Charles Hubert Sisson, CH, usually cited as C. H. Sisson, was a British writer, best known as a poet and translator.
Life
Born in Bristol in 1914, C. H. Sisson was noted as a poet, novelist, essayist and an important translator. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly. Sisson's parents were Richard Percy Sisson and Ellen Minnie Sisson. He was educated at the University of Bristol where he read English and Philosophy, and in France and Germany. As a poet he first came to light through the London Arts Review, X, founded by the painter Patrick Swift and the poet David Wright. He reacted against the prevailing intellectual climate of the 1930s, particularly the Auden Group, preferring to go back to the anti-romantic T. E. Hulme, and to the Anglican tradition. The modernism of his poetry follows a 'distinct genealogy' from Hulme to Eliot, Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis. His novel Christopher Homm experiments with form and is told backwards. Sisson entered the Ministry of Labour as Principal Assistant in 1936. During the Second World War he served in the British Army, in the ranks, in India. He was Simon Senior Research Fellow, Director of Establishments, Ministry of Labour, and Director of Occupational Safety and Health, Ministry of Employment. 1972 was also the year of his retirement from the Civil Service, with the rank of Under-Secretary. A standard text, The Spirit of British Administration, was the product of his Simon Senior Research Fellowship; it contains the main fruit of his reflection on the British Civil Service. The work notably compares British with French, German, Swedish, Austrian, and Spanish administrative methods; Sisson sees the British Civil Service as emerging favourably from the comparison. Only slight and negative mention is made of the United States of America. Sisson was no blind admirer of British methods, however. He was a 'severe critic of the British Civil Service and some of his essays caused controversy'. In his collection The London Zoo he writes this epitaph 'Here lies a civil servant. He was civil/ To everyone, and servant to the devil.' Sisson was married, in 1937, to Nora Gilbertson and they had two daughters. In 1993 C.H. Sisson was appointed a Companion of Honour for his services to Literature. Sisson died on 5 September 2003, aged 89.
Works
Poetry collections
An Asiatic Romance
Poems
The Spirit of British Administration
The London Zoo
Numbers
The Discarnation, or How the Flesh became Word and Dwelt Among Us
Metamorphoses,
Roman Poems
The Case of Walter Bagehot
In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems and Selected Translations
The Corridor
Anchises
Moon-Rise and Other Poems
Exactions,
Autobiographical and other papers of Philip Mairet, editor
Letters to an Editor, ed. M. Fisher, Manchester : Carcanet, 1989, prints sixty-three letters from Sisson to the Carcanet Press. In the same volume Robert Hass assesses Sissons' political thought.
