By Peter Stanford. London: Continuum. 2007. x + 368 pp. £25. ISBN 978-0-8264-8603-5

Brown, Richard Danson

English

Open Research Online

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsC Day-Lewis: A LifeJournal ItemHow to cite:Brown, Richard Danson (2010). C Day-Lewis: A Life. The Modern Language Review, 105(4) pp. 859–860.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© The Modern Language ReviewVersion: Version of RecordLink(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mhra/mlr/2010/00000105/00000003/art00047Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukOﬀprinted fromMODERN LANGUAGE REVIEWVOLUME 105, PART 3JULY 2010© Modern Humanities Research Association MLR, .,  zation of the ﬁction in the material and economic history of the Depression-eraSouth will be of interest to scholars of environmental literary criticism.U  K D FC Day-Lewis: A Life. By P S. London: Continuum. . x+ pp.£. ISBN ––––.Writing to Day-Lewis in , W. H. Auden congratulates his old friend on hisrecent Selected Poems: ‘e critics [. . .] think all our lot stopped writing  yearsago. How silly they are going to look presently’ (p. ). Peter Stanford agrees. Ina 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 hismoney on poems written aer the s, in particular his narrative verse (p. ).Despite his former celebrity, Day-Lewis has become a marginal ﬁgure in accountsof twentieth-century poetry. e general view has followed the vituperations ofhis bête noire Geoﬀrey Grigson that he was an Audenesque also-ran, whose mostcharacteristic work—the sequences From Feathers to Iron () and e MagneticMountain ()—refract Auden’s inﬂuence, vocabulary, and politics without suf-ﬁcient creative independence. In contrast with MacNeice and Spender, Day-Lewishas come to seem a poet whose work was conditioned by writing in Auden’s over-bearing shadow. As Stanford shows, such views are unfair. He exposes Grigson asmotivated more by malice and jealousy (pp. –). Similarly, the account of thefriendship between Auden and Day-Lewis suggests that this was initially a moreequal relationship, in which the older Day-Lewis oen disregarded Auden’s cat-egorical advice. But when reading Auden’s strictures on Transitional Poem (),it is hard to disagree with his criticism (‘you are not taking enough trouble aboutyour medium, your technique of expression’) of lines such as ‘From him rise upthe litanies of leaves | From the tormented wood, and semi-breves | Of birdsaccompany the simple dawn’ (p. ).One of Stanford’s great strengths is that he quotes copiously from the œuvre.Yet as the last quotation suggests, this becomes a double-edged virtue. On the onehand, Stanford gives a real sense of the range of Day-Lewis’s poetry; on the other,the reader is inevitably prodded into asking questions about the value of the work.Stanford is rightly wary of the biographer’s ‘temptation [. . .] of reading autobio-graphy into every line in [the subject’s] published work’ (p. ). With Day-Lewis,however, ‘reﬁned’ autobiography is never far away and became a cornerstone ofhis poetic. In a lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, he argued ‘We must love thepoet, in his work, before we ﬁnd critical reasons for approving that work’ (p. ).Stanford suggests that this position repudiates Leavisite orthodoxy and aligns Day-Lewis with his heroes, Hardy and Wordsworth. Yet it also poses the questionof how lovable Day-Lewis’s poetic persona is. His personal life was troubled: hehad a diﬃcult relationship with his clergyman father aer the early death of hismother. His two marriages were punctuated by a series of aﬀairs, including a Reviewslong, ultimately unhappy relationship with Rosamund Lehmann. ough Stanfordseeks to exculpate Day-Lewis from the charge of having aﬀairs to get poetic copy(p. ), his poetry is less reticent. In ‘e Widow Interviewed’, the widow of apoet 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,eComplete Poems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), p. ). e criticalissue is not so much whether Day-Lewis should have behaved better, but whetherhis behaviour led him to write good poems: the evidence from this biography, asfrom the Complete Poems, is mixed. ough the aﬀair with Lehmann provokedstrong individual poems during the s, too oen the reader gets the sense thatDay-Lewis uses poetry as a means of moral self-justiﬁcation.In this respect, though this sympathetic and detailed portrait makes a thoughtfulcase for Day-Lewis’s poetry, it also suggests some of the reasons why it has beeneclipsed in recent years. If the ‘ideological’ poems of the s now read as rathertoo earnest and humourless in their advocacy of social levelling (see ‘Learning toTalk’ from A Time to Dance ()), then the later personal poetry seems too oento settle for a special pleading for poets which ultimately does poetry few favours.T O U R D BJ. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. By J B-. Farnham: Ashgate. . xi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––.e rationale for Jeannette Baxter’s study on Ballard and Surrealism is the fact that,while his writing has oen been linked to Surrealism, no thorough analysis of thisconnection exists. Baxter hence seeks to address this shortfall, tying Surrealism tothe concept of ‘spectacular authorship’, which she delineates in her introduction.It is Baxter’s belief that this spectacular authorship allows readings of Ballard’sﬁctions as historically situated; much of her work is therefore concerned withcontradicting established readings of Ballard, such as those of McHale, Jameson,and Baudrillard.roughout, Baxter seeks to argue these contradictions through three mainstrategies. Firstly, she draws out careful intertextual relationships between Ballard’swork and the (politically engaged) texts and images of the Surrealist movement,and in doing so she oen, and convincingly, makes use of Surrealist images withinher text (it contains twenty-one black-and-white illustrations, including imagesfrom Ernst, Dali, and others). Secondly, she traces the evolution of Ballard’s texts.irdly, she makes reference to speciﬁc historical events which she argues can beread into Ballard’s texts.Aer using the introduction to locate Ballard ﬁrmly in relation to the historicalSurrealist movement, Baxter employs all three of these strategies throughout theﬁve chapters of the book. e ﬁrst of these strategies is most apparent in the ﬁrstsection, ‘Mapping a Surrealist Historiography’, in which Baxter makes extensiveuse of images, mainly from Max Ernst, to identify Ballard’s ﬁction as Surrealist,and therefore as a means of access to historical consciousness.

C Day-Lewis: A Life

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C Day-Lewis: A Life

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