C. H. Sisson opens his measured autobiography, On the Look-out, with characteristic skepticism.
I have the greatest difficulty in believing in the existence of human personality, and I hardly know what sort of thing it would be if it did exist. That there are people—men and women, conveniently classified as such—I can of course see as well as the next man. But it is evident that when people talk of themselves they are thinking of something quite different. . . . I find it easier to believe in God than in the existence of personality. That puts some difficulties in the way of an autobiography.
Yet Sisson hardly finds these difficulties insurmountable, leading one to suspect that this master of feline prose, whose intellect has aptly been described by the poet David Wright as “savage, luminous and just,” is wearing a wry smile. For not only is his opening salvo subtly and repeatedly contradicted throughout the autobiography but it also runs counter to the critical method he has employed to such advantage in his literary and political essays since the first was published in 1937.
In his criticism, Sisson approaches both the poet and the political writer (or clerc, as he would say) by setting the author’s oeuvre in social, historical, and cultural context. While he neither reduces his critical subjects to a series of assimilated character traits nor works within the narrow framework of a specific psychological or sociological theory, Sisson is
