In Contingencies of Value, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith writes that the text a reader receives after ‘a thousand individual acts of approval and rejection, preference and assessment, trial and revision’ is
not so much the achieved consummation of that process as its enforced abandonment: […] not because the author’s techniques are inadequate to his or her goals but because the goals themselves are inevitably multiple, mixed, mutually competing, [… ] and also because they are inevitably unstable, changing their nature [… ] during the very course of composition.
Herrnstein-Smith, 44
Extending over a period of 30 years, Jones’s project, with its fractures, insertions and numerous re-arrangements embodies Jones’s ‘multiple, mixed, and mutually competing’ goals. As Jones’s project moved from ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ into his ‘“conversation[s]” at the time of the Passion’ and then into his Celtic insertions and what we have titled The Grail Mass, his original desire to show how ‘everything is a balls-up and a kind of “Praise” at the same time’ (DGC, 86) came to be driven by two very separate impulses – the Spenglerian jeremiad and the sacramental memorial – that ultimately proved impossible for him to reconcile, at least to his satisfaction.
In our attempt to present the project in the fullest version that Jones constructed we have included those sections where the unresolved tensions are most apparent. Formally, these are most evident in Jones’s Celtic insertions into his Passion conversations, and we have noted where Jones made his insertions to aid the reader in negotiating the material. The issue at hand, though, is not that Jones was unable to resolve the formal tensions between the Spenglerian and the sacramental. Rather, it is that those tensions led to the three stages of his compositional process, and those discrete stages have a direct bearing on how readers can approach the material of The Grail Mass. The first stage was his initial construction of what amounted to at least two independent, autonomous works, one of which can be seen as structurally complete. The second involves his insertional method where he attempted to integrate the two strands resulting in The Grail Mass. The third was his final extraction of sections for revision into autonomous ‘fragments’.
It is our contention that the parts forming The Grail Mass – Section I to IV; ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’; and the Celtic insertions – can be read as a continuous and unified whole that can be judged on its own merit. Equally, though, ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ can and should be read as a complete work independent of both the Celtic insertions that split the work apart here and the fragments later extracted from it and published separately. Finally, each of the Celtic insertions and the four sections of what Hague published as ‘The Agent’ can be read both as parts of The Grail Mass and as fragments that function independently.
In order to aid the reader regarding the possible ways of reading both The Grail Mass and each of its constituent parts, we outline – beginning with The Agent – the compositional development, summarize the content, and point to the principal features of each of the parts of Jones’s project.
Sections I to IV present what Jones referred to as ‘a thing I did in 1940 (or thereabouts)’ involving a conversation between Judas and Caiaphas (DGC, 192) that he told Grisewood he was engaged in preparing for separate publication during his 1960–1962 revisions. Jones began by extracting five sheets from MS A: 3, 4 and 5 (although 5 had a question mark) and 16 and 17 and introducing them into MS B. Sheets 3, 4 and 5 were part of the version of ‘The Mass’ that opened MS A, and these sheets were later excluded.1 When added to sheets concerning the Cenacle from MS B, Sheets 16 and 17 became the source for what evolved into Section I and Section II of the sequence. Next, Jones expanded 17 to 17A to 17E, the origin of Section III, and then inserted them into his original MS B. All of this material was introduced between the end of ‘The Alternative Mass Opening’, what became the opening to The Anathemata, and the soldiers standing watch on the walls. All told, these initial insertions introduced approximately twenty-three sheets of material into Jones’s 143-sheet manuscript noted in the first puzzle sheet. Still later expansions, notably to Section III – what Jones specifically referred to as ‘The Agent’ – increased these four sections to approximately 38 sheets. Although this is not conclusive, it appears that Jones introduced the material into his original MS B, next significantly expanded it, later extracted it, subsequently re-introduced it, and then finally attempted to revise it for separate publication. We have chosen to include it as part of the whole, although the four-section sequence also stands alone.
Section I The general movement of the four sections is straightforward and while Jones draws on all four gospels throughout the sequence, Section I is grounded in John 13:27: ‘And after the sop, Satan entered into him’. Section I begins in the upper room with an allusion to John 13:23 where the beloved disciple is resting his head on Christ’s chest. The text then moves rapidly into the disciples’ protestations of innocence, Christ having previously announced that one of the twelve will betray him. This short introduction shifts into the body of the section, which is a long interior monologue on the part of Judas where he is involved in an internal debate regarding his role in the coming Passion. At times, the interior monologue presents what appears to be two separate voices as Judas asks ‘Who’s he that enters now my heart/and yet’s without’ (30) and dualities pervade the sequence. Throughout the monologue, the central issue Judas confronts is whether he is acting as a free agent or if he is simply enacting a pre-ordained role in a cosmic drama: ‘O truth, O fact, what maze you tangle/in the night I tread’ (31). Judas recognizes that as the betrayer, he is necessary to the pattern, and in a particularly resonant line notes ‘Hamans don’t hang on every tree/they’re key men/and most integral to the pattern/so would I be’ (32). Finally accepting that this is his lot, he decides that if he is to be the betrayer, then in the afterlife he will also betray Satan and ‘lead a faction war in hell’ (33). Meditating on the afterlife, however, Judas finally turns to the Sadducee belief in Sheol, ‘sweet oblivion […] where acts no longer generate their opposites’ (33) and where there is neither praise nor condemnation. Ultimately, caught in this duality, Judas seeks ‘Sheol’s hollow synthesis/[that] sets final term to all antithesis’ (34).
The section ends with Judas leaving the Cenacle for the house of Caiaphas to make arrangements for the betrayal. Throughout the section, Jones establishes a number of motifs that echo throughout the entire project, chief amongst them that of the labyrinth. History is seen as a maze, and Judas, in addition to seeing himself as an actor, pictures himself as one who wanders its meanders. In this, his reflections mirror the later thoughts of Jones’s two conscripts, Oenomaus and Crixus, who walk ‘in darkness in the shadow of the onager in the shadow of the labyrinths of the wall, of the world’ and who, like Judas, ‘don’t know the ins and out’ (62).
