Now that C. H. Sisson and Donald Davie are no longer on the masthead, I can allow myself one editorial luxury: PNR 39. The whole issue is given over to the work of C. H. Sisson on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

I hate his being 70. I met him when he was 58 (I was 24) and the adjustment to calendar time is difficult. He seems if anything more energetic now than he did then: since his retirement, his prose and verse have changed, he has been game for rather ambitious editorial challenges and literary conflicts. And he has written some of his best poetry. His poetic persona was always a little senior, sometimes making Tithonus look a youngster. But he remains inventive and he possesses that dissatisfaction which drives the really good poet on and denies him repose.

In this issue I have two objectives. The first is to document areas of his life in his own words, drawn from the unpublished memoirs One Eye on India (1949) and On the Lookout (1956), which cast light on his antecedents, his education, the time he spent in India during the Second World War, his years in the Civil Service. The memoirs, candid but not confessional, connect directly with many of his poems and reveal to what a degree he has been plainly autobiographical in his writing, especially latterly, a literalist even when he seems most figurative. My second (and principal) objective was to secure a variety of assessments of Sisson's work, not in a spirit of celebration but of engagement. Most of the contributors in one way or another dissent from his work, and this gives edge to the assessments which follow.

In the interview he gave me, Sisson speaks of Dante: 'Clearly a mind as capacious as his took in huge quantities of material.' He stresses the involuntary element both in what Dante absorbed and in what he assimilated to his purposes in his great poem. Had Dante written the Comedy earlier than the mid-point of his life, it might have been mis-shapen by unassimilated matter, ephemeral enthusiasms, a language not entirely his own. Looking at Sisson's work, one book stands out from the others as different in kind: deliberately conceived and executed, it contains in unassimilated tension most of the elements of his later work. Like a snake which has fed on a number of lumpy objects, the relatively young Sisson of An Asiatic Romance (Gaberbocchus, 1953) shows along his length the not-yet digested experiences which later were to cohere naturally. He deliberately explores them in the course of the novel. His time in India was still painfully heavy in his mind. The Civil Service - or Civil Servant - in its various grades and with its autochthonous manifestations, like a bacterial culture placed to grow experimentally in a new environment, was a daily irritant for the young man still not well-placed on the ladder of preferment. The culture of the Latin classics - Ovid provides the main narrative, though Sisson draws on Kafka and Smollet for his technique - already gave him his shapes. The novel is also, perhaps principally, about England as a colonial power: the English system of class, the otherness of those it blithely sought to administer, the imperviousness of the administrators to that otherness, experiencing it as fearful at worst, at best as quaint. All that is lacking of Sisson's mature concerns is the Anglican theme.

If An Asiatic Romance were only a bitter confluence of social and political experiences, wittily and elegantly rendered, it would not transcend satire. But it does, and this is because the setting of the action is the dreamed primitive principality in which all civil considerations are secondary to the autocratic ruler's fantasies and lusts. And the ruler, who the English characters fail to understand, is the pivot of the plot. The book is his finally brutal romance. The title is at once ironic and literal. The world of dream and the related world of desire are drawn out into waking consciousness and pursue their course there, before the unapprehending eyes of functionaries. It is the rape of Philomel, a brutal game of consequences foreseen - man's nature is constant - and therefore telling. The novel is memorable because of Sisson's masterly juxtaposition of a familiar, convention-shaped system and a reality which it serves, or which it feeds and sustains, and to which it is finally, at the deepest level, irrelevant.

In An Asiatic Romance, most of the lumps that memory has converted into second nature in Sisson's work, are expressed in an 'external style' which suits their as yet raw state. It is a little masterpiece of construction, wicked, impassioned, concentrated: a prelude to the prose and poems of his maturity.
MICHAEL SCHMIDT