Coming across memorable opening lines after a gap of many years can be like running into an old friend, and so I liked rereading the first words of Sisson’s essay “The Politics of Wyndham Lewis”: “Wyndham Lewis was born on board his father’s yacht. Perhaps it was thought safer for such an explosion to take place offshore.” That’s Sisson’s criticism at its perkiest, perhaps, but it’s still typical of his wit and confidence.
It also hints at the influences that formed him, and CH Sisson (or Charles Hubert – he sheltered behind those initials even more than TS Eliot did behind his), who died at the age of 89 in 2003, could be said to have been the last English modernist. But it is what you might call a high modernism: one that looks as if it is of the Right, but actually hasn’t approved of much since the 17th century. It takes religion and monarchy seriously, but so seriously that it looks as if it is meeting republicanism from around the other side. Here he is in “A Note on the Monarchy”: “Bagehot attributed importance to the monarchy, but it was an importance of an inferior kind. The Queen was ‘dignified’, in his phraseology: that meant she was not much good. She was for fools to goggle at. As there were a lot of fools, that counted for something.” He approves of Bagehot, and as all that most people know today of the Victorian economist’s view of the monarchy is his phrase about not letting the daylight in on magic, Sisson’s paraphrase is a useful corrective.
Sisson was a Tory; “a four-letter word”, as he puts it in the essay so titled, but his Toryism was one of “profound scepticism”. He came from a lower-middle-class background and knew when he was being condescended to by the Left, and, in his youth, by the likes of WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis in particular. “I could not help noticing that when they spoke of the workers it was as if they were speaking of people in some far-off fairyland or alternatively of a remote race of South Sea Islanders or of a favourite breed of beetles.”
This kind of attitude might place Sisson beyond the pale for many readers of this paper. Anyway, for him, what mattered above all else was poetry, or, shall we say, the careful arrangement of words on the page. His scepticism extended towards his own metier to the extent that his collected essays were published under the title The Avoidance of Literature.
His essays are superb. Sisson went on to edit the poetry magazine PN Review, and there are still some who think the publication represents a pernicious elitism, but there was a journalistic snap to his writing that greatly weakens that charge. His pieces on Eliot, WB Yeats and Edward Thomas are supremely useful no matter how well you know their work.
Then there’s his own poetry, a selection of which makes up about a third of this volume. It is in the tradition of modernism: harsh at times, beautiful at others, mindful of its influences and always trying to shake them off. At its best it recalls the work of Geoffrey Hill, but rawer and more inclined to lash out. “What is the cure for the disease/ Of consciousness?” he asks at the start of “Vigil and Ode for St George’s Day”; as PG Wodehouse said about Scotsmen with a grievance, you’re never going to mistake Sisson’s poetry for a ray of sunshine. But he was great, in his way, and shouldn’t be forgotten; and I like the fact that he was made a Companion of Honour in 1993, so for the last decade of his life he could sign himself off as “CH Sisson CH”.
• A CH Sisson Reader is published by Fyfield/Carcanet (£17.95).
