C Day-Lewis and the fickle business of literary reputations by Peter Stanford

The following essay is taken from the Epilogue to Peter Stanford’s well-received 2007 biography of C Day-Lewis and is reproduced here with his permission and that of his publishers, Continuum. To purchase a copy of Peter Stanford’s biography, C Day-Lewis: A Life, follow the links to Amazon in the Further Reading section of this website.

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The car is coming slowly and cautiously down the steep hill from the Iron Age fort into Musbury on a sunny winter’s morning. The narrow lane is lined with high green hedges which direct the eyes forward to the Axe Valley, spread out before us, and beyond it the blue of the sea. Sean Day-Lewis, retired newspaperman, is at the wheel, pointing out the landmarks of his father’s – and his own - life.

We stop on a bend. Just ahead of us is the house his parents called Brimclose when they bought it in 1938. Soon after his father died, Sean’s mother, Mary, sold up, finally knowing that there was no longer even the remotest chance of her ex-husband coming home to her. The new owners renamed it Woodhayes and have since extended it and painted it sky blue and white, remodelling over the years the garden Mary spent 35 years tending.

The details have changed but the landscape that so inspired Day-Lewis has not. To our right, Sean points out a wooden bench, concreted in position and with a plaque recording Mary Day-Lewis’s life and death, from cancer, in 1975. To our left is the wood that lay between Brimclose and Bullmoor Farm, where his father and Billie Currall would meet in those heady pre-war days.

Of his departure from this spot in 1950, Day-Lewis later wrote: ‘Self-exiled, I left what seems in retrospect a little Paradise. But, as Proust so wonderfully showed, for certain temperaments the only Paradise is Paradise Lost’. He had lived, Day-Lewis wrote in 1965 in ‘St Anthony’s Shirt’ in nine houses. As a poet Day-Lewis had a great capacity to respond to new places and new landscapes – Ireland, Dorset, Tuscany all inspired him. And to human beauty. Some of the women he fell in love with were famed for their good looks. But he never truly settled, physically or emotionally, however much part of him yearned for it. Each paradise was always, as he admitted, lost, often through his own actions. One side of him remained forever the traveller of his poems.

There is not, then, a single landscape where you have the sense of walking in his footsteps. In Musbury that day, with his eldest son at my side, he felt as close as he ever would as Sean mapped out the minutiae of their sparse domestic life in the early 1940s in a cottage that is now comfortably refurbished. I could almost hear the cricket ball being whacked around the weedy tennis court as Day-Lewis and Rex Warner fought it out. But later, when I returned without Sean to the cottage to recapture once again that connection with my subject, Day-Lewis was gone.

The obvious place to look for him is in his poetry. And there, warts and all, he most certainly is. Day-Lewis was the most autobiographical of poets. As I have included stanzas in the preceding chapters to reflect his state of mind at the various crossroads in his life, I have been acutely aware that making such a direct link would be dangerous and even impossible with most writers. With Day-Lewis, it feels the natural and right thing to do. There is, of course, a degree of licence – there were, for example, more than nine houses - but there too, more often, is an almost painful honesty about the important things. Yet even as he opens his heart in poetry, seeks to understand not to be understood as he put it himself, confides as he did nowhere else, he is also simultaneously holding himself apart, observing, suspecting, judging himself and his readers.

While writing this biography I chanced upon a magazine interview with an American folk singer. ‘Losing my mother early,’ she told the journalist, ‘has made me distant with people. I don’t do intimacy’. Surely it can’t be that straightforward, I said aloud to myself, noting at once the parallels with Day-Lewis. And anyway he had Knos, not a mother but someone who loved him, as ‘My Mother’s Sister’ so poignantly makes clear, to the very end.

That ability in Day-Lewis to be and do two things at once did, however, started very early. And persisted. Even when he was with his second wife, who studiedly avoided smothering him in the way that both his father and Rosamond Lehmann had, he continued to opt out – away from her in Harvard and Hull, away from her with other women. Balcon gave him a good deal of freedom at significant emotional cost to herself, but never broke his habit of keeping something of himself separate. As he lay dying, she had to write to Elaine Hamilton, with whom he had been conducting a flirtatious correspondence from his Chatto office, to ask her to stop sending him intimate gifts. The tension between being there and being elsewhere, repeated many times in his poetry, was never satisfactorily resolved and affected all his relationships.

