Cecil Day-Lewis

For British writer and lay theologian, see C. S. Lewis.

"Nicholas Blake" redirects here. For other uses, see Nicholas Blake (disambiguation).

Cecil Day-Lewis CBE
Born	(1904-04-27)27 April 1904 Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland
Died	22 May 1972(1972-05-22) (aged 68) Monken Hadley, Greater London, England
Resting place	St Michael's Church, Stinsford, Dorset, England
Occupation	Poet novelist
Nationality	British Irish
Alma mater	Wadham College, Oxford
Spouse	Constance Mary King ​ ​ (m. 1928; div. 1951)​ Jill Balcon ​ (m. 1951)​
Children	4, including Tamasin and Daniel
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
In office 2 January 1968 – 22 May 1972
Monarch	Elizabeth II
Preceded by	John Masefield
Succeeded by	John Betjeman

Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (or Day Lewis; 27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways.

During World War II, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information for the U.K. government, and also served in the Musbury branch of the British Home Guard. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Life and work

Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally border, Queen's County (now known as County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of Frank Day-Lewis, a Church of Ireland rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906). 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 ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames. In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), 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."

IS IT FAR TO GO?

Is it far to go?
A step — no further.
Is it hard to go?
Ask the melting snow,
The eddying feather.

What can I take there?
Not a hank, not a hair.
What shall I leave behind?
Ask the hastening wind,
The fainting star.

Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song.

Who will say farewell?
The beating bell.
Will anyone miss me?
That I dare not tell —
Quick, Rose, and kiss me.

(c. 1940)

After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Cecil 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 at Wadham College, Oxford. In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, 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, Helensburgh, Scotland (now Lomond School). 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 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 Second World 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 (1943), 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 (1947). Day-Lewis became a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1950 Birthday Honours. He later taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. During 1962–1963, he was the Norton Professor at Harvard University. Day-Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield. His appointment came after appointments secretary John Hewitt consulted with Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford (who stated that Day-Lewis "produced run of the mill poetry but nothing particularly outstanding") and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, chair of the Poetry Society (who stated that Day-Lewis was "a good administrative poet" and "a safe bet").

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.

Headstone of Cecil Day-Lewis in the Stinsford churchyard.

Cecil Day-Lewis died from 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 arranged to be buried near the author's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset.

Day-Lewis was the father of four children. His first two children, with Constance Mary King, were Sean Day-Lewis (3 August 1931–9 June 2022), a TV critic and writer, and Nicholas Day-Lewis, who became an engineer. His children with Balcon were Tamasin Day-Lewis, a television chef and food critic, and Daniel Day-Lewis, who became an award-winning actor. Sean Day-Lewis wrote a biography of his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).

Daniel Day-Lewis donated his father's archive of poetry to the Bodleian Library.

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. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modelled on W. H. Auden, but Day-Lewis developed the character as a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later 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 Second World War 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 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 widespread purges, repression, and executions under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Day-Lewis gradually became disillusioned with communism. In his autobiography, The Buried Day (1960), he renounces former communist views. His detective novel, The Sad Variety (1964), 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.

Selected works

Poetry

English Heritage blue plaque of Cecil Day-Lewis in Greenwich, London

• Transitional Poem (1929)
• From Feathers to Iron (1931)
• Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935)
• A Time to Dance and Other Poems (1935)
• Overtures to Death (1938)
• Word Over All (1943)
• Short Is the Time (1945)
• Selected Poems (1951)
• Collected Poems (1954)
• Pegasus and Other Poems (1957)
• The Gate, and Other Poems (1962)
• The Whispering Roots and Other Poems (1970)
• The Complete Poems of C. Day-Lewis (1992)
• Editor (with L. A. G. Strong): A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920–1940 (1941)
• Editor (with John Lehmann): The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915–1955 (1956)

Essay collections

• A Hope for Poetry (1934)
• Poetry for You (1944)
• The Poetic Image (1947)

Translations

• Virgil's Georgics (1940)
• Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin (1946)
• Virgil's Aeneid (1952)
• Virgil's Eclogues (1963)

Novels

• The Friendly Tree (1936)
• Starting Point (1937)
• Child of Misfortune (1939)

Novels for children

• Dick Willoughby (1933)
• The Otterbury Incident (1948)

Nigel Strangeways

• A Question of Proof (1935); First US edition by Harper and Brothers (1935)
• Thou Shell of Death (1936; First US edition by Harper and Brothers published as Shell of Death) (1936)
• There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
• The Beast Must Die (1938), adapted for the cinema by Román Viñoly Barreto in Argentina (1952) and by Claude Chabrol in France (1969), and in Britain in 2021 as The Beast Must Die television series.
• The Smiler with the Knife (1939). Serialised News Chronicle, 1939
• Malice in Wonderland (1940; also published as Murder with Malice. U.S. title: The Summer Camp Mystery)
• The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941; also published as The Corpse in the Snowman)
• Minute for Murder (1947)
• Head of a Traveller (1949)
• The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
• The Whisper in the Gloom (1954; also published as Catch and Kill)
• End of Chapter (1957)
• The Widow's Cruise (1959)
• The Worm of Death (1961)
• The Sad Variety (1964)
• The Morning after Death (1966)

Non-series novels

• A Tangled Web (1956; also published as Death and Daisy Bland)
• A Penknife in My Heart (1958)
• The Deadly Joker (1963)
• The Private Wound (1968)

Short stories

• "A Slice of Bad Luck" (The Bystander, 1 December 1935. Reprinted in Detection Medley, ed. John Rhode [Hutchinson, 1939]. Also published as "The Assassin's Club". Reprinted in Murder by the Book, ed. Martin Edwards, 2021)
• "Mr Prendergast and the Orange" (Sunday Dispatch, 27 March 1938. Reprinted in Bodies from the Library, Volume 3, ed. Tony Medawar [2020]. Also published as "Conscience Money".)
• "It Fell to Earth" (The Strand Magazine, June 1944. Also published as "Long Shot". Reprinted in Murder at the Manor, ed. Martin Edwards, 2016)
• "The Snow Line" (The Strand Magazine, February 1949. Also published as "A Study in White" and "A Problem in White". Reprinted in Silent Night, ed. Martin Edwards, 2015)
• "Sometimes the Blind See the Clearest" (Evening Standard, 18 March 1963. Also published as "Sometimes the Blind". Reprinted in The Long Arm of the Law, ed. Martin Edwards, 2017)

Radio plays

• Calling James Braithwaite. BBC Home Service, 20 and 22 July 1940. (Published in Bodies from the Library, Volume 1, edited by Tony Medawar [2018].)

Autobiography

• The Buried Day (1960)

Bibliography

• Sean Day-Lewis, Cecil Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980)
• Peter Stanford, C. Day-Lewis: A Life (2007) review

See also

• List of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric

External links

• Cecil Day-Lewis at IMDb
• Petri Liukkonen. "Cecil Day-Lewis". Books and Writers.
• Day-Lewis's poem '"Newsreel" read over footage from 1930s Pathe newsreels
• C. Day Lewis, A Revised Bibliography, 1929–39 and Index of MSS Locations with Introductory Notes Archived 26 October 2009 at the Wayback Machine by Nick Watson, (a 65-page booklet, Radged Press, 2003)
• The Volunteer – An ode to the International Brigade by Cecil Day Lewis