From the floor of the Axe valley, it looks like a white dot. Looking out to
sea halfway up the eastern slope, almost hidden by trees and hedgerows, is
Brimclose, the cottage Cecil Day-Lewis and his wife Mary bought for £1,600
in 1938.
Day-Lewis, who later became poet laureate but is now perhaps best known as the
father of Daniel Day-Lewis, the actor, was at the time among the most
prominent young literary figures in Britain.
MI5 had long kept a file on him because of his pro-Soviet sympathies – though
it had found very little to arouse suspicion beyond the cut of his
fashionably “very wide” trousers. He was now having doubts about his
political affiliations. Moving to Brimclose with his wife and two young
sons, he intended to turn his back on politics and rediscover his poetic
voice.
He found it, but at great pain to himself and the women entangled in his life.
Brimclose became an apex of one of the great literary love triangles of the
second world war, from which the poet eventually escaped with the beautiful
young woman who became Daniel’s mother – only to betray her, too. DAY-LEWIS
brought with him to the Devonshire cottage the unresolved problems of an
unsatisfactory marriage.
The son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, he lost his mother when he was four. The
maternal streak in Mary, the daughter of a master at Sherborne, the school
he attended, appealed to him when they met; but his dreamy self-absorption
and her lack of confidence in her femininity – “I believe I am half a boy in
thought and feeling”, she wrote in her diary – had combined to make it a
long, chaste courtship.
Even when the couple had relaxed enough to consummate their relationship
shortly before they married, Day-Lewis had responded with a poem on the
transience of love. This must have been a difficult stanza to read for the
woman who had just surrendered her virginity to him:
His pretty came among the primroses
With open breast for him. No more denied
Seemed no more ideal. He was unsatisfied . . .
He had an affair with a friend’s wife when Mary was pregnant with their first
child, Sean. Now, after a decade together, the 34-year-old poet was eager
for the sort of sexual excitement Mary could not provide. He found it in a
lively farmer’s wife, Billie Currall.
They trysted at “their tree” in a small copse or on nights away in London and
Oxford, stays at local inns and on at least one occasion in the marital
bedroom at Brimclose when Mary was absent. Mary soon learnt of her husband’s
passionate and very public liaison. She steeled herself to sit it out.
“She knew Cecil would never be happy with the same woman for long,” reflected
Barbara Cameron, a local villager with whom Mary formed an intimate bond
that Day-Lewis later referred to as “an affair”.
After the outbreak of war in 1939 he helped out with haymaking and took
command of the local Home Guard platoon.
John Currall, Billie’s husband, turned a blind eye to her continued
infidelity; but in September 1940 she gave birth to Day-Lewis’s son,
William. There was a crisis meeting at the Curralls’ farm. Mary took Barbara
Cameron with her for moral support. John Currall agreed to treat the child
as his own.
Day-Lewis was let off the hook by all concerned. Mary blamed herself for
failing to meet his wants. Even John Currall made it easy. He didn’t ask for
any financial support in raising the child.
Day-Lewis’s remorse came, eventually, in his poetry, but his words were as
much an elegy for his love for Billie, now fading fast, as they were an
acknowledgement of his deceit.
Oh quickly they fade – the sunny esplanade,
Speed-boats, wooden spades, and the dunes where we’ve lain:
Others will be lying amid the sea-pinks sighing
For love to be undying, and they’ll sigh in vain.
This appeared in Poems in Wartime, a collection of new works written at
Brimclose. Among the enthusiastic critics was the novelist Rosamond Lehmann,
an old acquaintance. She wrote in the New Statesman that Day-Lewis “is a
writer with a profound and happy experience of love”.
Her words inspired him to invite her to dinner on a visit to London. The
chemistry between them was instant. Within days they became lovers.
Day-Lewis had tired, as Mary trusted he would, of Billie Currall; but an
affair with Lehmann was an altogether different proposition. There was
something very grown-up and demanding about Lehmann’s love. The daughter of
an MP, she possessed, in public at least, a core confidence in her ability
(and her beauty); but this had been dented by a series of broken
relationships, including two marriages. She saw Day-Lewis as her saviour
from “black despair” and felt destined to marry him.
