In May 1962, poet and painter David Jones wrote to Harman Grisewood, one of his oldest friends, that he was trying to revise two works for publication. The first was ‘that thing that you liked – the dinner party with the old Roman blimp and the girl and the subaltern in Jerusalem at the time of Our Lord’s Passion’. The second was ‘a thing I did in 1940 (or thereabouts) about a conversation between Judas and Caiaphas’ (DGC, 192).1 In time, he told Grisewood, he hoped to publish ‘all the stuff behind The Anathemata that I had suppressed’. Unfortunately, the result would be ‘fragmentary’ because ‘the bugger is I’ve lost a lot of the pages’ (DJP, CD2/7).
The Judas and Caiaphas conversation and the dinner party with the old Roman blimp were more than simply works that pre-dated The Anathemata that Jones now hoped to revise and publish. They were originally sections of his ‘attempted writing’ that provided much of the initial material that he used to construct The Anathemata: Fragments of an attempted writing. The Anathemata, he had written in his preface to the work, was built from fragments worked on ‘intermittently between 1946 and 1951’ (A, 15) that derived from ‘experiments made from time to time between 1938 and 1945’ (A, 15). The remnants from those earlier experiments, though, had not so much been ‘suppressed’ after the publication of The Anathemata in 1952 as subsumed into ‘a work in progress’ that Jones hoped to publish, initially considering it a ‘continuation, or Part II of The Anathemata’ (A, 15).2
His 1962 attempts to bring the dinner conversation and the Judas material to publication were part of a larger effort begun two years earlier to complete that ‘work in progress’. Although by 1960 Jones no longer saw the work as a continuation of The Anathemata and by 1962 felt that any result could only be fragmentary, he continued to work on the material from the project until the end of his life.3 Although Jones had given up any real hope of bringing all his material together in a final continuous work, let alone a ‘continuation’ of The Anathemata, his original work in progress was far more unified and closer to completion than he suggested to Grisewood. Yet the very compositional method Jones employed in bringing these texts together – a process by which he repeatedly extracted, broke up and rearranged manuscripts he had already produced – created a state of textual disorder, even disarray, that made the final form of the work feel ever-more elusive.4 This edition of Jones’s manuscripts recovers his post-Anathemata project in what the editors consider to be its fullest form, a form that was closer to completion than had been previously thought.5
Seen in its entirety, Jones’s project was vast in its scope. When asked by Saunders Lewis as to what it was about, Jones wrote that it contained:
wodges of stuff about the Roman thing, or at least the Roman army, a good deal about the Crucifixion or rather the conditions surrounding the Crucifixion, the soldiers and also fragments concerning Judas, and the Jewish authorities a bit. Also things concerning Britain – or Roman Britain, especially a complex passage of some length about Wales and the Roman thing in Wales, a certain amount anent Arthur (inevitably). On balance largely concerned with conversations of grousing Roman soldiers (Celts) doing duty on the Wall of Jerusalem.
TLSL, 20–19
In its final pre-Anathemata incarnation, Jones’s project consisted of 340 manuscript sheets, of which approximately 76 were extracted, revised and used in the construction of The Anathemata.6 What remained in its post-Anathemata form became the source for the extracted fragments that he first published separately and later collected in The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments.
While important in terms of understanding the origins of The Anathemata and for placing the works in The Sleeping Lord in their original context, The Grail Mass is a remarkable achievement in its own right as an independent work. Part dramatic poem involving participants in the events of the Passion and part meditation on and quest for the origins of British culture, The Grail Mass forms Jones’s extended and provocative interrogation of the relationship between imperialist civilizations and the local cultures that they destroy. It is a post-colonial text that examines empire from the perspective of both colonizer and colonized and to which Jones endeavoured to give final form in the aftermath of the Suez crisis and in response to the growing prominence of independence movements in what would soon be former European dependencies. In the 1962 letter to Grisewood, cited above, Jones wrote that the material he had worked on between 1938 and 1946 was ‘beastly in a way and brutal’ but it seemed ‘more “contemporary” now than when I wrote them’ (DJP, CD 2/7). His condemnation of economic and military imperialism has lost none of its relevance today.
Of the six major parts to The Grail Mass, four – the version of ‘The Mass’ that opens the work, the Judas and Caiaphas conversation, the ‘grousing Roman soldiers’, and the Celtic insertions – have been recovered here in what amounts to almost their entirety and placed back in order. The fifth part – ‘a good deal about the Crucifixion’ – served as the source for the first fragment that he extracted and revised to construct The Anathemata, and we have made no attempt to recover it. The sixth – the ‘stuff about the Roman thing, or at least the Roman army’ and ‘the conditions surrounding the Crucifixion’ – was the dinner conversation with the old blimp. Like the Crucifixion material, Jones also brought it to a highly refined state and then extracted sections to serve as the second fragment for The Anathemata. After the extractions, he returned to the fractured and rearranged material in 1962, but it was left in a very rough form. We have separated it from the rest of The Grail Mass in this edition.7 While we have only five of the six original movements, one of which is in a rough draft, Jones’s method of composing works that were both interconnected but equally capable of standing alone still leaves us with an important body of work, distinct from both The Anathemata and the poems of The Sleeping Lord. In particular, his middle Roman conversation of ‘grousing Roman soldiers’, a section we have subtitled ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’, is an important work whether read on its own, in conjunction with the Celtic meditations that Jones later inserted, or as one part of the entire project.
Jones’s Roman conversations present economic and military imperialism in terms of the human cost it exacts on those who advance it, willingly or not. His Roman soldiers of occupation bemoaning their lot as living stones in the wall of imperialism who ‘don’t know the ins and outs/ how should we? how could we?’ (59) are the ancestors of the British soldiers serving the British Empire that Jones saw in spring 1934 from his window in the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem that he claimed were the inspiration for the work. It is easy to imagine a seasoned British soldier in Jerusalem in 1934 turning to a new recruit and saying something akin to ‘It’s not for the likes of you and me to cogitate high policy’ (59) as one of Jones’s Roman soldiers says to another.
Jones’s Celtic world of mist and illusion stands counter to this globalized world of economic and military imperialism. In contrast to Roman civilization that seeks to enclose all behind its imperial walls and to ‘liquidate the holy diversities’ (92) of local cultures under ‘the rational light that lights the world-routine’ (91), his Celtic meditations celebrate Wales and Celtic culture where
race sleeps on dreaming race and
under myth and over-myth, like the
leaf-layered forest floor are the uncertain
crust. (101)
Embedded into his Roman narrative, his three Celtic meditations form a poetic enclosure against those forces of military imperialism and economic assimilation; they are part of an attempt to recall and to evoke the origins of the West, an effort that culiminates in The Anathemata.
