Dan Davin – författare

Dan Davin was a novelist and publisher with an attractive bohemian streak. Closing Times is his literary memoirs. In it he provides recollections of seven of his friends, all writers: Julian Maclaren-Ross, W. R. Rodgers, Louis MacNeice, Enid Starkie, Joyce Cary, Dylan Thomas and the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger. The worlds these writers inhabited were as diverse as the settings of these memoirs: Fitzrovia just after the war, Oxford, the BBC, a P. E. N. congress in Edinburgh, the Lower East Side in New York, and a Dublin pub. In his introduction he writes, 'I have been governed intuitively more than consciously, by a principle of inclusion that takes as primary the personal relationship between my subject and me, and by my own conception of his character, what interested me about him, what brought us together, what I liked - or even loved - in him, what I thought to be the flaws . . .' The result, in effect, is an informal autobiography, a vivid and telling portrait of a literary man in his time, as well as a moving lament for 'the makers whom death has unmade'.In his Oxford DNB account of Dan Davin's life, Jon Stallworthy as well as pointing out this memoir is modelled on Johnson's The Lives of the English Poets writes persuasively,' The most memorable presence, however, in this gallery of ebullient, funny, tender portraits is that of the artist himself, cigarette-holder in hand, eyes half closed against the smoke.'

First published in 1986, these collected war stories are told in the order of the Middle East campaigns that provide their settings. The characters are mainly men from the New Zealand Division seen in battle, and in the intervals between battle, sometimes scared, bored, drunk, and disillusioned, like soldiers everywhere. One story, 'The General and the Nightingale,' gives a vivid picture of General Freyberg, the man Churchill called 'the Salamander of the British Empire'. The men of the 2NZ he described as 'a ball of fire'. The author of these stories was one of them.