David Jones was born on 1 November 1895 in Brockley, Kent, the youngest of three children of a Welsh father, James Jones, printer, and an English mother, Alice. From 1910 to 1914, he studied at Camberwell School of Art. At the outbreak of war, he tried, unsuccessfully, to join the Artists’ Rifles and some new Welsh cavalry, before enlisting in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Unlike Graves and Sassoon (see pp. 83 and 63), he served in that regiment as a private soldier, surviving the opening of the Battle of the Somme but being wounded in the leg on 11 July 1916 in the attack on Mametz Wood. He was back in action that October, but left France with severe trench fever in February 1918.
On demobilization, he at first wished to rejoin, but in 1919 accepted a grant to work at Westminster School of Art. He perceived connections between Post-Impressionist theory and Catholic sacramental theology and in 1921 became a Roman Catholic, working with Eric Gill, the engraver and stone-carver, whose own Roman Catholic and artistic beliefs strongly influenced Jones’s. His life was his work. He lived alone, frequently in poverty, but with the support of many friends, who loved him for his great learning, his generosity, gaiety and good humour; qualities that survived increasing eye trouble, chronic insomnia, and breakdowns in 1932 and 1947. His later writings include the obscure but powerful long religious poem, The Anathemata (1952), and the The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1973). There were major retrospective exhibitions of his drawings and paintings at the National Museum of Wales and the Tate Gallery in 1954-5 and (posthumously) in 1981. The recipient of numerous awards, honours, and prizes, he died in 1974.
Jones began In Parenthesis, his first literary work, in 1927 (as Blunden, Graves and Sassoon were at work on their memoirs of the war), but it was not published until 1937. T. S. Eliot ‘was proud to share the responsibility for that first publication’. He thought it ‘a work of genius’ and wrote ‘A Note of Introduction’ to its 1961 reissue. Long before, reviewing James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, he had written:
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him [. . ..] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
When Eliot wrote that, in 1932, he had already fulfilled his own prophecy with The Waste Land. That poem and Joyce’s novel showed David Jones ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to’ his own bitter experience of ‘the futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’, namely, his experience as a private soldier in the First World War.
The underlying narrative of In Parenthesis, like those underlying Ulysses and The Waste Land, is a journey: in Jones’s case, that of an infantry platoon from a parade-ground in England to a killing-ground in France. An old Welsh poem, The Gododdin (attributed to the sixth-century poet, Aneirin), provides the mythic sub-structure for Jones’s narrative. It commemorates the raid of 300 Celtic warriors of the tribe of Gododdin into the Saxon kingdom of Deira, and describes the ensuing battle at Catraeth (Catterick in Yorkshire). From this, ‘but a single man returned’ – perhaps an echo of the messenger’s refrain in the Old Testament Book of Job: ‘I only am escaped to tell thee.’
Jones’s wartime sketchbook
In Parenthesis is a difficult work. Jones called it a ‘writing’, at once acknowledging and dodging his reader’s first question: ‘Is it poetry or prose?’ The answer is ‘both’. It has the narrative structure we associate with the novel, but its language at many points takes on the allusiveness, density and momentum of poetry. This blending of categories, like its blending of matter ancient and modern, unsettles the reader – as, clearly, Jones meant us to be unsettled – and leaves us with the problem of how ‘this writing’ is to be read. Some of its most attentive readers have come to different conclusions. Herbert Read found it ‘as near a great epic of the war as ever the war generation will reach.’ Paul Fussell, however, holding that the Great War ‘will not be understood in traditional terms,’ thinks In Parenthesis ‘curiously ambiguous and indecisive [. . ..] a deeply conservative work which uses the past not, as it often pretends to do, to shame the present, but really to ennoble it.’ In his view, it is an ‘honourable miscarriage’ by a ‘turgid allusionist’. His criticisms raise crucial questions, which bear on how ‘this writing’ is to be read, a problem I should like to consider.
Setting aside for a moment Jones’s Preface, in which he speaks frankly and informally, as author to reader, we are introduced in the dedication to the more hieratic intonation of the poet. Its opening words proclaim it part of the work – ‘THIS WRITING IS FOR MY FRIENDS’. Printed in capital letters and without punctuation, it looks like a war memorial and sounds like a poem. The dedication states the theme, which is the commemoration of the dead – friends and enemies who shared the same pains. The dedication is followed by a quotation from another old Welsh text, The Mabinogion, and the title of Part I, ‘THE MANY MEN SO BEAUTIFUL,’ which invites the reader to remember a stanza from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:
Jones’s map, drawn to illustrate the sector described in Parts 3 and 4 of In Parenthesis
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
The title of Part I is followed by a epigraph, in which another lone survivor speaks:
Men marched, they kept equal step . . .
