“Davie
does not write for effect, or to enlarge his own claim to consideration. He
writes what he thinks is true, however awkward it may be.”
Incidentally,
the words apply with precision to Sisson’s own work. In “Summer Lightning” (The Batter Wife and Other Poems, 1982),
a poem addressed to Seamus Heaney, Davie writes: “Dread; yes dread—the one name
for the one / Game that we play here, surely. I think Sisson / Got it, don’t you?
Plain Dante, plain as a board, / and if flat, flat. The abhorrent, the
abhorred, / Ask to be utter plainly.” Sisson published his translation of La Divina Commedia in 1981. In Under Briggflatts (1989), Davie collects
three essays devoted to Sisson, including a review of the 1980 poetry
collection Exactions. He praises its “astringent
pleasures” and says Sisson’s poems are “a further tightening of English as
practiced by for instance Swift and Defoe in prose, and by any one of his
fellow citizens speaking under the stress of extreme experience.”
Thanks
to Sisson I learned of the South African poet David Wright (1920-1994). In On the Look-out: A Partial Autobiography
(1989), Sisson writes:
“…you
would recognize from the first gesture, certainly from the first words, that
you were in the presence of l’authenticité,
le seul luxe, as de Montherlant—himself less certainly authentic—called it.
For a moment one might be shaken into believing in the existence of the human
personality. If there were such a thing, this would be a specimen. Whether or
not there is such a thing, there is, under the name of David Wright, a literary
instrument of precision.”
In
turn, Wright composes “Horse Fair (for C. H. Sisson)” (A View of the North, 1976) and “A Letter to C.H. Sisson” (Poems and Versions, 1992). In the latter
Wright writes to and of his friend:
“The
vision, spare and authentic,
Of
an intellect I now know
As
savage, luminous, and just.”
And
this:
“For
all that you appreciate
The
underlay of the absurd
Beneath
each surface, comedy
Of
things as much as lacrimae
Rerum, I’d say your outlook
is
--Although
justified by log—
One
that, to what I call my mind,
Appears
inordinately bleak:
Nihilistic
would be the word,
But
that, against all evidence,
You
celebrate what is, and God.”
Sisson
has sent me back repeatedly to Dryden, Swift, Johnson, Barnes, Hardy and Péguy,
not to mention Horace, Catullus and Lucretius. He’s an enormously energizing
writer, one who spurs me to read more and write better. Here is an early poem
with a Dantean title, “In a Dark Wood,” appended by Sisson to the beginning of
his novel Peter Homm (1965):
“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
My 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.”
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