At 40, three years older than Day-Lewis, her hair had started to go white,
which she often tinted an ultraviolet colour; but with her youthful skin and
carefully made-up cheeks she was, her biographer Selina Hastings wrote,
“more striking than ever”.
Day-Lewis was no less striking: tall and slender, with penetrating blue eyes,
thick fair hair and an increasingly worn but ever more handsome face.
By the end of 1941, Day-Lewis was settling uneasily into a double life between
Brimclose, a flat he shared with Lehmann in London and her cottage in the
Berkshire Downs. He established himself on her arm as part of the literary
circuit in London, where she helped him get a permanent post at the Ministry
of Information that kept him out of military service.
“I felt completely married to him,” Lehmann would later say, “as he did to me.”
She misrepresented his feelings, however. Having an adult relationship of
equals with a beautiful, talented and passionate woman like Lehmann was a
revelation and was inspiring poems that were to become among his most
celebrated. Yet a part of him remained the boy who had lost his mother and
craved Mary’s mothering. When he was ill, it was to Brimclose he retired for
pampering and sympathy.
Where Mary would give him as much freedom as he wanted without reproach,
Rosamond’s intensity in pursuit of marriage could be suffocating. Yet his
yearning for her was repeated time and time again. When they were apart one
Christmas Day, he wrote to her from Brimclose: “Oh my darling sweet, I wish
we were going for a walk together & then having a huge tea & then
going to bed & loving each other silly.”
Matters came to a head with the publication of his new collection of poetry,
Word Over All. Mary received her copy by post. Underneath the dedication –
To Rosamond Lehmann – her husband had written “Mary, with my love, Cecil,
September 1943”. When she turned to the poems she found The Album, a love
poem to his new mistress. It is one of his most admired works, later learnt
by rote by generations of schoolchildren.
His affair went from the realm of suspicion to fact in Mary’s mind. As was her
habit, she did not make a scene or demand an explanation. When he came down
to Devon, determined for once to explain himself, she agreed on an open
compromise – he would divide his time between her and Lehmann, at least
until Sean and Nicholas had left home. In her diary that night Mary wrote a
single word: “Peace”.
Amid the intense personal and emotional pain of being torn between Mary and
Rosamond, Day-Lewis found he had discovered a rich new vein. Heartache,
crudely put, brought out the best in him as a poet.
Lehmann was aware of this. In a letter she voiced her fear that one day
Day-Lewis would “return to the bosom of his family & relinquish me
forever & write beautiful poetry about separation”.
The end of the war in 1945 brought the questions about the love triangle back
into sharp focus. Mary’s mother died of cancer at the end of July. Day-Lewis
stayed at Brimclose for the funeral but left straightaway for London. Just
before his father’s departure, Sean overheard his mother break down. “I had
never heard her cry before. It was a terrible, wailing sound which drifted
down through the floor-boards of their bedroom . . .”
Day-Lewis began to find the strain of his double life unbearable. Rosamond
continued to aspire to marriage and he continued to spell out his unchanging
reservations. He found writing itself a struggle. Under siege from Lehmann,
he convinced himself that the time had come to leave his wife. He told her
at Brimclose after a visit to the pub.
To soften the blow, Day-Lewis agreed to spend most of the next three months in
Devon before vacating Brimclose permanently. But three months became four
then five. Mary was doing what she did best – looking after her husband’s
every need, and making few demands for herself. However, the future
encroached as each new letter from Lehmann arrived, or when Day-Lewis sat at
his desk and found himself unable to write anything.
He resumed the old compromise, dividing his time between the two women, but
this could not quell his disquiet. As 1946 turned into 1947 he reported to a
friend that he had just scrapped “all or nearly all” of a 600-word poem –
“the best part of a year’s work wasted but it was simply not good enough”.