The history of Jones’s project is complex, and The Anathemata, the fragments of The Sleeping Lord, and the manuscripts forming The Grail Mass are closely intertwined, often overlapping with one another. Jones claimed that not merely The Anathemata but rather all of his writing stemmed from his visit to Jerusalem in 1934 (Dilworth, 2017: 168) and, it seems, from a specific incident during that visit. As he wrote in a letter to Saunders Lewis dated April 1971, Jones recalled seeing British soldiers of occupation from the window of his room in the Austrian Hospice. Initially these soldiers evoked images ‘from twenty years back’ and his own war time experiences. On one occasion, though, he recalls witnessing these soldiers suddenly altered into Roman soldiers from ‘two millennia close on […] a section from the Antonia’ (DGC, 57), an identification that only increased over time. While his epiphany in Jerusalem might have served as the immediate inspiration for the project, Jones had been connecting the Roman soldiers ‘accidentally’ caught up in the Passion and the British soldiers of the First World War since at least 1919. While still a student at Westminster School of Art, he drew a number of sketches of the Passion where he establishes clear visual parallels between Roman soldiers during the time of Christ and twentieth-century British soldiers.8 In discussing the sketch Soldiers Playing Dice at the Crucifixion, Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel note that
Strikingly, even at this early date, there is an attempt by Jones to establish a contemporaneity: the soldiers are in shorts, several wear tin helmets, and one has his hair cut in the current fashion, pudding-bowl style, like Stanley Spencer and the artist himself.
Miles and Shiel, 30
(see Figure 1)
Jones began his project in February 1936 in Sidmouth, even before In Parenthesis was published (Dilworth, 2017: 172). Writing to Jim Ede in 1938, he explained that his new work was about how ‘everything is a balls-up and a kind of “Praise” at the same time’ (DGC, 86). Jones, though, soon came to feel it was ‘a rambling affair’ that ‘wandered into all kinds of things’ and thought that eventually it might ‘have to be (if it ever appears) a kind of thing in sections’ (DGC, 91). By early 1939, ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’, as he then called it, had moved into separate sections, and one section in particular had ‘got[ten] a lot more “religious” than I anticipated’ (DGC, 91).9 By this time, the opening section of ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ led into a section Jones later called ‘The Mass’ in which a parishioner strains to see past the other congregants in order to watch the priest who is beginning the consecration. At that point, the text moves to the Cenacle and then to Judas (RQ, 113). With the passages on Judas, Jones’s project found itself wandering into the events of the Passion, and by March 1940 the work had evolved into a dramatic narrative, a ‘“conversation” at the time of the Passion’, as he described it to Grisewood (Quoted in RQ, 235). For the next four years his attention turned to the dramatic narrative as he developed three linked conversations that followed the events from the Cenacle to a dinner taking place shortly after the Crucifixion.
Written under the auspices of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Man and Technics, his dramatic narrative was a thinly veiled jeremiad against the military imperialism and economic globalism that Jones saw as the hallmark and curse of the twentieth century.10 It was from these conversations, completed in a rough draft by the winter 1943, that Jones would extract the Roman material of The Anathemata and later develop the Roman fragments of The Sleeping Lord. Nevertheless, as he completed this draft, Jones’s vision of his work subtly shifted. Rather than simply write a Spenglerian jeremiad against modern culture, Jones now also hoped to create a sacramentalist work that would at the same time re-present and preserve the very cultural material and heritage which he believed was in danger of being lost in a world that increasingly denigrated the symbolic and sacral in the interests of the purely utile and profane. A letter to The Catholic Herald dated 29 November 1942 where he outlines the West’s coming into being seems to disclose this new intention:
In our case, the ‘choice’ was the Mediterranean culture or fusion of cultures: To Israel were the promises made. To the Greco-Roman world … was granted the privilege of giving modes and forms and shapes and instruments by which those Judaic promises were made available under forms native to themselves. Subsequently, the North and West accepted, or were compelled to accept, those Judaean revelations under those Mediterranean forms and translated them into terms of a Christian art by virtue of imagination. The extremely complex historical result is ‘our world’, a world of imagination and affection within a pomerium which circuits Kells, Byzantium, Hippo, Uppsala. It remains our world even in these global days.
DJP, CF2
Beginning in early spring 1943 and on into winter 1946, Jones, although still developing and refining his Roman material, composed his Celtic meditations, three of which he later inserted directly into his dramatic narrative, beginning with one which concerned the invasion of Wales by the Romans. From this line of development came Jones’s Celtic poems, ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Sleeping Lord’, much of the Celtic material in The Anathemata and the Celtic material published by René Hague and Grisewood in their edition of Jones’s manuscripts, The Roman Quarry and Other Sequences. Where the Roman conversations concerning the Passion formed a tightly structured, linear dramatic poem bound to clearly identified speakers in a highly charged historical moment, the Celtic material moved away from the narrative and into meditations presented by a disembodied cultural consciousness capable of ranging through time and space. Equally important, while Spengler is the guiding force behind the Roman jeremiad, the Jesuit theologian Maurice de la Taille – whose work The Mystery of Faith had a profound impact on Jones’s thinking regarding the relationship between the Eucharist and art – informs Jones’s Celtic insertions, as it does The Anathemata.
By 1946, though, Jones became concerned that the project, which he now called The Anathemata, had failed to achieve the shape and unity he considered necessary and he began to radically reorganize his work. He began by selecting a seven-sheet, highly condensed version of his verse reflection on the celebration of Mass that focused on the priest at the moment of consecration. He then extracted 22 sheets of material on the Crucifixion from his Roman dramatic narrative, revised it to make the work less ‘“realistic”’ (TLSL, 19) and ‘more evocative and recalling – with more overtones and undertones’ (TLSL, 19) – and inserted that material between sheets 5 and 6 of his meditation on the liturgy.11 This was followed by the insertion of 34 sheets of material, again drawn from his Roman conversations, which he also revised and inserted into his text. Next came the introduction of parts of his Celtic material. By the time he was done with the extractions, revisions and insertions from his earlier experiments, most of ‘Middle- Sea and Lear-Sea’, over half of ‘Keel, Ram, Stauros’, parts of ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ and almost all of ‘Sherthursday and Venus Day’ had been introduced into what Jones now called Part of The Anathemata, the title he gave to the typescript he sent to Faber & Faber in 1949 and a title he would only change to The Anathemata: Fragments of an attempted writing when the work was in galleys.12
Even before The Anathemata appeared, Jones was considering publishing his ‘continuation’. As he wrote to Grisewood, ‘I’m half thinking about getting out my “new book.” It starts with the word: Taratantara!’ (Quoted in IN, 41n),13 suggesting that the continuation was close to completion. Unfortunately, Jones’s precarious economic circumstances, his recurring physical and psychological problems, and his unsettled living conditions made finishing the project difficult. Adding to the difficulty was that Jones employed two strategies that indirectly helped to defeat his efforts and that pointed to the unresolved tension in his earlier experiments between the Spenglerian and sacramentalist strains as to how everything could be both a ‘balls-up and a kind of “Praise” at the same time’.
In 1955, Jones was solicited by the poet Vernon Watkins for a contribution to a special edition of Poetry honouring Dylan Thomas. The result was a work that Jones insisted the editors acknowledge as a fragment from a work in progress. Entitled ‘The Wall’, it opens with the lines ‘We don’t know the ins and outs / how should we? how could we?’(SL, 10). This fragment, though, was itself a fragment from a much longer version of ‘The Wall’ that ‘starts with the word: Taratantara!’ Between 1955 and 1960, Jones would publish another extraction from his ‘work in progress’, ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ in The Listener, and would record the now-lost tape for the BBC that – in addition to ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ – included an extended variant of ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Mass’, the original opening to his project that was written circa 1944, ‘but subsequently lost’ (RQ, 231).