Men marched, they had been nurtured together.
Soldier attending to a grave near Mametz Wood, August 1916
Even a Welsh reader might not recognize the source of these lines as The Gododdin, but neither will an Irish reader recognize the source of every quotation in Joyce’s Ulysses. Modernist writers, however, have taught their readers how to respond to this strategy and, if the author of In Parenthesis is a ‘turgid allusionist’, as Fussell charges, the authors of Ulysses and The Waste Land must stand indicted of the same offence – and to a greater degree, in that their allusions are culled from wider fields of reference.
Jones, unlike Joyce, assists his reader with notes, so there can be no mistaking the one message of his three preliminary quotations. They introduce the action like the voice of the Chorus in Greek tragedy, and the descendants of those who died at Catraeth once again keep ‘equal step’:
’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt.
Coming sergeant.
Pick ’em up, pick ’em up – I’ll stalk within yer chamber.
Private Leg . . . sick.
Private Ball . . . absent.
Two sketches from Jones’s notebook
The shift of tone – from tragic poetry to comic prose – is bold and brilliantly successful. One must not overlook the jokes: that at the expense of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem beginning:
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber
which appeared in his book, Certayne Psalms, published in 1549 – ‘01549 Wyatt’ – and, more important, Jones’s pun on his hero’s name. Fussell misses two-thirds of the point when he says that John Ball is ‘named after the priest who led the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381.’ The Private Ball, who follows Private Leg in the sergeant’s roster, is sacerdotal, surely, but also ballistic and – it must be said – anatomical.
Jones’s bardic predecessor, Aneirin, had celebrated the high-ranking heroes of The Gododdin in a high style. The low-ranking celebrant of a more democratic age suits his style to his lower ranking heroes, though his ear is marvellously attuned to social distinctions. As befits a poet whose earliest memory ‘was of a thing of great marvel – a troop of horses moving a column to the tarantara of bugles,’ and who thereupon resolved ‘some day I shall ride on horseback,’ his mounted officers are generally presented in chivalric terms. The platoon commander, Mr Jenkins, in keeping with his lower station, is presented in gentlemanly terms: ‘The Squire from the Rout of San Romano smokes Melachino No. 9.’ Jones, the painter, is alluding to the young man in the foreground of Paolo Uccello’s great painting, ‘Rout of San Romano’, who sits erect in the saddle, as we first see Mr Jenkins: ‘flax head held front . . . unhelmeted.’ Jones presents him affectionately:
Mr. Jenkins got his full lieutenancy on his twenty-first birthday, and a parcel from Fortnum and Mason; he grieved for his friend, Talbot Rhys [killed and left hanging on the wire], and felt an indifference to the spring offensive – and why was non-conforming Captain Gwyn so stuffy about the trebled whisky chits.
With two exceptions, all the characters in In Parenthesis are presented sympathetically, including ‘the enemy front-fighters’ and those who pray for them behind the lines:
But all the old women in Bavaria are busy with their novenas, you bet your life, and don’t sleep lest the watch should fail, nor weave for the wire might trip his darling feet and the dead Karl might not come home.
Jones’s sketch of platoon commander
Jones has his indignation, but it is reserved for a certain category of non-combatants first referred to in Part 2. Entitled ‘CHAMBERS GO OFF, CORPORALS STAY’, this opens with the troops being lectured ‘in the barn, with its great roof, sprung, upreaching, humane, and redolent of a vanished order.’ There are lectures on hygiene by the medical officer, ‘who glossed his technical discourses with every lewdness, whose heroism and humanity reached towards sanctity.’ Like the great roof of the barn, upreaching, humane, he speaks of a vanished order, but ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,’ and Jones portrays the representative of the new order less kindly:
the Bombing Officer [. . .] told them lightly of the efficacy of his trade; he predicted an important future for the new Mills Mk. IV grenade, just on the market; he discussed the improvised jam-tins of the veterans, of the bombs of after the Marne, grenades of Loos and Laventie – he compared these elementary, amateurish, inefficiencies with the compact and supremely satisfactory invention of this Mr. Mills, to whom his country was so greatly indebted.
Long before the Bombing Officer takes his leave ‘like a departing commercial traveller’, Jones’s scornful irony has told us that he is no gentleman and has no understanding of history, heroism or humanity. This theme is developed further at the end of Part 2, when his hero is introduced to the supremely satisfactory invention of someone in Mr Mills’s line of trade: a shell that narrowly misses him, ‘a stinking physicist’s destroying toy.’
Jones’s 1917 sketch of a parachute, barbed wire and a ruined church
The indictment of the scientist is delivered more coolly and searchingly in the Preface:
We feel a rubicon has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves. We doubt the decency of our inventions [. . . .]