Section II This section returns to the upper room as Thomas, ‘the wary Didymus’ (35), secures the room against any prying eyes. Point of view seems to shift to Peter in a series of short reflections, ranging from the disciple’s relief that Judas, the only one not from Galilee, has left; through a recognition that the two swords in the corner might not be sufficient should there be trouble; and to a recollection of the transfiguration on Mount Thabor. These reflections, in turn, are interspersed with minimal action, again loosely connected, as the upper room is straightened up after the Paschal dinner and Christ readies himself to go to Gethsemane. Just as Judas in the first section sees himself in a maze, so ‘here the storm way/the dark meander now, the way deepens here’ (36). The section ends with the question ‘what meander now […] if it’s brook-way/where is Achitophel?’ (37). In evoking Achitophel, this last question recalls David’s counsellor who betrayed him when Absalom, David’s son, revolted against him. At the same time, it anticipates Judas’s betrayal; Achitophel, who like Judas committed suicide by hanging himself, was often seen as an antitype of Judas. It also anticipates Section III when Judas tells Caiaphas that he will meet the soldiers sent to arrest Christ ‘in the shadow of the hanged duke’s/ monolith’ (39), that is, a site that was once purported to be the tomb of Absalom.
Section III The focus returns to Judas who is now making arrangements with Caiaphas, and this section is where Jones made the most extensive additions as the four sections evolved. It begins with some initial discussion as to the meeting place and the general arrangements. Although Judas is willing to betray Christ, he tells Caiaphas that he deals only in facts and ‘Though I barter him for your coin bright/I’ll not paint black/what’s lily white’ (38). Judas’s voice retreats and Caiaphas takes over in a long monologue divided into three components. In the first movement, Caiaphas outlines the issues involved and speaks, as he calls it, for ‘factuality’ (40). If the Gospel of John provides the inspiration for Judas’s internal monologue in Section I, Spengler’s The Decline of the West provides the intellectual framework for Caiaphas’ ruminations in Section III. The conflict between the ‘fact’ of megapolitan and universal empire and the ‘dream’ of the local culture has been an underlying theme throughout the first three sections, as it is throughout the entire project. As Jasmine Hunter Evans and Christine Pagnoulle point out:
At the heart of Jones’s Roman poetry lay Spengler’s conceptualization of the ‘break’ between culture and civilization in which the dualism of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ could be used to divide types of men: culture truth-men with their religious history and artistic worldview, and civilizational fact-men, with their political history and pragmatic worldview. Jones used this dualism to shape the agency and motivation of his characters in ‘The Agent’.2
In this, Caiaphas bears a strong resemblance to the Tribune. Where the Tribune speaks for the state as religion, Caiaphas gives voice to organized religion serving the state. Taken together, however, they become the embodiment of what Crixus fears:
Should ever the men of rule with
the masters of the covenant come to a profitable
pact, should universal Caesar kiss the
indivisible baal, then farewell hearth and farewell
home for all the genii of the place and the sweet
name-numina. (84)
Like the Tribune, Caiaphas sees the shape of the future:
We do not, as some others do,
intermeddle phantasy with fact,
but we who sit in office, seeing
in detail and that unconsciously
close, the present shape, foresee in
part the shapeless future (40)
The two figures as administrators share complicated parallels. The Tribune is the colonial administrator who recognizes the damage that empire imposes on the conquerors and has a clear sense of what is being lost and feels that loss deeply. Caiaphas as a member of the elite of the conquered, and faced with the choice between rebellion, one of the subthemes of the movement, and accommodation chooses accommodation. Both, though, are aware of what this portends. Just as the Tribune says to his men ‘you shall understand/the horror of this thing’ (149), Caiaphas tells Judas the future is ‘hideous’ (40). The section then shifts to where Jones moves into the prophetic mode as Caiaphas foresees, though dimly, the destruction of Jerusalem and the founding of Aelia Capitolina in its stead. Finally, the discussion turns back to Judas’s role in the proceedings as Caiaphas tells Judas ‘Yours is a double role/ granted to few’ and part of a ‘complex dance, significantly/ masked’ (49). After this, he dismisses Judas with the words:
Go then:
here’s not all night to spare.
Get doing what is to do.
See that you’re there. (49)
Section IV This is the shortest of the sections, only four sheets in length, and concerns the detail assigned to arrest Christ in Gethsemane. Again Jones seems to be following a suggestion in John in that those sent to apprehend Christ are soldiers. Although he discovered later in the compositional process that it was local auxilia that were employed, here the arresting detail remains Roman. At the time of the Passion there were no Roman troops stationed in Jerusalem; however, there were four legions stationed in the general area, as Jones outlines in a footnote and as one of the soldiers mentions (51, 50-51): the Fretensis, the Ferrata, the Fulminata, and the Gallica. One of the soldiers, recalling Roman rites of spring and the death of Hector, mockingly asks about the nature of their detail and the man to be arrested.
After asking a series of questions regarding who will be involved in what they see as a mock ritual, the soldier contrasts how Christ had ridden into town ‘cum floribus et palmi’ (51) the previous Sunday morning and how this ‘Jove’s night’ they will ‘stick a feather in his cap, and/ call him Purpuratus!’ (52). Like both Judas in Section I and Caiaphas in Section III, the soldiers see themselves as part of a performance. In keeping with the mockery, however, and in keeping with their anonymity in the proceedings, they see themselves as simply part of a ‘pantomime’ (52).
