Showing posts with label Cecil Day-Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cecil Day-Lewis. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

In Auden's Shadow: Cecil Day-Lewis



Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)


There's a reason why the name may seem familiar to you. Yes, Cecil Day-Lewis was the father of triple Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. If you look carefully, you can see the family resemblance:



It would be a shame if this fact were allowed to obscure Day-Lewis's own achievements, though, which were many and various - some have said a little too various:



Greenwich Society: Memorial Tree (1973)


  • C. Day-Lewis (his preferred version of the name - though he often wrote it 'Day Lewis,' which has caused a certain confusion among critics and bibliographers) was the UK Poet Laureate from 1967, when John Masefield died, until his own death in 1972, when John Betjeman succeeded him.




  • C. Day-Lewis: The Otterbury Incident (1948)


  • As well as writing numerous novels under his own name, including the children's classic The Otterbury Incident (1948), Day-Lewis was probably most celebrated for a series of 20-odd detective thrillers written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake between 1935 and 1968. He claimed that he'd originally based his detective 'Nigel Strangeways' on certain character traits of W. H. Auden's, but the resemblance grew less and less marked over time.




  • 'Nicholas Blake': The Widow's Cruise (1959)


  • Like Louis MacNeice, Day-Lewis was a classical scholar, and took twenty years (1940-63) to complete one of the most celebrated modern translations of the complete works of Virgil.




  • C. Day-Lewis, trans. The Aeneid of Virgil (1953)


  • Charles Causley's claim that he was 'the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century' certainly remains a minority view but, though such early poems as his 1933 Magnetic Mountain sequence are probably still the most quoted, his reputation as a latter-day pastoralist ensures him a hearing even now.




C. Day-Lewis: The Poetry Archive


And, speaking of early poems, here's one from his 1938 book Overtures to Death, published - like MacNeice's Autumn Journal - under the shadow of Munich and Chamberlain's promise of 'peace in our time':

Newsreel

Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.

Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream.

Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed -
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.

There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks' race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.

Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble -
These silver shadows - to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?

See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world's soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected -
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home!

Grow nearer home - and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You'll know you slept too long.

The Auden influence is still apparent here: the somewhat heavy-handed politics combined with an undeniable lyric precision. This is the Macspaunday side of Day-Lewis: Marxist on the surface but Georgian underneath.

And here, a few years later, from Word Over All (1943), is a lyric which could easily find a place alongside A. E. Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries':

Where are the War Poets? (1943)

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse -
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.




So who exactly was Cecil Day-Lewis? He's often referred to as an 'Anglo-Irish' poet, due to the fact that he was born, and lived till the age of 2, in Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland. His clergyman father moved to London in 1906, and Day-Lewis was brought up there, albeit continuing to spend summer holidays with his relatives in County Wexford.

The slight schizophrenia of this shared English and Irish heritage continued throughout his life:
His father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames. In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results."


C. Day-Lewis: The Buried Day (1960)


Which brings me to the subject of autobiographies. I promised to comment on the biographies available for each of the writers in this series, but their own accounts of their lives undoubtedly also deserve some comment.



C. Day-Lewis: The Buried Day (1980)


As well as the Day-Lewis book mentioned above, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice both wrote autobiographies, World within World (1951) and The Strings are False (1941), respectively.



Louis MacNeice: The Strings are False (1941 / 1965)


I've already included some quotes from Spender's autobiography in my post on him. Louis MacNeice's autobiography was written early in the war, in 1941, but not published until after his death, in 1965. It was, I suppose, too nakedly revealing of his own complex relationship with 'Irishness' - and with his own work - to be released during his lifetime.



When it comes to biographies, the situation is a little more complex.

The standard life was written by Sean, one of two sons by Day-Lewis's first marriage - to Constance Mary King. There's a certain (understandable) amount of family rancour visible there, given that his second wife, actress Jill Balcon, was a considerably more glamorous figure, and it was the children of this match who achieved fame.

Be that as it may, it's a competently written book, by a well-known journalist, and fleshes out the information in his father's own more impressionistic account.

The fact is, though, for all his fame and undoubted literary success, C. Day-Lewis is now a largely forgotten figure. There's a tradition of burying or otherwise commemorating Poet Laureates in Westminster Abbey. John Betjeman, his successor in the job, made it - Day-Lewis did not.

Unfortunately a more recent biography, by Peter Stanford - which I must confess I haven't yet read - has (according to reviewers, at any rate) failed to make a very strong case for revived interest in him.



