Blissettjones

     
We
are shy when people start talking about friendship, especially if they
go on and on. Aristotle deals with it sensibly in his Ethics,
in such a way as not to embarrass his friends. Erasmus, in the first
great best-seller of the age of print, his collection of the sayings
of Greek and Roman notables, the Adages, in all its many editions
led off with the observation, attributed to and quoted by many, that
a friend is a second self. There he left it, with a smile to his many
friends, chief among them Thomas More. In treating friendship as one
of the Four Loves, C.S. Lewis observes that lovers sit so that
they look at each other, and two is quite enough, whereas friends sit
side by side or in profile, sometimes with other friends, attending
to whatever draws them together — a religion or a cause, a book or
a picture, some topic or personality or just the passing scene. He or
she who has more to give just gives more; those who have less give what
they can. Attention is giving.

     
It
is in the context of friendship that I propose to say something about
knowing David Jones personally, through visits, thirty of them, and
an exchange of letters over the last quarter-century of his life. Then,
touching on my several studies, published and unpublished, of aspects
of his life and work, I hope I will be seen as continuing that friendship,
and extending it, for literary attention, concern, and scholarship have
a place — for some of us a place of honour — in the world of friendship.
That place of honour may be likened to a mediaeval chantry, or shrine,
for we have had, as members of the David Jones Society, a newsletter
and now have a journal, with conferences, exhibitions, tours, events.
Shall I use that friendly word “get-togethers”? Once, in his
immense poem, The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser pays tribute
to the poet who most decisively and pervasively influenced him —

Dan
Chaucer, well of English undefiled,

On
fames eternall beadroll worthie to be filed. (FQ IV.ii.32)

He places this tribute in Book
IV, the Legend of Friendship. I stretch back some seventy years to relate,
from the opening pages of The Long Conversation, how my interest
in David Jones began:

     
I
promise that this memoir will move, as this sentence does, from the
personal pronoun ‘I’ to the proper name ‘David Jones’. My subject
is how I came to know David Jones, and I must begin in 1938 when I was
in my late teens. Though the capital of British Columbia, Victoria was
then a quiet city full of retired English people and busy Scots: its
daily life hardly impinged on me at all, and the things it considered
important I dismissed as of no moment. Apart from Victoria High School
only one institution mattered to me: the Victoria Public Library, under
the direction of Miss Margaret Clay, was an exceptionally well stocked
and up-to-date collection, and I cut through it like a blowtorch. I
made a point of bringing a different library book to school every day
— with no thought of endearing myself to classmates or teachers. This
was the time of crisis leading up to Munich and the outbreak of war,
and I fed my fires weekly with the New Statesman and the New
Republic and the New Masses and daily with the literature
of modernism.

     
One
day — yes, I could walk to the shelf and put my hand on it today —
I noticed among the new books a handsome Faber volume with the cryptic
title In Parenthesis; the author’s name could hardly have been
plainer, David Jones. I opened it to the frontispiece, engraved by the
author, who was evidently an artist. In a moment it fused together all
my imaginings of the Great War (family lore, war songs at school, war
films and fiction) with that enchanted realm of suffering and barely-possible
deliverance, the Waste Land. The avant-garde character of the book I
was altogether in the mood for, though I cannot pretend that I read
it with as much understanding as excitement. Its evident Christianity
I was ready to tolerate, by a willing suspension of disbelief.

     
I
returned the book, read, with a resolution to read it again. One aspect
of it, I now realize, had drawn a total blank. The title-page bore an
epigraph in Welsh, and the book clearly had a whole Welsh dimension
that was lost on me: the Welsh words I did not attempt to pronounce,
and if I looked up the notes, the Welsh ones did not stick. This is
odd because my maternal grandfather, Frederick Jones, married a Miss
Mary Jones (they were both from Cheshire near the Welsh border), and
my mother’s name was Gladys; the Saxon Blissetts came from Hereford
and have a family tradition of defending the Marcher country against
incursions of the Wild Welsh.

     
What
did stay permanently in my memory was the sense of the book as a ‘shape
in words’ and certain great passages — the rat of no-man’s-land
(I.P., 54-5), the Old Bill character serving as warden of stores
(89-90), the men on the eve of battle talking of ordinary things (139-40),
sweet sister death (162-3), and the Queen of the Woods (185-6). I read
the book again, as I had promised myself, in the late ‘40s when I
was a graduate student, encouraged this time by friends like Norman
Endicott, editor of the works of Sir Thomas Browne, and Barker Fairley,
the Goethe Scholar, who shared my enthusiasm for the writing and enlarged
my knowledge of David Jones the painter. The Christianity of the work
I took quite positively this time, and the difficulties of the writing
(except the Welsheries) began to disperse like the morning mists in
its great description of a day in the trenches. (L.C., 1-2)

     
Our
correspondence began before our meeting. In the mid-1950s I wrote to
a large number of contemporary poets to ask whether Edmund Spenser was
to them, as he had been over the centuries, “the poets’ poet.”
David Jones was one of these, and, along with my enquiry, I mentioned
that I had reviewed his second book, The Anathemata (1952). He
replied, largely in the negative to the Spenser question, but asked
me to send a copy of the review. This I did, with an apology for saying,
erroneously, that he was Eric Gill’s son-in-law, and he replied again
in friendly manner. When, in 1958-59 I spent a sabbatical in London,
I sent him Christmas greetings, to which he replied by inviting me to
visit him. Three replies: I can cross the threshold. Here is what I
wrote down, in breathless notes on the underground from Harrow to Kensington,
and in connected prose the next day, little thinking that there might
be future visits:

15
January 1959

     
David
Jones’s letter in reply to my Christmas greeting had seemed rather
weary, and I hesitated about telephoning him, not wishing to seem or
be an exploiter: academic predators are my own breed and I understand
their ways all too well; but he did write down his telephone number,
twice. When he came to the telephone, I found his voice brisk (with
a very slight English stammer) and cordial. ‘Why not this afternoon?’
he said and told me how to reach Northwick Lodge.