While the gospels, and particularly John, provide the obvious narrative source for the project, and Spengler provides one of the theoretical influences, Jones’s reading of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, particularly Part VI, The Scapegoat, and, more specifically, Frazer’s note, ‘The Crucifixion of Christ’, places the opening events of the Passion within the framework of Frazer’s theories on the scapegoat. Before discussing Frazer, however, it is useful to take a brief look at a key feature of Jones’s style.
Jones’s most important stylistic element in this sequence as throughout both The Grail Mass and later The Anathemata involves creating a cultural density in which a passage compresses events, references, traditions and linguistic elements from multiple time periods to shoulder the full weight of cultural history on a particular moment. Most notably in The Grail Mass’s third Celtic insertion and later with The Anathemata’s ‘Angle-Land’, Jones utilizes a complex macaronic technique as English, Latin, German, Norse and Welsh play against each other to illustrate the process of cross-cultural influence and development. More commonly, Jones will place words from different languages together to establish analogical relationships. For example, in a short passage of six lines from Section III, Jones blends British colloquial slang (‘gaffer’ and ‘bagman’) with Latin (‘dux’ and ‘urbes’) and German (‘kultur’) (47-8). Similarly, a character will employ a phrase that reverberates back from that textual moment of the Passion to an earlier historical moment, forward to the compositional present or, in some cases, both. Again in Section III in Caiaphas’s prophetic vision, Caiaphas unknowingly foresees the levelling of Jerusalem and the founding of Aelia Capitolina. Recalling ‘General Nebuzardan’ (44), he watches as a Roman performs the ritual ploughing undertaken at the inauguration of a new city and hears the following being sung:
For Athena to gain
Quirinus must till.
Let’s plough their palladia
into their hill.
We’ll turn the fossa deep
for Farmer Rufus
he bids ’em reap
not almond-fronded rods, but fasces. (45)
One footnote tells us the moment that Caiaphas foresees harkens back to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians: ‘As we read in Jeremiah 52:12–14’ (44n). The next, however, allies the moment with the compositional present of the 1940s with the note ‘Cf.g Adolf Hitler’s aphorism: “‘the sword must gain what the plough must till’” (45n). This is one of Jones’s most characteristic devices, involving the interrelationship of allusions whereby one allusion in a passage modifies another which, in turn, modifies still another, creating a rich density of meaning in the process. In this case, the two allusions evoke three catastrophic moments in Jewish history – the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar; the levelling of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 CE and subsequent founding of Aelia Capitolina in approximately 130 CE under Hadrian; and the compositional present of the 1940s and the National Socialist’s anti-semitic platform and ultimate genocide – that comment on each other in complex ways that defy easy reading. It is precisely what occurred in 587 BCE that Caiaphas is trying to avoid. As Caiaphas tells Judas, although Christ himself is inconsequential, ‘we need an azazel./A goat’s a goat,/the lot’s on him’ (48). As he says, ‘accommodate we must — or, be what/no man can effectively be — Caesar’s enemy’ (48). Christ is clearly an ‘irritant’ (48) to Roman order and he, like all irritants, must be eliminated. When seen in light of his actions and motives, Caiaphas’s vision becomes deeply ironic as he foresees that which his actions seek to prevent. The allusion to Hitler’s aphorism only complicates the matter further.3
This type of inter-allusive referentiality is a device Jones employs throughout The Grail Mass, The Anathemata and the fragments collected in The Sleeping Lord. In some cases, it results in the forced prophetic ‘visions’ such as one encounters in Caiaphas’s prophecy and later in the prophetic passages in ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’. In others, particularly in the central meditation on the Crucifixion in ‘The Fatigue’, it results in some of Jones’s most evocative and powerful work.
As noted, Frazer’s volume on the scapegoat is the third foundational work to the opening sequence. While Jones directly refers to Frazer in a number of footnotes throughout ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’, Frazer’s presence can be discerned in Section IV, where the soldier’s questions place Christ’s Passion within the context of the Roman ritual of beating Mamurius Veturius, ‘the Old Mars’, with rods and then driving him out of the city:
Does he issue from Dung or Skaian Gate?
Do we chase Hector round the wall or is
a new Mars come?
Or do we chase the Old Mars out
as Spring by Spring in Latium is done
at these ides of the first month? (50)
This ritual humiliation, which Jones discovered in Frazer, places the events within the greater context of the sacrificial scapegoat. Jones’s adaptation of Frazer, though, involves more than a simple comparison of a Roman spring ritual to the scourging and mocking of Christ. Frazer’s deeper influence is first present in Section I when Judas thinks ‘Bride Ishtar!/Hamans don’t hang on every tree’ (32). Here, Jones is alluding to Frazer’s reading of the biblical story of Haman and Mordechai (Esther, 7:6–10) in which Harman is hanged on gallows he had originally built for the execution of his rival Mordechai, after a failed attempt to instigate religious violence against the Jewish people. Frazer traces analogues between this tale and the Persian spring festival of Sacaea in which two mock kings are selected: one freed, the other executed. Frazer goes on to suggest analogies between carnivalesque practices of ritual humiliation and the relationship between Jesus and Barabbas in the gospels.4
To return to Section IV of the sequence, the final passages exemplifies this method of compressed inclusion where Jones takes a charged moment and invests it with as much cultural resonance as possible, all within the framework of the scapegoat:
or what tribunus militum will loan
his tailored paludamentum
when we crown him
Jack O’ the Bean?
Who’ll garland his skewered limbs with
flower-of-May, for the solemn entry?
Who’ll chant his trisagion
but the Cock of Gaul?
Last Sol’s morn:
he came to town cum floribus et palmi.
This Jove’s night:
we’ll stick a feather in his cap, and
call him Purpuratus!
