'More Interesting to Me Than the Future'

“The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists more amusing than optimists and failures more attractive than successes. I do not say that my preferences are based upon universal principles or that everyone should share them; in any case I should not want to live in a world of mental clones of myself, even if it were possible. I merely describe my own preferences as they happen to be.” 

What Theodore Dalrymple describes is neither an ironclad law of existence, a wallow in sentimentality nor an affliction of the elderly. It’s common sense, a recognition of reality. The future is fiction. It is the home turf of utopians and other schemers, whose visions have the solidity of steam; that is, hot air. The past is where we come from. It made us. As a corollary to Ecclesiastes 1:9, C.H. Sisson writes in his essay “Natural History”: “It  is an absurdity to try to be original. You might as well try to be beautiful or intelligent.”

John Talbot and Victoria Moul have edited the first book devoted to Sisson (1914-2003), the English poet, critic, translator and civil servant: C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). I discovered Sisson more than a decade ago, having never heard of him before. Few recent significant writers have been so thoroughly ignored and forgotten, and Sisson revels in his unfashionableness. The Talbot/Moul volume consists largely of essays by academics, which is important, but I commend Sisson to common readers. If you judge Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) the major poet of our age, Sisson is your man. They were mutual admirers. Hanna Crawforth’s contribution to the Sisson volume is titled “‘Magnificent Anachronism’: Sisson in the Seventeenth Century.” She describes Sisson as “a profoundly unfashionable poet” and says he cultivated a “position on the periphery of English twentieth-century poetic tradition.”  

 

Sisson’s backward-facing sensibility is suggested by his prolific body of work as a translator of Heine, Catullus, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Horace, La Fontaine, Racine, Du Bellay and others. His Dante has become my Dante. Consider what he writes in “On Translating Dante,” the introduction to his version of The Divine Comedy:

 

“[A]ll literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance.”

 

Sisson’s understanding of reading and books resembles my own. Without system or plan, we're guided by unpremeditated whim and happy serendipity, “the drift of our interests at the time.” The writers he cites – French, German, Roman and English, respectively – represent the national and linguistic tributaries leading to the River Sisson. Were I assembling a similar list, I would have to leave out the German and add the Russian and a few Americans.

 

Here is an early poem by Sisson with a Dantean title, “In a Dark Wood,” appended by him to the beginning of his excellent and largely unknown 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.”

 

And here is a healthy dose of realism, Sisson’s “The Commonplace” (Exactions, 1980):

 

“A commonplace is good for nothing now

Yet that is how the world goes, all the same:

Nothing is what you had when you set out,

And nothing you will have when you go home.”