     
The
Lodge is halfway up the hill at Harrow, an oblong building, its white
paint peeling, dead cold. Mr. Jones came downstairs to greet me, wearing
his greatcoat and scarf. His room was warmer than the hall though still
cold enough for our breath to steam. I was unused to being cold indoors,
but this was cold even for England.

     
It
is a large single room, untidy but not at all squalid, rather giving
the impression of there being a great many things ready to hand. A fireplace,
two chairs, a mantel with a number of objects arranged freely but not
in a clutter — a small Calvary in wood, originally intended as a block
for an engraving, an inscription in Welsh on dark greenish-grey stone;
books everywhere, in bookcases and piled on shelves or on the floor;
a large table with pens and brushes and engraving tools; pictures on
the walls, on an easel, stacked against the wall. Profusion, not at
all menacing — neither a bombardment of things nor a tightly clenched
trove.

Mr.
Jones himself is a rather small man, though his handshake on greeting
me was larger and warmer than mine; quiet, but with a good deal of nervous
energy, so that conversation may sometimes lapse but never sag. His
face can look tired and old in repose but has an almost boyish animation
when we are talking. There are glimpses of joy and a certain radiance,
no coercive power. Short, untidy hair brushed down over his forehead.
A man of the spirit but not sacerdotal: too thin-skinned to be a priest,
not methodical enough for a monk. More of an anchorite, a hermit, his
room a rather ample cell where he subtly compounds his works of simples.

     
He
was full of questions about Canada and the sort of chaps I taught English
to in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He pronounced the name as if he had committed
it to memory as the last place in the world: we are used to that, and
I was able to convince him without much difficulty that my native province
is habitable, even civilized. As strangers and pilgrims do, we exchanged
perplexities about Americans, of whom he has come to know several in
recent years, servicemen, boarding at Northwick Lodge. The most surprising
thing about them, apart from their general receptivity and sudden chasms
of blankness, was the way so many of the hulking big bruisers turned
out to their various churches on Sunday mornings.

     
He
kept thinking of new things to show me and so the conversation was not
very consecutive — and I’m not much good at recalling what other
people say. Before the light failed I had a good look at a number of
drawings, including the large watercolour on an easel, Aphrodite
in Aulis, which has a depth and volume hardly to be guessed from
reproduction in reduced size. When it was first shown in a gallery,
a studious-looking man fell into talk with him about it, said he took
a professional interest in goddesses: it was E.R. Dodds, author of
The Greeks and the Irrational, that splendid book. The title of
the picture, by the way, has no reference to George Moore’s novel,
which Mr. Jones says he may have heard of but has certainly not read.
The technical problem of the picture was so to dispose it as to make
Aphrodite dominant — blooming, buxom, but not heavy — and the artist
is satisfied on this score. The pencil line and the colouring are laid
on concurrently, not pencil first and then colour. This is not what
one would expect, and I had the sense that he often has to overrule
the contrary assumption.

I
had brought along my copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
and he inscribed it for me. It is the one of his illustrated books that
he thinks the most successful. He said the Golden Cockerel Press people,
like lunatics, called in a bevy of girl art students to colour the wood
engravings for his Gulliver’s Travels. Every single copy. He
removed the colour from his own. I was relieved to hear this, for I
thought the colouring poisonous when I looked at the book in the British
Museum. Contrary to orders, they used the wrong paper and didn’t dampen
it for The Chester Play of the Deluge, and so the black is not
properly black: the reproduction in the Tate Gallery catalogue is superior
to the book. As for The Book of Jonah, it is ‘pure Eric’
— good, with that reservation.

     
I
showed him The Wounded Knight, a copper engraving I had bought
at the Redfern Gallery, but he thought it a pretty faint print that
should not have been pulled and I could see that he preferred not to
sign it. He didn’t know that some watercolours of his were being shown
there currently, and he wondered about their source of supply. His experience
in trying to get money out of them has not always been happy, in spite
of their calling him David to put him at his ease. He recalled that
at his exhibition there some years ago he had wanted to show but not
to sell Vexilla Regis (‘The view from this window — that
is the tree,’ he said, pointing),^[1]  
and so had been persuaded
to put an exorbitant price on it, but an old friend, a very nice chap
from Cambridge [H.S. Ede], bought it for his mother, who was ill and
had set her heart on it. It was the only high payment he had ever received,
but he wishes he had kept the picture, as he needs his main ‘things’
around him. ‘Serves me right for asking more that the just price.’
This he said with simple contrition, as if he were confessing to St.
Thomas Aquinas.

     
When
talking of Gulliver’s Travels, he mentioned the great number
of blocks to be engraved, conveying the sense of its having been a fatiguing
commission, and this led to Aubrey Beardsley who at the outset of his
career was given a huge commission to illustrate Malory, very gratifying
no doubt but foreign to his temperament and crushing in its magnitude.
Beardsley he admires highly; he did not know whether or not Canon John
Gray had been in the Beardsley circle. He recalled Gray as a remarkable
priest who, in his church in Edinburgh, was said to spend many hours
regularly waiting in the confessional for anyone who might need him:
a real mortification for one who started life as a minor poet of the
1890s and whose surname was appropriated, jocularly, by his famous friend
Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Canon Gray was a great
walker and no matter how many miles he had covered in town or country
always arrived fresh and unruffled, his shoes gleaming. He often talked
of Wilde and others of that time but Mr. Jones does not recall his mentioning
Beardsley.