Between 1960 and 1962, Jones made a sustained effort, if not to complete his long poem, then at least to bring as much as possible to what he considered a publishable state. With the support of Kathleen Raine, T.S. Eliot and Sir Kenneth Clark, Jones applied for and was awarded a Bollingen Foundation Award in 1960 to support his work on the project. One result was the publication of ‘The Tutelar of the Place’ in 1960, ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ in 1964, ‘The Hunt’ and ‘The Fatigue’ in 1965, and ‘The Sleeping Lord’ in 1967. But there was another shift in his approach to the material. When asked by Lewis why he had never completed his earlier experiments, Jones told him that, among other reasons, he had never been able to ‘forge the necessary connecting links’ (TLSL, 19) to bring the disparate pieces together. During the 1962 attempt that earlier problem – coupled with Jones’s apparent loss of various pages over the years – was further compounded by the recent extractions. Even while attempting to bring order to the project, the extractions of the most recent fragments fractured his project further. Owing to his inability both to recover the missing pieces and to ‘forge the necessary connecting links’, Jones began to present his published Roman fragments, not as parts of a ‘work in progress’ or even as parts of a once-continuous narrative but as interrelated ‘fragments’. By this point, Jones seemed to accept the impossibility of completing his project as a continuous poem and in his approach to the material he was now attempting to salvage what he could of the earlier project rather than complete it, often making revisions that served to obscure their original unity.14
In the last years of his life, Jones, however, returned to his work, making one final effort to bring some kind of order to his now-shattered project. In 1972, he gathered together seven of the fragments he had published between 1955 and 1967,15 added to them a substantially revised version of an extraction from ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ – the work he abandoned in 1940 – and the brief and haunting ‘A, a, a Domine Deus’, which was itself extracted from the original version of ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’, and then collected these pieces in the 1974 volume, The Sleeping Lord. At the same time, though, he published a revision of his earlier version of ‘The Mass’ under the title of ‘The Kensington Mass’ in Agenda. Although the journal’s editor William Cookson voiced his hope that soon the full version of ‘The Kensington Mass’ would appear, Jones wrote to Hague shortly before he died that what Agenda had published was only ‘a fragment of a draft’, adding that it ‘can’t possibly be finished within the year’ (DJP, CD 2/5). In looking at the manuscripts, it seems evident that Jones was simply rearranging bits and pieces of what remained from his drafts.
When Jones made his final return to the material, he was residing in Calvary Nursing Home, having lived there since 1970 after he suffered a fall as a result of a slight stroke. In ill-health and separated from many of his manuscripts, he found ‘The Kensington Mass’ to be ‘very differently gesceapenne from the thing I made in the ’40s and indeed from what I thought it would be in this ’74 attempt’ (DGC, 262). ‘Gesceapenne’ is an Old English word meaning ‘formed’ that Jones remembered from the narrative poem ‘Genesis B’ in which immediately after the Fall Eve is described as ‘sceone gesceapene’ or ‘beautifully shaped’ (Scheck, 115). In what would be his last letter, he admitted to Hague that ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I can manage what I wanted’. Still, he felt that he ‘must make the attempt somehow’ (DGC, 262). On 28 October 1974, three days after he wrote this letter, Jones died.
After Jones’s death, Hague and Grisewood undertook the organizing and editing of his manuscripts. The result was The Roman Quarry, an uneven assemblage of shards and fragments drawn from different periods of Jones’s career and in various stages of completion. Hague and Grisewood cautioned readers that Jones would not have published the works in The Roman Quarry in their current states. At its best, the collection is, according to Vincent Sherry, to be viewed as ‘a Rosetta stone for the poet’s later writings’ (Sherry, 393). In spite of its many problems, however, the edition did show that, in Hague’s words, all of Jones’s work after In Parenthesis formed ‘a draft for a wide-ranging poem which he was never able to complete’ (RQ, xiv).
Hague and Grisewood faced three problems in editing Jones’s papers. The first was the sheer chaos Grisewood faced when confronting them. A hoarder of all his work, visual and literary, Jones kept everything related to it that he could. At the same time, he was a self-admitted disaster when it came to keeping track of his papers and his disorganization often overwhelmed him. As Grisewood, who was asked by Jones’s heirs to take charge of his papers, recalls:
When, on a fine spring day in 1975, the many boxes began to be unloaded I felt some apprehension at what lay ahead […] Not only the bulk but the miscellaneity was daunting. It was as if a reckless tornado had had its way with the many thousands of sheets, and had taken some impish pleasure in the companionship of a laundry list with page 68 of some early draft of In Parenthesis, while leaving page 69 to be found months later stuck by some unused postage stamps to an old catalogue of a Seven and Five Exhibition, inside the leaves of which were the unnumbered pages of a nameless typescript which turned out to be the missing sheets of ‘Balaam’s Ass’.
RQ, ix
Grisewood began organizing Jones’s writing by first separating papers into published and unpublished prose and published and unpublished poetry. He then undertook the editing of the unpublished prose which appeared as The Dying Gaul and Other Writings in 1978. Organizing the poetry proved far more difficult. After the manuscript drafts and other papers associated with Jones’s published poetry that could be identified as clearly belonging to In Parenthesis, The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord had been separated out, over 1,300 sheets of poetry still remained. Found in various folders, there appeared to be ten different works written at different times over Jones’s career, all in various stages of completion. At this point, separating the published from unpublished in some cases proved impossible, particularly in the case of the material in the folder eventually published as The Roman Quarry, which included versions of many of the texts found in The Sleeping Lord. After organizing the ten works into three loose sequences, Grisewood turned the poetry over to Hague for editing.
The second problem arose from the first. Hague realized early on that The Anathemata and the material they published as ‘The Roman Quarry’, ‘The Narrows’, ‘The Agent’, ‘The Old Quarry, I and II’, and what they called ‘The Grail Mass’ were intimately connected and intended to form a whole, but neither he nor Grisewood could determine how all those apparently disparate elements came together. Central to organizing and editing the project was understanding the relationship between the unpublished manuscripts and the manuscripts to The Anathemata. By 1978, though, the manuscripts to The Anathemata had already been sent on to the National Library of Wales and with them a number of sheets, particularly those regarding the meditation on the celebration of Mass that opened the text, crucial to establishing the relationship between the various parts and establishing some of the links that Jones had attempted to forge.
This led into the third problem. Among Jones’s papers, Hague found the following ‘puzzle sheet’ which he discusses in a memorandum dated 29 February 1980:
Commence Book on p. 3 of Manuscript B
‘We already etc’ to ‘doubts if they be sufficient’
on P. 7 of MS. B.
Insertion from pp. 3 & 4 & 5 (?) & 16 & 17 of Manuscript A
‘You can hear a penny dropt’ ‘this one fetches more light’
to bottom of p. 6. MS. A
Continue with p. 7. MS. B
‘On night gust etc’ to
p. 57 MS. B
pp. 58–143 MS. C intact
From p. 7 MS. A
‘Soon will be the fracture of Branch’
to end of MS. A.
