Art and Action is a collection of
essays, mostly literary, published by Methuen in 1965. Sisson opens his
introduction with a sentence from a letter written by Walter Bagehot – “People
in practical life have better, at least more disciplined tempers.” – that prompts Sisson to ask: “Can it be that
the discipline of practical life [work, family and the attendant
responsibilities] affects the writer more deeply, so that his work itself is
tempered by it?” He answers, “I think it may,” and cites Yeats as an example of
an artist who became involved in “public affairs” later in life (serving two
terms as a senator in Ireland), an experience that helped “disperse the
literary twilight in which he grew up.” Here’s where Sisson gets interesting:
“.
. . in an age in which literature has become merely a minor and unimportant
part of the entertainment industry it is worth recalling that some of the best
books in the language were written by people who were not literary men, in our
sense of the term, at all, but men concerned with the government of church or
state, and that their books are literature because they said well what, in a
particular conjunction of events, they had to say.”
One
thinks of Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A
Chapter in the History of Religion (1950) and Lincoln’s Speeches and Writings – literary masterworks
written by men otherwise occupied. Neither was a littérateur. Sisson says his theme in the essays is
“the possibilities of accommodation between literature, and more properly the clerc, and what Bagehot would call
`practical life.’” By clerc –
literally clerk or clergyman – Sisson means a public writer, sometimes overtly political,
one who writes to be understood and make things happen in the world, the
opposite of an aesthete. The first examples that come to this reader’s mind are
Swift and Montesquieu.
Among Sisson’s varied examples are Paul Louis Courier, Charles Maurras, Andrew
Marvell and Charles Péguy. In an essay written half a century ago, “The Profession
of Letters,” Sisson presciently nails our era of professionalized, workshop-trained,
degree-bearing writers:
“A
society which can support a body of literate men, and make social use of their
literacy, is no doubt in a healthier way than one whose literates can remain
alive only by keeping themselves in a
constant state of effusion and selling what comes out to make work for
printers. It is not that there is not or should not be writing for which no
social use has yet been thought of. Many literary productions of high value are
of this kind. But to mould a class on the pattern of genius is asking for
trouble, both because it deprives the ordinary social world of injections of
talent which it needs for its health and because it must result in the
mediocres entertaining fantastic notions of their own artistic performance.”
We
greet writing like this – clear thinking, really, artfully expressed – like a
cold wind on a hot afternoon. For
Sisson, it always comes back to work. A piece of writing is a worked object
with function. Later in the same essay Sisson says: “The poet has a purpose,
not the grand one of reforming the world or improving its politics, but the
limited one of making a poem.” And in the ominously titled “Art and Morality”
he says:
“The
notion of `making’ poems leaves many things unsaid, but unlike the theory of
self-expression it is solid enough not to disappear with a change in
metaphysic, and is moreover of general application, being as true of a song of
Campion as of Wordsworth’s Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality.”
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