     
Like
Beardsley, David Jones does not work from sketches: the original drawing
is revised and developed until it feels the way the first conception
felt. I mentioned the signs of innumerable erasures in the Beardsley
drawing of Siegfried now on display in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, and that led to Wagner — as I had rather hoped than plotted.
No, he doesn’t like Wagner at all, thinks his style vulgar, doesn’t
enjoy opera: in fact, when his friends went to the opera years ago,
he would sit on a bench in the Underground (or was it in the train itself,
the Inner Circle Line?) and read a book until it was time to meet them.
Any Wagnerism in his writing must come through as mediated by Joyce,
of whom he never tires. Joyce is his writer, when he dares admit it.

     
He
was curious to hear about T.S. Eliot’s new play, The Elder Statesman,
and was pleased when I said that I found it witty and wise. ‘Marriage
has done wonder for Tom — filled him out, even physically. It’s
good to see him happy.’ Eliot he has known for a very long time; Edith
Sitwell he has come to know in the past two years. He had feared she
might be arty and brittle but instead found her warm-hearted and easy
and quite without ‘side’. He thought she would be a Spenserian,
if I liked. He is himself put off mainly (not exclusively) by Spenser’s
fierceness in the matter of Ireland, and of course I didn’t defend
it except historically. I tried to persuade him to enter the heartland
of The Faerie Queene, where he would find something like his
own landscape. He gave me the look of a man who resolves to open his
Spenser one of these days.

     
He
showed me a little book on Bonnard. ‘Far superior to Degas. I can’t
understand how they have come to be so misjudged.’ ‘More heart?’
I suggested, thinking of Degas’s limiting sarcasm, and he agreed,
or let it pass. He recalled that his old teacher at the Camberwell School
of Art before the Great War, A.S. Hartrick, knew many French painters
of that generation and always referred to Degas as Degaz, which he said
was how the painter pronounced his name. Without ever being strenuously
avant-garde, David Jones, from his earliest days, was aware of what
belonged to ‘the Now’, to use his phrase, and receptive to it.
Tachisme he is out of sympathy with and says there is some fakery
involved in claiming for accident what is (when it amounts to anything)
skill. He admires Ben Nicholson in spite of his fanatical abstractionism.
He was delighted with what I told him about the Canadian painter David
Milne (whom I had mentioned in my review): how he soldiered through
the Depression in the northern wilds, living in a shack and subsisting
on pork and beans, how he avoided all commercial art or teaching (a
vigorous nod of the head at this), and how, when he talked (not very
much) about art, you could imagine a trustful chipmunk on his shoulder.

     
‘What
do you think of old Spengler?’ he demanded, putting on a sort of Prussian
bark very different from his usual quiet speech. I said I thought him
a poet of ideas, obviously somebody — full of false analogies and
true metaphors, I might have added, but didn’t think of it until halfway
home. He thinks Spengler underestimated and rather too easily forgotten
when Toynbee and Mumford and Malraux come to mind. We talked about the
tragedy of Germany, and he made the admission (rather, tore the admission
out of himself) that he had been quite pro-German in the appeasement
era, out of fellow-feeling for the ‘enemy front-fighters against whom
we found ourselves by misadventure’, having dismissed all earlier
reports of Nazi cruelty and nihilism as propaganda, like the stories
of soldiers crucified on hay ricks in the Great War. The truth came
as a terrible shock, and he has been pondering ever since on whether
a new age of torment and outrage has opened or whether the old securities
and decencies had been an illusion all the time. It was here that a
lapse in conversation took place, for I had much the same sort of assent,
to the opposite political evil, on my conscience.

     
We
consumed two pots of Lapsang Souchong tea in the loose, mainly pleasant
talk. When it was time for me to go, David Jones put on his scarf and
coat and accompanied me to the front door, and I walked through the
cold fog down to the station. (L.C., 8-12)

Eight
more of these visits occurred before the end of the sabbatical, during
which time I met René Hague, his old friend who became my close friend
(The Long Conversation is dedicated to René and Joan Hague)
and built up my basic collection of books illustrated by David Jones
(a toast to antiquarian booksellers; to Anthony Rota and Peter Scott
and to Hugh Anson-Cartwright, friendly themselves, they encourage the
friendship of writers and collectors). I could make myself useful by
fetching things from Central London. After that, I was not able to revisit
London for ten years, but by then we knew each other well enough for
correspondence to flourish: I tried with success to time my letters
to St. David’s Day (1 March) and his birthday (All Saints’ Day,
1 November). Then, from 1969 to the year of his death, 1974, I crossed
the Atlantic every year and saw him usually several times. There are
many passages that I wish we had time for me to read; I choose one,
from August 1972 when he was reading a typescript of The Sleeping
Lord because it shows his sense of fun amid the tribulations of
his later years:

     
At
a lull in the conversation I said that I was reading In Parenthesis
again rather closely and continued to be puzzled by the mysterious ‘Aunty
Bembridge’, which seems to be neither soldiers’ slang nor an allusion
to a famous person. David laughed as if in recollection. The name ‘Bembridge’
is taken from an officer at headquarters who was only a name to him,
but the character is that of Brigadier-General Price-Davies, V.C., his
own brigadier, who was famous for being a fuss-pot and martinet, without
fear and without imagination. He would tour the front-line trenches
with a pole marked in inches, and if the parapet was an inch or two
high or low, the sandbags would have to be removed and replaced to meet
the regulation height, all this with bullets and shells whizzing round
his and everyone’s heads. The great story (a real chuckle this time)
concerns his talking to a number of junior officers, in the open, as
an enemy bombardment bracketed in on them, he taking no notice, they
ready to dodge or duck into a shell hole at the slightest encouragement.
At that moment the post arrived, with a parcel for the Brigadier, elaborately
tied in knots, which he proceeded to untie, saying, ‘Hate cutting
string. Seems a wicked waste, especially in wartime.’ He added, as
a postscript, ‘Waste not, want not, I always say.’ Finally the parcel
was open, and he remarked, with a slight frown of vexation, ‘My dear
old aunt. I can’t get it into her head that I do like chocolate but
don’t like boxes of chocolates.’

