SEVENTY YEARS WITH DAVID JONES
We are shy when people start talking about friendship, especially if they go on and on. Aristotle deals with it sensibly in his Ethics, in such a way as not to embarrass his friends. Erasmus, in the first great best-seller of the age of print, his collection of the sayings of Greek and Roman notables, the Adages, in all its many editions led off with the observation, attributed to and quoted by many, that a friend is a second self. There he left it, with a smile to his many friends, chief among them Thomas More. In treating friendship as one of the Four Loves, C.S. Lewis observes that lovers sit so that they look at each other, and two is quite enough, whereas friends sit side by side or in profile, sometimes with other friends, attending to whatever draws them together — a religion or a cause, a book or a picture, some topic or personality or just the passing scene. He or she who has more to give just gives more; those who have less give what they can. Attention is giving. It is in the context of friendship that I propose to say something about knowing David Jones personally, through visits, thirty of them, and an exchange of letters over the last quarter-century of his life. Then, touching on my several studies, published and unpublished, of aspects of his life and work, I hope I will be seen as continuing that friendship, and extending it, for literary attention, concern, and scholarship have a place — for some of us a place of honour — in the world of friendship. That place of honour may be likened to a mediaeval chantry, or shrine, for we have had, as members of the David Jones Society, a newsletter and now have a journal, with conferences, exhibitions, tours, events. Shall I use that friendly word “get-togethers”? Once, in his immense poem, The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser pays tribute to the poet who most decisively and pervasively influenced him —
He places this tribute in Book IV, the Legend of Friendship. I stretch back some seventy years to relate, from the opening pages of The Long Conversation, how my interest in David Jones began:
I had brought along my copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and he inscribed it for me. It is the one of his illustrated books that he thinks the most successful. He said the Golden Cockerel Press people, like lunatics, called in a bevy of girl art students to colour the wood engravings for his Gulliver’s Travels. Every single copy. He removed the colour from his own. I was relieved to hear this, for I thought the colouring poisonous when I looked at the book in the British Museum. Contrary to orders, they used the wrong paper and didn’t dampen it for The Chester Play of the Deluge, and so the black is not properly black: the reproduction in the Tate Gallery catalogue is superior to the book. As for The Book of Jonah, it is ‘pure Eric’ — good, with that reservation.
Eight more of these visits occurred before the end of the sabbatical, during which time I met René Hague, his old friend who became my close friend (The Long Conversation is dedicated to René and Joan Hague) and built up my basic collection of books illustrated by David Jones (a toast to antiquarian booksellers; to Anthony Rota and Peter Scott and to Hugh Anson-Cartwright, friendly themselves, they encourage the friendship of writers and collectors). I could make myself useful by fetching things from Central London. After that, I was not able to revisit London for ten years, but by then we knew each other well enough for correspondence to flourish: I tried with success to time my letters to St. David’s Day (1 March) and his birthday (All Saints’ Day, 1 November). Then, from 1969 to the year of his death, 1974, I crossed the Atlantic every year and saw him usually several times. There are many passages that I wish we had time for me to read; I choose one, from August 1972 when he was reading a typescript of The Sleeping Lord because it shows his sense of fun amid the tribulations of his later years:
There,
with reluctance, I take leave of the old friend and turn to a more rarefied
exercise of friendship, in critical writing.
II Twice in David Jones’s lifetime, both times I think to his pleasure and approval, I brought out articles on his work. “Himself at the Cave-Mouth” (1967) I have been surprised to find not only explored the key images of the cave and labyrinth that pervade all his work (including much that had not then been published) but pointed forward to several lines of investigation that I had then no inkling of. The other, “In Parenthesis among the War Books,” (1973) made me examine pretty well all the English books — history, memoirs, fiction, poetry — on the Great War that Jones and his readers in the Thirties could have known, including many translations into English. I demonstrated, at least to my satisfaction, the pre-eminence of In Parenthesis among them. I was fortunate to be assigned to teach a seminar on the literature of the Great War, and even more fortunate that young Tom Dilworth turned up as a member of it. Exclaiming WOW! he made David Jones from that time forth his consuming interest, writing MA, and PhD theses on him, from which emerged his magisterial book on The Shape of Meaning. I rejoice that he was able three times to visit Jones with me and that he has been entrusted with writing the official biography, an immense labour now nearing completion. Three other doctoral theses were completed under my direction. Since friendship is our theme and the association of teacher and student is a major division of friendship, let me put them on the beadroll: Vincent Sherry, concerned with allusion and concentrating on Dai’s Boast; Patrick Deane, placing Jones among the writers of the Thirties; Paul Robichaud, on making the past present, especially the mediaeval and the Welsh past. To these should be added John Terpstra, not a literary student but a cabinet-maker and poet, working full time, who needed one course to graduate and wrote an extended “senior essay” on “The Sleeping Lord.” The second reader for the Department