Peter Stanford: C. Day-Lewis: A Life (2007)


Perhaps his admirers can take comfort in a 1963 letter from W. H. Auden:
How delighted I was to find your later poetry so much finer than your earlier ... The critics, of course, think our lot stopped writing 25 years ago. How silly they are going to look presently.
The most endearing anecdote I myself have heard about Day-Lewis concerns his last days, spent at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis had to be forbidden from entering the sick room, as the Poet Laureate found his conversation so amusing that he would end up laughing uncontrollably, thus putting his health in jeopardy. Not such a bad way to go, perhaps, literally laughing yourself to death ...

HIs widow, Jill Balcon, continued to hope for a revival till she herself died in 2009:
I think he's still on the schools' curriculum, but he has come into some sort of obscurity that I cannot quite fathom.
When she gave performances of his work, she noticed that most of the comments and letters she received concerned his poem 'Walking Away.'
A lot of people identify with it. It is about letting a child go. In this case it was his son, Sean, going off to school, but everybody who is a parent identifies with the moment when the children have to go. I wept when my son went to kindergarten for heaven's sake. He was only four, but I knew that forever and ever he would be going to school, to college, to marry and all the things they do.
Perhaps, then. that's as good a place to end as any:
Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
His poetry is now available in full in the magnificent edition below. If there ever is a revival, at least it will be readily accessible to anyone who takes an interest in an old-fashioned nature poet: a stance which now seems more timely than ever.



C. Day-Lewis: Complete Poems (1992)






C. Day-Lewis: Collected Poems 1954 (1970)

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)


[titles I own are marked in bold]:

    Poetry:

  1. Beechen Vigil (1925)
  2. Country Comets (1928)
  3. Transitional Poem (1929)
  4. From Feathers to Iron (1931)
  5. The Magnetic Mountain (1933)
  6. Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935)
  7. A Time to Dance (1935)
  8. Noah and the Waters (1936)
  9. Overtures to Death (1938)
  10. Word Over All (1943)
  11. Short is the Time (1945)
  12. Poems 1943-47 (1948)
  13. Poems: A Selection by the Author. 1951. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.
  14. An Italian Visit (1953)
  15. Christmas Eve. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Ariel Poem. London: Faber, 1954.
  16. Collected Poems. 1954. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
  17. Pegasus (1957)
  18. The Gate (1962)
  19. The Room (1965)
  20. The Whispering Roots (1970)
  21. Posthumous Poems (1979)
  22. The Complete Poems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

  23. Translation:

  24. Virgil's Georgics (1940)
  25. Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin (1946)
  26. The Aeneid. 1952. Appreciation by John Pollard. Original Illustrations by David Whitfield. Books That Have Changed Men’s Thinking. Geneva: Heron Books, 1969.
  27. Virgil's Eclogues (1963)
  28. The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil. 1940, 1952, 1963. Oxford Paperbacks. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

  29. Non-fiction:

  30. A Hope for Poetry (1934)
  31. Poetry for You: A Book for Boys and Girls on the Enjoyment of Poetry. 1944. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957.
  32. The Poetic Image. 1947. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 25. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1965.
  33. The Buried Day (1960)

  34. Fiction:

  35. Dick Willoughby (1933)
  36. The Friendly Tree (1936)
  37. Starting Point (1937)
  38. Child of Misfortune (1939)
  39. The Otterbury Incident. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1948. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

  40. [as 'Nicholas Blake]:

  41. A Question of Proof (1935)
  42. Thou Shell of Death (1936)
  43. There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
  44. The Beast Must Die (1938)
  45. The Smiler with the Knife (1939)
  46. Malice in Wonderland (1940)
  47. The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941)
  48. Minute for Murder (1947)
  49. Head of a Traveller (1949)
  50. The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
  51. The Whisper in the Gloom (1954)
  52. A Tangled Web (1956)
  53. End of Chapter (1957)
  54. A Penknife in My Heart (1958)
  55. The Widow's Cruise (1959)
  56. The Worm of Death (1961)
  57. The Deadly Joker (1963)
  58. The Sad Variety (1964)
  59. The Morning after Death (1966)
  60. The Private Wound (1968)

  61. Edited:

  62. [with L. A. G. Strong] A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920–1940 (1941)
  63. Robert Frost. Selected Poems. Introduction by C. Day Lewis. The Penguin Poets. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
  64. [with John Lehmann] The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915–1955 (1956)
  65. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1963. With a Memoir by Edmund Blunden. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.

  66. Secondary:

  67. Sean Day-Lewis. C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life. 1980. Unwin Paperbacks. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1982.



Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)


Saturday, April 18, 2020

In Auden's Shadow



Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)


I guess it must be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever looked at this blog just how much I've been influenced by the life and works of the late Wystan Hugh Auden. I tried to explain the obsession here, but it's quite a tall order to sum up so long a course of reading and thinking in one short post.