But let’s away
this pantomime must be advanced
before the light of Venus-Day. (51–2)
On the level of narrative, the Roman soldiers are simply asking who will provide the robe, the flowers and the other elements involved in the mockery, using the Roman ritual as a model and casting ahead to the next day’s events. Jones, however, in his allusiveness, continually casts beyond the immediate events of Good Friday. The ‘trisagion’ of ‘Who’ll chant his trisagion/but the Cock of Gaul?’ evokes the Improperia, or Remonstrances, sung during the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday, but links them to Blondie Taranus, the Gallic trumpeter who sounds the classicum that opens the second part of ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ (51). Similarly, in keeping with the mockery, the phrase, ‘We’ll stick a feather in his cap/and call him Purpuratus’, anachronistically echoes the song ‘Yankee Doodle’ originally sung by British officers to mock colonial soldiers during the French and Indian War, although the tune has much older roots in Europe as a harvest tune. The word ‘Purpuratus’, translating ‘clothed in purple’ continues the theme of ritual mockery and at first seems simply to refer to Christ’s scourging and crowning with thorns as King of the Jews. The phrase, however, extends beyond the next day, and the first emperor to whom the appellation was applied was Galerius (260–311 CE). As part of the Roman Tetrarchy, Galerius was sovereign in the eastern provinces, although still subordinate to Diocletian. As reported by Ammianus and recorded in Jerome’s Chronicon, when Galerius was defeated in battle by the Persians, Diocletian subjected Galerius to the humiliation of travelling on foot ahead of his procession while clothed in purple.
In spite of its difficulties – the long digression where Caiaphas prophesizes in Section III is particularly problematic and betrays the limitations characteristic of the prophetic passages throughout The Grail Mass – ‘The Agent’ is a work that warrants further consideration and study both as a ‘fragment’ and as part of the entire project.
Jones claimed that the initial inspiration for all his literary work following In Parenthesis derived from his vision of British soldiers of occupation suddenly transformed into Roman legionaries. While this may have been the immediate inspiration, Jones had shown an interest in the events of the Passion as witnessed through the eyes of those ‘accidentally involved’ and in the similarities of the Roman legionaries to British soldiers of the First World War since his time at Westminster School of Art. He did a number of studies on the subject, circa 1921, some of which are in the possession of the Tate.
The text we have entitled ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ has its compositional origins as an approximately seventy-seven sheet draft forming the original MS B of the first puzzle sheet described in our introduction (10–11). While textual evidence suggests the material evolved from elements in the original MS A, this is not conclusive. Jones began work on the material in 1940 and had completed a full draft, the initial MS B, by 1943. The original MS B opened with a rough version of ‘The Alternative Mass Opening’, and ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ narratively begins when the sound of the classicum signalling the beginning of the middle watch penetrates into the upper room just after Christ institutes the Eucharist – an event the poem ties to the priest’s act of consecration during the Mass – and two conscripts, Privates Oenomaus and Crixus, come on duty. In its earliest version, there were three principal figures – Crixus, a 20-year veteran who served in the German campaigns; Oenomaus, a six-year veteran; and Brasso Olenius, a centurion who originally gave the speech in ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’; however, Jones immediately altered the material and introduced the Tribune as a fourth figure who gives the final speech.
‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ falls into two parts with Crixus and Oenomaus dominating the first half and Brasso and the Tribune the second. In the first part, the two conscripts reflect on the nature of empire and their particular roles as soldiers of occupation in a wide-ranging colloquy. They are, we are told, the ‘stone[s] in the living/wall that circuits the city’ (57). Over the course of the watch, they also witness signs of a disturbance that proves to be the arrest of Christ in Gethsemane. Toward the end of their watch, Crixus offers a prayer to the Great Mother that celebrates site, diversity and local culture, values that stand in direct opposition to those of empire and imperialism which they serve, however reluctantly. Immediately after his plea that the Great Mother will protect them against ‘the technicians [who] manipulate the dead limbs of our culture as though it yet had life’ (84), the classicum sounds again and the middle watch ends.
The second half begins with Crixus and Oenomaus discussing the Celtic trumpeter who has sounded the changing of the guard which leads into a discussion of ‘west-wave Celts’ (87), and from there into how Rome’s global economy assimilates local cultures. Brasso comes upon the two and, realizing that they have not been standing guard but have been talking together, assigns them to the next day’s fatigue. On returning to the guard house, the Tribune enters. After speaking to Brasso, the Tribune addresses the men on the nature of empire, calling on them to share with him ‘this barrack bread’ and to drink wine from this ‘issue cup’ in a dark and bitter counterpoint to the consecration at the Cenacle (152). In an unpublished letter to Jones from 1969, Lewis described ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ as: ‘Moving and terrible. An indictment of all empires, of all that destroy the local thing, not merely military conquests, but industrial and commercial expansion’ (DJP, CT1/4).
Offering a complex and controversial view on economic and political imperialism, particularly as regards its relationship to local cultures, ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ is the clearest and most complete poetic articulation of Jones’s views on contemporary civilization. With his hymn to the Great Mother as the textual centre, the opening and closing sacramental acts by Christ and the Tribune form a complex commentary on each other; the watch of Brasso and the two conscripts enacts an imperialistic version of the concurrent watch in Gethsemane. Awkward passages and narrative inconsistencies notwithstanding, the work evidences a very high level of structural complexity and presents some of Jones’s most powerful poetry.
Jones employed a number of different texts to provide him with information while writing ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’, many of which are cited in the footnotes. The two most important, though, are Spengler’s Decline of the West and Tacitus’s Annals. Jones was, as we noted in our introduction (6n), immersed in and battling with Spengler while composing the work, and Spengler’s theories outline a four-part pattern that begins with a cultural spring and ends in a civilizational winter. Late civilizations are marked by economic and military imperialism that precedes their final collapse. Spengler also proposes a morphological system whereby different time periods are contemporaneous on his spring-to-winter continuum. Thus, Imperial Rome with its expansionist wars and its world economy provided a parallel with the twentieth century West. Opposed to, but being destroyed by this coming world-state, are small local cultures, their way of life rooted in their particular sites. In its imperial phase, civilization militarily dominates and economically and culturally assimilates local cultures to the megalopolis, a Spenglerian coinage Jones uses repeatedly in his writings. While Jones had held similar cultural views since his time at Ditchling, Spengler provided Jones with both a specific terminology and a systematic way of examining history, even while he was fundamentally opposed to Spengler’s nihilism and his championing of a utilitarian view of the human being.
