From The London Review of Books:
‘You ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed’. He himself felt anomalous in the 1920s, and by the decade’s end ‘incredibly ancient’; at some point he slipped from seeming younger to seeming older than everyone around him. He was a self-taught modernist with an allegiance to medieval romance and Celtic art, a Londoner who was out of place in London, a Welshman who didn’t speak Welsh. He was an artist who constructed images out of words – in his painted inscriptions – and whose poems took in the observable world, including everything glimpsed in his peripheral vision. There was the hand-held and eye-level, frame-by-frame actuality of In Parenthesis (1937), his poem of the trenches, noise-saturated, full of chiaroscuro and stalked by horror, but recorded with intricate stylistic detachment; later, there were the ever receding vistas of The Anathemata (1952), his epic about the matter of Britain.
As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained account into brief chapters or time sections – wisely, because the hard to track Jones, endlessly on the move, never settled, and is to be found only in the day by day. The book reflects the tenacity and hiddenness of its subject, beginning with his London Welsh origins.
Jones’s father was a printer’s overseer for a Nonconformist weekly on Fleet Street, from a line of North Wales plasterers and stonemasons. His mother’s family were pure Rotherhithe: boatbuilders and shipwrights, her father a mast-and-block maker competent ‘in all that belongs to a ship’s carpentry’. Starting out as a teacher and governess, Alice Jones née Bradshaw ended her working life reluctantly with marriage and the family’s move from Rotherhithe to Brockley – London still, or just, with one foot in open country rather than river. She kept up with advanced ideas: she wanted to call her second son Oscar, got away with Walter (after Pater), but was confounded when at the age of nine he chose to answer only to his middle name, David. She had gone up in the world doctrinally, to keep Wales at bay and to counter her husband’s evangelical and downward move, as a lay preacher who had swerved from his Anglican origins. But both parents were high-minded, and questions of ritual remained alive, as they would for Jones throughout his life, in a household whose aspirations were framed by a lower middle-class artisanal culture on the cusp of change.
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But his early attention was fixed on Wales, part of whose purpose for him was its remoteness, brought near by avid childhood reading. During his first eight years the family did not visit Wales. When they did so it was a Rubicon he had already crossed, ratified by seeing hills for the first time and sea for the second. His loyalties were separate if indivisible, and decades later he corrected his publisher T.S. Eliot’s reference to him – not Welsh, but ‘a Londoner of Welsh and English descent’. He was encouraged to draw from early on – the urge to convey the look of things was as involuntary ‘as stroking a cat’ – and, at his own insistence, was sent at the age of 14 to the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He was taught cosmopolitan visual lessons under cover of an apprenticeship for a career as a professional illustrator, continuous with his father’s trade, whose Edwardian disjecta littered the house. ‘I was brought up in a home that took the printed page and its illustration for granted,’ he remarked in an ‘Autobiographical Talk’ collected in Epoch and Artist. Camberwell was an extension of Brockley, art an extension of storytelling. Dilworth makes clear these contexts for In Parenthesis: it was a painter’s first experiment with words, originally intended to be illustrated.
In 1914, Jones enlisted without hesitation, remarking later that ‘history came to my aid.’ He tried to join the Welsh Horse Yeomanry, with no experience of horses, and then the Artists Rifles, but was deficient in chest measurement, before succeeding with the newly raised London Welsh battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a regiment in which commissions were held by Graves and Sassoon (neither of whom, as a private, he would meet). Some of the officers were Welsh, but the ranks were hastily recruited Cockney volunteers, and Jones was caught up in an emergency of language, unfamiliar idioms, indecipherable accents. Basic training in North Wales, musketry and manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, the march to Southampton and the night crossing to France in December 1915, the first experience of a long-range heavy shell: these rites of passage are distributed between the flickering personae of In Parenthesis, as a prelude which takes up much of the work.
Jones was an infantryman, equidistant from officers and ‘other arms’. He was good at hearing where a shell would fall, what kind and calibre it was, and where to put himself. The draughtsman’s hand-eye co-ordination made him useful with a rifle, and would serve him as a map-maker. Physically slight, he excelled at night patrol, for which he repeatedly volunteered, as exempting him from fatigues. He preferred the company of comrades to any other – making himself scarce when the possibility of a commission was offered – and preferred the firing line to anywhere else. The climax of In Parenthesis is the attack on Mametz Wood in the first days of the Somme: an affair of marching, waiting, cancellation, repositioning, followed by a Now of battle fought by exhausted troops wound to a pitch of dread by long anticipation. The assault was directed at thick forest, heavily defended, a mile deep and the width of a division. Jones was not in the first wave but in close support. A frontal attack was the order of the day, ‘clear view … leisurely walk … waves of slowly walking men’. The final approach took four minutes, over rough and rising ground, without flanking support, during which a third of his battalion fell. After thirty hours of hugger-mugger in the wood Jones, mercifully, was shot in the leg. He crawled back towards the British trenches, was carried to a dressing station, told what a beautiful blighty – a wound serious enough to require the soldier to be sent back to England – by the orderly who removed the bullet.
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The difficulty with reading the poem as a narrative account of those years is that In Parenthesis confounds chronology: not begun until a decade after 1918, not published until two decades after the events, in the shadow of a coming war. ‘I did not intend this as a “War Book” – it happens to be concerned with war’: as the hesitant and haunting preface suggests, it is a work of l’entre-deux-guerres. Its revelation is that the peacetime distinction between past and present is unreal, and that our historical condition is to be between wars. This is why the world of his trenches is so curiously normalised, the habitat of one who was there long enough to take it for granted. Business as usual, or in the chalked polyglot of the estaminet behind the lines: ‘BIERE/EGG CHIP 3 FRANC/CAFE AU LAIT/ENGLISH SPOKE HEER.’ Jones’s explanation of the work’s title refers to the composition, not to the experiences: ‘This writing is called In Parenthesis because I have written it in a kind of space between – I don’t know between quite what – but as you turn aside to do something … and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.’ The between-time of which this speaks is close in apprehension to Eliot’s ‘twenty years largely wasted’.
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In Parenthesis bristles with intimations of class – ‘men on horseback, of evident aloofness’ – as an otherness more mysterious than the enemy, and ‘the clipt hierarchic command’ is one of the poem’s terse vernaculars. Imperturbable officers stroll in the open during heavy barrages, greet one another nonchalantly amid the falling shells (‘Well, Dell!’), are attired as if paying afternoon calls in Belgravia – and die without looking back. Jones had been sartorially susceptible even before he volunteered (one witness remarked that, however hard up in later years, he always got his shoes at Lobb’s), and he would have agreed with his friend the classicist W.F. Jackson Knight that the Great War was ‘a frightfully dressy affair’. Much of this is parodic – he resented the tone-deafness and hauteur of the officer caste – but there is a residue of fascination.
Even so, as Jones wrote in 1935, ‘I must be and am essentially a private soldier, in and out of the war,’ and he thought of the artist as an infantryman who works directly with his materials, who prospers by lying low.
Link to the rest at The London Review of Books
“War is hell, certainly, but Jones never doubted that there is a good deal of hell around and this aspect of the matter did not greatly surprise him.”
~ D. S. Carne-Ross