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C(ecil) Day Lewis (1904-1972) - pseudonym NICHOLAS BLAKE | |
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Anglo-Irish poet, critic, and educator. Cecil Day-Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968. He also gained fame as a detective story writer under the name Nicholas Blake. In sixteen of his twenty mystery novels the hero was Nigel Stangeways, an Oxford graduate, who was modeled after W.H. Auden. Lewis was married twice and fathered five children, one of whom is the Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. "Nigel's six feet sprawled all over the place; his gestures were nervous and 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 noncommittal. Yet there was an underlying similarity between the two. A latent, sardonic humor 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." (from Thou Shell of Death, 1936) Cecil Day-Lewis was born at Ballintubber, Queen's County (now county Laois), Ireland. His father was a Protestant clergyman. After his mother died, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt. Day Lewis graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1927. In Oxford he became part of the circle that gathered around W.H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His own first collection of poems, BEECHEN VIRGIL, appeared in 1925. Tempt me no more, for I In his youth Day-Lewis adopted communist views but after the late 1930s he gradually became disillusioned. As an act of rebellion, he also removed the hyphen in his name, but reinstated it later in life. In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master, and worked as a schoolmaster at three schools. In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel. He needed money to repair the roof of the cottage he was then living in. His agent advised him to separate the roles of detective novelist and poet. Thus he created Nigel Strangeways, the hero of sixteen of his twenty books. The first novel, A QUESTION OF PROOF, published under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, was written to pay for the repair of a leaky roof. For Day-Lewis's surprise, it became a selection of the Crime Club and eventually was followed by nineteen more crime novels. From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. 'Well, I've not been in jail yet. I did get fined for sitting in Trafalgar Square. It was one of those Committee of a Hundred picnics.' By the end of the decade Day-Lewis was living in Devon. He had published several collections of poems under the influence of Auden, among others FROM FEATHERS TO IRON (1932), COLLECTED POEMS (1935), and A TIME TO DANCE AND OTHER POEMS (1935). From 1941 he worked at the Ministry of Information as an editor in the publication department. At the end of the war he joined the firm Chatto&Windus as a director and senior editor. In WORD OVER ALL (1943) Day-Lewis distanced him from Auden and reached his full stature as a poet. The poems also reflected his personal life, an affair which resulted in a son, and the relationship with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann. In 1951 Day-Lewis married actress Jill Balcon, with whom he lived in a large Georgian house in Greenwich. He was professor of poetry at Oxford in 1951-56, and a lecturer in the 1950s and 1960s at several universities. In succession to John Masefield he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968. Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, Honorary Member of the American Academy, Member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Day-Lewis died on May 22, 1972, in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elisabeth Jane Howard, where he and his wife were staying. A great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he had arranged that he should be buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford churchyard. Day-Lewis's early mystery novels are full of literary references, from Shakespeare to Blake, Keats, Arthur Hugh Clough and A.E. Housman. A Question of Proof was set in similar preparatory school milieu, where he was teaching at the time. After starting his relationship Rosamond Lehmann, Day Lewis dedicated HEAD OF A TRAVELER (1949) to her children. Among Day-Lewis's best mysteries are THE BEAST MUST DIE (1938), a story of a father seeking revenge on the hit and run driver who killed his child, THE CASE OF THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1941), A TANGLED WEB (1956), based on a real murder case, and END OF CHAPTER (1957). The critic and award-winning mystery writer H.R.F. Keating included in 1987 The Beast Must Die among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. Day Lewis's own son was almost run over in a circumstance similar to that which the story describes. It begins with the promise: "I am going to kill a man... I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him." The title of the story was taken from the text of Brahm's Four Serious Songs, a paraphrase of the Book of Ecclesiastes: "The beast must die, the man dieth also, yea both must die." THE PRIVATE WOUND (1968) concerns the problems that divide Ireland, and was considered the most autobiographical of the author's works in the mystery genre. THOU SHELL OF DEATH (1936) was a contemporary version of Cyril Tourneur's gory 1607 play, The Revenger's Tragedy. Day-Lewis's best-known children's book is THE OTTERBURY INCIDENT (1948), a story of a group of kids, who outwit criminals. In DICK WILLOUGHBY (1933) Day-Lewis depicted the life of a young Elizabethan, adding into his adventures secret tunnels, sword-play, an evil Catholic kinsman, and an innocent romance. Nigel Strangeways: Oxford graduate, six feet tall, blue eyed, always at the disposal of Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard, the British Secret Service, and his many friends. In Thou Shell of Death Stangeways meets and marries explorer Georgia Cavendish, but after WW II he continues as a widower. During the years, Nigel Strangeways ages and changes, and sees the world less idealistically. It is told that the primary model for the detective was the writer W.H. Auden. - For further reading: C. Day Lewis by Clifford Dyment (1955);The Buried Day by C. Day Lewis (1960); C. Day Lewis, The Poet Laureate: A Bibliography by Geoffrey Handley-Taylor and Timothy d'Arch Smith (1968); C. Day Lewis by Joseph N. Riddel (1971); C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life by Sean Day-Lewis (1980); Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keatring (1987); St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996) - Other university professors who have published mystery novels: Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin. Selected works:
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