C Day-Lewis: A Life

389 Pages·2007·16.17 MB·English

by  Peter Stanford

C Day-Lewis

C Day-Lewis
A Life
PETER STANFORD
continuum
CONTINUUM
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© Peter Stanford 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the
publishers.
Credits for plate section:
Page one: Jill Day-Lewis
Page two: Jill Day-Lewis/Sean Day-Lewis
Page three: Sean Day-Lewis
Page four: Sean Day-Lewis/Jonathan Fenby
Page five: Sean Day-Lewis
Page six: Sean Day-Lewis
Page seven: Natasha, Lady Spender/Jill Day-Lewis/ Estate of Janet Stone/ PA Photos
Page eight: Estate of Janet Stone/Jill Day-Lewis
First published 2007
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN 9780826486035
Typeset by YHT Ltd, London
To Lilla I. M. Birtwistle,
lyric poet, gallery owner and all round inspiration
(1918-2006)

Contents
Prologue ix
PART ONE: YOUTH
Chapter 1 Never of a Land Rightfully Ours 3
2 A Hostile Land to Spy 11
3 A Land of Milk and Honey 21
4 Black Frost of my Youth 29
5 Rip Van Winkle Forest 37
6 The Sunless Stream 45
7 Eldorados Close to Hand 55
PART TWO: THE THIRTIES
Chapter 8 The Tow-Haired Poet 65
9 Lust to Love 75
10 Farewell Adolescent Moon 83
11 Radiance from Ashes Arises 95
12 Make Your Choice 107
13 Terra Incognita 119
14 On a Tilting Deck 131
15 Dreams Dared Imagine 139
16 No Man's Land 149
17 Earth Shakes Beneath Us 161
PART THREE: AT WAR
Chapter 18 Where are the War Poets? 175
19 The Magic Answer 185
20 The Maturing Field 195
vii
C DAY-LEWIS - A LIFE
21 That It Should End So 205
22 Grinding Himself to Powder 215
23 Now Comes the Zero 223
24 In a Dream 233
PART FOUR: A KIND OF PEACE
Chapter 25 The Estate of Simple Being 245
26 Find our Balance 255
27 Self-Betrayal 263
28 Change of Address 273
29 Easing Away 283
30 Haunted by Darkness 293
31 Second Childhood 303
32 Old Captain Death 313
Epilogue 321
Notes 327
Bibliography 347
Acknowledgements 351
Index 353
Vlll
Prologue
'I have just been appointed Poet Laureate', C Day-Lewis wrote to his American
academic friend, Al Gelpi, on January 1, 1968, the day the news was formally
announced.1 The revelation came halfway through his letter. Day-Lewis was not
one by nature to boast. The role, he explained to Gelpi, was often seen as 'being
put out to grass, or receiving the Kiss of Death'. The wife of John Betjeman, one
of his rivals for the job, had taken much the same line a few weeks earlier in a
newspaper interview. 'If John gets it,' she said, 'he'll never write a decent line of
poetry again.'2 She was to be proved wrong when Betjeman later succeeded Day-
Lewis.
The role of Poet Laureate can be both a blessing and a curse. It is an honour in
a poet's lifetime to be singled out. It offers a way of drawing attention to their
poetry, a mark of achievement in a career which usually offers few tangible
rewards, and the guarantee of a certain kind of immortality by being included in
a list that includes Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson - as well as the now for-
gotten Laurence Eusden, Nahum Tate, Thomas Shadwell. cThere were no decent
Poets Laureate between Tennyson and Ted Hughes' is a proposition that has of
late found its way onto more than one student examination paper.
To be Poet Laureate is also to lay yourself open to ridicule for being too
establishment, too close to the royal family in an age where such proximity is
taken as a disadvantage, and too ready to pop up with platitudes in verse to
mark national events. Only Kipling, Day-Lewis was warned by his old friend
W. H. Auden at the time of his appointment, 'was crazy enough to believe that,
in recording his personal highly idiosyncratic reactions to public events, he was
speaking with the Voice of England'.3 For Stephen Spender, being Laureate
meant that 'fellow poets, like fieldsmen standing round a batsman, wait for their
egregious colleague to hit up a poem celebrating a royal birth or other such
public event, which provides them with the chance to catch him out'.4
As a claim to any kind of enduring significance, then, to have been Laureate is
not the first quality a biographer would want to quote to recommend his
subject. Yet when I have mentioned the name of C Day-Lewis over the several
years I have been researching and writing this book, it has been one of three
details about him that appear to have lodged ever after in the public con-
sciousness. Top of the list by a long way is the identity of his son. 'Ah, he's the
father of Daniel Day-Lewis.' And indeed he is, though he did not live, as any
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