     
Our
laughter at this put David in mind of the wildest laughter of his life.
One night an officer, an N.C.O., and two men went out, one of them ’79
Jones, on patrol to inspect and if possible to cut the enemy’s wire.
After inching snakelike along in the unusual silence, in which they
could hear the Jerry sentry pacing up and down, one of them knocked
over a tin can with the butt of his rifle. It was so bloody incompetent,
and so bloody serious, that they could do nothing but laugh, and the
four of them did nothing but that for minutes on end, heaving with suppressed
merriment expecting every moment the Jerry would come to see what the
joke was. That sort of incident would be unknown in the world of Ernst
Jünger; if it happened, he would leave it sternly unreported.

     
Likewise
later, in the monastery at Caldey when David was making a retreat, a
novice made a ludicrous liturgical mistake and, after convulsive attempts
by everyone to maintain gravity and composure, the Prior simply had
to rap for attention and send them all out of the chapel for ten minutes.

     
The
woes of the Church came up again. It had seemed bad enough years ago
when the Caldey Benedictines were dispersed over some scandal (completely
unsuspected by DJ), but now! The enemy seems to have taken all the places
of power. There was some old bishop who said recently, about the liturgical
upheaval, that he had been waiting all his life for it. ‘The bloody
old hypocrite! All these years our acts of worship were nothing but
play-acting, mummery, bowing and scraping.’ He continued: ‘I was
talking about this to a priest a few months ago. I said, you fall in
love with a girl, visit her often, kiss her, tell her many times and
in many ways that you love her; then you visit her less and less often,
give her an occasional peck, tell her that she has your esteem. “What
has that to do with it?” asked the priest. It has everything to do
with it: it means that what you do in religion, as in love, is the sign
of what you are.’

     
David
usually goes to the half-past eight Mass as being the least deformed,
but two Sundays ago he had gone to the eleven o’clock, on the Feast
of the Transfiguration, and it consisted of the priest poking around
with bits of paper until suddenly the words of Consecration were spoken.
‘And then he had the cheek, in the middle of these blasphemies, to
preach a bloody sermon on the meaning of the Transfiguration!’

     
This
was vehemently spoken, then David signed and said, ‘Why must all experiments
in liturgy be compulsory? Why must they replace the Mass that was known
and loved and set up an unbridgeable discontinuity? Why must every one
of the new experiments be so thin and truncated and incapable of making
any lasting impression?’

     
He
remembers years ago seeing Dom Gregory Dix, whose Shape of the Liturgy
he thinks a great work of the spirit. There was some sort of Anglo-Catholic
Congress, and a very ancient liturgy was to be celebrated. John Betjeman
couldn’t use his ticket, and so David went with Penelope, hoping he
wouldn’t be exposed and expelled. He remembers, as I do, Dom Gregory’s
stillness and concentration; they did not meet then or ever.

     
Rather
to my surprise, DJ disclosed that he knew the books of both Frazer and
Jessie L. Weston before he knew or had heard of The Waste Land.^[2]  
He met T.S. Eliot in the later ?20s when he came to know some literary
people, and discovered the poetry of Eliot and Hopkins concurrently.
The full, not the abridged Frazer is the thing to read: most of the
good of it is in the notes and documentation. (This matches what he
said about Spengler some years ago.) He recognized the comparative slightness
and tendentiousness of Jessie L. Weston from the beginning, as well
as her ‘poetic suggestiveness’.

     
Gossip
about the Laureateship. Betjeman, he said again, would grace the position
since so much of his best work is occasional. Recently the TLS
had said that the three best poets were too old for it — Robert Graves,
David Jones, and ‘that Scotsman’. ‘Hugh MacDiarmid,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course.’ David knew of his work through (I believe he said)
Saunders Lewis. He was pleased to learn that Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher
Grieve) admires David Jones almost as much as he admires Charles Doughty,
and spent a whole afternoon with me in Toronto looking at my DJ collection.

     
David
laughed at the thought of the Laureateship but took some pleasure in
being named. He said again that he doesn’t think of himself as being
old — and how shocked he was when his doctor crudely told him that
he would never get out of Calvary Nursing Home. ‘Not the right line
to take with a man suffering from neurasthenia, even if true: it puts
an end to hope.’ He returned to this when I was about to go, after
he had played the record of ‘The Sleeping Lord’: ‘I don’t love
this life, but I think I have a lot more poems to write — a lot more
to do for . . . Britain.’ He hesitated, briefly, then chose the awkward
‘Britain’ over the easy ‘England’. A laugh and good-bye. (L.C.,
94-7)

     
There,
with reluctance, I take leave of the old friend and turn to a more rarefied
exercise of friendship, in critical writing.

II

     
Twice
in David Jones’s lifetime, both times I think to his pleasure and
approval, I brought out articles on his work. “Himself at the Cave-Mouth”
(1967) I have been surprised to find not only explored the key images
of the cave and labyrinth that pervade all his work (including much
that had not then been published) but pointed forward to several lines
of investigation that I had then no inkling of. The other, “In
Parenthesis among the War Books,” (1973) made me examine pretty
well all the English books — history, memoirs, fiction, poetry —
on the Great War that Jones and his readers in the Thirties could have
known, including many translations into English. I demonstrated, at
least to my satisfaction, the pre-eminence of In Parenthesis
among them.