What attracted Jones to Tacitus was Tacitus’s writings on Rome’s Germanic campaigns, which suggested parallels between Rome’s wars and the world wars of the the twentieth century. Tacitus’s account of the Teutoburg forest campaigns spoke to Jones’s own experience at the Somme. Equally important was Tacitus’s concern with the changes in Roman society as Rome entered a permanent imperial period under Tiberius’s rule, changes that Jones felt were occurring in western civilization. As he wrote in a letter to Burns in March of 1942: ‘Been reading some Tacitus. […] Considering how relatively early he was in the Roman Empire, it’s interesting that he speaks as though the whole show was long past its peak’ (DGC, 117).
As soon as Jones completed his first seventy-seven sheet draft in 1943, he immediately began to revise to address issues with the original version. There were, essentially, four types of revisions. One type of revision concerned issues of historical fact. Throughout the writing of the work, Jones was constantly undertaking research on, among other things, Roman cultural and military history, Celtic culture and Jerusalem at the time of Christ. As a result, he was continually finding more accurate information. The most important was that when Jones began writing his conversation, he was working under a false assumption regarding the troops stationed in Jerusalem. In ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’, Jones’s conscripts were Roman soldiers stationed at the Antonia. It was only after completing the first version in rough draft that he discovered that there were no Roman troops permanently stationed in Jerusalem. The troops stationed in Jerusalem at that time were local auxilliaries. Jones’s discovery prompted wide-ranging revisions throughout, particularly regarding the presence of the Tribune.5 A second kind of revision resulted from Jones’s deepening concern with imperialism, the world economy and the process of cultural assimilation. This led to the revisions that expanded the text further. The most prominent of these is Section X, which later forms the meditation on the workings of the central administration in ‘The Fatigue’. This was introduced as a four-sheet insertion on sheet 68 of the 77-sheet MS B after Jones had completed the first full draft. Evidence suggests it was composed in December 1943 and January 1944,6 and inserted shortly thereafter. Next, in an apparent attempt to link the events of the Passion with the London setting of a version of ‘The Mass’, Jones hoped to include matter concerning pre-Roman Britain, using a device where Crixus tells Oenomaus what ‘they do say’ (87) regarding British Celts, all of which take place in the opening pages of Section VIII.
The first three types of revisions, while sometimes creating narrative inconsistencies or leading to passages that appear to be more instructional than poetic, should not create problems for a reader. The fourth type of revision, however, is quite different. As his sacramentalist ethos started to assert itself, Jones began to revise his text to incorporate as much cultural material as possible and to employ increasingly charged language. This led him to introduce a prophetic mode. At two points in ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ Jones’s speakers clearly have knowledge and a perspective that – given the realistic frame of the narrative – they could not have enjoyed. Both points evidence a radical shift in language and the text becomes, to recall Jones’s letter to Lewis, ‘more evocative and recalling’ (TLSL, 19). Both are insertions. Both were made after the 143-sheet manuscript B of the first puzzle was completed and in all likelihood after the 86-sheet MS B of the second puzzle sheet. In the view of the editors, the first is successfully integrated into the work, while the second is not. The first is the original and longer version of the central meditation on the Crucifixion from ‘The Fatigue’ that begins ‘When you survey the unredemptive cross’ (132) and continues to ‘between March-drought and sharp April/on a Venus Day’ (136). A six-sheet insertion Jones labelled 125A to 125F, and which here is Section IX, it derived from the same Crucifixion material from which Jones also extracted the first insertion into The Anathemata. While the date of its extraction, revision and insertion is unclear, its insertion comes after the second puzzle sheet but before the publication of The Anathemata. The second forms the bulk of Section XI and was introduced at the lines beginning with ‘Sergeant – a word’ (139) and concludes with ‘and this is the dawn for trouble’ (142). The insertion was introduced at sheet 126. The prophetic material begins after ‘Wherefore sergeant/take a tip from y’r townee, by the/Sibyl now possessed’ (140) and continues to the end of the section. Apparently drawn from the Crucifixion section, it was revised and inserted into The Grail Mass material at the same time as the other insertion. In fact, Jones would later take the lines beginning ‘arbor axed from arbour-side’ and ending with ‘fronde, flore, germine’ (141) and employ them as the frontispiece to ‘The Fatigue’. It is not the material itself which separates the two, but the presentation. In the insertion that he later used in ‘The Fatigue’, Jones abandons the particular narrator and instead employs for the first time in the Roman material a disembodied consciousness to present the lines, a consciousness cognizant not only of the import of the coming moment but also of its later reverberations in Western culture. In the second insertion, the device of a Sibyl infusing a soldier on guard appears to be just that, an awkward device that draws attention to itself. In this regard, we would draw the reader’s attention to the material first introduced into and then later deleted from ‘Keel, Ram, Stauros’ (174–80).
In a letter dated 6 May 1943, Jones wrote to Burns:
I’ve been reading some elementary geology books lately […] In the course of the thing I’ve been trying to write I had occasion to write of a Roman Road in Wales and a river which cuts it […] I could not proceed without knowing what precisely the strata of those parts were made of.