It left him a contradictory character, a man of great charm who inspired and returned loyalty in his friends but who could simultaneously wound the women he loved; a poet who wrote epic narrative verse about the heroism of others but who did not want to fight himself; a private man who preached that ‘we must consume our own smoke’ but who then shared his intimate secrets and those of the people closest to him in his poems; a man of such self-abnegation that he didn’t break the taboo around mentioning he was dying, but whose poetry can often border on the self-obsessed. It is not, as his some critics have said, that he had no voice of his own. Rather that he had too many.

When asked about enduring literary fame, Day-Lewis was characteristically modest. Roger Woodis, another of the long list of young poets whom he had encouraged while at Chatto, recalled that he once asked Day-Lewis how you could discern if a writer was one of the greats. ‘The only way to tell is to rise from the grave 100 years from now – and even then you can’t be sure’, he replied . That same wry common sense was in evidence in a newspaper interview he gave in 1968. ‘Such immortality as I ever want is for a few people to read my poems for a few years after I am dead’.

There were two he picked out in particular – ‘O Dreams, O Destinations’ and ‘On Not Saying Everything’. Both contained many of the elements of conflict that he continuously examined in his lifetime and therefore are fitting monuments to his work. To their number, in various anthologies of twentieth century verse, have been added ‘The Album’, ‘Where Are the War Poets’, ‘Sheep Dog Trials in Hyde Park’, ‘My Mother’s Sister’, among others. All have a place in the canon while his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid is still widely used and held by many to be peerless. A new audio recording of it was made in 2003 with Paul Scofield, Toby Stephens and Jill Balcon.

What may have surprised Day-Lewis is the popularity of one of his domestic poems, those everyday observations from life which feature heavily in his mature work. ‘Walking Away’ was a 1962 reflection on waving his son off at school. Its last line – ‘Love is proved in the letting go’ was used in 2006 on the publicity posters for The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a film starring Day-Lewis’s son, the Oscar-wining actor, Daniel, and written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller. Given Daniel’s acclaim, some of those who are so drawn to ‘Walking Away’ as a summing up of the central dilemma of parenthood may have Daniel’s face in mind as they read or listen to the words. It was, however, inspired by my guide in Musbury, his older half-brother, Sean.

If poets are often popularly remembered for a single poem, their ‘best bet at remembrance’ as Robert Frost put it, then ‘Walking Away’ has become Day-Lewis’s legacy. As an introduction to his work, a glimpse of his capacity to move from the personal to the universal, it serves admirably. But it is best regarded as an invitation to explore his poetry further.

That, however, has largely failed to happen since his death in 1972. A volume of Posthumous Poems was published in 1979, a Complete volume in 1992 and compilations in 1977 (selected by Ian Parsons, his long-time colleague at Chatto and Windus) and in 2004 (chosen by his widow to mark his centenary). There have been periodic upsurges in public interest – such as that which accompanied the ‘Young Writers of the Thirties’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1976, with its shared spotlight on Day-Lewis, WH Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice.

However, overall his work has suffered a neglect since his death. The claim by the critic GM Young, trumpeted on the jacket of subsequent editions of his 1938 collection Overtures to Death and Other Poems, that ‘I should like to have it on the record that in 1938 someone had the wit to foresee that in 2038 Day Lewis’s ‘Nabara’ would be numbered among the great English poems’, now sounds a little off-the-mark.

So why is the Day-Lewis that lies beyond ‘Walking Away’ and the ‘wilted’ laurels of the Laureateship overlooked? Part of the reason may simply be because the very art of poetry today is suffering from the sort of widespread public indifference that he recognized, warned of and tried to counter.

There is also that natural cycle of interest in a writer’s work, the necessary lull that often comes after his or her death before a truer, dispassionate evaluation can be reached once distanced from the literary fashion and the distracting headlines of what in Day-Lewis’s case was a very public life. It often happens with writers that when they die they disappear in more senses than one, leaving only the question of whether their reputation will be born again.

Some modern critics are today so severe in their judgments of Day-Lewis that any resurrection seems out of the question. The Irish poet Eaven Boland, for example, writing in PN Review in 1998, accused him of writing ‘cool, dejected, rose-water poems, with their flowery symbols of transience’. Even Spender, who outlived his old friend by many years, was doubtful in reviewing the Complete volume of poems in 1992, accusing Day-Lewis of ‘writing more for the beautiful speaking voice than out of the inward voice, the hidden persona which is the touchstone of poetry’.