RQ, 281
What Hague had discovered was the blueprint to Jones’s first attempt to ‘forge the connecting links’ that would bring a version of ‘The Mass’, his three ‘“conversation[s]” at the time of the Passion’ and his Celtic material together. While Hague had the folder containing ‘pp. 58–143 MS. C’, the cover of the folder was marked ‘B’ and the last sheet of the manuscript was marked ‘End of Section XII, End of MS B’. From this he not unreasonably concluded that, ‘David must have muddled or changed the letters of the three groups of MSS’. MS A, Hague decided, was the work his edition called ‘The Old Quarry, I and II’; MS B must then be what he called ‘The Roman Quarry’; and finally ‘MS C must then be “The Judas Sequence”’ (RQ, 282). Hague recognized that ‘The Roman Quarry’ contained Sections VIII through sections XII, but he decided ‘what sections I to VII were we can only guess’. In fact, Sections I through IV were what Hague published as ‘The Agent’, while sections V, VI and VII were from the missing 51 sheets of the MS B.
When Jones first began his project, he labelled the manuscript MS A. That MS A moved from the celebration of Mass in the present back to the Cenacle and then into the earliest versions of the Judas material before Caiaphas was introduced, through the Passion and an early draft of the Roman dinner conversation which in its earliest form took place in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion.16 At the same time, though, Jones also found himself engaged on a separate, but allied, conversation. This became a 76-sheet manuscript that he called MS B. Like MS A, MS B also began with the celebration of Mass in the present before moving back to the Cenacle, but then it branched into Jones’s conversation on the walls of the Antonia. The opening Mass of MS B, however, was a condensed version of its counterpart in MS A, and the MS B version shaped the text that Jones eventually used to frame The Anathemata. When Jones inserted his Celtic material into his conversation on the walls, this turned his 76-sheet manuscript MS B into a 143-sheet manuscript which he then re-paginated and divided into two parts, MS B (1–57) and MS C (58–143).
It was at this point that Jones made his first attempt to bring all of this material together and created the puzzle sheet to which Hague refers. The opening to MS B noted in the puzzle sheet – ‘we already etc’ to ‘doubts if they be sufficient’ – is an early version of the text reflecting upon the celebration of Mass that Jones would later split and use as the frame to The Anathemata. The section of MS B from ‘On night gust etc’ to ‘p. 57 MS. B’ was the first half of the work ‘largely concerned with conversations of grousing Roman soldiers (Celts) doing duty on the Wall of Jerusalem’. As to the insertions from MS A, the puzzle sheet notes two distinct insertions. The first – ‘p.p. 3 & 4 & 5(?)’ – attempted to integrate material from the version of ‘The Mass’ that opens Jones’s MS A into the project, while the second – the ‘16 & 17’ – involved intergrating the Judas material. The first ultimately proved unsuccessful while the second underwent significant expansion.17 These attempts are charted in two drafts of the version of ‘The Mass’ that frames The Anathemata, which are now found among the manuscripts to the poem. The first is an early draft of the version of ‘The Mass’ that opens MS B where the text moves directly from a truncated version of the Cenacle with the line ‘doubts if they be sufficient’ to a bugle call signalling the changing of the guard for the middle watch with the lines ‘on the night gust’. In between those two lines in the right-hand margin Jones has written ‘end of section’, while in the left-hand margin he has written ‘space here/insertion from/p4 of MS. A/ “you can hear a penny dropt”’ – the lines cited here come from the MS A version of ‘The Mass’ referenced in the puzzle sheet (DJP, LA1/3 folio 23) (see Figure 2). Then there is the second and later draft sheet that he also annotated where he attempts to bring in the Judas material. The puzzle sheet Hague used places the insertion of the Judas material – the ‘16 & 17’ of the above blueprint – at the same point as the insertion of the MS A version of ‘The Mass’; the second draft sheet shows that Jones made the insertion of the significantly expanded Judas material as part of a general development of Cenacle material as his annotations in the left-hand margins to that later draft manuscript attests:
| So these men, so late in time, curiously | |||
| surviving, taught by the saving | |||
precepts & confident in their accredited briefs |
|||
| make bold to play | |||
| elder brother | |||
| to cloak their | |||
| remedial making, they grave in | |||
| flint rock through tinsel orphreiny | |||
| their work man’s smock, they raid | |||
| deep and wide, beneath their antique | |||
| accoutrements they fetch from far the | |||
| margarite. They have access for us. | |||
| Incline themselves, make immemorial | |||
| gestures, speak low, in a low voice, as | |||
| one who in small voice where a few | |||
| battened and one gone out. | |||
| The Cenacle | There’s conspiracy here and birthday. He plants the vine. |
||
| The new code is promulgated in the oral style; he |
|||
| insert from | would have only intimate ears hear. | ||
| A text 17A | The wary Didymus tries the shutter | ||
| to 17E | If it be firm, he says, against the wolf-wind | DJP, LA 1/3, folio 7 (see Figure 3) |
|
What came after the 143-page MSS B and C when the project returned to MS A was the dinner conversation following the Crucifixion. Jones was, it seems, facing one of his first problems in forging the links: the events of the Cenacle after the consecration and on to Gethsemane, Judas’s visit to Caiaphas and his discussion with the arresting officers, and the conversation on the walls of the Antonia during the middle watch were all taking place simultaneously.
What compounded Hague’s confusion over the manuscripts was that Jones made more than one attempt to bring his material together before the final re-organization that resulted in The Anathemata. With the manuscripts to The Anathemata is a later outline in which there were also three manuscripts labelled A, B and C but, as Hague suggested, Jones had changed the manuscripts and A, B and C referred to different manuscripts than the earlier outline. Here the outline reads:
| MS A | ||||
| Commence: These at the sagging ends | ||||
| ending: The Middle Watches of the World | ||||
| roughly 158 pp | ||||
| MS B from Thar she blows | ||||
| ending this deliverance | ||||
| 86 pp | ||||
| MS C in present state 96 pp | ||||
| unrevised or sorted | ||||
| total 340 pp. | DJP, LA 1/19 | |||
By the time of this second outline, Jones had further refined his opening version of ‘The Mass’ and had merged and expanded the earlier MS A material on the Cenacle and Judas. He re-labelled his manuscripts A, B and C to reflect the new configuration and repaginated his sheets. MS A begins with the version of ‘The Mass’ that frames The Anathemata – ‘These, at the sagging end’ (A, 49) – and moves to an expanded section on the Cenacle and continues to the departure to Gethsemane. It includes a greatly expanded version of Judas’s conversation with Caiaphas and continues to Judas’s meeting with the guard detail. It then goes to the first half of the conversation on the walls of the Antonia that opened with the trumpet and the lines ‘on the night gust’. MS B was the second part of that conversation on the walls that also opened with a trumpet sounding the change of guard and included the Celtic insertions. Originally numbered 58 through 143, for the second outline, Jones had re-named the MS B and repaginated sheets, so 58 was now also 1, 59 was also 2, and so on to the last sheet which was originally sheet 76, next was sheet 143, and finally became sheet 86.