     
I
was fortunate to be assigned to teach a seminar on the literature of
the Great War, and even more fortunate that young Tom Dilworth turned
up as a member of it. Exclaiming WOW! he made David Jones from that
time forth his consuming interest, writing MA, and PhD theses on him,
from which emerged his magisterial book on The Shape of Meaning.
I rejoice that he was able three times to visit Jones with me and that
he has been entrusted with writing the official biography, an immense
labour now nearing completion. Three other doctoral theses were completed
under my direction. Since friendship is our theme and the association
of teacher and student is a major division of friendship, let me put
them on the beadroll: Vincent Sherry, concerned with allusion and concentrating
on Dai’s Boast; Patrick Deane, placing Jones among the writers of
the Thirties; Paul Robichaud, on making the past present, especially
the mediaeval and the Welsh past. To these should be added John Terpstra,
not a literary student but a cabinet-maker and poet, working full time,
who needed one course to graduate and wrote an extended “senior essay”
on “The Sleeping Lord.” The second reader for the Department of
English snapped it up for publication in the University of Toronto
Quarterly.

     
A
necessary postscript to these remarks, lest it be thought that academic
life is simply a matter of degrees and publications and accreditation.
David Jones was very insistent on the spoken nature of his writings,
wanted them read aloud, took care to indicate pronunciation, and himself
made recordings (with Peter Orr of the British Council and Argo Records)
of an oral quality well above that of most recorded poets. In my seminar
students giving papers on Graves and Sorley and Blunden and Sassoon
were encouraged to quote freely, and we ended the spring term by reading
aloud by turns the whole of In Parenthesis. Since then I have
taken part in two full readings of In Parenthesis, and I have
been privileged to hear the gifted actor Tom Durham render (?), recite
(?), no, create The Tribune’s Visitation and other extended
writings. Douglas Cleverdon’s adaptations of In Parenthesis
and The Anathemata rank high among the glories of radio. I am
convinced that in literary studies nothing can take the place of this
bodily possession. Somewhere along the line, any serious readers but
especially teachers and future teachers must learn to speak, not to
gabble, mumble, mouth, or honk.

     
Still
on the theme of friendship, I propose now to give an account of my long-continued
involvement with David Jones in critical and scholarly writing: influence
as friendship, in distinction from, though not in denial of, Harold
Bloom’s important insight into influence as rivalry. In coming to
grips with a writer, one is initially drawn to some elements in a shared
world of ideas, feelings, judgments, perhaps very general, perhaps minutely
particular, all of them framed by an ineradicable separation — in
this case, bodies twain, two generations, five time-zones and many tangential
interests and experiences.

     
When
news of his death came in 1974, I thought immediately of putting our
correspondence and my narrative of visits together, along with such
articles as I had published or drafted. (All his own writings were preserved,
but letters to him, including all but one of mine, were swept away in
a prompt housecleaning.) I submitted this text to the publisher and
they quite rightly wanted the memoir only. Rightly, because “Himself
at the Cave-Mouth,” exploring two related master-images in his art,
both visual and literary, (the cave and the labyrinth) pointed beyond
itself to matters that in course of time demanded separate and extended
treatment — the question of epic; the “Welsh Thing”; the matter
of “recession” in art as found in the view from a room through a
window and its possible analogy in literature as far-reaching allusion;
the centrality of the Cross in the writing and the art; the pervasiveness
of questioning.

     
More
immediately “In Parenthesis among the War Books” insisted
that I proceed to an orderly sequence of related studies. The first
of these I called “To Make a Shape in Words” (a phrase used by the
author for the purpose of his writing). Here I took a passage from the
original article, defining what by the bias of historical events would
be expected of any book dealing with the British sector of the Western
Front. There must be a hundred examples, some well known, most forgotten.
In its driest outline the shape of the experience of the Great War in
the British sector of the Western Front may be defined by all or most
of these events in roughly this order: the outbreak of war, enlistment,
basic training, embarkation, the base, marching to the line, the sound
of bombardment, the first shell, entering the trenches, digging in,
under fire, the first death, relief and leave, return, on patrol, in
combat, the suffering of hardships or wounds or sickness, the end.

     
Even
given this expected shape, the war writer has to select and compose
the heavy conglomeration of routine and surprise, boredom and terror,
puzzlement and illumination. As I looked at In Parenthesis, which
is divided into seven parts, it so happened that I was at the same time
much immersed in a radically unrelated interest, the string quartets
of Bela Bartók — unrelated because David Jones, exceptionally knowledgeable
about plainchant and delighting in folk-songs, spirituals, sea-chanties,
and soldiers’ songs, was not “musical” in the sense that most
major Modernists were musical: Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust, Joyce, Thomas
Mann, Eliot, Pound, Auden, recital and concert and opera-goers. Eliot
would know Bartók’s quartets, Jones would come to know Eliot’s.
However, two of Bartók’s quartets are disposed in a distinctive five-movement
“arch structure,” the first movement clearly balancing the last,
the second the penultimate, the third being central. Looking at In
Parenthesis, I saw that its seven parts likewise made an arch. At
the time, Tom Dilworth already keenly aware of pictorial structure,
was working on his thesis, and we must have talked about this as we
did about everything else. I mention this because he has gone on to
explore the full ramifications of this and other structural practices
not only in the writings but in the sequences of engravings. Having
seen the manuscripts in Aberystwyth, he was able to tell me that the
epigraphs from Y Gododdin at the head of each section were a
late afterthought: they secure the arch.

