Left: Cecil Day-Lewis in 1968 with his wife, Jill, and children Daniel and Tamasin. |
Sins of the fathers
John Horder reviews a new biography of Cecil Day Lewis and reflects on the significance of father and son relationships
C Day-Lewis: A Life. By Peter Stanford.
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CECIL Day-Lewis accounted for a quarter of the Oxford gang of poets in the 1930s. It included W H Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender.
He was prodigiously gifted – not as intellectually brilliant a poet as Auden, but gifted all the same as a tenor. He had a beautiful voice, and was an outstanding performer of his own and other poets’ work. He was also extraordinarily attractive to the opposite sex.
Cecil wrote detective novels under the name of Nicholas Blake in order to pay the gas and electricity bills, and then to buy a secondhand Mercedes after he became Poet Laureate.
His children included Sean from his first marriage to Mary King, and Daniel, the actor, whose mother was Jill Balcon. They were crucial in the telling of the story he was trying desperately to comprehend: the overall meaning of his own life and death.
I must declare an interest. Cecil was the editor of my first hardback book of poems (A Sense of Being) in 1968 when he was poetry editor at Chatto and Windus with the Hogarth Press. He wrote the blurb. By the time it was made public that he was going to succeed John Masefield as Poet Laureate on New Year’s Eve 1967, after Masefield’s reign had gone on for too many years, Cecil had become ill from working too hard.
By then, he knew he didn’t have it in him to be the ‘Great Poet’ he had so desperately striven to become. This Peter Stanford just about gets round to admitting.
Throughout this tedious biography, Stanford who, like many biographers, doesn’t seem to have read one word or Freud or Jung, shows very little if any psychological understanding of Cecil the man. Cecil couldn’t stop himself from having affairs with the likes of Rosamund Lehmann and Elizabeth Jane Howard, both outstanding novelists, even when he knew he was only creating more heartbreak and misery for himself – and them.
Like many male poets educated at Oxford, he could never fully express his feelings, and only his anger and tears with the utmost difficulty.
He was trapped in the role of matinee idol all his life. In neglecting to include Daniel’s story, Stanford has failed to tell Cecil’s fully.
Ironically, Daniel, since Cecil’s death, has become the ‘Great Actor’ by over-identifying with every role he has played. He recovers after each of his films by making shoes with his own hands.
When playing Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989, Daniel appeared to be so convinced that Hamlet’s father was in reality Cecil, that he collapsed from physical andmental exhaustion and could not continue in the part. Some clues to all this can be found throughout these 326 pages.
Cecil’s father, the Revd Frank Day-Lewis, had been unable to express warmth and affection to Cecil. In turn, Cecil was unable to express warmth and affection to Daniel and Sean. Like father, like son.
Cecil’s poem ‘Walking Away’, which he dedicated to Sean, has vital insights in the telling of all their stories.
*
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.
The 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 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.
Cecil Day-Lewis
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