The literary wife: Working with the widow

It was the actress Jill Balcon who first drew my attention to Cecil Day-Lewis's poem about literary widows. She hoped, she said, that she had avoided the pitfalls he described. Published in 1965, "The Widow Interviewed" was both an affectionate satire and a commentary on how the memory of a celebrated husband can tend towards hagiography.

'The Poet' (well, that's the way her generation

Talked) 'the Poet wrote these for me when first - '

(she said, touching the yellowed manuscripts

Like a blind girl gentling a young man's hair)

- 'When first we were bethrothed. I have kept them:

The rest I had to sell.'

The figure of the literary widow, guarding the great man's work and tending the flame of his reputation, is a familiar one. Day-Lewis's evocation was very loosely based on two women who had done just that: Willa Muir, wife of the Scottish poet, Edwin Muir, and Helen Thomas, who devoted the rest of her long life to immortalising her poet spouse, Edward Thomas, who died at 39 in the trenches of the First World War.

To the cast list can be added others such as Kathleen Tynan, Sonia Orwell, Caitlin Thomas and Beatrice Behan. Valerie Eliot, like many literary widows a younger second wife, continues to enjoy a high profile as well as a reputation for unpredictability in exercising her posthumous power over the estate of her late husband, T S Eliot. She is, for instance, reported to have tried to block Peter Ackroyd's 1984 life of Eliot by refusing him permission to quote from the poems, though, her critics point out, she was happy to allow Andrew Lloyd Webber to use them in his West End musical, Cats.

Researching and writing the first authorised biography of Day-Lewis brought me into contact with Natasha Spender, whose husband, Stephen, was, like Day-Lewis, one of the lionised "Poets of the Thirties". Her St John Wood's home is a treasure-trove of documents about 20th-century literary life and her memories carry you back effortlessly to the days when Isaiah Berlin, WH Auden and Igor Stravinsky came to dinner.

But it has been with Jill Balcon that I have worked most closely, and who has given me my first-hand knowledge of "working with the widow". When she married Day-Lewis in 1951, he was 21 years her senior. She had made an eye-catching film debut in 1947 as Madeleine Bray in Nicholas Nickleby, alongside Sybil Thorndike and Stanley Holloway. She was a memorable Zenocrate in Tyrone Guthrie's Old Vic production of Tamburlaine. She continues to work hard, as a sought-after reader of audio books and poetry.

Biographers divide roughly down the middle over whether the involvement of the surviving family of their subject is a blessing or a curse on their efforts. Some argue in favour of simply being left alone with the archive to come to their own judgement with no outside "interference".

I come down on the other side of the argument. If anyone has special insight into Day-Lewis's poetry and his life, then it must be Balcon. She was there when many of the most celebrated works of the second half of his life were written. Usually she was the first reader when he would emerge with a draft from his study. Later, she would share a recital platform with him as he read from his work. Since his death in 1972, she has combined career and motherhood (their children are the cookery writer, Tamasin, and the award-winning actor, Daniel) with editing several editions of Day-Lewis's poetry, most recently a selection to mark his centenary in 2004.

We met quite by chance. I had written a newspaper article about grief and the underrated trauma of losing your parents when you are on the threshold of middle age. Radio 4's Woman's Hour asked me on to talk about it. Jill Balcon was my fellow guest. She is, it turned out, much admired by Jenni Murray.

We carried on talking off-air with the result that I visited her home in Hampshire to write a newspaper profile. While I was there, she showed me the archives she had kept of her husband's papers. And from that glimpse, a biography developed. Slowly.

Though her husband had - unlike TS Eliot - left no final instructions to bar co-operation with a life, she was at first hesitant about my approach. She had been unhappy with a portrait of Day-Lewis, published by her stepson, Sean, in 1980. Moreover she was candid in addressing some of the potential conflicts involved in the genre, informed by her own attitude to biographies which is, she admits, ambiguous. She likes reading them but has reservations about the making public of private lives.

Nevertheless she had, I discovered early on, a down-to-earth view of what publishers were looking for in a literary life. She was not, as might be imagined, stranded in an age when biographies and autobiographies could, like her husband's own elegant 1960 offering The Buried Day, leave out the most contentious personal details without attracting any adverse comment.

Some of those details are now long in the public domain. He had an affair (and a child) in the early 1940s with a neighbour, Billie Currall, soon after he, his first wife and two sons had moved to Devon. This was "revealed" in the 1980 memoir, though Day-Lewis had written about it himself both in his poetry and, in 1968 but without naming names, in The Private Wound, the final one of his series of detective novels produced under the pen name Nicholas Blake.