     
The
next probe, after establishing the genre of “war book” and accounting
for the shape of this particular war book, was to engage with the urgent
question of whether the rendition of experience at the limits of human
endurance requires or is aided by an analogous stretching to the limits
of language. Is there, and should there be, a “Syntax of Violence”?
Using the vocabulary of Stylistics, I adduce many devices of foregrounding
to be found pervading the writing: the layout on the page, the huge
range of diction from the technical to the demotic, allusive and concrete,
literary and spoken, all exactly accurate, unexpected respellings, rapid
shifts of person and abrupt changes of rhythm, and, of course, the long
debated question of imitative sound. Here I take what I think is a reasonable
position between the Old Macdonald’s Farm people, who think sound
carries sense — bow-wow, moo moo, oink oink, etc., and the linguistic
purists who would disallow any linkage of sound and meaning. Yound Alexander
Pope got it right: “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” While
a writer or speaker does not (or should not) let sound dictate sense,
it is a fact that certain sound patterns are readily actable and others
are not. Unlike most of my essays, this was never delivered. It appeared
in the generous and indispensable collection edited by the poet John
Matthias and published by the University of Maine Press under the auspices
of the National Poetry Society. I had thought that it might be controversial,
but to the best of my knowledge it has entirely escaped notice.

     
Not
so “The Efficacious Word,” delivered at the very first David Jones
Conference, 1975, at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, and
published in a collection of Eight Essays, edited by the convener,
the poet Roland Mathias. People will come up to me and say, with a chuckle,
that they enjoyed my footwork in dealing with Jones’s definitive answer
to the ticklish question of how to render the blasphemous and obscene
language universal in the war experience but still in 1937 under legal
ban in print. It is all there but is not allowed to take over and swell
to a pleurisy.

     
These
essays moved easily from one to another and form a group. Much later,
two more on the same line have asserted their right to exist. One, encouraged
by a tour with the David Jones Society to the Western Front and delivered
at a David Jones day in the Imperial War Museum, concerns itself not
with whole battalions of war writers but with three, all born in 1895,
all fusiliers: David Jones, who lived to be 79; Robert Graves, who lived
to be 90, both in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the German, Ernst Jünger
of the Hanover Fusiliers, who lived to be 102. In that smaller company
the parallels and contrasts of English and German, officer and private,
and of three distinct literary sensibilities can be dealt with in some
detail.

     
The
other recent war article, not yet publicly delivered, deals with two
perfectly allowable metaphors that have decomposed into polluting clichés
— Sacrifice and Slaughter. True, there is an element of sacrifice
in joining the forces — sacrifice of time and prospects, of youth
and health, but a sacrificial victim is put to death, and no soldier
wants or expects simply to be put to death. And from the commander’s
point of view the loss of troops is a matter of expenditure, not sacrifice.
Similarly with slaughter, the business of a slaughterhouse is to be
efficient, hygienic, and total: there are no prisoners, no wounded,
no survivors, no wooden cross, no letters of sympathy, no Memorial Day.
In the context of war writing, most talk of sacrifice is prate, most
talk of slaughter is rant. This will be an unpopular statement, but
it needs to be made. David Jones touches legitimately on both metaphors
but eschews both clichés.

     
In
revision most of this set of articles centring on In Parenthesis
have needed only incidental clarification and removal of redundancies.
The original survey of the war books, however, dealt with a succession
of topics: “fun and games,” gear and tackle and trim, comrades and
enemies, word and song, landscape with animals, moon and stars, “the
glory of women,” and the large questions of civilization and Christendom
and what may be called imaging the unimaginable. I have found that there
needed to be two more, “footslogging” and “the feel of things”.
Infantry regiments are “regiments of foot,” the “foot mob,”
and the process of turning a civilian into a soldier moves first through
the feet, by marching. The trained soldier in modern warfare may be
transported by vehicles to the support lines: from then on he is on
his feet. In Parenthesis is without rival in registering this
fact: in “Starlight Order” the sensitive reader’s feet should
ache in sympathy. So too, the feel of things. The strangeness of life
at the Front is a strangeness of feel: the uniform and its care, the
rifle’s wood and iron, mess tin and helmet, sacking and duckboard,
the varieties of rain, the qualities of mud. Here David Jones the artist
can evoke not just the visible but, as artists can do, the feel of the
visible.

     
The
sequence of my studies thus far has been quite clear, and they must
stand more or less in the order in which they were written. The subsequent
essays, intermittently composed have less sequence but do tend to form
themselves into groups, often pairs. A revered mentor, Reid MacCallum,
used to say with a laugh, “There are just two sorts of people in this
world, those who divide everything into two and those who don’t.”

     
The
first group of essays, however, is a threesome. Belonging in the neighbourhood
of “Three Fusiliers” but not engaged with war are three further
studies in literary congeniality. One is concerned with Chesterton and
Belloc, as Catholic writers and public personalities of course, but
also simply as copious writers one enjoys and keeps on reading, as Jones
clearly did. The second is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Jones studied art
formally for years at Camberwell and Westminster Art Schools, but he
had to learn his second art on his own. I surmise that Gerard Manley
Hopkins was a major formative influence on Jones’s style, along with
Malory and perhaps George Borrow. There are many illuminating references
to Hopkins, early and late, and he understood and appropriated Hopkins’s
sense of haecceitas (“thisness” as distinct from “whatness”):
it is their common practice and possession. The third, T.S. Eliot. Jones
knew T.S. Eliot’s poetry from an early age and came to The Waste
Land already familiar with The Golden Bough, which he read
in its original, multi-volume edition. They were friends from the 30s
to the end of Eliot’s life. Eliot exerted himself to ensure publication
by Faber of The Anathemata and wrote a brief laudatory preface
to a reissue of In Parenthesis. Jones, I will argue, has the
stronger grasp of the Roman Thing than Eliot, his “Tribune’s Visitation”
being a clear success in taking us into the mind and world of imperial
Rome, whereas Eliot abandoned his Coriolan sequence, as I think,
because it became confused, not being based on adequate historical knowledge
and insight.