MS C is the most complex to explain. In the first outline, it had been in MS A. Now, however, in an altered form it was MS C. In developing his conversations between 1940 and 1945, Jones wanted to make his work less realistic and more evocative, as he said to Lewis. This was particularly true of his dinner conversation. According to an interview conducted by Jones’s biographer Thomas Dilworth, Grisewood remembered this dinner conversation as ‘realistic, witty satirical, in the style of a novel’ and, Dilworth adds, Jones was ‘apparently influenced by stream of consciousness technique in Ulysses’ (Dilworth, 2017: 209).18 Jones, however, recalled it as crude and impious and in a letter to Grisewood dated 13 April 1940 when he was working on the material, Jones wrote that it was ‘too prosy’ and ‘lacking poetic texture and intensity’(Dilworth, 2017: 209). Between 1940 and 1945, he had revised sections of it and then, manuscript evidence suggests, extracted those passages for use elsewhere. The MS C to which the outline refers is that original dinner conversation as he was still in the process of revising and sorting it. This MS C was also the manuscript to which Jones returned in 1960, and it was this manuscript – now an amalgam of very early material from 1940 and more polished material from later stages – that Hague and Grisewood published as ‘The Old Quarry, II’.19
This brings us to the current edition of Jones’s manuscripts, The Grail Mass. Its editors do not present this as ‘the continuation, or Part II’ of The Anathemata. Jones, as we have already noted, had given up all notions of a continuation by 1958. Additionally, with the 1960 effort, Jones gave up hope of completing a long continuous work. Neither do we consider this as in any way completing or continuing Jones’s 1974 ‘very differently gesceapenne’ or very differently shaped work, ‘The Kensington Mass’ which he saw only as a ‘fragment of a draft’. Given that there is considerable overlap between The Grail Mass and The Sleeping Lord, this new edition allows for a deeper appreciation of the published fragments, but more than that the editors consider The Grail Mass a separate work that should be judged on its own merits and not simply as a ‘Rosetta stone for the poet’s later writings’. This edition brings to publication in the most complete form available Jones’s work in progress as of his 1960–1962 attempt. It is in recovering many of the sections that Jones believed to be lost, including sheets 7 to 58 of Hague and Grisewood’s puzzle sheet, the subsequent reconstruction of the full version of ‘The Wall’ and in our re-ordering of other sections of the work in progress, that our edition differs most significantly from The Roman Quarry. In restoring Jones’s works to its 1960–1962 form, we have had the advantage not only of the work undertaken by Hague and Grisewood, but also the full range of manuscripts and typescripts available at the National Library of Wales. In addition, we have relied on both the outlines noted above and Jones’s own extensive annotations of his manuscripts. Finally, we were able to decipher Jones’s intricate coding system which he used to keep track of his project.20
In deciding upon the 1960–1962 state of the project, we address a problem that The Roman Quarry does not. Jones’s project existed in a number of forms, but The Roman Quarry is never clear as to what version or what stage of the project’s evolution it is publishing. Considering the number of manuscript sheets they lacked, Hague and Grisewood were, by their own admission, often most concerned with establishing the continuity of a particular work and only secondarily with the status of that particular piece in the context of the other parts of Jones’s work in progress. For example, Hague and Grisewood published all of the material concerning Judas, the Cenacle, Caiaphas and the Roman soldiers detailed to arrest Christ as ‘The Agent’ and as what they rightly viewed as a four-part sequence, beginning with the lines ‘What lags you now? /They’re pious men’ (RQ, 132). As we discovered, ‘The Agent’ was the title Jones gave to Section III of what he eventually came to see as a four-part sequence that was to include Sections I, II and IV, although it was Section III that underwent significant expansion and revision in his 1962 attempt. Although Jones told Grisewood he was in the process of revising material for a new book, he never brought the work to publication; it is unclear whether this was the result of a failure to finish the revisions or dissatisfaction with the sequence. In order to make the four-part version cohere, Hague moved some sheets from one section to another and rearranged other passages to achieve a fit. While ‘The Agent’ is the most obvious example, there are other places throughout the edition where Hague has substituted a sheet or a passage from one section to fill in an apparent textual lacuna in another and where he moved an insertion from one place to another in the interests of continuity.
Due to the project’s tangled compositional history and Jones’s own often disordered habits, nothing resembling a single ‘manuscript’ serves as a copy text for The Grail Mass. What we have presented here is a composite text reconstructed from different sources currently on deposit in the David Jones Papers at the National Library of Wales, and there has been an abundance of drafts, typescripts and fair copies on which to draw. As to the manuscripts that Hague and Grisewood used in publishing The Roman Quarry and that we use in ‘On the Traverse of the Wall, II’, we have generally relied on the same body of manuscripts available to the previous editors; however, in some cases, we have chosen different draft versions based on our assessment of those same manuscripts. In some instances, as in material that Jones later used for ‘The Fatigue’, there are substantial differences among The Roman Quarry, ‘The Fatigue’ and this edition. As to the first 51 sheets that we recovered and that constitute ‘On the Traverse of the Wall, I’, most were drawn from files containing sheets that were available to Hague and Grisewood but were excluded by them from their edition (DJP, LR6/8), although some individual sheets were also found scattered across the David Jones Papers. The one exception to this procedure for ‘On the Traverse of the Wall, I’ concerns material published as the fragment ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ where we used the manuscript entitled ‘The Dream of Private Crixus’ (DJP, LS3–3) on file with the material associated with The Sleeping Lord. Jones cut this section directly from his work in progress, only later changing the names of the principal figures and introducing the Welsh as he prepared the renamed text for publication.21
This exception points to a more general feature of our edition that separates it from both The Roman Quarry and The Sleeping Lord. As Jones began to realize he was unable to complete his project, his attitude towards it shifted. As he brought more fragments to publication, it further fractured his work, reinforcing his belief that completing the project was impossible. In extracting sections for the published fragments, he sometimes revised in ways that obscured the project’s original unity. Some revisions involve apparently minor details, such as changing Crixus’s name to Clitus in ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ and Oenomaus to Porrex in ‘The Narrows’ while retaining those names elsewhere, as in ‘The Fatigue’.22 Some, such as the introduction of Welsh to a much greater degree after 1960, are more substantive. The same kind of masking is seen in his notes accompanying the published works in The Sleeping Lord where he suggests that the Roman poems are interrelated in that they are ‘concerned with the Roman troops garrisoned in Syria Palestina at the time of the Passion’ (SL, 24). In the introduction to ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ he is explicit, though, that the poem takes place ‘in any year of those first few decades of the 1st Century’ (SL, 45). In restoring Jones’s work in progress, we have used those manuscripts and retained those elements that Jones later eliminated as he blurred the original continuity and moved to separate publication.
In dividing the text into a number of sections, the editors follow Jones’s practice in The Anathemata. Discussing the divisions he introduced into his published text, Jones explained:
I call them “sections” as “parts” implies too positive a division, and “cantos” is ruled out as implying something properly metrical. The titles in fact are not meant to indicate real divisions but only to indicate the direction of the flow or the turn of the subject matter. No more than that.
DJP, LA 2/1 – t2i–ii
The formal division of The Anathemata into titled sections occurred very late in the compositional and organizational process.
