The multi-talented writer Cecil Day-Lewis is best known to the present-day public as the father of the actor Daniel, but he has at least as great a claim to lasting fame.
He was born in Ballintubber, Co Laois, exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, but his clergyman father brought him to London in infancy to be reared, following the death of his mother. He returned to Ireland frequently for holidays, however. On his mother's side he was related to Oliver Goldsmith.
He was educated at Sherborne and then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he became part of the group of poets that gathered around W.H. Auden. With Auden, he edited the anthology Oxford Poetry in 1927. His own first collection of poems, Beechen Virgil, had appeared two years before.
In 1928, he married Constance M. King, the daughter of his old master at Sherborne, and he taught at three schools in Oxford, Helensburgh and Cheltenham, but teaching didn't appeal to him very much. In the 1930s, he became part of a group of left-wing poets, which included Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, who gave voice to the prevalent feeling of disenchantment and social discontent.
In 1935, Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income by writing a detective novel. (He needed money to repair the roof of the cottage he was living in at the time.) His agent advised him to keep the roles of poet and novelist separate, so he adopted the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. For his first novel, A Question of Proof, he created the character of Nigel Strangeways, who became the hero of 16 of his 20 detective stories.
"Nigel's six feet sprawled all over the place; his gestures were nervous and a little uncouth; a lock of sandy-coloured hair dropping over his forehead, and the deceptive naïveté of his face in repose gave him a resemblance to an overgrown prep schoolboy. His eyes were the same blue as his uncle's, but shortsighted and non-committal. Yet there was an underlying similarity between the two. A latent, sardonic humour in their conversation, a friendliness and simple generosity in their smiles, and that impression of energy in reserve which is always given by those who possess an abundance of life directed towards consciously realised aims." (Thou Shell of Death, 1936.)
His early crime novels are full of literary references, from Shakespeare through Blake and Keats to Arthur Hugh Clough and A.E. Housman. Indeed, Thou Shell of Death was a contemporary version of Cyril Tourneur's gory 1607 play, The Revenger's Tragedy. Malice in Wonderland (1940) and The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) are among the best of his detective novels but perhaps the finest of them all is The Beast Must Die (1938).
This tells of a father seeking revenge on the hit-and-run driver who killed his child. The title was taken from the text of Brahms's Four Serious Songs and paraphrased a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes: "The beast must die, the man dieth also, yea both must die." The book has the wonderful opening: "I am going to kill a man. I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to kill him." The plot follows the emergence of contradictory emotions as good (love) comes from evil (murder and hatred), but neither emotion is able to overcome the rigours of fate, however much the characters try to control the course of events. The story was made into a film in 1969, directed by Claude Chabrol.
From the mid-1930s, Day Lewis was able to make a living from his writing and during the decade he published several collections of poems under the influence of Auden, among them From Feathers to Iron (1932), Collected Poems (1935), A Time to Dance and Other Poems (1935) and Overtures to Death (1938). By the end of the 1930s, however, he was becoming gradually disillusioned with the communist views he had adopted in his youth. His style was no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional lyricism. Some critics believe he reached his full stature as a poet in the collection Word Over All (1943).
From 1941, Day-Lewis worked at the Ministry for Information as an editor in the publications department. At the end of the second World War, he joined the firm Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor. His first marriage was dissolved in 1951 and he married the actress Jill Balcon, by whom he fathered Daniel Day-Lewis.
From 1951 to 1956 he was professor of poetry at Oxford and lectured in several universities during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1968, he succeeded John Masefield as Poet Laureate.
Day-Lewis was also a very fine critic and among his best works were A Hope for Poetry (1934), Poetry for You (1945) and Enjoying Poetry (1952). Another of his talents was as a translator, his main publications here being versions of Virgil's Georgics (1940), Aeneid (1952) and Eclogues (1963).
A great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he arranged that he should be buried as close as possible to Hardy's grave in Stinsford churchyard, Dorset. The following stanza from A Failure shows his tenacious attitude to life:
"But it's useless to argue the
why and wherefore
When a crop is so thin.
There's nothing to do but set
the teeth
And plough it in."