Public too is his long attachment throughout the 1940s with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, but this still causes Balcon particular pain. She had met Day-Lewis when he was living part of the time with Lehmann (though still married to his first wife). Balcon was subsequently attacked by Lehmann's circle, who blamed the split on her, rather than the long-term failure of the Day-Lewis/Lehmann relationship, eloquently chronicled in their letters, now in the archive of King's College, Cambridge, and summed up in his poem "The Neurotic".

Balcon's wounds are still sensitive after over five decades. Why, she asked me more than once, did the subject of Lehmann always come up whenever Day-Lewis was discussed? The biographer in me knew the answer. Lehmann was an outstanding novelist in the 1930s and 1940s but she never quite got over Day-Lewis's departure. She only wrote two more novels between 1950 and her death 40 years later. But another part of me could just as easily see Balcon's point. Day-Lewis spent less than 10 of his 68 years with Lehmann. Casting her in the central role in his private life was rather like giving the equivalent part in his development as a poet to W H Auden - another name that comes up whenever Day-Lewis is mentioned. For roughly five years between 1928 to 1933, the two were extremely close and Day-Lewis himself admitted he began to write "pastiche-Auden". But the friendship cooled, and he went on, in the succeeding four decades, to find his own voice, influenced by others including W B Yeats, Robert Frost and, above all, Thomas Hardy.

In view of these potential stumbling blocks, it was vital, I decided, once Balcon had overcome her doubts and agreed to work with me, that we had some commonly agreed yardstick for what was a legitimate avenue of enquiry. Again, some biographers may recoil from the very idea of a yardstick. Everything should be on the table. But depending on what that yardstick is, the final result may well be the same. Our yardstick - arrived at during another of our always-candid discussions over the delicious lunches she made for me when I visited - was Day-Lewis's poetry. It was, after all, the reason why I wanted to write about him. Why bother with a life of a poet unless you admire his verse?

So if he wrote about something in his poetry - or in his detective novels and his several works of prose - then it was, we agreed, something that must be investigated in the biography. It was a mark of Balcon's essential openness that she agreed to this. For her husband was, beneath a veneer of detachment, the most autobiographical of poets.

It is usually in the domain of their husband's betrayal of them that other literary widows, past and present, have forced biographers to draw a veil. In the final resort, as the executors of the literary estate, they have the power to refuse permission to quote a single line of the poetry. Balcon was on occasion visibly distressed by having to explore with me her husband's references in his verse to other women he was involved with during their almost 23 years together. Yet she always finally saw the bigger picture - the search to understand the poetry.

Researching Day-Lewis's entanglements in these years with three women novelists, Elizabeth Jane Howard (then as now a friend of Balcon's), A S Byatt and Attia Hosain, brought me up against the toughest aspect of working with the widow. But after careful reflection, Balcon placed no obstacles in my path. What had the greatest impact on the biography was the negative effect that reliving with her the manner of Day-Lewis's betrayal had on my affection for him.

Another area of debate among biographers is whether you have to like your subject to write a good book about them. I've always been in the camp that says you do. Having started off admiring Day-Lewis's poetry, I grew over the period of my research to admire him as a person too: for his commitment in the 1930s (however flawed and naïve) to building a better world; for the charisma he had in the flesh which rose off the page in various accounts of him; for his refusal to accept easy answers in his struggles between duty and love, emotions that most of us have felt at some time or other; and for his consistent commitment to public service, something that links his "political" 1930s poetry with his appointment in 1968 as a modernising Poet Laureate.

Yet that admiration ebbed away when confronted by Balcon's hurt at his sometimes cruel treatment of her. What sort of man would do that, I was forced to ask? The poem, "Sailing from Cleggan", was written, she recalled, after she had stumbled upon a love letter from another woman - we'll call her X - in his jacket pocket, when fetching, at his request, his cigarettes. He could be casual about covering up his betrayal.

Once, as we sat in her magical garden with a fountain playing beside us, Balcon read to me the love letters that Day-Lewis had sent to her. She paused, after a particularly lyrical passage. I was moved by his words, but she said simply: "That must have been when he was seeing X."

I felt guilty for putting her through it, but it was necessary and invaluable for the biography for it highlighted the greatest contradiction in Day-Lewis's character. One part of him craved domesticity and the exclusive love of a woman who was in many ways his soulmate. Yet another part of him remained forever dissatisfied, always the traveller that is such a constant figure in his poems.

Surely the ultimate test of working with the widow is to decide if any important detail has been left out of the final book to assuage her feelings or win her approval. My answer to that is an emphatic no. Instead Balcon made detailed and precise suggestions on my manuscript which she left me free to accept or reject. Contrary to the popular stereotype of the behaviour of the literary widow, this book was for her, I came to appreciate, an act of unlocking and sharing a memory that she has held so very close to her for so long.

'C Day-Lewis: A Life' by Peter Stanford is published by Continuum at £25

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