     
Two
more, rather chunky, studies take their place next, on wide literary
and cultural subjects. There has been much throwing about of brains
as to whether In Parenthesis and The Anathemata are epic
poems. It is a question that will not go away and is discussed by John
H. Johnston, Bernard Bergonzi, Thomas Dilworth, Kathleen Staudt and
others. The history of epic criticism has tended in two directions:
either to derive from the Iliad a set of rules to be imposed
on all others, including the rather restive Odyssey, or to define
epic as the greatest work of man, which it is no longer possible to
write. Virgil has not lacked critics who would exclude him; Milton worried
about “an age too late”; the dictator of neo-classicism, Boileau,
rejected Tasso and by implication Milton for their use of Christian
“machinery” as an impiety; and Edgar Allan Poe, that tremendous
influence on French literature, asserted that “there is no such thing
as a long poem … a long poem is a contradiction in terms.” David
Jones, with two long poems containing history within him clamoring to
be written, and with Catholic Christianity as the mainstay of his life
and of all he had to say, met this challenge, leading us to the conclusion
that an epic is a great poem that comes as a surprise when epic is presumed
dead. (The Odyssey must have been a surprise.)

     
Looking
back on his childhood David Jones thumped his chest and exclaimed “I
already had the Welsh Thing here.” A long article with that as its
title balances the treatment of epic, for the world of Wales and its
literature may be termed “unepic”, as lacking architecture; instead,
it possesses, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “its turn for style, its
turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic.” In youth, ever
with “the Welsh Thing in here,” David pored over the Mabinogion
and Giraldus Cambrensis and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and, with more a Celtic
than a French eye, Malory. On his sixteenth birthday his father gave
him The Welsh People: chapters on their origin, history and law,
language, literature and characteristics, by Sir John Rhys and David
Brynmore-Jones, a 600-page book still in his possession after more than
sixty years. He plugged away at Welsh, never achieving the freedom of
the language but immersing himself in words, lore, and historical detail.
To the challenge of writing the long poem with historical and Christian
content and force, the Welsh Thing added a second, awkwardly difficult
challenge, to incorporate in his writing Welsh substance of high value
that has no centre and is impatient of organization.

     
Before
proceeding to my final section and its two essays that, like “Himself
at the Cave-Mouth,” try to explore his lifetime concerns and attitudes
of mind, I have placed four essays, or two pairs of essays, on restricted
subjects, all of them serving to join his two great talents, as artist
and as writer, with another, often forgotten or played down, as a thinker,
a prophet. The influential art critic, Harold Rosenberg, happened upon
the essay on “Art and Sacrament” in Epoch and Artist and
wrote an enthusiastic account of its argument in The New Yorker
without apparently being fully aware that Jones was a figure of stature
in both art and literature. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury,
has long known and prized the art and the writings, but it is significant
that as Regius Professor of Divinity he prescribed this essay of Jones
as a prime text for the advanced study of sacramental theology. Similarly,
Oswyn Murray, a Fellow of Balliol and a historian, praises him for the
range, accuracy, and insight of his historical imagination.

     
The
first pair are “Balaam’s Ass and Other Animals” and “The Scapebeast,”
which reveal not only his eye and feeling for animals but his thinking
about the nature and mystery of animals. The second pair, rooted in
the pictorial, raise the questions of how literacy affects the painter
and how the widespread (but by no means universal) practice of what
I call fenestralia avails in Jones’s art: by that I mean an
interior scene with a window and a view through that window of another
scene. Let me expand a little on these two pairs.

As
an art student just before the Great War young David Jones was undecided
whether to be a historical painter or an animal painter. Those categories
seem distant to us now, but painters then were regularly sorted according
to subject matter: portrait, landscape (rural, rugged, marine, urban),
historical, animal. His imagination was stirred by great historical
events — call them “scenes” — like the death of the last Prince
of Wales or the death at Trafalgar of Nelson, whose anniversaries he
observed faithfully every year — but his talent did not direct him
to the broad historical canvas. History remains implicit in many of
his pictures. A substantial proportion of his drawings, from childhood
to old age depict animals, and there was a period in high maturity when
he frequented the London Zoo to give close wondering attention to creatures,
an attention reflected in the abandoned Book of Balaam’s Ass,
which he attempted between In Parenthesis and The Anathemata.
It may be noted that David Jones, who loved cats and gave “stroking
a cat” as a ready example of something natural and innocent, never
possessed one, such was his lifelong practice of doing without, without
even much complaining of doing without.

     
A
close probing look at a specific animal, which he calls the “Scapebeast,”
belongs in this context, which reaches out to the metaphor and cliché
of sacrifice and slaughter. The tailpiece of In Parenthesis,
at once a ram caught in a thicket of barbed wire and a beast banished
to the wilderness, is a retrospective commentary on the action and meaning
of the writing. It positively directs the reader to the rich scriptural
commentary and it pointed this reader to the surprisingly sparse pictorial
record, explicit in Holman Hunt’s terrific “Scapegoat” in the
Lady Lever Gallery, implicit in Robert Rauschenberg’s “Monogram”,
in Stockholm — that angora goat with a tire round its middle, its
face bashed in and covered with paint, standing on a tiny plot of waste
ground.

     
The
reverberant idea of the scapegoat is rooted in ritual, which in turn
is fixed in scriptural writing, the scroll, the Book. This raises the
related question, especially relevant to David Jones and other artists
who are not only highly literate but exercise a second, even an equal,
talent in writing — the question of the effect of literacy on visual
art. Debates, long, hot, ill-defined, inconclusive, keep taking place
on the Sister Arts, the literary in painting, the pictorial in writing.
The same purists who scorn the “literary” in art will say of some
quite non-representational piece, “the way I read this painting….”
It is germane to note that the great bulk of easel paintings, water-colours,
engravings, and finished drawings are either the shape of a page of
print or of an opening of a book, and that a visitor to a gallery habitually,
almost automatically, gives each item on display the sort and duration
of attention he gives to a printed page. I have tried to come to grips
with the ramifications of this phenomenon with particular reference
to the doubly-gifted Wyndham Lewis and David Jones.

