The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (1960)

This autobiography of the author's earlier years confirms what I'd already felt about him, something which he also admits in a tangential way: he is a mixed phenomenon. He calls it 'the divided mind', which is a too-easy seeing of both sides which can amount to indecisiveness, or, presumably, to a fatal energy-slide in terms of the primary pointedness of his work. I see it more in terms of being really quite enamoured of his self-pricking honesty in discussing the pressures in his life and poetry, quickly followed by a slipping-sliding of confidence as he takes an angle which seems too superficial, or as he seems to covert himself away in a too-comfy turn of phrase. I'm not sure whether this was intended to be his only autobiographical work. It turned out so. We have much more of him as a child and young man in the period leading up to the Second World War; his life beyond that is sketchy in the extreme - the story was to be filled in by his son, Sean, in his admirable insider's biography from 1980. This book is marked with passages of great insight, alongside lesser stretches.