of English snapped it up for publication in the University of Toronto Quarterly. A necessary postscript to these remarks, lest it be thought that academic life is simply a matter of degrees and publications and accreditation. David Jones was very insistent on the spoken nature of his writings, wanted them read aloud, took care to indicate pronunciation, and himself made recordings (with Peter Orr of the British Council and Argo Records) of an oral quality well above that of most recorded poets. In my seminar students giving papers on Graves and Sorley and Blunden and Sassoon were encouraged to quote freely, and we ended the spring term by reading aloud by turns the whole of In Parenthesis. Since then I have taken part in two full readings of In Parenthesis, and I have been privileged to hear the gifted actor Tom Durham render (?), recite (?), no, create The Tribune’s Visitation and other extended writings. Douglas Cleverdon’s adaptations of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata rank high among the glories of radio. I am convinced that in literary studies nothing can take the place of this bodily possession. Somewhere along the line, any serious readers but especially teachers and future teachers must learn to speak, not to gabble, mumble, mouth, or honk. Still on the theme of friendship, I propose now to give an account of my long-continued involvement with David Jones in critical and scholarly writing: influence as friendship, in distinction from, though not in denial of, Harold Bloom’s important insight into influence as rivalry. In coming to grips with a writer, one is initially drawn to some elements in a shared world of ideas, feelings, judgments, perhaps very general, perhaps minutely particular, all of them framed by an ineradicable separation — in this case, bodies twain, two generations, five time-zones and many tangential interests and experiences. When news of his death came in 1974, I thought immediately of putting our correspondence and my narrative of visits together, along with such articles as I had published or drafted. (All his own writings were preserved, but letters to him, including all but one of mine, were swept away in a prompt housecleaning.) I submitted this text to the publisher and they quite rightly wanted the memoir only. Rightly, because “Himself at the Cave-Mouth,” exploring two related master-images in his art, both visual and literary, (the cave and the labyrinth) pointed beyond itself to matters that in course of time demanded separate and extended treatment — the question of epic; the “Welsh Thing”; the matter of “recession” in art as found in the view from a room through a window and its possible analogy in literature as far-reaching allusion; the centrality of the Cross in the writing and the art; the pervasiveness of questioning. More immediately “In Parenthesis among the War Books” insisted that I proceed to an orderly sequence of related studies. The first of these I called “To Make a Shape in Words” (a phrase used by the author for the purpose of his writing). Here I took a passage from the original article, defining what by the bias of historical events would be expected of any book dealing with the British sector of the Western Front. There must be a hundred examples, some well known, most forgotten. In its driest outline the shape of the experience of the Great War in the British sector of the Western Front may be defined by all or most of these events in roughly this order: the outbreak of war, enlistment, basic training, embarkation, the base, marching to the line, the sound of bombardment, the first shell, entering the trenches, digging in, under fire, the first death, relief and leave, return, on patrol, in combat, the suffering of hardships or wounds or sickness, the end. Even given this expected shape, the war writer has to select and compose the heavy conglomeration of routine and surprise, boredom and terror, puzzlement and illumination. As I looked at In Parenthesis, which is divided into seven parts, it so happened that I was at the same time much immersed in a radically unrelated interest, the string quartets of Bela Bartók — unrelated because David Jones, exceptionally knowledgeable about plainchant and delighting in folk-songs, spirituals, sea-chanties, and soldiers’ songs, was not “musical” in the sense that most major Modernists were musical: Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust, Joyce, Thomas Mann, Eliot, Pound, Auden, recital and concert and opera-goers. Eliot would know Bartók’s quartets, Jones would come to know Eliot’s. However, two of Bartók’s quartets are disposed in a distinctive five-movement “arch structure,” the first movement clearly balancing the last, the second the penultimate, the third being central. Looking at In Parenthesis, I saw that its seven parts likewise made an arch. At the time, Tom Dilworth already keenly aware of pictorial structure, was working on his thesis, and we must have talked about this as we did about everything else. I mention this because he has gone on to explore the full ramifications of this and other structural practices not only in the writings but in the sequences of engravings. Having seen the manuscripts in Aberystwyth, he was able to tell me that the epigraphs from Y Gododdin at the head of each section were a late afterthought: they secure the arch. The next probe, after establishing the genre of “war book” and accounting for the shape of this particular war book, was to engage with the urgent question of whether the rendition of experience at the limits of human endurance requires or is aided by an analogous stretching to the limits of language. Is there, and should there be, a “Syntax of Violence”? Using the vocabulary of Stylistics, I adduce many devices of foregrounding to be found pervading the writing: the layout on the page, the huge range of diction from the technical to the demotic, allusive and concrete, literary and spoken, all exactly accurate, unexpected respellings, rapid shifts of person and abrupt changes of rhythm, and, of course, the long debated question