The most public sign of this questioning of Day-Lewis’s enduring worth as a poet has been the refusal so far to allot him in a space in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. He had in his lifetime assumed – often out loud - that being Poet Laureate would be sufficient qualification. He was asked, he liked to recall, in 1970 to write a guide to Poets’ Corner by the Abbey authorities. So one lunchtime he slipped away from Chatto’s to do his research but once in the Abbey was denied access by an officious verger. ‘But I am the Poet Laureate,’ Day-Lewis told him, ‘and I want to get into Poets’ Corner before I die’.

The final decision on posthumous admission rests with the Dean of the Abbey and his advisors and they seem at present unconvinced. Despite a 50-strong letter of petition in 2001 from the Royal Society of Literature, signed by, among others, the Nobel Laureate and Day-Lewis admirer Seamus Heaney, the Dean has so far refused to budge.

The factors that seem to count against Day-Lewis in this and, more generally in critical debate, have all been addressed in this biography - the echoes of others in his work, the accusation that he published too much, the formality of his writing, his rejection of Modernism, and his struggle adequately to escape the tag of poet of the ‘thirties.
 
Yet there has always remained a staunch body of opinion in literary and academic circles that fights against the tendency to sideline Day-Lewis. In 1998 his friend from Harvard, Al Gelpi, now Professor of American Literature at Stanford University, published Living In Time, a critical study of Day-Lewis’s verse which argues trenchantly that he remains ‘one of the great and important poets of the [twentieth] century’. John Bayley, Warton Professor of English at Oxford, is another who has defended Day-Lewis publicly, especially against the charge that he was simply Auden’s best-known camp follower. ‘Because he threw himself into whatever appealed at the time, Day-Lewis’s poetry travelled in the end further than Auden’s, however unexpectedly,’ Bayley has written. ‘Auden, for all his different interests, was stuck with his inescapable persona: his admiring disciple was free to derive a poetic voice from anywhere else he chose – from Italy to the English past, other voices and other rooms.’

And in a lecture at Day-Lewis’s old Oxford college, Wadham, to mark the centenary of his birth in 2004, the medievalist Bernard O’Donoghue concluded, after reviewing his work, ‘there are many reasons to believe with Auden that his [Day-Lewis’s] hour will come again, even if “the critics” do not yet quite look silly for believing that “our lot” stopped writing in the thirties. Poems like “The Nabara” have a power and a relevance to our times which have not been recognised. But that too is a victim of the aesthetic fashions of an age which is resistant to the long poem’.

A final factor that, I believe, has militated against continuing wider interest in him in the years since his death has been the absence of a biography. As its title suggests, The Buried Day is less than revealing. C Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life, Sean Day-Lewis’s 1980 book about his father, began the task of revealing the man behind the public persona, but was not considered by its author to tell the whole story. Yet Day-Lewis was, as already pointed out, unusually autobiographical in his verse, and so to understand the particular references and context of his writing is, I hope, a spur to read more of it.

If proof were needed that reacquaintance with Day-Lewis is fruitful, it came in a review of the centenary edition of his poems in the Times Literary Supplement, the paper that at the end of his life was forever attacking Day-Lewis. The critic, William Wootten, begins by rehearsing all the familiar arguments about why Day-Lewis is deservedly neglected. ‘In a world where talent in poetry gets few rewards,’ he adds for good measure, ‘this poet was lucky enough [in his lifetime] to receive too many’. The curse of the Poet Laureateship again.

Yet as the article continues, and Wootten rereads some of Day-Lewis’s work, he is forced to reconsider. ‘GM Young would be delighted to see that Wootten is particularly drawn to ’The Nabara’. It is, he finds, ‘a stirring narrative poem’. As he progresses to the 1940s, Wootten gets still more enthusiastic. ‘The war poems…remain some of the best of the Home Front. The poems of private life hold up even better’. And even if in the 1960s, when Wootten complains that Day-Lewis published ‘too many poems that are slight, occasional or about such subjects as Christmas’, he continues to find ‘unexpected pleasures’, highlighting ‘The Disabused’ as ‘chillingly compelling’.

The review ends up reading like something that might have been written in the 1930s when Day-Lewis was at the height of his critical acclaim. That cycle of praise and neglect can turn again. Too many biographies of poets (and artists in general) begin or end with the authors offering superlatives about their subjects. Given Day-Lewis’s own modesty, such claims would be out of place here. Instead, there is only a plea. Like Wootten, delve into Day-Lewis’s poetry one more time. In particular read collections such as Word Over All in the light of his life and see if you agree with John Betjeman’s verdict on him, written in the year Day-Lewis died: ‘I am absolutely sure his poetry is underrated. He persists in the mind. I only rattle on the ears’