By February 1947, with Britain in the grips of one of the worst winters on
record, Lehmann was confiding in a friend that Day-Lewis was “very far from
well, with a gastric ulcer boiling up, & dreadfully thin &
depressed”.
In an effort to save himself, Day-Lewis once again told Mary that he was going
to live permanently with Rosamond. On June 2 Mary drove him one last time to
Axminster to catch the first train of the day to London. En route, she broke
down and started crying uncontrollably. They turned back, Mary still
distraught and her husband by now furious.
Day-Lewis telephoned Lehmann. His inability to leave must finally, he said,
mean that he had to end his relationship with her. He and Mary spent the
next six days in near silence. “This life at present is HELL,” she wrote in
her diary.
As Mary reflected on the future of her marriage, she noticed Billie Currall
out and about with a new baby. During his darkest moments of despair over
Mary and Rosamond, Day-Lewis had once more renewed his friendship with
Currall. He had even given her a ring that had once belonged to his mother.
Now Currall had given birth to a son. He was named after her husband, John,
and no questions were raised over his parentage; but Mary later noted a
striking resemblance between John Currall junior and her own husband, and
between John and her second son, Nicholas. She wondered out loud in later
life to Sean if John was Day-Lewis’s child.
At the end of her life Billie, never an entirely reliable witness, told Sean
this was true. If so, it seems Currall never informed either Day-Lewis or
John himself.
Day-Lewis’s reputation as a writer had never been higher. But he wrote, he
once remarked, “not to be understood but to understand”. Now, in writing a
new poem, he at last understood the way out: it was no longer a question of
choosing between Rosamond and Mary, but of disentangling himself from both.
While Lehmann was still planning their future together, he wrote an elegy for
their lost love.
I imagine you really gone for ever.
Clocks stop. Clouds bleed. Flames numb.
My world shrunk to an echoing Memorial skull.
As he made his decision he met a beautiful young woman barely half his age. On
January 3, 1948, he appeared on BBC Radio’s Home Service on the Sunday
evening poetry magazine Time For Verse alongside a young actress, Jill
Balcon. It was her 23rd birthday.
“He was extremely courteous,” she recalled, “but he had a look of being light
years removed from where he was. Through mutual friends, I knew a lot about
the problems in his life. I left the studio sure he hadn’t really noticed
me.”
She was mistaken. Day-Lewis wanted her to join him on stage for a poetry
recital. She had other commitments, however. “I had to say no but regretted
it . . . He had charm, in the original sense of the word, a kind of magical
magnetism.”
The attraction was mutual. With her pale skin, thick blue-black hair, large
dark eyes and slight figure, Balcon was striking. Of eastern European Jewish
descent, she was the only daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, head of Ealing
Studios.
Day-Lewis spent Christmas 1949 at home in Devon, sending Lehmann a brief,
businesslike letter. But he posted Balcon as a present an anthology of
English verse with a foreword by himself. Over the Christmas holiday he
heard her performing on the radio and wrote at once to her. “This is the
first fan letter I have ever written to an actress, believe it or not . . .”
After celebrating his 21st wedding anniversary with Mary quietly at Brimclose,
he travelled up from Devon to Lehmann’s home in time to see in the new year.
Laurens van der Post and his wife were her guests and watched as, on the
stroke of midnight, she took her lover’s arm and said “isn’t it wonderful to
be together at this moment”. Van der Post saw Day-Lewis flinch.
Back in London, after dinner at the Maison Basque in Mayfair, he walked Balcon
home past what had once been George Eliot’s house in Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk.
They carved their initials in the tree outside. That night they became
lovers.
He could say nothing to Lehmann because he was scheduled to perform five days
later at a 16th birthday party for her daughter Sally. The party was a
success, guests reported. The next day, however, Day-Lewis sent Lehmann a
letter telling her he was leaving her. She wrote back at once demanding that
he come and explain himself.
Lehmann was convinced that a kind of madness had overtaken him. “He looked
like a murderer.”
Seeing how shaken Lehmann was, Day-Lewis weakly agreed not to see Balcon for
three months so as to test his love for her.