DJP, CD 1/19
This is the earliest reference to the materials that comprise the three insertions of Celtic material that Jones introduced into his Roman conversation of ‘grousing soldiers’ on the Walls of the Antonia. Between early 1943 and early 1946, Jones composed the material that would come to form his three Celtic insertions. The exact dates of the insertions are not clear; however, all three were composed and inserted before he created the first puzzle sheet and the Celtic material accounts for the majority of material used to expand his original MS B manuscript from 77 sheets to 143. Over the course of the insertions, one sees the evolution of Jones’s style and form as each insertion takes the reader further away from the dramatic poem occurring on Holy Thursday in Jerusalem and more deeply into Wales and Celtic culture. Jones’s form shifts from narrative to meditation and the language becomes increasingly ‘more evocative and recalling’. Jones introduced the material by first splitting two lines on sheet 66 of his Roman conversation and then nesting his first insertion between those two lines. He then split this first insertion in the same way and nested the second insertion between two lines of the first. Finally, he split his second insertion and inserted the third within the second. While Jones first employed insertions with Dai Greatcoat’s speech in In Parenthesis (Dilworth, 1988: 170), his Celtic insertions appear to be his first attempt to employ insertions of fully composed ‘fragments’ into an existing text as a constructional method; in this, the text anticipates the method Jones used in constructing The Anathemata.
In ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’, Crixus and Oenomaus have been ruminating on the world order and its impact on local cultures and how western Celtic culture will be the next to fall. Crixus says that their culture will end:
When the flotillas white the tide
that washes tidal Isca and
Severn flood floods to
hendre-height with tides of
Empire. (92)
Then, he continues, with:
When calibans of Logia Sinus
swear by Bron that tree-tops walk
the spume because the green troughs
hide all but the top-trees of our
cruising biremes pooping the
after swell and sea-watchers on
Mona tell that
boding corpse-lights hover
Cantref Manawyddan. (124)
It was between these two passages that Jones made his first insertion regarding the ‘Roman road in Wales’ and the ‘river which cuts it’. The first insertion was initially fifteen sheets in length that Jones marked 66A to 66O and, in it, Crixus affords the initial point of view. Here he imagines the legions landing, being shaped into order by ‘a bawling optio barking/ ’em into some sort of shape’ (95) and then moving inland. Roman civilization, embodied in the road and the bridge, confronts Celtic culture, as seen in water and forest. As the troops – ‘the men with the groma’(96) – go deeper into Wales seeking to impose their order on the land, the point of view shifts from Crixus to an omniscient voice, and the text moves away from narrative and becomes meditative and speculative. In contrast to the clear and ordered world of Rome, one is in a place ‘where every barrier shifts’ (97). The troops come to the megaliths and cairns that cover the landscape ‘where the narrow-skulled prospector lies’ (102). This is the centre of the first insertion, after which the text retraces itself and the troops move back to the ships; from there, Crixus and Oenomaus continue their colloquy.
While the above is a summary of the initial version of the insertion, the manuscripts show two areas where Jones undertook revisions and additions which stressed the confrontation between culture and civilization, and which began to explore the Celtic deposits. The first became the current opening to the first Celtic insertion. Here Jones introduces the insertion with a passage where the ‘aged ousel of Cilgwri’ (93), the stag of Rehdynfre, and the ‘king-salmon of Glevum’ (93) raise a warning as the Roman troops land. In Welsh lore, these are the three oldest creatures, and they figure prominently in the tale of Culhwch ac Olwen from The Mabinogion where Arthur’s ambassadors search for information on Mabon. The second area of addition and revision occurs when the speaker notes that they are in a place where ‘the singing birds yet sing the song the/ported weapons heard’ (98) and concludes with ‘this is the zone/here are the marches/where such things may be’ (100). The Claudian invasion occurred in 44 CE, so this is initially an imaginative projection by Crixus of that invasion. The Julian incursion took place in 55 BCE. As Jones explains in a footnote, he is relying on the theme of ‘The song of the birds of’ Rhiannon whose singing creates peace between opposing forces to account for the ‘eight decades’ (99). As the drafts to the manuscript show, Jones introduced these revisions and additions to the original insertion around the time he introduced the second Celtic insertion. While Jones had used elements of Welsh folklore earlier, this is the first time that he directly refers to Arthurian material which becomes the core of the second Celtic insertion.
In the winter 1942–1943, Jones was working on an essay, ‘The Myth of Arthur’, where he says the purpose of ‘genuine myth’ is ‘to conserve, to develop, to bring together, to make significant for the present what the past holds’ (E&A, 243). This essay has a bearing on four diagrams now held at the National Library of Wales and which were drawn around the same time. Beginning in pencil and ink, these diagrams move into colour as each becomes more complex than the last. In them, Jones maps out the history, with its variations and complex connections, of the myth of Arthur. These are the cartoons leading to Jones’s A Map of the Themes in the Artist’s Mind. During this same period, Jones, immersing himself in Welsh material in the same way he had previously immersed himself in Spengler and Tacitus, began to compose and insert the extensively researched Celtic matter into his work.
In the first insertion, Jones’s Romans come to the megaliths and cairn and the narrator asks ‘and does the stone mastaba cairn the/negotiator?’ (102), after which the ‘factual gromatici, peeish in/the hills-god’s driving piss’ begin their return (122). It was between these two lines that Jones introduced his second Celtic insertion, labelled 66H1 to 66H14, beginning with a series of questions regarding those stones. In interrogating the stones, Jones surveys geographical and cultural layers and brings together the successive waves of invaders who come to compose Wales. In developing material that will later become ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Sleeping Lord’, Jones uses the Welsh medieval tale of the hunting of the Great Boar from Culhwch ac Olwen and the myth of the sleeping redeemer who will come again to renew the land. While the first insertion maintained a tenuous continuity with the Roman conversation on Holy Thursday, the second abandons the surface narrative in an attempt to establish a more complex historical relationship between Rome and Wales through the figure of Arthur, and with it a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between conquered and conqueror.
