C Day-Lewis: A Life by Peter Stanford

Abstract

MLR, 105.3, 2010 859 zation of the fiction in thematerial and economic history of the Depression-era South will be of interest to scholars of environmental literary criticism. University of Kansas Doreen Fowler C Day-Lewis: A Life. By Peter Stanford. London: Continuum. 2007. x+368pp. ?25. ISBN 978-0-8264-8603-5. Writing to Day-Lewis in 1963,W. H. Auden congratulates his old friend on his recent Selected Poems: 'The critics [. . .] think all our lot stopped writing 25 years ago. How silly they are going to look presently' (p. 283). Peter Stanford agrees. In a passionate epilogue, he argues that because Day-Lewis's work is unusually auto biographical', a biography is a necessary 'spur to read more of it', while putting his money on poems written after the 1930s, in particular his narrative verse (p. 325). Despite his former celebrity,Day-Lewis has become amarginal figure inaccounts of twentieth-century poetry. The general view has followed the vituperations of his bete noire Geoffrey Grigson that he was an Audenesque also-ran, whose most characteristic work?the sequences From Feathers to Iron (1931) and TheMagnetic Mountain (1933)?refract Auden's influence, vocabulary, and politics without suf ficient creative independence. In contrast with MacNeice and Spender, Day-Lewis has come to seem a poet whose work was conditioned bywriting inAuden's over bearing shadow. As Stanford shows, such views are unfair. He exposes Grigson as motivated more bymalice and jealousy (pp. 133-34). Similarly, the account of the friendship between Auden and Day-Lewis suggests that thiswas initially a more equal relationship, inwhich the older Day-Lewis often disregarded Auden's cat egorical advice. But when reading Auden's strictures on Transitional Poem (1929), it ishard to disagree with his criticism ('you are not taking enough trouble about your medium, your technique of expression') of lines such as 'From him rise up the litanies of leaves | From the tormented wood, and semi-breves |Of birds accompany the simple dawn' (p. 81). One of Stanford's great strengths is that he quotes copiously from the ceuvre. Yet as the last quotation suggests, this becomes a double-edged virtue. On the one hand, Stanford gives a real sense of the range ofDay-Lewis's poetry; on the other, the reader is inevitably prodded into asking questions about the value of thework. Stanford is rightlywary of the biographer's 'temptation [...] of reading autobio graphy into every line in [the subject's] published work' (p. 13).With Day-Lewis, however, 'refined' autobiography is never far away and became a cornerstone of his poetic. In a lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, he argued 'Wemust love the poet, in his work, before we find critical reasons for approving thatwork' (p. 249). Stanford suggests that this position repudiates Leavisite orthodoxy and aligns Day Lewis with his heroes, Hardy and Wordsworth. Yet it also poses the question of how lovable Day-Lewis's poetic persona is.His personal lifewas troubled: he had a difficult relationship with his clergyman father after the early death of his mother. His two marriages were punctuated by a series of affairs, including a 86o Reviews long, ultimately unhappy relationship with Rosamund Lehmann. Though Stanford seeks to exculpate Day-Lewis from the charge of having affairs to get poetic copy (p. 287), his poetry is less reticent. In 'TheWidow Interviewed', thewidow of a poet justifies his extra-marital sallies on the grounds that 'One place he might find [...] a poem's crude and filthy ore, was |Between a woman's legs' (Day-Lewis, The Complete Poems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 631). The critical issue is not somuch whether Day-Lewis should have behaved better, but whether his behaviour led him towrite good poems: the evidence from this biography, as from the Complete Poems, ismixed. Though the affairwith Lehmann provoked strong individual poems during the 1940s, too often the reader gets the sense that Day-Lewis uses poetry as ameans ofmoral self-justification. In this respect, though this sympathetic and detailed portraitmakes a thoughtful case forDay-Lewis's poetry, it also suggests some of the reasons why ithas been eclipsed in recent years. If the 'ideological' poems of the 1930s...