In a Dry Place
Nicolas Tredell
- On the Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography by C.H. Sisson
Carcanet, 234 pp, £14.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 85635 758 8 - In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers by C.H. Sisson
Carcanet, 296 pp, £18.95, September 1990, ISBN 0 85635 877 0
Autobiography is an art of reticence as well as revelation. But the 20th century, reacting against supposed Victorian prudery, takes its cues from Rousseau and Freud to urge ‘frankness as never before’: autobiography should be the scene of revelation, a public confessional, an equivalent, in book form, of the newspaper exposé that ‘tells all’. But all can never be told: one can never escape one’s life, one’s language, one’s cultural situation to give a full report. As the poem at the end of C.H. Sisson’s ‘partial autobiography’ says:
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