of imitative sound. Here I take what I think is a reasonable position between the Old Macdonald’s Farm people, who think sound carries sense — bow-wow, moo moo, oink oink, etc., and the linguistic purists who would disallow any linkage of sound and meaning. Yound Alexander Pope got it right: “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” While a writer or speaker does not (or should not) let sound dictate sense, it is a fact that certain sound patterns are readily actable and others are not. Unlike most of my essays, this was never delivered. It appeared in the generous and indispensable collection edited by the poet John Matthias and published by the University of Maine Press under the auspices of the National Poetry Society. I had thought that it might be controversial, but to the best of my knowledge it has entirely escaped notice. Not so “The Efficacious Word,” delivered at the very first David Jones Conference, 1975, at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, and published in a collection of Eight Essays, edited by the convener, the poet Roland Mathias. People will come up to me and say, with a chuckle, that they enjoyed my footwork in dealing with Jones’s definitive answer to the ticklish question of how to render the blasphemous and obscene language universal in the war experience but still in 1937 under legal ban in print. It is all there but is not allowed to take over and swell to a pleurisy. These essays moved easily from one to another and form a group. Much later, two more on the same line have asserted their right to exist. One, encouraged by a tour with the David Jones Society to the Western Front and delivered at a David Jones day in the Imperial War Museum, concerns itself not with whole battalions of war writers but with three, all born in 1895, all fusiliers: David Jones, who lived to be 79; Robert Graves, who lived to be 90, both in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the German, Ernst Jünger of the Hanover Fusiliers, who lived to be 102. In that smaller company the parallels and contrasts of English and German, officer and private, and of three distinct literary sensibilities can be dealt with in some detail. The other recent war article, not yet publicly delivered, deals with two perfectly allowable metaphors that have decomposed into polluting clichés — Sacrifice and Slaughter. True, there is an element of sacrifice in joining the forces — sacrifice of time and prospects, of youth and health, but a sacrificial victim is put to death, and no soldier wants or expects simply to be put to death. And from the commander’s point of view the loss of troops is a matter of expenditure, not sacrifice. Similarly with slaughter, the business of a slaughterhouse is to be efficient, hygienic, and total: there are no prisoners, no wounded, no survivors, no wooden cross, no letters of sympathy, no Memorial Day. In the context of war writing, most talk of sacrifice is prate, most talk of slaughter is rant. This will be an unpopular statement, but it needs to be made. David Jones touches legitimately on both metaphors but eschews both clichés. In revision most of this set of articles centring on In Parenthesis have needed only incidental clarification and removal of redundancies. The original survey of the war books, however, dealt with a succession of topics: “fun and games,” gear and tackle and trim, comrades and enemies, word and song, landscape with animals, moon and stars, “the glory of women,” and the large questions of civilization and Christendom and what may be called imaging the unimaginable. I have found that there needed to be two more, “footslogging” and “the feel of things”. Infantry regiments are “regiments of foot,” the “foot mob,” and the process of turning a civilian into a soldier moves first through the feet, by marching. The trained soldier in modern warfare may be transported by vehicles to the support lines: from then on he is on his feet. In Parenthesis is without rival in registering this fact: in “Starlight Order” the sensitive reader’s feet should ache in sympathy. So too, the feel of things. The strangeness of life at the Front is a strangeness of feel: the uniform and its care, the rifle’s wood and iron, mess tin and helmet, sacking and duckboard, the varieties of rain, the qualities of mud. Here David Jones the artist can evoke not just the visible but, as artists can do, the feel of the visible. The sequence of my studies thus far has been quite clear, and they must stand more or less in the order in which they were written. The subsequent essays, intermittently composed have less sequence but do tend to form themselves into groups, often pairs. A revered mentor, Reid MacCallum, used to say with a laugh, “There are just two sorts of people in this world, those who divide everything into two and those who don’t.” The first group of essays, however, is a threesome. Belonging in the neighbourhood of “Three Fusiliers” but not engaged with war are three further studies in literary congeniality. One is concerned with Chesterton and Belloc, as Catholic writers and public personalities of course, but also simply as copious writers one enjoys and keeps on reading, as Jones clearly did. The second is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Jones studied art formally for years at Camberwell and Westminster Art Schools, but he had to learn his second art on his own. I surmise that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a major formative influence on Jones’s style, along with Malory and perhaps George Borrow. There are many illuminating references to Hopkins, early and late, and he understood and appropriated Hopkins’s sense of haecceitas (“thisness” as distinct from “whatness”): it is their common practice and possession. The third, T.S. Eliot. Jones knew T.S. Eliot’s poetry from an early age and came to The Waste Land already familiar with The Golden Bough, which he read in its original, multi-volume edition. They were friends from the 30s to the end of Eliot’s life. Eliot exerted himself to ensure publication by Faber of The