In fact he had already telephoned Balcon to ask her to spend the rest of her
life with him. Completely taken aback, she had said yes.
Day-Lewis’s next task was to tell Mary. In her diary she wrote simply: “Jill
Balcon comes into the picture. Everything has the feeling of nightmare, I
broke down.”
True to his word to Lehmann, Day-Lewis sat out the next three months without
seeing Balcon. While the lovers endured the separation, Rosamond and Mary
met at a Mayfair hotel. Mary had long experience of his habit of embarking
on relationships then tiring of them. Rosamond, by contrast, was struggling
with wounded pride. The only explanation she could see for Day-Lewis’s
behaviour was mental illness. She persuaded Mary that they should insist he
saw a psychiatrist.
Day-Lewis agreed and saw a consultant in Wimpole Street but was diagnosed of
sound mind. Lehmann summoned him to her cottage. When he returned in the
early hours to Balcon’s tiny flat in Pimlico he looked, Balcon said, “as if
he had been tortured”.
Sean and Nicholas Day-Lewis, although no longer children, were kept in the
dark about what was happening. Mary and Nicholas joined Day-Lewis at
Buckingham Palace to receive the CBE from King George VI. It was only a few
weeks’ later, after Mary had at last reluctantly agreed to divorce him, that
Day-Lewis took 16-year-old Nicholas to lunch in London. “The announcement,
finally made once we had reached his office, was a tremendous embarrassment
all around – very painful to him, obviously, and leaving me utterly
disbelieving,” Nicholas recalled. ON MONDAY September 11, 1950, Day-Lewis
left Brimclose for the last time. This time there would be no turning back.
He and Balcon had few possessions to bring to their first home, a studio at
73a Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, west London. While Day-Lewis worked at
a small table, Balcon would learn her lines out loud in the tiny bathroom
with the door shut so as not to disturb him.
Elizabeth Jane Howard visited soon after they had moved in. “The best thing
about the evening as far as I was concerned was finding that Cecil laughed
at the same things, and not only that but that he was just as good at being
convulsed to the point of tears as Jilly had always been.”
All who came into contact with the couple heard the laughter. Even Sean
Day-Lewis wrote: “When I encountered them for the first time after they had
set up house together, the release of all inhibitions was palpable. Their
continuous endearments and physical touchings, their constant proximity to
one another, suggested that they could hardly believe their luck.”
On April 27, 1951, Day-Lewis’s 47th birthday, they were married at Kensington
register office. Balcon was 26.
Lehmann continued to correspond with Mary but had no contact with Day-Lewis
except for publicly denouncing him when they came face to face at a
publishing party.
On September 17, 1953, Balcon presented Day-Lewis with his first daughter,
Lydia Tamasin, elder sister to Daniel. Day-Lewis’s life had never been
happier.
“Darling,” he told Balcon in a note attached to her Christmas present, “this
has been such a wonderful year, my happiest year . . . I adore you, sweet
Jill.”
But, as he had written so many times in his poetry, such happiness seldom
lasts long unchallenged. His attention had already been drawn to her closest
friend.
© Peter Stanford 2007 Extracted from C Day-Lewis: a Life, by Peter
Stanford, to be published by Continuum on May 22 at £20. It is available for
£18 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Life of Cecil Day-Lewis
1904 Born in Ireland, son of the Rev Frank Day-Lewis
1905 Family moves to England
1908 Mother, Kathleen, dies
1917-23 Sherborne school. Meets Mary King, daughter of inspirational
English teacher
1923-7 Wadham College, Oxford. With WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis
MacNeice becomes the nucleus of the future Thirties Poets
1928 Marries Mary. Two sons, Sean and Nicholas
1940 Has son with Billie Currall, farmer’s wife
1947 Possibly second son with Currall
1950 Divorced by Mary
1951 Marries Jill Balcon, actress. Daughter, Tamasin, and son, Daniel
1968 Appointed poet laureate
1972 Dies
