PoetryThere is a growing consensus that David Jones was the most considerable double talent, writer and artist, since William Blake. So the first biography of this master of word and image is bound to be interesting, especially since he became almost a hermit, protecting his elaborate solitude which, when breached, yielded extraordinary riches.
Two streams of British tradition flow into his work. His father, James Jones, was a printer for the Christian Herald in London. But more important was his paternal grandfather, John Jones, plasterer, whom they visited in north Wales in the early years of the century. David's image of his father's father was of a "tall, powerful man . . . seated near the little stone oratory of St Trillo on the sea-shore . . . "
"The Land of my Fathers, they can have it," cried Dylan Thomas from a station bar in Swansea, on his way to London. Neither Dylan nor David spoke or even sang Welsh, but David Jones wrote to the patriotic Welsh writer, Saunders Lewis, of "this passionate conviction that I belonged to my father's nation that I certainly felt by the time I was seven . . ." As a boy, Jones read books like George Borrow's Wild Wales, the Mabinogion and even Giraldus Cambrensis. Brought to Westminster Abbey, the infant zealot David spat on the tomb of Edward I, as a protest against the Plantagenet conquest of Wales.
The other stream was from Thameside, his mother from a boat-building family, her father claiming regicide Protestant ancestry, a reader of the Bible and Milton every morning before breakfast. David's talent declared itself early, with that curious obstinacy that was part of his artistic nature. "I wanted only to pursue the practice of the visual arts and go to an art school." At the age of 14, still wearing short trousers, Jones was at the Camberwell School of Art, admiring a cast of the Dying Gaul, and another (although he was not yet allowed into the Life Class) of the Venus de Milo, which Keith Aldritt describes as the first glimpse of "the nature of the feminine".
The problem of earning a living was solved for him by the Great War. There is an endearing photograph of a baby-faced Jones swathed in his army greatcoat, the Dai Greatcoat of his autobiography in letters, as edited by Rene Hague of Shanagarry. In contrast to writers like Owen, Sassoon and Robert Graves, David Jones seems nearly to have enjoyed the war. His long prose poem In Parenthesis (1937) is a hymn to comradeship, valorous British soldiers enduring the violence wrought by "the war-lords of Odin". Like his friend Stanley Spencer, he would devote part of his life to trying to create a redemptive vision of that terrible war. One of his most beautiful early drawings is of a long-tailed rat slinking along the trenches, proof of how his caressing eye could transform even that squalor through lovingly rendered detail.
He was invalided out to Ireland, like Graves, although they did not meet. On a walk with a few soldier friends, he experienced almost an aisling, meeting first an "old hag making up a fire" in her hovel, and then a beautiful girl herding cows. "She . . . wore a red skirt with a very wide hem of crimson velvet, and was a figure of great dignity, with flowing red hair."
After the war, there was another school of art, the Westminster this time, where he met Sickert, whom he came to regard as the best English painter since Turner. Sickert prepared him for the long haul of the artist, complaining loudly that "he had stacks of unsold effing pictures at home". But the big influence on David's life was his meeting with Eric Gill, one of those charismatic, renegade personalities who excuse themselves anything. He was even a lay monk, in two senses, in charge of artistic communes, but also a powerful, priapic figure who sexually initiated his sisters and two daughters. One of these, Petra, became engaged to David. But Jones remained a shy, vulnerable bachelor, always getting into scrapes, denounced by his father for turning Catholic, "an idolator like the heathen"; only then he would never have written his great meditation on the Mass, The Anathemata (1952).
The Wedding Poems take their titles, of course, from Spenser's Prothalamion, and Epithalamion (perhaps the only major poem written so far about Cork!). This is all the more surprising because Jones hated Spenser, whom he thought misunderstood Romance. To his pal, Hague, he wrote: "The attitude of that sod Spenser with his bloody Faerie Queene makes me speechless with rage." Jones was not alone in his loathing; Seamus Murphy, the Cork sculptor, described Spenser as a "malign dwarf". But, alas, Jones's efforts are not well served by the comparison, largely because they are occasional poems, private gifts, not intended for publication. Also, the metre never really catches fire, giving the verses a stilted, wooden quality. Finally, Jones tended to get a bit gooey over women, so that some of the images are excessive, with the bride, poor girl, compared to all the shining heroines and goddesses of history and legend.
It does add to the Jones canon, however, and the commentary of Thomas Dilworth is detailed and instructive. We learn, for example, that among Jones's other prejudices, is the poetry of Yeats. Jones divided poets into Aristotelians (good) and Platonists (bad). And Dilworth quotes Jones as contending that he did not like W.B. because of "his Neoplatonic denial of the particular". I look forward to Dilworth's more comprehensive biography. But in the meantime we have Aldritt's glimpse of "The tall figure of Yeats (with) his great mass of white hair" sweeping up to a bashful Jones in a London drawing-room to declare: "I salute the author of In Parenthesis." At least that time Yeats was particular in his praise!
Aldritt agrees, but then perhaps he is too dedicated to the idea of Jones as a Modernist. True, The Waste Land and Finnegans Wake were sacred texts for Jones, but The Sleeping Lord (1974) draws upon Arthurian and other Celtic legend.
Jones's mind seems to me Late Romantic, a tapestry of medieval themes and the intense detail of Celtic art. In fact, his art has some of the layered, dreamy benevolence of Jack B. Yeats. He was, indeed, a Master of the Matter of Britain.
John Montague was the first Ireland Professor of Poetry. His new collection, Drunken Sailor, is due this year
David Jones: Writer and Artist By Keith Aldritt Constable, 208pp. £20 Wedding Poems By David Jones. Edited by Thomas Dilworth Enitharmon, 88pp. £12