Nevertheless, even in the early stages of the project, Jones made it clear where one section began and another ended, if only for himself. This is particularly evident with his Celtic insertions, which we have marked in our text. This practice reveals the complex nesting structure of The Grail Mass. As he wrote to William Hayward, Jones was very aware that his method of nesting insertions was often confusing to readers:
It is a disadvantage of my method that these changes are insufficiently marked. But the trouble is that it’s rather like a dream – one finds oneself in a new situation before one has left the earlier one.
LWH, 38
Jones’s own notes on the composition process for ‘The Fatigue’ – notes substantiated by subsequent manuscript analysis – show how this worked in practice. The three sections of the work are drawn from three different narrative strands; Jones constructed the text by nesting two separate insertions, the meditation on the Cross and the reflection on the central administration, into his original conversation between the Roman legionaries.
The division of the text into 14 sections used in our edition was introduced and marked by Jones in his manuscripts at an indeterminate stage in the compositional process. For example, Hague and Grisewood’s version of ‘The Agent’ was composed of Sections I to IV; ‘The Crucifixion’ was Section XIII, while ‘The Roman Dinner Conversation’ was Section XIV. It is difficult to date exactly when Jones formally divided the text into this 14-section scheme; however, the last two sections introduced into the text came about when he extracted material from the remnants of his Crucifixion section and inserted it into his 143-sheet manuscript; he then took material from his polished dinner conversation and inserted it as Section XI. We have retained the divisions into sections when Jones noted them on the manuscript sheets and the titles (as with ‘The Agent’ and ‘The Wall’) that were also on manuscript sheets. There is one caveat to this. Sections XIII, ‘The Crucifixion’, and XIV, ‘The Roman Dinner Conversation’, are not included in the body of The Grail Mass for reasons previously mentioned; however, the absence of a numbered section, for example Section VII, does not imply that that section is missing. Rather it simply recognizes that no manuscript sheet with either that particular Roman numeral or title was located. We have included both Jones’s section numerals and our own markings to distinguish his Celtic insertions to assist the reader in approaching The Grail Mass in the various ways we outline in ‘A Guide to The Grail Mass’ at the back of this edition.
This edition contends with the challenges posed by the division between poetry and prose in Jones’s work. We have been required to make a number of decisions as to how poetry and prose should be divided. In the first instance, where The Grail Mass text is very close to that of the ‘fragments’ published in The Sleeping Lord, we have replicated the lineation as it appears in print, reproducing the line breaks found in the published text and letting the text designated as prose run continuously to the right-hand margin. Secondly, and like Hague and Grisewood in The Roman Quarry, we have followed Jones’s directions to his typist when the manuscripts are so marked. The differences between our edition and The Roman Quarry emerge in a third case. In lieu of explicit markings or guidelines, Hague published all Jones’s text as continuous prose, evincing a belief that Jones’s compositional practice involved an initial blocking out in prose followed by a subsequent reordering of this material into lines of verse. In support of this account of Jones’s compositional process, one might turn to Jones’s observation that the lineation of The Anathemata was ‘a visual contrivance, far from logically worked out, to try & enhance both sound & sense or sense in sound’ (IN, 67). Yet, while he noted that this contrivance had, on occasion, been introduced into the text as late as the proof stage, Jones pointed to other examples from his work that enjoyed a long-standing manuscript history (IN, 67). With this in mind, the editors of the present edition have followed Dilworth’s edition of Jones’s Wedding Poems and reproduced the text as it appears in the manuscripts or, as close as possible, based on an examination of Jones’s multiple draft versions. In many cases, we have found evidence of Jones arranging the text at the manuscript stage with attention to ‘sense in sound’ in ways that situate his work far closer to poetry than to prose.
This editorial challenge touches on critical difficulties that have dogged the work Jones published during his lifetime as much as that he left unpublished. In a reader’s report on In Parenthesis for Faber & Faber in 1936, Eliot observed the Jones’s great war poem was written in ‘a kind of prose which is frequently on the edge of verse’ and later, in a blurb for the published volume, remarked: ‘We list In Parenthesis under “poetry”, though the author’s medium, according to conventional classification, must be called prose’ (Schuchard, 74–75). Jones himself professed to be ‘terribly ignorant of, and extremely block-headed with regard to, all that science of prosody’ (IN, 37–38), and thus it would appear that a defence of Jones’s work as ‘a kind of poetry’ rather than ‘a kind of prose’ must rest on not so much the layout of the text as the heightened status of the language of the work.
Yet, alongside its linguistic intensity, The Grail Mass also reveals Jones’s understanding of poetry as an oral phenomenon. When discussing prosody with his friend, Desmond Chute, Jones wrote: ‘My only criterion is how it sounds when I read it out loud to myself’ (IN, 38) and our text is full of references and allusions to performed poetry in the form of bards, liturgies and songs (see the note on ‘Dream’). Jones’s project was also developed in dialogue with the emergence of radio broadcasting;23 the long text of ‘The Hunt’ included here, as well as a version of ‘The Mass’, was recorded for the BBC. Thanks at least in part to his friends in broadcasting, dramatizations of both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata were also recorded for radio: productions in which Jones himself was involved and to which he listened with a critical ear. Through our setting of Jones’s text, we have endeavoured to bring out what his project owed to an oral conception of poetry. Among the numerous pleasures entailed by this approach, our edition – in bringing together the extant manuscript of ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ – enables readers to hear in an entirely new way the pieces that Jones subsequently extracted from his manuscripts and reworked for publication in The Sleeping Lord: ‘The Wall’, ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’, ‘The Fatigue’ and ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’. The text as we present it becomes not merely the rough outline for the highly wrought, self-standing dramatic monologues of The Sleeping Lord, but rather a poem that revels in the clashing tones and speech patterns of its various dramatic personages and marches to the hypnotic thud of the ballad-like refrain: ‘from the traverse of the agger, / from the circuit of the wall’ (53).
Issues of sound also shaped a recognisable visual feature of the text of The Anathemata: Jones’s footnotes. Explaining his choice of footnotes over endnotes in his second major published work, Jones wrote:
The notes, because they so often concern the sounds of the words used in the text, and are thus immediately relevant to its form, are printed along with it, rather than at the back of the book.
A, 43
At times in The Anathemata, the purpose of the footnotes for readers – as Nora Delaney has argued – is comparable to the way in which ‘dynamics and articulation marks’ instruct performers with regard to the ‘sounding of notes on a musical score’ (Delaney, 81). Throughout The Anathemata, Jones is particularly concerned with the pronunciation of the Welsh words he inserts into his text.
The Grail Mass, however, includes few footnotes addressing pronunciation. They instead reflect the composite matter of the poem. The notes to Sections I–IV – the Judas narrative – frequently cite the biblical texts to which the narrative alludes; the notes to ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ concern themselves principally with information about the conditions of Roman legionary life and the geography of Jerusalem; the Celtic insertions provide detail about Welsh history, law and myth.
These notes are best understood not as didactic attempts to limit the meaning of the lines to which they refer, but rather in terms of Jones’s oft-used geological metaphors of ‘strata’ or ‘deposits’ to describe the way in which meaning builds up over time within a culture.24 He was particularly concerned with layers of meaning, and argued that to appreciate the textures on the surface one must know what lies beneath. A page of Jones’s poetry with footnotes running along the bottom and the verse printed above instantiates this understanding. The footnotes do not explain away the verse; they uncover a lower stratum of meaning upon which the poetry above is built. From this perspective, they endeavour not to draw the text down to a fixed meaning, but rather point upward, opening out possibilities of association that would have been otherwise inaccessible and which Jones hopes will subsequently inform the reader’s engagement with the verbal play of the poem itself. The visual impact of Jones’s footnoted poetry is one of the reasons the editors have confined commentary to extended endnotes.
