As conceived by its creator, Matt Weiner, the television show Mad Men is a running catalogue of dissolution: Its various characters lie, cheat, steal, drink, smoke, and fornicate their way up the corporate ladder in a 1960s New York advertising agency. Weiner frames their sins as occupational hazards, the natural result of a Madison Avenue culture that peddles deception and excess. Each episode alternates brainstorming sessions for the agency’s ad campaigns with scenes from profligate lives led away from the office, a narrative parallel that suggests advertising—and, by extension, the marketplace—is a uniformly corrupting affair.
But with Mad Men in its final season, fans might do well to consider the alternative vision of L. E. Sissman (1928-1976), a real-life advertising executive in the 1960s, who appeared to survive the experience with his soul intact—even deepened.
Along with his advertising career in Boston, where, over the years, he worked as a creative vice president at two leading firms, Sissman built a national reputation as a man of letters, penning book reviews for the New Yorker, a regular first-person column for the Atlantic, and several books of poetry. John Updike was a big fan, admiring Sissman’s literary work as an expression of an “amiable, attentive intelligence.” Other contemporary admirers included fellow poets Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, and Howard Moss. The writer behind Sissman’s poems and essays seemed centered, charming, humane. “A sensible, decent man: that is the voice,” Updike said of his friend.
Sissman pointed out that he had become who he was because of his advertising career, not in spite of it. “I learned while I earned: my advanced training in being human was wholly subsidized by a kind management,” he recalled of his time in the executive suite. “Whatever I gave at the office, I received more in return.” Although he acknowledged that corporate life could be brutal, in one of his most quoted essays, “What I Gave at the Office,” Sissman stressed the benefits of his white-collar position:
Because of his work in both business and literature, Sissman invited frequent comparisons to Wallace Stevens, who became one of America’s most celebrated poets while holding a top job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. With more time, Sissman might have joined Stevens in the pantheon of national literature; but after an 11-year battle with Hodgkin’s disease, he died in 1976, his early exit reducing him to a historical footnote. He was 48 years old, and, as a literary late-bloomer, he’d assembled a relatively small body of work. Shortly after the posthumous publication of Hello, Darkness (1978), Sissman fell off the literary map. The last real attention to Sissman came in 1999, when Houghton Mifflin published Night Music, a slender retrospective of his best poems. His books haven’t remained in print, and he maintains a literary half-life in tattered editions that turn up on the Internet or on lonely library shelves.
The complication—and, to some degree, part of the appeal—of Sissman’s legacy is that his premature passing has frozen him in time, making him look rather like a period piece. In the author photo for Innocent Bystander, Sissman’s 1975 collection of Atlantic columns, he casually clenches a pipe in his mouth, an extravagant wreath of tobacco smoke clouding his brow, which is defined by owlish dark-frame glasses. Clean-shaven and exuding confidence, he could easily pass as one of Weiner’s Mad Men. Sissman knew the agency life dramatized in Mad Men, and he lived long enough to see it fall out of fashion. Although the subtitle of Innocent Bystander is The Scene From the ’70s, Sissman’s essays usually took the longer view, catching informative glimpses of the 1960s (and earlier decades) in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in “High Wind on Madison Avenue,” Sissman’s declaration that the era subsequently dramatized by Mad Men was already on the way out. He describes the corporate game of that period as a myth, and then deflates it:
Sissman suggested that the real-life Mad Men of the time were more to be pitied than scorned—a reality not lost in Weiner’s story arc—and were not nearly so powerful or privileged as people thought. Bruised by clients contemptuous of their craft, the agency man had grown insecure, creating campaigns that catered to the lowest common denominator. Sissman noted hopefully that the old guard was already being replaced by a diverse crowd of young innovators, more authentic in their approach to consumers. Collectively, they promised to usher in “a day when patronizing, maddening, intrusive advertising, with its burden of inflated claims and excessive promises, will at last (and none too soon) perish from the earth.”
Although Sissman’s prediction of a kinder, gentler advertising culture now looks, perhaps, too hopeful, his refusal to dismiss the industry’s leaders as a herd of Babbitts seems intuitive. In his poems and essays, Sissman reflexively avoided the bland generality in favor of the telling particular, which is why Updike, another master of precise observation, liked him so much. “When he evokes a city, it is Detroit or New York or Boston; there is no confusing the tint of the pavements,” Updike wrote. “When he recalls a day from his life, though it comes from as far away as November 1944, it arrives not only with all its solid furniture but with its own weather—in this case, ‘thin, slate-colored clouds sometimes letting through flat blades of sun.’ ”
Even in “Dying: An Introduction,” the poem in which he chronicles his fatal diagnosis, Sissman insists on planting a cosmic moment within the quirky little textures of the temporal realm. He notes, for example, that the prelude to his life-altering news unfolds in a medical waiting room full of old magazines:
A blue-rinsed dam
In Davidows, a husk
Of an old man,
A one-eyed boy—I sit
And share their pervigilium.
One Punch and two
Times later comes the call.
The passage hints at Sissman’s poetic style, which his literary executor, Peter Davison, once described as part Randall Jarrell, part Weldon Kees, and part Frank O’Hara. Using “pervigilium” rather than the more prosaic “vigil” to describe his wait was vintage Sissman, too. Latinisms wind through his writing like ivy, the markings of a man who had been a spelling bee champion and Quiz Kid in his childhood, then the class poet of Harvard’s class of 1949.
But Sissman’s occasionally exotic vocabulary seems not so much a matter of ostentation as earnest enthusiasm—a desire to use the full weight of the English language to indelibly record his experiences. His illness sharpened his sense that, with every word, he was writing himself into posterity—a reality that heightened his perceptions and his power to record them. “Instead of a curtain falling,” Sissman said of his diagnosis, “a curtain rose.”
He looked to George Orwell, another writer who had worked in the shadow of a terminal illness, as a role model. Like Orwell, Sissman was a declared political liberal whose distrust of cant and affection for old things frequently made him seem, on a personal level, endearingly conservative. He liked antique furniture, vintage books, and ancient houses. The synthetic sensibility of the 1960s and ’70s appears to have deepened his distrust of novelty. In “Plastic English,” an essay he offered as a kind of homage to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” Sissman lamented the fuzzing-up of his mother tongue by marketers and bureaucrats. Like Orwell, he saw clear language as an ethical imperative.
But Sissman loved exacting English not only for its moral stature; he also loved its power to please. That pleasure endures in his writing, especially in the essays, which brim with lyrical reflections on everything from farmer’s almanacs to family dogs to antique clocks. “The Crystal Year,” a perfectly poised contemplation of married life, should be required reading for students of composition. In that essay, as in the rest of his work, the cinematic clarity of his imagery fixes experience as deftly as butterflies pinned to velvet. Listen as he brings a sacramental sense of occasion to his wife’s baking: “To see her asserting herself over matter—the fork pricking the ideal number of steam vents in the top pie crust, the knife slicing its hoop of excess off the pie’s circumference with micrometric exactitude—is to see a very grave and honorable human candle lit.”
To read Sissman’s work is to wish for more of it. His letters and book reviews remain uncollected, something an enterprising university press should try to correct. At the very least, an anthology of his out-of-print writings is long overdue. In the meantime, there’s comfort in revisiting his slender oeuvre. In one of his best essays, “The Constant Rereader’s Five-Foot Shelf,” he celebrated the joys of scanning familiar writers repeatedly: “A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.” Sissman belongs to that community of writers who deserve to be read, again.
Danny Heitman is the author, most recently, of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
