Danny Heitman wrote a piece for The Magazine of The Weekly Standard about “Darkness Visible: L.E. Sissman, poet in a gray flannel suit” in which Updike is mentioned. The news “peg” is the final season of Mad Men, and Sissman is evoked as an example of “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 ‘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 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.’ '”