As well as being central to Jones’s process of composition, the footnotes proved vital to our editorial efforts in reconstructing The Grail Mass. In drafting his work – and unlike the method adopted in the printed text – Jones wrote the footnotes to a page of manuscript text not on the bottom of the page in question, but rather on the back of the preceding manuscript sheet. Placing the reverse of the previous manuscript page alongside the current page of poetic text gave Jones a large blank surface on which to write without interjecting additional sheets that risked becoming disordered, while also allowing him to consult the page of manuscript text he was annotating. In reconstructing the text, the editors were able to establish the sequence of The Grail Mass by reuniting the footnotes on the reverse of a manuscript page with the text from the following page that the notes were intended to annotate.
Drawing on this work on the manuscripts, our edition introduces additional spacing into the Roman material. In his drafts, Jones used a pilcrow to mark where one character stops speaking and another one begins; to honour this division we introduce a blank line between speakers. The Roman Quarry does not replicate the spacing signified by the pilcrow in Jones’s manuscripts, and the resulting lack of clarity over the speaker at a given moment is one of a number of challenges readers face when using Hague and Grisewood’s edition. Jones’s use of the pilcrow is broadly consistent across the manuscript record, but on a few occasions the sign is unexpectedly omitted at points where there is a change of speaker. In such instances, we have silently supplied a space in the interests of both consistency and readability.
As to punctuation more broadly, for texts that closely follow the versions published in The Sleeping Lord, we have replicated the published punctuation. In texts that have not previously been published – or which differ significantly from the published version – we have followed the pointing included in the particular manuscript sheet from which our text is drawn. Where the punctuation of a particular manuscript page is insufficient for bringing out the sense of the passage, we have compared the pointing across Jones’s various drafts of a given page and introduced punctuation found in these alternative versions where it is helpful. In a small number of instances, published, manuscript, and composite manuscript punctuation proved insufficient. In these cases, we have silently added punctuation, endeavouring to do so with a light touch and only to ensure that the sense of the passage adequately emerges.
1 The letters in Dai Greatcoat were often extensively edited. When an excised passage from a letter used in Dai Greatcoat is cited, we refer to the location number in the David Jones Papers at the National Library of Wales. The url for the online catalogue of the David Jones Papers is https://archives.library.wales/index.php/david-jones-artist-and-writer-papers-2
2 At the end of one of the early drafts to what is the last manuscript page of The Anathemata, halfway down the sheet and following the lines that conclude The Anathemata Jones has placed ++++ across the page, followed by the lines ‘On the night gust’, the opening lines to the original version of ‘The Wall’. In a later draft of that same final page, he has the lines ‘Why’s he elect’ – the opening to his Cenacle and Judas material – over which he has the Roman numeral I (DJP, LA 1/3). In a still-later draft to a third version of the final sheet, he has ‘End of Part I’.
3 The last fragment extracted from his project, ‘The Narrows’, was published in Anglo-Welsh Review, vol. 22, no. 50 (Autumn 1973).
4 One of the clearest examples of his tendency to misplace parts can be seen with a section that he called ‘The Mass’. He originally developed this material circa 1944 from sheets extracted from his original MS A. At one point, it served as the opening to his project. He subsequently claimed that he lost it and developed an alternative opening that became the introduction to The Anathemata. He later found the opening again and recorded it on 8 March 1958 for a now-lost BBC programme produced by Anna Kallin for which a typed copy, fair copy and drafts exist (DJP, LR 4/1). Jones either misplaced this material again or was unable to access his manuscripts while in Calvary Nursing Home, and ‘The Kensington Mass’ published by Agenda in 1974 was Jones’s final reconstruction of that Mass opening.
5 For reasons of publication history, ‘The Kensington Mass’ – the title of the last fragment he published – is not appropriate for the current edition, and we have substituted The Grail Mass, the title Hague and Grisewood provided for the fair copy that Jones used for a now-lost BBC recording.
6 As Jones attempted to bring together his ‘wodges of stuff’ before he began the radical re-organization and re-construction that resulted in The Anathemata, he wrote down at least three blueprints that outlined the work at different stages. In his process of extracting, re-arranging, inserting and revising, he would also often annotate individual sheets that he saw as structurally important, whether as to a sheet’s position in the overall project or as to what material was to be inserted at a given point. The final pre-Anathemata blueprint which we discuss later in our introduction, lists three MSS – A, B and C – and notes where A and B begin and end. It notes of MS C that it is still ‘unrevised or sorted’. It also gives the number of manuscript sheets in each and notes that the total is 340 sheets.
7 In all, over 60 sheets of Roman material were extracted from his pre-Anathemata project for use in The Anathemata. All were extracted from two specific sections of the earlier ‘“conversation” at the time of the Passion’ (Quoted in RQ, 235): what Jones labelled Section XIII, ‘The Crucifixion’; and Section XIV, ‘The Roman Dinner Conversation’. These formed the bulk of ‘Sherthursday and Venus Day’, extensive sections of ‘Middle Sea and Lear Sea’, and parts of both ‘Keel, Ram, Stauros’ and ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’. Additionally, he went back into those two sections, extracted long passages, and inserted them in other sections during his 1962 revision and as he prepared more fragments for separate publication. For example, the central meditation on the Cross found in ‘The Fatigue’ was initially written circa 1943–1945 as part of the Crucifixion section. It was extracted and placed in the second conversation of the ‘grousing Roman soldiers’ in a longer form (published in this edition), and then finally condensed for publication in ‘The Fatigue’ in 1965.
8 Although Jones destroyed a number of his pre-1925 works, some of these sketches survived and are available online from the Tate’s holdings on David Jones (www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/tga-8222/drawings-and-watercolours-by-david-jones-photographs-of-his-work-and-source-material).
9 The first section was ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ while the second section was to be called ‘The Mass’. One movement of that second section Jones apparently called ‘Absalom’. This in time evolved into ‘The Agent’.
10 When Jones travelled to Jerusalem in 1934, he took with him a copy of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Dilworth, 2017: 163), a text that with its system of morphologies might very well have reinforced his epiphany. In a letter dated 26 February 1942 while Jones was in the midst of composing his conversations, he writes that he is again reading Spengler: ‘I’ve been immersed in Spengler, I’m battling with him […] He’s so right, and, as I think, also so wrong’ (DGC, 115). The battle was evident in the marginalia of Jones’s copy of The Decline of the West and Spengler’s presence can be felt throughout Jones’s essays of the 1940s. Most importantly, Spengler’s thought and terminology pervade the conversations of The Grail Mass.
11 Although Dilworth does not go into detail, he was the first to discover that Jones ‘selected his ur-fragment, which is one these Mass-poems or a section of a longer Mass-poem, and split it’ (Dilworth, 1988: 171). The ur-fragment is normally discussed as a seven-sheet work; however, due to Jones’s penchant for continual revising, some versions of the drafts of the final sheet of the extraction are labelled 7 and others 8, although the material is substantially the same.
