It is good to be reminded of the left-wing writers of the 1930s who took arms against the injustices of a society in which they were themselves privileged members. Sometimes they were over-hectic preachers —
Take off your coat: grow lean:
Suffer humiliation:
Patrol the passes alone
And eat your iron ration.
— but there was nobility in their cause. Nevertheless, the question has to be asked: is any biography of a near-contemporary writer anything but an example of the Higher Gossip? Curiosity about the life can masquerade as revived interest in the work.
This careful account of one such life can on the whole be absolved. Peter Stanford is at pains to associate the private life of his subject with the public poems he made out of that life; and in the process of decoding reveals how immediately autobiographical they are. Cecil Day-Lewis was not a ‘confessional’ poet, in the sense of some of the poets (mostly American) who followed him. However, when we learn here what particular emotional, temperamental and political millstones he felt himself being ground by, the more easily we appreciate the skill, and sometimes the success, with which he widens them from the personal into the more generally human. He was, in his heyday, a surprisingly ‘popular’ poet.
The ‘political’, the ‘generally human’, are specially significant in his case, but also with other well-known left-wing writers and poets of the period. They were fighting against such great odds that they seemed a sort of gang — the ‘MacSpaunday’ composite invented by Roy Campbell, a poet who (almost) belonged to the opposite camp: MacNeice (the least ideological but certainly on the Left), Spender, Auden, and Day-Lewis, the most publicly committed of all, an active member of the Communist party; MI5 kept a file on him.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in