I first encountered his poetry at school, in the mid-1970s. I can remember the moment, in fact. I was standing in the school store-room, waiting my turn to be 'seen' by one of the teachers (I think there was some lesson in how to ace a job interview going on, but I could be wrong about that).



I noticed a book with an exceptionally garish cover lying on the table, and picked it up to see what it was. I was already a great fan of the poetry of A. E. Housman, so the first poem I picked from the table of contents was, I think, Auden's sonnet about him:



A. E. Housman (1859-1936)


No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.

It enraged me! How dare he speak so flippantly of so wonderful a writer! 'His private lust' indeed! How could he know? I went around fulminating about the cheek of 'modern' poets who dared to criticise their elders and betters for weeks afterward.

It enraged me - but also fascinated me. I'd had a chance to look at some of the other poems in the book and, while I didn't understand everything I was reading (still don't, for that matter), I understood enough for them to stay with me, keep nagging at me, get under my skin against my will.



W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (1976)


My Christmas present that year (1977) was Auden's newly published Collected Poems. By then I'd got to the stage of writing a sign for my door which read:

W. H. Auden rules!
And Edward Mendelson is his prophet ...

Mendelson's editing seemed amazingly accomplished and abstruse to me at the time, especially given the maze of competing readings and revisions he had to deal with as the poet's literary executor. Auden (like Wordsworth - or, for that matter, Yeats) was one of those poets who could never leave well enough alone.



Stephen Spender, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute (1975)


A great deal of my interest came from the book above, however. The fascinating essays and reminiscences it contained seemed to open up a whole cornucopia of thirties imagery and lifestyles. There was a photo-montage of Night Mail (the film, and the poem Auden wrote for it), pieces by Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, a host of other old friends - virtually everyone who was anyone, in fact, except for those who'd predeceased him.

And so the obsession began to spread, gradually encompassing all the other writers whose lives he'd touched, or in whose books he'd somehow been recorded. I've written elsewhere on this blog about Isherwood, who would have to rank first in that pantheon, but there were many others as well: basically all the members of the so-called Auden Group:



Samuel Hynes: The Auden Generation (1977)


Hence, some 45 years after "first looking into Auden's Poems", this projected series of posts about those who have ended up - fairly or unfairly - in Auden's shadow. Auden could be a dominant, some would say a domineering figure. What of those other writers and poets? What might one say about them?

There are a great many to choose from. For a start, there are the other three components of 'Macspaunday' (a derogatory epithet coined by pro-Fascist writer Roy Campbell for this set of largely left-wing poets): Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis = Mac / sp /aun / day - get it?

Then there are those notorious lines from Day-Lewis's long poem The Magnetic Mountain (1933), much mocked and denigrated at the time by George Orwell (who referred to Auden as 'a kind of gutless Kipling'):
Then I'll hit the trail for that promising land;
May catch up with Wystan and Rex my friend ...
"Wystan" is, of course, W. H. Auden; "Rex" is Rex Warner. Ought he, too, to go on the list, then?

And then there are the editors and anthologists who promoted - some would say pushed - this literary movement at the time: Michael Roberts, whose two anthologies New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933) constituted the first real attempt to define it; and Geoffrey Grigson, whose magazine New Verse (1933-39) existed - as he himself said - primarily to promote and print the work of Auden and his friends.



This, then, is my list of writers left unfairly - at least arguably - in Auden's shadow (I must confess to having found some inspiration for my title in Paul Theroux's memoir of his long and difficult friendship with West Indian writer V. S. Naipaul):

  1. Michael Roberts (1902-1948)
  2. Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)
  3. Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985)
  4. Rex Warner (1905-1986)
  5. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
  6. Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

I'll put up the blogposts as I finish them, in no particular order, to avoid any invidious implications of primacy or degrees of importance. The list above, however, is arranged chronologically in order of date of birth. It's important, at times, to remember that Day-Lewis was three years Auden's senior, and Spender two years his junior.

Such details generally matter little for people you encounter as an adult, but the Auden group met first at school (Isherwood and Edward Upward), then at university (Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis), and a certain in-built competitiveness was the inevitable result.

There are plenty of other people I could have included: Charles Madge, of Mass-Observation fame, who did after all run off with Stephen Spender's first wife, and whose unfortunate account of first reading Auden (from his 'Letter to the Intelligentsia') remains extant to haunt him:
But there waited for me in the summer morning
Auden fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew.
And all the world's stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions
Edward Upward the surrealist, too, was closely involved with the group. And if you count in their enemies: George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, the list could grow to include virtually everyone prominent in the arts in the 1930s ...

Let's begin with the six authors above, then. I think there are important things to be said about each of them - or if not, it isn't from lack of effort on my part in collecting their various works.



Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)