Cecil Day-Lewis, the forgotten

In Children Leaving Home, a poem written at the end of his life for his two younger offspring, Tamasin and Daniel, the Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72) posed the question ‘What shall I have to bequeath?’ His dispirited answer was ‘a sack of genes/I did not choose, some verse/Long out of fashion, a laurel wreath/Wilted…’

Time has proved him wrong. Half a century on from his death on 22nd May 1972, that same sack of genes has seen Daniel become the only three-times winner of the Oscar for Best Actor.

Meanwhile, Walking Away, written after he dropped off his elder son, Sean, at school – with the resonant final lines, ‘selfhood begins with a walking away/ And love is proved in the letting go’ – is on the GCSE syllabus. It’s now regularly included in public polls of the top ten poems of childhood and parenthood.

Only last year, a remake of The Beast Must Die, his 1938 crime thriller (he wrote detective fiction under the name Nicholas Blake), was translated to the small screen and won a Royal Television Society award. Yet for one so celebrated in his lifetime, such a harvest might be judged thin pickings. In 1934, when, with Stephen Spender and W H Auden, he was sweeping all before him as one of the left-wing ‘Thirties Poets’, T E Lawrence recommended Day-Lewis to Winston Churchill as ‘the one great man in these lands’.

Though he still has his champions (though his most vocal, his actress wife, Jill Balcon, died in 2009), he has not so far made that elusive transition into the canon of English literature. And 50 years after his death is a good moment to ask whether he will ever make it.

There was an enthusiastic campaign by the Royal Society of Literature to have him buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. It failed. He is buried with Jill next to his hero, Thomas Hardy, in Stinsford churchyard in Dorset. The reason for the Abbey’s decision has never been made public, but Balcon suggested publicly that it could have been influenced by disapproval of Day-Lewis’s complicated private life.

On the eve of the Second World War, he left his wife and two small children to set up home with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. Then in 1950 he split with her – a shock she never really recovered from – and married Balcon, 21 years his junior.

The domestic complications continued right up to his death at 68 from cancer. The setting was Lemmons on the outskirts of north London, home to Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. One of Balcon’s closest friends, Howard had had an affair in 1954 with Day-Lewis – ‘one of the worst things I ever did,’ she said in her autobiography, Slipstream.

A mixture of guilt, pity and love, she later said, made her take in Day-Lewis for his last weeks, enabling Balcon to complete a commitment at nearby Elstree Studios. The ménage was the source of endless gossip in literary circles. But in the last poem he wrote, Day-Lewis presents it as the final consolation he needed. ‘I accept my weakness with my friends’/Good natures sweetening each day my sick room.’

But if he is to be remembered and discussed in another 50 years, the entanglements of his life and loves won’t be sufficient reason.

In a 1968 interview, he picked out his poem O Dreams, O Destinations as the one that might endure. Appearing in Word Over All (1943), in nine perfectly crafted sonnets it charts a journey through childhood and delayed adolescence to adulthood.

It was his response to that famous line in a 1939 tribute to W B Yeats by Auden – ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – distancing himself from the political activism of the 1930s. DayLewis also pulled back from front-line involvement – ‘slipping the painter’ of his membership of the Communist Party.

But he continued to believe that poetry could make things happen, even if it rarely did. O Dreams, O Destinations captures beautifully, with all the attendant melancholy, that only uncertainty and questions without clear answers lie ahead.

Yet his usually autobiographical lyric poetry is also memorable, as Walking Away shows, when it is simultaneously most personal and most universal.

The House Where I Was Born is his heart-rending 1957 account of a visit back to the rectory where he was born in County Laois (an only child after his mother’s death when he was four). It is for every son and daughter who has questions they should have asked their now-dead parents.

Who makes it into the canon, and who doesn’t, is an enigmatic process. But, on this Day-Lewis anniversary, do give him a try.

‘I am absolutely sure his poetry is underrated,’ John Betjeman wrote in 1972 about his predecessor as Poet Laureate (from 1968 to 1972). ‘He persists in the mind.’

At home in Greenwich, 1968

Peter Stanford is author of C Day-Lewis: A Life (Continuum)