A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom

• Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis by Albert Gelpi
  Oxford, 246 pp, £30.00, March 1998, ISBN 0 19 509863 3

Always read the acknowledgments. These preliminary matters often say more about the real, sad, self-deluding and lonely life of the writer and scholar than any number of biographies: the long-suffering husbands and wives; the neglected children; the countless hours spent on research in libraries and archives; the pathetic gratitude to agents and outside research bodies; the sabbatical leave kindly granted; the endless discussions with brilliant and understanding friends or fellow Faculty, who nonetheless bear no responsibility for any errors that remain. And then there are all those others, the unacknowledged, too numerous and too mundane to mention: the Mister Kiplings, the Messrs Cadbury and McVitie, the Jack Daniels, the Sainsburys, the Guinnesses, the Marks and the Spencers, and of course dear old Mister Gordon and his fine distillery. These many named and unnamed of the acknowledgment pages are the foundations on which a book is built: they help to determine its size and shape, its character and its content, and they deserve our attention. When Helen Vendler begins her recent book on Seamus Heaney, for example, ‘I am grateful to Seamus Heaney, first and foremost, for all the invaluable poetry and prose that he has added to the store of literature in English,’ you can be fairly sure that she’s not about to set out on a careless demolition job, and when she then goes on to thank the stock-piling Heaney for personally checking her chronology and compiling the book’s discography, you know for certain that what you are about to witness is a bit of celebratory barn-raising. And quite right too: Vendler teaches at Harvard, and so does Heaney, and you don’t, as the saying goes, shit on your own doorstep.