     
Only
one of my probes into aspects of Jones’s achievement originated in
his work as a painter, and so I have only the smallest claim to a place
beside Paul Hills and Nicolete Gray, Derek Shiel and his collaborator
Jonathan Miles, though the vein I am exploring I think is a rich one.
Painters who are concerned at all with representation may be divided
into those who approach their “thing” as if looking through a window
and those who have no such thought. David Jones is, many times over,
what I call a fenestralian. The fenestral picture looks out; it embraces
an interior, a window or aperture, and a view through it to something
exterior. It depicts or implies depth of recession — two planes, which
can evoke two states of mind, two qualities of time, two tones of feeling.
The use of the window motif has always required of the artist second
thoughts, a refocusing of attention, an effort to catch the dimension
of depth; and it makes the same demand on the viewer. It can never be
simply an “impression” or an “expression”. Unlike the door,
the window is a threshold of perception, not of action. You hesitate
and decide at a doorway; you glance or gaze through a window, blankly,
sharply, with dread, with curiosity, with longing. The perceiver remains
here, but there opens out to him in imagination and futurity,
promise or threat. The interior may be full or spare, lived-in or strange;
it may range from the fortress to the prison, from safety to confinement,
from cozy familiarity to crushing boredom. The exterior is the realm
of at least potential movement, whether of danger or enjoyment, of exhilaration
or routine. Interior and exterior in pictorial conjunction may co-exist
in various degrees of harmony or discord, and either can stand for “appearance”
to the other’s “reality.” In this regard, Jones stands with the
Pre-Raphaelites and not with Turner or Constable; not with Picasso or
Braque but emphatically with Matisse and Bonnard; not with Ben but with
Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. My full treatment of this subject,
on which I have far too much information, is not yet complete, and one
thing I hope to explore is whether the use of historical allusion in
the writing can justly be likened to the opening of windows.

     
The
final two essays share with the first a wide comprehensive scope. I
have given them the names “Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis” and “In
this Place of Questioning.”

     
“Stat
Crux dum Volvitur Orbis” is the motto of the Carthusian Order: “the
Cross stands still while the World revolves around it,” quoted, with
emphasis, several times by David Jones. Restless, fragmentary, his writings
may seem, touching momentarily upon myriads of topics, puzzling, at
times even distracting, in spite of the most ample and intentionally
helpful annotation ever supplied by poet to reader. That reader, however,
is never quite lost at sea, never has the dismaying sense of a maze
without a centre or an exit, of its signifying nothing. In The Anathemata
the great prehistoric and historic voyages of the first half are made
in ships, types of the Ark of Salvation, whose masts recall the Cross
(a time-honoured patristic image), whose keel and rib-cage recall the
Cross no less (a striking image original with Jones). The second half
culminates in a vision of Christ reigning and triumphing from the Tree.

     
In
the Preface (23) a great question is put: “If the poet writes ‘wood’
what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked?” I
have taken up that challenge and have found and tried to demonstrate
to anyone’s satisfaction that the wood and iron in all his writings
regularly and in detail recall the cross and thorns, the nails and spear
of Calvary. The trees in Biez and Mametz Woods recall the Tree of the
Cross implicitly, as it is explicitly evoked at the end of The Anathemata:

He does what is done in many places

what he does other

he does after the mode

of what has always been done.

What did he do other

recumbent at the garnished supper?

What did he do yet other

riding the Axile Tree? (243)

     
I
had thought of ending there, for fear of being in the case of Gustav
Mahler, who wrote a Resurrection Symphony and then went on to compose
other ambitious works on different and necessarily lesser themes. However,
while David Jones brings both his extended writings to strong conclusions,
any reader will have noticed that the two concluding sentences just
quoted both end with question marks.

     
The
first draft of the first piece I ever wrote on David Jones began with
a question: “An epic in the interrogative mood?” Any reader of his
writings, from beginning to end, will be struck by the great number
— uniquely great if I am not mistaken — of questions there, with
or without the mark of interrogation. It was one of the matters of style
he himself remarked on in the Preface to In Parenthesis; it continues.
Sometimes it is an antiphonal chant of question and response; memorably
in The Anathemata, it is an advancing column of questions, all
beginning, by anaphora, with “how else?” Sometimes it is simply
an exclamation of wonder at the thisness of people and things. Everything
occurs “in this place of questioning where you must ask the question
and the answer questions you.” I chose those words, from the posthumous
Roman Quarry, to frame the bookplate made for me by the eminent
wood-engraver Simon Brett, himself an admirer of the engraver-poet.
I wanted there and I want now to leave the same sort of impression that
Jones wanted his work as a whole to leave, one of openness and promise,
of eager questioning in lively expectation of an answer — this being
over and above the dogged endurance (“The Duration — wot you signed
for”) that he embodied in his day-to-day existence. In old age he
struck Stephen Spender as “happy”, and so he always struck me as
happy and hopeful and questioning to some purpose, even when feeling
“mouldy” and grousing like an old soldier about the weather in Christendom.

William Blissett

19 February A.D. MMIX

Footnotes:

2.  
Dai Greatcoat, 46, dates David’s introduction to J.L. Weston to 1929.

William Blissett: Writings on David Jones, Excluding Reviews

I. The Long Conversation, Oxford University Press, 1981

II. Published Articles

1.  “Himself at the Cave-Mouth,” University of Toronto Quarterly. 36, 1967, 259-273