In the second insertion, the voice questions whether a ring of stones is a burial area or the ‘kennel [of] the bitch hounds’ (103) who hunted the Great Boar. This leads into the first version of ‘The Hunt’, a seven-sheet passage that asks whether the quarry was for ‘world-gain’ or the ‘world-hog’ (103). Those engaged in the hunt are not only the Celtic warriors, but both the ‘small elusive men’ (104) who preceded and were conquered by the Celts and the Roman Arya who, in turn, conquered the Celts. After the hunting party is introduced, the leader of the hunt, deliberately unnamed though clearly Arthur, enters. As the hunt continues, the leader becomes more and more closely identified with the land he guards, and finally we come to the end of the hunt ‘where the leader rested from toil’ (109). At this point, the speaker asks where the leader is buried, and we move into the original seven-sheet version of ‘The Sleeping Lord’. Here the Lord of the Hunt is not merely identified with the land but metamorphosed into the land in which he is buried. The climax of the second insertion comes when the voice asks: ‘Does the land wait the sleeping/lord or is the wasted land/that very lord who sleeps’ (119), which concludes ‘The Sleeping Lord’. Here, the narrator asks ‘What was he called — was his/ womb-name Cronus or had he/ another — was he always the stern/ Maristuran?’ (119–20) and asks if the leader predates the Roman Arya, in this place ‘where the known and the/ unknown traffic together/ […] at the brink of/the lithosphere’ (121) and we return to the first Celtic insertion.
The third and final insertion of Celtic matter into the text is the most complex structurally, linguistically and culturally. It is equally complex in terms of its relationship, not only to the other insertions in The Grail Mass, but also to the hall priest’s prayer in ‘The Sleeping Lord’ and to the trading voyage in ‘Middle-Sea and Lear-Sea’. While the Hall Priest’s prayer was composed well after the publication of The Anathemata, the manuscript evidence shows that the Celtic material in ‘Middle-Sea and Lear-Sea’ and the third Celtic insertion were composed as part of the same body of material and during the same period, beginning in late 1943 and on through 1946.
In the second Celtic insertion, the narrator asks ‘Is the Usk a drain for his gleaming tears/when he weeps for the land … [ and if the] Tawe clog[s] for his sorrows’ (109). Here the work recalls the southern coalfields of Wales, as the tears and blood of the maimed Lord ‘mingle his anguish-stream/ with the scored-valleys’ titled refuse’ (109) as the rivers run to the Severn and the ‘widening Hafren’ (109). Can the sea, the narrator asks, distinguish between ‘the marking and indelible balm from flotsomed sewage and the seaped valley-waste’ (110) before saying ‘But yet he sleeps’ (119) and returning to the evocation of the Lord as the ravaged and wasted land, a land ravaged now by economic exploitation.
Between the final question and ‘But yet he sleeps’, Jones introduced his final Celtic insertion, a fourteen-sheet insertion numbered 66H12a to 66H12n. Just as the previous insertion was a quest through the landscape of Wales for the Sleeping Lord, the third insertion follows the waters of the Celtic Sea in a quest for ‘Mannan, deep of counsel’, a Celtic sea god that Jones initially equates with Manwyddan, the magician husband of Rhiannon. On reaching the ocean’s waters, the voice asks ‘But where’s that tribious conjuror/who is both steady steer-bord hand/and heaver of the keel-track’ (111). Over the course of the insertion, the quest leads from the waters of the Severn, to Caldey and Tenby islands, and then over to Ireland where ‘his three shanks wheel the Leinster/brume’ (112). It moves on to Ulster and over to Scotland ‘where Dalriada whites to Kintyre’ and to the Isle of Man (112). The quest continues to Anglesey in Wales and follows the waters down the coast and back to its beginning. A geographical tour de force, the insertion circles the waters of the Celtic Sea, touching Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as it encompasses the entire region.
More than simply a quest for Mannan, though, the insertion becomes a quest for Lear and the other Gods of the region: ‘where’s Nuada/where’s the Roarer, or was he/the Strider, or what, by his/shape-shifting name, is he properly/called?’ (115). The quest for his name becomes increasingly layered and dense, as Jones evokes the ancient gods of the cultures that have given rise to the region, moving in time from the earliest Celtic figures to the Roman and on to the Norse as he seeks out the origins of the culture. Finally, all of the deities are conflated in a litany of names that opens with the lines ‘Call him as may be’ and ends with the line ‘But what’s this Bright?/Who’s quit the wine-darks and the pseudo-deeps?/Who’s broke middle-sea?’ (117). In creating the insertion, Jones gathers into it all of the cultures that have given rise to the region as Celtic gods and goddesses, Roman and Norse deities and Christian saints are introduced and conflated as Jones presents a region as a site where the cultural process is one that makes ‘ceaseless metamorphosis/the only constant’ (117). In evoking the fusion of cultures, Jones employs a densely macaronic language, calling on Latin, English and Welsh.
The third Celtic insertion presents some of Jones’s most powerful and complex poetry. While clearly capable of standing on its own, it is a passage that also needs to be read in the context of two other works. The first is ‘The Sleeping Lord’. In creating ‘The Sleeping Lord’, Jones split the text between ‘where, would say, his foot-chafer leans’ (109) and ‘are his ankles/lapped by the ferric waters’ (109) and introduced a passage that Dilworth describes as ‘a series of additional questions about Arthur’s foot-holder and candle-bearer, which is divided in its turn to accommodate the silent prayer of Arthur’s hall-priest’ (Dilworth, 1988: 332). In the hall-priest’s prayer, the priest recalls past rulers: ‘Paternus of the Rex Pexa, Cunedda Wedlig, The Conditor and, far more recent so more green in memory, the Count Ambrosius Aurelianus that men call Emrys Wedlig’ (SL, 84). The hall priest is one of Jones’s rememberers, one who sees similarities between the four gospels and the four branches of the Mabinogion. The priest’s list resembles the second part of the litany Jones included in his 1943 essay, ‘The Myth of Arthur’:
Cult-figures of an ancient theology got mixed with quasi-legendary figures and with straight historical persons: Beli, Llŷr, Lludd, Bendigiedfran, Coel Hên, Paternus of the Red Tunic, Macsen Wledig, Cunedda Wledlig, Ambrosius, Arthur, Cadwallon of the Long Hand, Cadwaladr the Blessed.