12 In his preface to The Anathemata, Jones notes ‘what is now sheet 166 of my written MS has at different times been sheet 75 and sheet 7’ (A, 15). What he fails to note, however, is that sheet 7, 75 and 166 was always the final sheet as the text moved from the seven-sheet extraction, to its first version and to the third version, at which point a typed copy was sent to Faber & Faber. It is also useful to note that there were two final insertions into the text that did not lead to a re-pagination of the manuscript. Had there been, sheet 7/75/166 would have had a fourth number added to it.
13 These particular lines were shifted about often over the life of the project. Originally, they were used to introduce what Jones called Section VIII. Later they became the introduction to the original version of ‘The Wall’. Finally, they were used in the inscription for ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’.
14 ‘By the spring of 1958 Jones realized that the material written at Sheffield Terrace and excluded from The Anathemata would ‘not be a “second part” of The Ana’ as he had intended and not ‘a continuous whole like The Anathemata, but … a sequence’ (Dilworth, 2017: 294). There is no question that, by 1958, Jones had ceased to think of the project as a ‘continuation’ of The Anathemata, and that even at that time he had serious reservations as to whether it would be a ‘continuous whole like The Anathemata.’ It appears, though, that it was only when he confronted the mass of material during the 1960 attempt – and faced by the gaps in the project – that he finally thought of the works as parts in a sequence. On some of the manuscript sheets one finds written in biro in the margins Jones’s notes to himself as to what material had already been extracted and published.
15 The seven previously published fragments are the four Roman works — ‘The Wall’ first published in Poetry, vol. LXXXVII, no. 2 (November 1955); ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ which appeared in Art and Literature, no.1 (March 1964); ‘The Fatigue’ privately printed in 1965; and ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ first printed in The Listener (22 May 1958) – and his three Celtic works – ‘The Tutelar of the Place’ which first appeared in Poetry, vol. XCVII, no. 4 (January 1961); ‘The Hunt’ which was published in Agenda, vol. 4, no. 1 (April–May 1965); and ‘The Sleeping Lord’ which first appeared in the David Jones special issue of Agenda, vol. 5, nos 1–3, (Spring–Summer, 1967). An eighth ‘fragment’, ‘The Narrows’, first appeared in The Anglo-Welsh Review, vol. 22, no. 50 (Autumn 1973) and was later published in the David Jones special issue of Agenda vol. 11, no. 4 – vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn–Winter, 1973–1974).
16 This is a rapid and incomplete summary of MS A up to the dinner conversation that Hague and Grisewood published as ‘The Old Quarry, Part I’ (RQ, 113–131). In many ways, ‘The Mass’ in its earliest form is close in style to the original ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’, as is the opening to the original dinner conversation. There is textual evidence to suggest that in later versions of the dinner conversation, the site for the dinner shifted to Rome and it took place some time after the Crucifixion, although the same three figures are the participants. It is from this later version that Jones took his fragments for The Anathemata.
17 To say that the attempt was unsuccessful deserves qualification. The insertions of ‘3, 4 & 5(?)’ from MS A first introduced at sheet 7 of MS B were extensively revised and expanded becoming Sheets 7A through 7I. They were later either deliberately extracted or lost, only to be recovered by Jones to be recorded by Anna Kallin for the BBC as ‘The Mass’ in 1958, a recording that also was subsequently lost or destroyed. In The Roman Quarry a version of 7A through 7I is published as ‘The Grail Mass’ and in this edition, a slightly revised version serves as the opening to the project.
18 The opening to the dinner conversation as published both here and in The Roman Quarry clearly bears this out. In fact, much of the style of the dinner conversation is similar to the conversation in ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ with Cicily and Pamela-born-between-the-sirens. It is interesting that ‘Under Arcturus’, Jones’s last work composed in his final years, returns to the same format of an older soldier, in this case Emeritus Nodens who is also alluded to in the original version of the ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’, speaking of his experiences to a younger audience who simply consider him a bore.
19 It is clear even from even a cursory examination that the manuscript was formed by Jones from sheets taken from different stages of that dinner conversation’s life, and that in 1962 he was trying to bring to publication a text that he notes above was ‘unrevised or sorted’.
20 Central to reconstructing the structure was deciphering Jones’s often dizzying array of numbers. The proliferation of numbers came about as a result of his insertional method, his subsequent re-pagination and, in some cases, from his re-alphabetizing his manuscripts. Often, he reused the same sheets over again so that they afford a kind of history of the project; in other cases he used new sheets and simply transcribed the passage so that – even though the lines were identical – they only had one number. To illustrate the general method, a relatively easy sheet to decipher is one of the drafts of the last sheet of what became ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ which had 77, 143 and 86 written on it. The 76 denoted its pagination in the original conversation on the walls of the Antonia in the MS B of the first outline, the 143 denoted its position after the Celtic insertions in the MS C of the first outline and the 86 denoted its position in MS C of the second outline. The pagination of the inserts often had fewer numbers but indicated a more complex development, particularly in the case of the Celtic insertions: to illustrate, one sheet is labeled 66H12k and was part of the third Celtic insertion into the conversation on the wall. The first Celtic insertion was labelled 66A to 66O, and was made between sheets 66 and 67 of the original 76-sheet manuscript. The second insertion of sheets – 66H1 to 66H14 – was made between sheet 66H and 66I. The final insertion was made between 66H12 and 66H13 and was 66H12a to 66H12n. The illustrational sheet was sheet k of that final insert. The sheet is also labelled 103, reflecting its position in the 143-sheet verion and 46, which is its location in the 86-sheet version of MS B of the second puzzle sheet (DJP, LR 1/1, folio 704; see Figure 4). Such insertions and insertions-within-insertions are central to Jones’s compositional process.
21 It should be noted that while there are numerous drafts to In Parenthesis and to The Anathemata, there are very few to the poems in The Sleeping Lord. Most of the drafts to these poems can be found in Hague and Grisewood’s discard file (DJP, LR8–6) consisting of 395ff. which was later sorted by the present editor into 11 folders.
22 In the introductory note to ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’, he explains where the names comes from and adds ‘I do not feel inclined to alter it now’, possibly a private joke in that he has just altered the name. In ‘The Narrows’, Jones has changed Oenomaus to Porrex, apparently after a legendary king of the Britons and a name that appears in ‘Under Arcturus’. In the cases of ‘The Tutelar of the Place’, ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ and ‘The Hunt’, when he prepared these works for separate publication, he began to introduce Welsh words with much greater frequency, what Hague referred to as Jones’s ‘Cambrianizing tricks’ (DJP, LS3/3). The 1958 fair copy to the variant of ‘The Hunt’ does not employ the Welsh in the same way that the manuscript ‘The Dream of Private Crixus’ does.
23 See Erik Tonning, ‘Christian Modernism at the BBC’, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, edited by Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, Erik Tonning (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 113–134.
24 ‘The complex of faults and folds which the ritual strata of that day laid bare had its own wonder’ (Jones, 1956: 18). ‘I believe that there is, in the principle that informs the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matière, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product’ (E&A, 117).
