bless the upper-case “c”), Ransom and Lowell, and substitute Bunting, Berryman, R.S. Thomas and Hill, but I’m pleased Sissman accepted Larkin in toto. He goes on to include books devoted to his non-literary interests – automobiles, trains and military history. Such a bookshelf, after all, is idiosyncratic and beyond challenge, like the contents of one’s suitcase for a cruise around the world. Who am I to say Sissman shouldn’t pack Henry Manney’s collected automotive columns from Road & Track?

Sissman is on my shelf because he makes excellent company. He’s smart, stoical, observant, cheerful, well-read, funny and free of self-pity. In his introduction, Updike likens Sissman distantly to Montaigne. The passage is worth quoting at length, and I hope it stirs you to seek out Innocent Bystander (1975) and Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978):

“A sensible, decent man: that is the voice. His poetry is both more tender and more cruel than his prose ever is; his audience, we feel, has shifted in his mind, from the unshockable empyrean audience, the single fierce inner attendant, to whom a poet addresses himself – has shifted to a congeries (another of his pet words) of fallible, woundable, only slightly educable mortals. From Montaigne on, this is the voice of the essayist, this voice inviting us onto the shared ground of a middling sensuality, a middling understanding, a voice that, if it raves, raves never against us, but against a perfidious other, some stronghold as closed to our innocence as Mamma Leone’s kitchen or Richard Nixon’s White House.”