Cecil Day-Lewis and his deeply-felt love of Dorset

Cecil (who wrote without using the hyphen in his name) was a great admirer of Hardy whose poetry influenced his own lyrics.

He gave talks on him and wrote introductions for several new editions of his hero’s novels (Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Under the Greenwood Tree). He also wrote a “Birthday poem for Thomas Hardy”.

“Great brow, frail frame – gone. Yet you abide

In the shadow and sheen,

All the mellowing traits of a countryside

That nursed your tragic-comical scene;

And in us, warmer-hearted and brisker-eyed

Since you have been”.

Rodney Legg, in Literary Dorset, seems critical of Day-Lewis’s presumption to end up beside the Hardy grave, as he was “someone with no earthly Dorset connection”.

The grave of Cecil Day-Lewis

This seems an unfair judgement. Ask the stone to say, to whom there belong? Who are we to judge whether someone has a deeply-felt Dorset connection? The Dorset-born-and-bred are more hospitable and inclusive than that.

Sailing in Lyme Bay, Cecil would admire the views of the Cobb and Golden Cap. Day-Lewis had always been drawn to Dorset (and Devon), from the time of his schooldays at Sherborne School (first term in 1917). He frequently returned to Sherborne thereafter and was married to Mary, his first wife, in Sherborne Abbey.

Their son Sean Day-Lewis, who was once a local reporter for the Bridport News, describes in C. Day-Lewis, An English Literary Life, 1980, a number of his father’s visits to Dorset over the years, to Plush, Abbotsbury, Lyme Regis, Litton Cheney, Piddletrenthide, Dorchester and Sherborne.

A son of Cecil's second marriage to Jill Balcon, Daniel Day-Lewis went on to become a much lauded actor, winning three Oscars for performances in films such as My Left Foot.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Sean Day-Lewis concludes his biography by describing the train journey from Waterloo to Dorchester for his father’s funeral at Stinsford: “The train took us to Dorchester and the Dorset landscape to which, like the other places of his life, he had never been more than a visitor”.

St Michael's Church, Stinsford, where Cecil Day-Lewis is buried

In that sense we are all visitors on this earth. When we are young, we don’t always appreciate what is right under our noses.

In The Buried Day (1960), Cecil writes of his Sherborne schooldays and how he was almost blind to the beauty of the place and took much for granted, including the rich Dorset accents which were just like background music to life at school; how the south-west wind “came to us from west Dorset across the Blackmore Vale, over country whose varied loveliness I find incomparable now, but which then I saw little of and cared for still less.” In 1922, when he won the school’s Barnes Elocution Prize, he knew nothing of the Dorset poet after whom it was named. “Thomas Hardy, who was living only a bicycle-ride away, might have been an undistinguished native of Northumberland for all that many of us knew about him”.

It was when staying in Lyme Regis in 1938 that Cecil and Mary discovered and bought a cottage in the village of Musbury, East Devon, close to Colyton, Axminster and Seaton.

I confess I am not a great admirer of his poetry (lyrical or revolutionary), although some poems stand out, like “Walking Away” and “The Conflict”. His translations of Virgil’s “The Aeneid” and “The Georgics” are of a different order. I was required to study his version of “The Aeneid” in the summer before I went up to Wadham College, Oxford (where C. Day-Lewis had himself been an undergraduate from 1923, graduating in 1927). I still dip into his excellent translations from the Latin (Sean says his father was given a little help by Maurice Bowra, who’d been his tutor at Wadham. Sir Maurice was Warden of Wadham by the time I went up).

Some may find it hard to understand why Day-Lewis was put under close surveillance by MI5, as a result of his political activities and membership of the Communist Party in the 1930s. MI5 put him on a blacklist and intercepted his letters, as disclosed in November 2003, when papers were released by the National Archive.

From his pro-Communist days, he saw the “ploughland curve as a graph of history” and, like the less politically-minded William Barnes and Hardy too, he expressed his concern for the unsung labourers who ploughed the land and his consciousness of the “difficult birth of our new seed”, his determination to “bear my part of the harvest” (from the controversial Prologue to Noah and the Waters, 1956).

The first verse of his poem that begins, “You that love England, who have an ear for her music”, ends with the words:

“Listen. Can you not hear the entrance of a new theme”.

His passionately-held Communist sympathies and convictions are reflected in poems like “You that love England”, “In Me Two Worlds” and the propagandistic “Tempt me no more”. From the latter:

“Comrades, my tongue can speak

No comfortable words,

Calls to a forlorn hope,

Gives work and not rewards.

O keep the sickle sharp

And follow still the plough:

Others may reap, though some

See not the winter through”.

From In Me Two Worlds (1935)

“But see, from vision’s height

March down the men to come.

And in my body rebel cells

Look forward to the fight”.

“They tap my nerves for power, my veins

To stain their banners red”…

“Out of the dawn their fire comes fast

To conquer and to change”.

In The Buried Day, Cecil admits that in the 1930’s “I could believe it permissible to do evil that good may come”.

