Cecil Day-Lewis


Cecil Day-Lewis, often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the British government's Ministry of Information and also served in the Musbury branch of the Home Guard. He was the father of the actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis and the chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Life and work

Cecil Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally border, Queen's County, Ireland. He was the son of Frank Day-Lewis, a Church of Ireland rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake. Some of his family were from England and the family had originally been from Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire, and settled in Ireland in the late 1860s. His father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's and adoptive father's surnames. In his autobiography The Buried Day, 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."
After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Day-Lewis was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. Day-Lewis's first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil and other Poems, appeared in 1925.
In 1928 Day-Lewis married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne teacher. Day-Lewis worked as a schoolmaster in three schools, including Larchfield School in Helensburgh, Scotland. During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, to whom he dedicated his 1943 poetry collection Word Over All. In 1948 Day-Lewis met the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon, at the recording of a radio programme and began an affair with her that year. He conducted simultaneous relationships with his wife Constance Mary, who lived with their two sons in Dorset, with Lehmann, who lived in Oxfordshire, and with Balcon. Finally he broke with his wife and Lehmann, and after his marriage was dissolved in 1951, he married Balcon, but he was no more faithful to her than he had been to his wife or Lehmann. Jill's father was deeply unhappy about the scandalous affair since she was named publicly as co-respondent in Day-Lewis' divorce. He disinherited her and cut off all relationships with her and Day-Lewis.
During the Second World War, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell's experience of the BBC. During the war his work was less influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All, when he finally distanced himself from Auden. After the war, he joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor.
In 1946 Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image. He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1950 Birthday Honours. He later taught poetry at the University of Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. During 1962–1963, he was the Norton Professor at Harvard University in the United States. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1968, in succession to John Masefield. His appointment came after the appointments secretary John Hewitt consulted with Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, chair of the Poetry Society.
Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
Day-Lewis died of pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972, aged 68, at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his family were staying. As a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he had arranged to be buried near Hardy's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset.
Day-Lewis was the father of four children. His first two, with Constance Mary King, were Sean Day-Lewis, a television critic and writer, and Nicholas Day-Lewis, an engineer. His children with Balcon were Tamasin Day-Lewis, a television chef and food critic, and Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, an award-winning actor. Sean wrote a biography of his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life. Daniel donated his father's archive of poetry to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

Nicholas Blake

In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to increase his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof, under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. He created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has access to official crime investigations. He published nineteen further crime novels. From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. Four of the Blake novels – A Tangled Web, A Penknife in My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound – do not feature Strangeways.
Minute for Murder is set against the background of Day-Lewis's wartime experiences in the Ministry of Information. Head of a Traveller features as a principal character a well-known poet, frustrated and suffering writer's block, whose best poetic days are long behind him. Readers and critics have speculated whether the author is describing himself or one of his colleagues or has entirely invented the character.

Political views

In his youth and during the disruption and suffering of the Great Depression, Day-Lewis adopted communist views, becoming a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1935 to 1938. His early poetry was marked by didacticism and a preoccupation with social themes. In 1937 he edited The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution. In the introduction, he supported a popular front against a "Capitalism that has no further use for culture". He explains that the title refers to Prometheus bound by his chains, quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to Prometheus Unbound and says the contributors believe that "the Promethean fire of enlightenment, which should be given for the benefit of mankind at large, is being used at present to stoke up the furnaces of private profit". The contributors were: Rex Warner, Edward Upward, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Barbara Nixon, Anthony Blunt, Alan Bush, Charles Madge, Alistair Brown, J.D. Bernal, T.A. Jackson and Edgell Rickword.
After the late 1930s, which were marked by the purges, repression, and executions under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Day-Lewis gradually became disillusioned with communism. In his autobiography, The Buried Day, he renounces his former communist views. His detective novel The Sad Variety contains a scathing portrayal of doctrinaire communists, the Soviet Union's repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the ruthless tactics of Soviet intelligence agents.

Works

Poetry

  • Transitional Poem
  • From Feathers to Iron
  • Collected Poems 1929–1933
  • A Time to Dance and Other Poems
  • Overtures to Death
  • Word Over All
  • Short Is the Time
  • Selected Poems
  • Walking Away
  • Collected Poems
  • Pegasus and Other Poems
  • The Gate, and Other Poems
  • The Whispering Roots and Other Poems
  • The Complete Poems of C. Day-Lewis
  • Editor : A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920–1940
  • Editor : ''The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915–1955''

    Essay collections

  • A Hope for Poetry
  • Poetry for You
  • ''The Poetic Image''

    Translations

  • Virgil's Georgics
  • Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin
  • Virgil's Aeneid
  • Virgil's ''Eclogues''

    Novels written under his own name

Novels

  • The Friendly Tree
  • Starting Point
  • ''Child of Misfortune''

    Novels for children

  • Dick Willoughby
  • ''The Otterbury Incident''

    Novels written as Nicholas Blake

[Nigel Strangeways]
  • A Question of Proof ; First US edition by Harper and Brothers
  • Thou Shell of Death
  • There's Trouble Brewing
  • The Beast Must Die, adapted for the cinema by Román Viñoly Barreto in Argentina and by Claude Chabrol in France, and in Britain in 2021 as The Beast Must Die television series.
  • The Smiler with the Knife. Serialised News Chronicle, 1939
  • Malice in Wonderland
  • The Case of the Abominable Snowman
  • Minute for Murder
  • Head of a Traveller
  • The Dreadful Hollow
  • The Whisper in the Gloom
  • End of Chapter
  • The Widow's Cruise
  • The Worm of Death
  • The Sad Variety
  • ''The Morning after Death''
    Non-series novels
  • A Tangled Web
  • A Penknife in My Heart
  • The Deadly Joker
  • ''The Private Wound''

    Short stories

  • "A Slice of Bad Luck"
  • "Mr Prendergast and the Orange"
  • "It Fell to Earth"
  • "The Snow Line"
  • "Sometimes the Blind See the Clearest"