Not everyone would feel the same about the decency of ‘striking with a hand weapon’, but Jones’s use of the word is revealing. Decency is the distinguishing characteristic of the gentlemen, that nineteenth-century mutation of the medieval knight. The traditions of the gentleman were chivalric, humanistic and tended to produce a deep distrust of science. The subject of In Parenthesis is the destruction of an old order – still recognizably chivalric – by a new disorder, here represented by the ‘physicist’s destroying toy’.
The imminence of that destruction reinforces the tragic dignity with which Mr Jenkins’s platoon prepares for what the reader knows will be its last battle. Two moments of preparation, in particular, evoke the rituals of the old order, and at both the narrator adopts the shorter line, the higher style, of poetry. As Cibno, in The Gododdin, took communion and his comrades drank together before setting off for Catraeth, so the men of No. 1 section receive the sacrament – ‘one-third part of a loaf’ and a share of the ‘half mess-tin of rum’:
Come off it Moses – dole out the issue.
Dispense salvation,
strictly apportion it,
let us be renewed,
for christ’s sake let us be warm.
O have a care – don’t spill the precious
O don’t jog his hand – ministering;
do take care.
O please – give the poor bugger elbow room.
The sacrament of the Last Supper is followed – as the mead-drinking of Aneirin’s warriors was followed – by the boast. Dai Great-coat articulates his English with an
alien care.
My fathers were with the Black Prinse of Wales
at the passion of
the blind Bohemian king.
They served in these fields [. . ..]
British raiding party under fire, March 1917
Dai’s boast, modelled on Taliesin’s boast in The Mabinogion, asserts that he was present at all the major moments in the history of the ‘hand weapon’, from the primal war in Heaven to the Crucifixion and after.
That history begins its last chapter with Part 7 of In Parenthesis, entitled ‘THE FIVE UNMISTAKEABLE MARKS’. The allusion to the five wounds of the crucified Christ is balanced by the secular epigraph:
Gododdin I demand thy support.
It is our duty to sing: a meeting
place has been found.
Invoking Aneirin’s aid, in Aneirin’s words, Jones proceeds to discharge his duty as a poet: he sings – there is more poetry in Part 7 than in any other – of the meeting at Mametz Wood in July 1916. As the platoon waits to go over the top at ‘the place of a skull’, the first of the comrades is killed:
No one to care there for Aneirin Lewis spilled there
Who worshipped his ancestors like a chink
Who sleeps in Arthur’s lap [. . ..]
At zero hour, their platoon commander takes them over the top:
Mr. Jenkins half inclined his head to them – he walked just
barely in advance of his platoon and immediately to the left of
Private Ball.
He makes the conventional sign
and there is the deeply inward effort of spent men who would
make response for him,
and take it at the double.
He sinks on one knee
and now on the other,
his upper body tilts in rigid inclination
this way and back;
weighted lanyard runs out to full tether,
swings like a pendulum
and the clock run down.
Lurched over, jerked iron saucer over tilted brow,
clampt unkindly over lip and chin
nor no ventaille to this darkening
and masked face lifts to grope the air
and so disconsolate;
enfeebled fingering at a paltry strap –
buckle holds,
holds him blind against the morning.
however, to deny the inescapable conclusion of his own evidence and seriously misread In Parenthesis. Jones, he says,
has attempted [. . .] to elevate the new Matter of Flanders and Picardy to the status of the old Matter of Britain. That it refuses to be so elevated, that it resists being subsumed into the heroic myth is less Jones’s fault than the war’s. The war will not be understood in traditional terms [. . ..]
But Fussell’s own evidence shows that Jones – and Blunden and many others – did see the war (at least up to July 1916, the time-span of In Parenthesis) in traditional terms. It comforted them to feel that they were sharing their parapet with Shakespeare’s Fluellen and Malory’s knights. Jones’s battlefield is one on which past and future clash in unequal combat. The poet celebrates the traditional humanity his heroes show to one another, their courage in the face of almost certain death, as he execrates the inhumanity of the mechanistic forces brought against them.
He dedicated In Parenthesis to
[. . .] MY FRIENDS [. . .]
AND TO THE ENEMY
FRONT-FIGHTERS WHO SHARED OUR
PAINS AGAINST WHOM WE FOUND
OURSELVES BY MISADVENTURE
The crucial conclusion to that long dedication calls to mind a poem by another poet of Welsh descent, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
And again the Book of Job: ‘I only am escaped to tell thee.’ Owen’s speaker too, tells of friendship, that of a ‘strange friend’ who tells him:
‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .’
A ghostly whisper from beyond the grave is perhaps a fitting note on which to end an account of the soldier poets’ witness to the First World War.
