Book Review

Fragments against ruins

Reading David Jones

"Bugger it, I can do better than that!" It was with these hearty words that, according to a former editor of The Tablet Tom Burns, David Jones put down his copy of All Quiet on the Western Front and made up his mind to write In Parenthesis. The poem was published eight years later, in 1937. T.S. Eliot was "deeply moved" and called it "a work of genius". Although seldom read nowadays, it is generally recognised as one of the most important works of literature to have come out of the Great War. Thomas Dilworth goes much further in his praise. "Dramatically at least as powerful as Joyce's Ulysses", he writes, "it is far more successful aesthetically. ... It is the Iliad of the modern age."

No poet writes in a vacuum, of course; and no poet was more conscious of this than David Jones. That In Parenthesis was conceived in Tom Burns' flat is no coincidence, for Burns' various residences in Chelsea during the years between the wars were the focus of a vigorous cultural life where Jones took pleasure in plundering the wisdom of a remarkable group of friends. These included T. S. Eliot, Eric Gill, René Hague, Harman Grisewood and, on his rare visits to London, Christopher Dawson. They had all been influenced by Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism and they were all deeply aware of a cultural crisis that they vaguely referred to as "the break".

In a short essay of memoirs, Dawson summed up neatly what "the break" meant. Walt Disney's characters, he remarked, were fast replacing King Arthur and Peredur in the imagination of children. In some ways this could be seen as a sign of health, for they were more spontaneous and closer to contemporary reality. Nevertheless, for the most part they were not part of the oral tradition that carried the mind back for millennia. Consequently, if the process continued, those who remembered the world before the wars were witnessing a change of unprecedented magnitude. What they were remembering, in fact, was not just the Edwardian and Victorian ages, "but a whole series of ages - a river of immemorial time which has suddenly dried up and become lost in the seismic cleft that has opened between the present and the past".

The work of David Jones could be summed up as the most determined attempt to remedy this situation. Indeed, no one heeded the message of T. S. Eliot's famous lines in The Waste Land, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins", more conscientiously than Jones did. It was a tall order by any standards, requiring complete and unstinted dedication. After a series of emotional crises leading to a nervous breakdown, Jones accepted the challenge with the peaceful serenity of a genuine vocation, requiring a life of celibacy. Shunning the priesthood, he opted to live as a layman in the spirit of the third order of St Dominic which he had joined shortly after his conversion to Catholicism in the early 1920s. The point was to affirm ordinary life and to be contemporary in the fullest way possible.

The thought of St Thomas Aquinas as presented by Maritain was a breath of fresh air in this endeavour. Art and Scholasticism was poles apart from the truncated and legalistic versions of Thomism that plagued manuals of theology at the time, and it opened up an invigorating window into St Thomas' resolute application of the Aristotelian notion that body and soul are not two separate things but an interrelated composite unity, and that consequently all knowledge had to be grounded in particulars, in the singular existence of a changing physical world.

This vision was equally remote from both idealism and empiricism. Its recognition of the autonomous rights of reason and science against the exclusive domination of theology, and of the autonomous rights of nature against the jealous claims of the world of the spirit, opened the way for a type of humanism in which artistic creativity could be much more genuinely Christian precisely because it was much more rooted in culture and therefore much more incarnated.

In his prose writings and letters, Jones often fulminated against the legacy of nominalism, a philosophical movement that had rejected the Thomist synthesis and its key principle that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. Nominalism, in fact, had opened the door to the "utile infiltration", as Jones called the emblematic quality of modern civilisation in The Anathemata. The remedy was a much needed revaluation of the necessary complement to the utile, "the gratuitous", which alone could make art truly sacramental. In other words, Jones saw his vocation as a mission to shore up gratuitous fragments against the utile ruins of modern civilisation.

The long and laborious effort culminated in the publication of The Anathemata in 1952. The greatness of the work, "probably the finest long poem written in English this century" as W.H. Auden wrote, has never been in question. But The Anathemata is nonetheless enormously difficult and has been out of print for a lamentably long time. It had, I must confess, always defeated me. Now, however, with the help of Dilworth's book, I have proudly joined the ranks of those who rate it as one of the greatest poems ever written. As Dilworth puts it, "The Anathemata is the only non-narrative epic-length poem in English to achieve effective formal unity ... If In Parenthesis is the modern Iliad, The Anathemata is the modern Odyssey."

Thomas Dilworth, who is professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario, has written an enormously learned and detailed book. In every page it displays years of dedicated reading and study, and an openness to share the insights of others, including a host of graduate students whom he dutifully acknowledges. The book's greatest merit is the clarity with which it explains the extraordinary unity of Jones' complete oeuvre, especially the way in which the engravings and paintings (for Jones shares with Blake the unusual distinction of having been both a great poet and a great painter) shed light on the beauty of the structure of otherwise quite recondite stanzas and sequences.

Reading David Jones is also remarkably unpretentious and free of unnecessary jargon. Written to help the general interested reader, it is happy to be classed alongside Campbell and Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake - if only because Thomas Dilworth remembers Jones' fondness for that book and his praise of it as "helpful" and "humble". We can only hope that Dilworth's timely study will help to remedy what he calls the "egregious critical scandal" of ignoring one of the greatest and most accomplished artists of the twentieth century, thereby bringing back some sacramental gratuity into our increasingly utile world.

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