Although a privileged and well-connected member of the ‘bourgeoisie’, and later the Establishment (or the ‘aesthetic aristocracy’), educated at Sherborne School and Oxford University, it may seem strange that someone who was effectively living in two worlds, who had slowly converted to Communism from his time at Oxford, had such an axe to grind and might well have been perceived as “a traitor to his class”. He sent a cheque to the Party’s election fund in 1933.

He had held and expressed far-Left views more forcefully from 1933-1939, having joined the struggle to ‘give birth to a new world’, yet he was soon able to find wartime employment at the Ministry of Information. Day-Lewis was spied upon by MI5, as a result of his political affiliations. He’d finally joined the Party in 1936 and was an active member for several years, until 1938/1939, loosening his formal ties to it by the time he first wrote to apply for a Civil Service Ministry job in August 1939. He admits that in 1938 he still felt no antipathy for Communist theory, “and not much for Communist practice”. He did not renounce the Party, but his active involvement faded or was suppressed, after he moved to Devon in August 1938. It is believed that he was disillusioned by the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, and by the “anti-cultural line” of the CPGB.

He was made a CBE in the King’s Birthday Honours in 1950, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1951.

I was bemused and taken aback to read Sean’s quotations from his theoretically internationalist father’s intolerant and culturally-insensitive letters of 1952, written from Bologna and Florence, when on a British Council lecture tour of Italy. He had soon realised that members of his audience couldn’t follow his talks closely, for linguistic reasons:

“It really is more exhausting than I’d anticipated, trying to put things over to a foreign audience, particularly when, in the Italian manner, some of them stroll in long after I’d started while others stroll out long before I’d finished as if one was conducting a service at a Roman Catholic cathedral” (from Bologna).

“I’m depressed by the utter futility of lecturing to these cow-eyed women and earnest, worried-looking men who can’t understand half I say…Bugger British culture and Italo-British relations. Viva the hearth and the bed!” (to Jill, his second wife, from Florence).

Having spent 35 years of my life with the British Council, I find those comments as offensive as some of the disagreeable elements of racism displayed in his Dorset detective novel, The Deadly Joker, which conveys several village residents’ attitudes to an ‘exotic’ Indian female character, Vera Paston, the murder victim.

Whether or not he was subjected to a sufficiently robust security vetting, Cecil managed to start work at the Publications Division at the Ministry of Information (M.O.I., based at London University’s Senate House) in March 1941. He was employed in the editorial section, writing captions for photographs. His novel Minute for Murder (one of many detective stories featuring Nigel Strangeways, written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake) was published in 1947. Drawing on his own experiences at the M.O.I., it is ironical that MI5 concerns are mentioned in this convoluted whodunit murder story, set in the Visual Propaganda Division of the Ministry of Morale. The most intriguing aspect of the plot is the disappearance on the day of the murder of a secret ‘PHQ14/150 file’ of security-censored, stopped or ‘canned’ photographic prints and negatives, some destined for destruction (photos showing details of secret apparatus such as radar devices on aircraft, positions of unexploded bombs, ships’ numbers, shoulder-flashes of a Division or of dangerously revealing events in the Pacific theatre) - a treasonable offence if stolen or intended for the eyes of an enemy agent.

In the first chapter of the novel, the main character, Nigel Strangeways, says to himself, “I shall start a new file: a Most Secret file; a dossier on the Division. I shall see how much, during the few remaining months I have to stay in Government service, I can find out about my colleagues. And I shall put it all down in my Most Secret file”.

The other of the Nicholas Blake detective novels that I have tried to read, The Deadly Joker, has the Dorset setting. I found it tiresome and not to my taste. The best thing about it is the name of the village, ‘Netherplash Cantorum’. I noted with interest that it was dedicated to the proprietors of the Brace of Pheasants in Plush. During the recent hot spell, I could at least sympathise with this sentence:

“The next day was grilling hot. Like any other English village on a Sunday afternoon, Netherplash Cantorum went into a coma”.

Stinsford has the writer’s bones - another village ‘of the singers’. Cecil Day-Lewis deserves his plot there, near to Hardy’s heart. Of his ‘songs’, the most enduring, for me, remain his inspiring translations of the poems of Virgil.

Luckily for Cecil Day-Lewis, he was not buried in Whitchurch Canonicorum. He would have had a lot of explaining to do to the ghost of Georgi Markov, the murdered Bulgarian dissident, who was buried there in October 1978 – but that’s another story.

We are all visitors on this earth.

Jim Potts is the author of This Spinning World, 43 stories from far and wide (which includes 6 stories set in Dorset). Published by Colenso Books

• ISBN-10 : ‎ 1912788020

• ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-1912788026

Link to his Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jim-Potts/e/B003N1JW2U%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

References and Sources:

C. Day-Lewis, An English Literary Life, Sean Day-Lewis (1980 and 1982)

The Buried Day, C. Day Lewis, London, 1960

“Poet laureate was on MI5's 'black list' of Communists”, The Independent, 14 November 2003

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/poet-laureate-was-on-mi5-s-black-list-of-communists-78297.html

“MI5 spied on future laureate Day Lewis”, The Guardian, 14 November, 2003

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/nov/14/books.artsandhumanities