THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The military career of David Jones (1895-1974), and the consequent Roman bias of the literature that eventually
emerged from it, were quite distinct from Graves’s. Jones, born in London of a Welsh father and an English mother,
remained fascinated by his divided British inheritance. He was a cockney Welshman who, despite his love of its
sounds and its literature, never fully mastered the Welsh language. After studying at the Camberwell School of Art,
Jones joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers and served as a private soldier in the trenches on the Western Front. It was
this view from the ranks, partly
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refocused after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1921, which determined the intimacy, the nervous
intensity and peculiarly Latinate reference of his subsequent poetry (he remained an equally intense and experimental
painter). Jones began work on his epic of suffering and comradeship, In Parenthesis, in 1927. It was not published
until 1937 and was latterly reprinted with an appreciative ‘Note of Introduction’ by T. S. Eliot. Its title refers both to a
private history which had become, as Jones saw it, ‘a kind of space between’ and to an escape from the ‘brackets’ of
the 1914-18 war. In Parenthesis is divided into seven parts, each of which intermixes and combines the various
registers of terse military commands, profane army slang, Welsh tags, cockney phrasing, reportage, description,
extended prose meditation, and the striking fragmentation of prose into a dense and allusive poetry. Throughout,
Jones sees his patient modern soldiers, Private John Ball and Private Watkin, the one the Saxon Londoner and the
other the Celtic Briton, as bearing in their bodies ‘the genuine tradition of the Island of Britain’. It was a tradition
which he saw as moulded in turn by the popular vigour of Welsh and English comic literature, and the modern musichall.
But his soldiers have also unconsciously inherited a line of recorded history stretching back to the ancient
meeting of Roman and Celt, a meeting finally cemented in the Latin Christianization of the colony of Britain. They
move through a confused khaki world of reveilles, mud, mustard-gas, barbed wire, and bomb-craters, but it is also a
world haunted by the ghosts of Welsh heroes and Roman legionaries. Out of the twisted debris of all battles, ancient
and modern, Jones painstakingly assembled a diverse and often dazzling work of art, part objet trouvé, part collage,
part expressionist construction.
The fragmentary archaeological poetry perfected by Eliot in the 1920s clearly left its imprint on Jones’s slowly
produced work. His longest poem, Anathemata (1952), in part a tribute to his native London, interweaves the
legendary history of Britain with the complexly layered history and prehistory of Europe, tying the island to the
Continent by threads that are both Celtic and Teutonic, both Imperial Roman and Roman Catholic. Celtic, Latin, and
Germanic concepts jostle each other when, for example, he considers the anonymous prehistoric sculptor of the socalled
Willendorf Venus (a buxom Celtic figure found near the Danube):
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Who were his gens-men or had he no Hausname yet
no nomen for his fecit-mark
the Master of the Venus?
whose man-hands god-handled the Willendorf stone
before they unbound the last glaciation
for the Uhland Father to be-ribbon die blaue Donau
with his Vanabride blue.
O long before they lateen’d her Ister
or Romanitas manned her gender’d stream.
O Europa!
Anathemata is shot through with modernist effect, Modernist fragmentation, and modernist difficulty, but, as with
Joyce’s later work, it is ordered by an artistic sensibility which is essentially theological. When in a late poem, The
Tribune’s Visitation (1958, 1969), he returned to the idea of a Welsh soldier, he described not a muddy private on the
Western Front, but a conscripted Celt in the Roman army witnessing the passion of Christ. For Jones, history was a
process of conflations and synchronies out of which poetry was painfully squeezed.
‘Society’ and Society: The New Novelists of the 1920s and 1930s
To the upper- and middle-class generations that either avoided or missed combat in the First World War, the often
flippant 1920s and the far gloomier 1930s were less a time for retrospects than an age that seemed like a springboard