David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet

Thomas Dilworth

Jonathan Cape, £25

Review by Brian Morton

WHY is one of the greatest English writers and artists of the 20th century not better known? David Jones rarely claims more than a footnote reference in general histories of Modernism, and is frequently ignored altogether.

So, why is this? For once, there might be an answer, or series of answers, more substantive than “unaccountable neglect”. For a start, Jones wrote almost entirely in long forms, which are impossible to anthologise. (Even so, a recent book on the long poem in English doesn’t mention him at all.) Arguably, he didn’t write in recognisable poetic forms, creating his two greatest works In Parenthesis and The Anathemata out of a mixture of poetry, prose and diary-like observation.

There are further strong clues in Thomas Dilworth’s subtitle. Because Jones was in essence an artist-poet (somewhat like Blake, but technically superior in both realms), he has tended to be left to the art historians by the literary critics and to the literary critics by the art historians, neither having the technical skill to judge him all-in-all. Also, no “war poet” survived the Western Front by quite so many decades; dying in the trenches adds charisma to a career; living until 1974 does not. And yet, even in later life, he showed all the symptoms of a man who had spent longer on active service than any of his fellow war poets and had suffered deeply from its shocks. When I met him, very briefly, in 1972, he seemed to my young eyes both impossibly vulnerable, jumping at a banged door as he once jumped at howitzer shells, but also impossibly exalted and ecstatic.

There’s a final reason for the neglect of Jones, and it’s a little disingenuously omitted from that subtitle. Jones’s Catholicism, to which he turned after seeing Mass celebrated in a ruined house behind Ypres, and which was then encouraged by a highly cultured priest called Fr John O’Connor, who may have been the prototype for GK Chesterton’s Father Brown, renders him somewhat alien to the critical mainstream. Jones regarded the Mass as the ultimate work of art, a conviction that led some advisers to steer him away from holy orders, believing that too aesthetic a view of the Eucharist precluded a genuine vocation.

Jones studied carpentry at Eric Gill’s Ditchling community, but was as insufficient at that trade as he had been at orthodox school subjects. Mathematics evaded him and he never learned to spell. His mother even criticised his letters home from the front, more troubled by orthographical lapses than by the chance he might be killed, as he nearly was. Jones was briefly engaged to Gill’s daughter Petra, but the marriage never happened; not, as some have thought, because Petra was the object of her father’s incestuous desires, as another sister was, but because Jones, though highly sexed, seems to have struggled to form a mature relationship.

In Parenthesis appeared in 1937, and in 1961 with an admiring introduction by TS Eliot, who thought Jones the most important British poet of the time. It centres on the long monologue of Dai Greatcoat, a composite figure out of Jones’s long exposure to Welsh myth (he was part-Welsh in fact and totally so in imagination), the Mabinogion, Shakespeare’s histories, European romance and scripture. Jones’s mother was Anglican, his father an Evangelical preacher who drew on the distinctive hywll of the Welsh pulpit. The Anathemata came later, an even more knotted and complex excerpt from what was intended to be a much longer poem. Further extracts and passages were eventually published as The Sleeping Lord.

Jones’s art, like that of Cecil Collins, deals with numinous states and visionary presences. He started out as an illustrator, rejected the tradition of Raphael and learned to draw with the pencil point, yielding a style that always seems to shimmer off the paper or canvas. Putting the two aspects of the work together is not so much a departmental problem as a matter of surrendering to their unique aspects.

Thomas Dilworth has spent his career studying Jones. A much fuller account of his subject’s wartime experience has already been published. He wrote three earlier books on Jones, and edited two more. An even fuller version of the present biography will be available online for scholars. For the moment, though, this is as lucid, sympathetic and insightful a life as could be hoped for. Jones emerges from it strongly, if often perversely. He is now surely ready to take his place at the head of 20th century English letters and art.