E&A, 216
The same essay, though, also recalls the mythic figures standing behind those quasi-legendary figures, the sum of which evolved into the figures of Romance whose ‘tradition echoes a still earlier one’ (E&A, 218), the origins of which the third Celtic insertion evokes. In many ways, the two very different insertions outline processes of cultural transmission and transformation which complement each other, with the insertion published in ‘The Sleeping Lord’ continuing the process begun in the earlier excluded insertion.
At the conclusion of the third Celtic insertion, we are presented with a question: ‘But what’s this Bright?/Who’s quit the wine-darks and the pseudo-deeps?/Who’s broke middle-sea?’ (117) and the text then begins to evoke Venus as the mythic underpinnings to Gwenhyfar, the consort of Arthur. In the third Celtic insertion, the implications of the female figure are not fully developed and principally serve as the lead back to the second Celtic insertion. The question, though, has a bearing on The Anathemata and specifically on the vine-juice skipper’s voyage. In the third insertion into what becomes The Anathemata, Jones recalls a ‘vine-juice skipper’ (A, 182), an ‘old Pelasgian’ (A, 107) who, they say, ‘made Thule’ (A, 97). The original version of this insertion charts the tin voyage where the skipper overshoots Cornwall and must turn around and return. This skipper had ‘some rare chinas/beyond the Pillars’ (A, 171) and the voice asks if he has ‘been on the spree/with Nodens’ (A, 171). The insertions to The Anathemata are very complex and our purpose is not to examine them in depth (see Goldpaugh, 2017); however, it appears that at one point in the organizational process, Jones intended for the ‘vine-juice skipper’ to come into contact with a Mannan figure. Both the material on the skipper and the trading voyage and the material of the third Celtic insertion are concerned with the same process of cultural transmission and transformation. Additionally, as the manuscripts show, the material in both was composed during the same time period, developing between late 1944 and early 1946. Most tellingly, if one follows the geography, the furthest southern point of the geographical circle formed by the insertion, and the point where the skipper on the trade voyage realizes he has overshot the mark and turns back are very close, if not identical. It appears then that, at one point during the organization, the answer to the question ‘But what’s this Bright?’ (117) is the ship captained by the skipper.
1 These three sheets extracted from MS A were first introduced at sheet seven of MS B where they were extensively revised and expanded, becoming Sheets 7A to 7I. They were later either deliberately extracted or lost, only to be recovered by Jones and recorded by Anna Kallin as ‘The Mass’ in 1958, a recording that also was subsequently lost or destroyed. In The Roman Quarry versions of 7A to 7I are published as ‘The Grail Mass’ and in this edition they serve as the opening to the project.
2 We are greatly indebted to Christine Pagnoulle’s and Jasmine Hunter’s forthcoming article in Religion and Literature, ‘“The Agent”: Probing into Agency’ Religion & Literature vol. 49, no. 2 (2018): 19–29. To date, this is the only article that explores ‘The Agent’ in depth, and in it, the authors examine the complex issue of Judas’s agency and the influence of Spengler on the development of the figure of Caiaphas.
3 Ever since Elizabeth Ward’s David Jones, Mythmaker (1983), Jones’s political leanings have come under scrutiny. Ward argues that Jones evidenced pro-fascist sympathies and what she sees as his deeply reactionary politics have had a deleterious impact on the reception of his poetry. The counter-argument to Ward’s reading has come from Dilworth (See Dilworth, 1986: 149–162). In David Jones on Religion, Politics and Culture: Uncollected Writings, both Tom Villis in his commentary on the Hitler Essay and Oliver Bevington in his commentary on Jones’s letter to Neville Chamberlain dated 18 December 1938 place Jones’s political attitudes in terms of the Roman Catholic intellectual currents of the time (Villis) and Jones’s initial support for Chamberlain’s policies, his First World War experience, and the influence of Malory on Jones’s development (Bevington). Considering the circumstances under which Jones wrote the sequence, his own conflicted views on empire, and his earlier approval of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, the above textual moment is particularly fraught, with Caiaphas championing appeasement. The aphorism Jones cites – ‘the sword must gain what the plough must till’ – appears in chapter 4, volume 1 of Mein Kampf as ‘the new Reich must again set itself on the march of the Teutonic knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plough and daily bread for the nation’.
4 In ‘On the Traverse of the Wall,’ Crixus says ‘Bar-abbas, Car-abbas, they’re all/sons of the Father and all out for trouble’ (139) speaking of the numerous ‘redeemers’ who populate the landscape. While apparently referencing Barabbas, Son of the Father, who will be set free even as Christ is condemned, the term Car-abbas comes from the name of a ‘mock king’ used to ridicule Herod Agrippa when he travelled through Alexandria on his way to be installed as King of Judea in 41 CE. While the original source is Philo Judaeus, Frazer notes and discusses this ritual humiliation in his note on the Crucifixion in the context of the Christ-Barabbas, Haman-Mordecai configuration. For a fuller treatment of Frazer and Jones, see Jamie Callison’s article ‘David Jones’s “Barbaric-Fetish”: Frazer and the Aesthetic Value of Liturgy’, Modernist Cultures, vol. 12, no. 3 (Winter 2017): 438-461.
5 The most obvious impact this had was on ‘The Roman Dinner Conversation’.
6 Among other evidence for the date of the insertion, on the back of one of the drafts, there is a note dated 30 December 1943 sent from 12 Sheffield Place to Mrs Lewis and Canon Lewis declining an invitation to Nest Cleverdon’s wedding.