“What I'll
settle for, and what I’m really, secretly, glad I’m getting [for Christmas],
is, apart from a few small but welcome gifts, a holiday season when I expect to
sit around with my friends and exchange some real talk -- not mere small talk
-- instead of gifts; when they will make me feel (and I them, I hope) that our
friendship has worn and flexed and given for another year with a net gain in
suppleness and pertinence; when -- it will go without saying because there’s no
unmawkish way of saying it -- we all, severally and collectively, realize,
sheltered and fire-warmed somewhere in a snowy, hostile landscape, that the
only gift that matters is a spark of brave forthcomingness, an unshuttering of
spirit, from another living person, so soon, like us, to disappear.”
Little more
than three years later, Sissman disappeared, killed by the Hodgkin’s disease
first diagnosed in 1965. All of Sissman’s mature poems, published in three
volumes, he wrote in that extraordinary decade. It and a generous selection of
previously uncollected verse are gathered in the posthumously published Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E.
Sissman (1978). Many of the Atlantic essays are available in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s
(1975). Let’s hope an enterprising publisher some day collects the book reviews
Sissman wrote for The New Yorker
(including a memorable one of Gravity’s
Rainbow), and other fugitive pieces. The same enlightened publisher might
also collect the movie reviews Thomas Berger wrote for Esquire. The 70’s were a lousy time for writing in America – free verse
had won -- but pockets of worth remained.
Though
Sissman looked coolly at death – not in the abstract; his death – Sissman’s truest themes were friendship and love, as
the passage quoted above suggests. In “Auld Acquaintance” (Innocent Bystander) Sissman notes that he and his wife seldom go
out on New Year’s Eve (known to some of us as Amateur’s Night). Then he writes:
“But in New
Year’s and through the gelid, isolated month of January [Sissman lived in
Massachusetts], I often think, with an involuntary smile, of friends. Some live
fairly nearby; others are a continent or more away. Some I’ve seen fairly
frequently and recently; others, not for many years. But all, if they were here
with me, would immediately, without hesitation or embarrassment, proceed to
open the richly wrapped gift of times we’ve shared, and, in cutting up old
touches, advance the state of our relationship. Even in their absence, I can
see and hear them now.”
This from the man who wrote in “The Tree Warden”:
This from the man who wrote in “The Tree Warden”:
“In the New
Year, night after night will wane;
Color will
conquer; art will be long again.”
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