'It Is Often Three O’clock in the Morning'

The seasons as allegory work best in Northern latitudes. Spring is birth and winter is – well, death – and then spring is birth again. Native Northerners internalize the cycle. We know that winter toughens us and summer is profligate. Further south, the seasons blur and are hardly there at all. As I write on Tuesday, the temperature in Houston is 85 degrees, the leaves are green and butterflies flit in the front garden. An eternal semi-summer, interrupted by the odd hurricane. Every autumn (by the calendar), the season feels wrong. My last Northern autumn was nineteen years ago but it still turns within me like a seasonal circadian rhythm. 

An informal search suggests November appears more often than any other month in the poems of L.E. Sissman (1928-76). He was a lifelong Northerner. Born in Detroit, he lived most of his life in greater Boston and was diagnosed in 1965 with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, then a routinely fatal disease. The final section of the title poem in his first collection, Dying: An Introduction (1968), opens with these lines: “Outside, although November by the clock, / Has a thick smell of spring.” And closes with these:

 

“Through my / Invisible new veil / Of finity, I see / November’s world— / Low scud, slick street, three giggling girls-- / As, oddly, not as somber / As December,/ But as green / As anything: / As spring.”

 

The poem is loosely organized around the seasons and the diagnosis and treatment of Sissman’s cancer. That the final section is titled “Outbound” suggests the poet was a realist. Finity is a rare word that means “the condition of being subject to limitations.” Youth’s illusions of immortality have been dismissed. Winter is coming.

 

In his second collection, Scattered Returns (1969), Sissman includes “A War Requiem,” arranged in five movements with thirty-two subsections – twenty-three pages in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). The poem’s scheme is a forty-year sampler of American life starting with the Great Depression, thematically bracketed by World War I and Vietnam. The scaffolding of “A War Requiem” is Sissman’s life. Here are the opening lines of the twenty-first section, “A Marriage, 1958”:

 

“November russets flush the last of green

Out of its summer coverts; mist and frost

Condense and crystallize on lignified

Black twigs; red berries shrivel; a sad light

Undistances horizons, setting dense

Swatches of nothingness beyond the fence

In non-objective umber.”

 

The month reappears in the twenty-third section, “Cambridge, 1963,” which mingles national and personal history:

 

“A wake, without the whiskey or the words

Of eulogy, before the one blue eye

Of television in the deepening

November evening. When, earlier,

My secretary said that she’d heard that he

Had just been shot, we gaped in nervous pre-

Lapsarian unbelief. Now it is not

More real but we are less so . . .”

 

In his essay “A Novembrist Manifesto” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s (Vanguard Press, 1975), Sissman writes an appreciation of a much-misunderstood month, originally published in the November 1971 issue of The Atlantic:

 

“In the dark day of November, it is often three o’clock in the morning. We sit alone, freshly reminded of our mortal state, in inconsolable judgment on the waning sources of our unfounded pride. Our achievements wither and dry and shrivel to insignificance  until they’d fit the head of a pin; our ego, a summer roarer, now sits, a bad boy, in the dunce’s corner; our petty crimes against ourselves and others now pass in review at regimental strength before our routed-marshal’s eyes.”

 

The title, I assume, is adapted from the Russian "Decembrist Manifesto" of 1825. Sissman next addresses the role of November in life’s allegory:

 

“To buoy ourselves up and carry our frail selves through the rising insupportability of life, we take on, through the year, a thick, false costume of defenses crowned with a raffish, reckless, smiling social mask and founded on false pride and false belief in our immortal Geist. In November, all that falls away, and we sit alone with the knowledge of a failing body and a failed mind that has hardly begun to attack its objectives.”

 

You don’t need to be dying of cancer to get the message. November, leafless and cold in the North, is a month of reckoning, a time to take a hard look at ourselves. It’s no coincidence that Thanksgiving Day comes later this month. Sissman doesn’t leave us beat-up and tempted by self-pity:

 

“Then, of course—the larder bare, the slate wiped clean—the hope is free to start. Once our attention has been distracted from the screaming, constant claims of self, we can begin again from square one of our humble, real, deflated self. We suddenly have time—for the first time in a year—for pity that is not coextensive with ourselves. We have time to stop taking others for granted or for pawns in our personal politics and to see them, objectively and shamingly, as more steadfast and less self-blandished than we are. We have time to pay our respects, our too-long-deferred tributes, to the people who have sheltered and nurtured us in spite of our pretensions.”

 

Half-forgotten or never known in the first place, L.E. Sissman is one of our most rewarding writers. His gravitas, courage and ready sense of absurdity are bracing in this age of whining and self-obsession. Four and a half years after writing this essay, he was dead at age forty-eight.