Anathemata and wrote a brief laudatory preface to a reissue of In Parenthesis. Jones, I will argue, has the stronger grasp of the Roman Thing than Eliot, his “Tribune’s Visitation” being a clear success in taking us into the mind and world of imperial Rome, whereas Eliot abandoned his Coriolan sequence, as I think, because it became confused, not being based on adequate historical knowledge and insight. Two more, rather chunky, studies take their place next, on wide literary and cultural subjects. There has been much throwing about of brains as to whether In Parenthesis and The Anathemata are epic poems. It is a question that will not go away and is discussed by John H. Johnston, Bernard Bergonzi, Thomas Dilworth, Kathleen Staudt and others. The history of epic criticism has tended in two directions: either to derive from the Iliad a set of rules to be imposed on all others, including the rather restive Odyssey, or to define epic as the greatest work of man, which it is no longer possible to write. Virgil has not lacked critics who would exclude him; Milton worried about “an age too late”; the dictator of neo-classicism, Boileau, rejected Tasso and by implication Milton for their use of Christian “machinery” as an impiety; and Edgar Allan Poe, that tremendous influence on French literature, asserted that “there is no such thing as a long poem … a long poem is a contradiction in terms.” David Jones, with two long poems containing history within him clamoring to be written, and with Catholic Christianity as the mainstay of his life and of all he had to say, met this challenge, leading us to the conclusion that an epic is a great poem that comes as a surprise when epic is presumed dead. (The Odyssey must have been a surprise.) Looking back on his childhood David Jones thumped his chest and exclaimed “I already had the Welsh Thing here.” A long article with that as its title balances the treatment of epic, for the world of Wales and its literature may be termed “unepic”, as lacking architecture; instead, it possesses, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic.” In youth, ever with “the Welsh Thing in here,” David pored over the Mabinogion and Giraldus Cambrensis and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and, with more a Celtic than a French eye, Malory. On his sixteenth birthday his father gave him The Welsh People: chapters on their origin, history and law, language, literature and characteristics, by Sir John Rhys and David Brynmore-Jones, a 600-page book still in his possession after more than sixty years. He plugged away at Welsh, never achieving the freedom of the language but immersing himself in words, lore, and historical detail. To the challenge of writing the long poem with historical and Christian content and force, the Welsh Thing added a second, awkwardly difficult challenge, to incorporate in his writing Welsh substance of high value that has no centre and is impatient of organization. Before proceeding to my final section and its two essays that, like “Himself at the Cave-Mouth,” try to explore his lifetime concerns and attitudes of mind, I have placed four essays, or two pairs of essays, on restricted subjects, all of them serving to join his two great talents, as artist and as writer, with another, often forgotten or played down, as a thinker, a prophet. The influential art critic, Harold Rosenberg, happened upon the essay on “Art and Sacrament” in Epoch and Artist and wrote an enthusiastic account of its argument in The New Yorker without apparently being fully aware that Jones was a figure of stature in both art and literature. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has long known and prized the art and the writings, but it is significant that as Regius Professor of Divinity he prescribed this essay of Jones as a prime text for the advanced study of sacramental theology. Similarly, Oswyn Murray, a Fellow of Balliol and a historian, praises him for the range, accuracy, and insight of his historical imagination. The first pair are “Balaam’s Ass and Other Animals” and “The Scapebeast,” which reveal not only his eye and feeling for animals but his thinking about the nature and mystery of animals. The second pair, rooted in the pictorial, raise the questions of how literacy affects the painter and how the widespread (but by no means universal) practice of what I call fenestralia avails in Jones’s art: by that I mean an interior scene with a window and a view through that window of another scene. Let me expand a little on these two pairs. As an art student just before the Great War young David Jones was undecided whether to be a historical painter or an animal painter. Those categories seem distant to us now, but painters then were regularly sorted according to subject matter: portrait, landscape (rural, rugged, marine, urban), historical, animal. His imagination was stirred by great historical events — call them “scenes” — like the death of the last Prince of Wales or the death at Trafalgar of Nelson, whose anniversaries he observed faithfully every year — but his talent did not direct him to the broad historical canvas. History remains implicit in many of his pictures. A substantial proportion of his drawings, from childhood to old age depict animals, and there was a period in high maturity when he frequented the London Zoo to give close wondering attention to creatures, an attention reflected in the abandoned Book of Balaam’s Ass, which he attempted between In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. It may be noted that David Jones, who loved cats and gave “stroking a cat” as a ready example of something natural and innocent, never possessed one, such was his lifelong practice of doing without, without even much complaining of doing without. A close probing look at a specific animal, which he calls the “Scapebeast,” belongs in this context, which reaches out to the metaphor and cliché of sacrifice and slaughter. The tailpiece of In Parenthesis, at once a ram caught in a thicket of barbed wire and a beast banished to the wilderness, is a retrospective commentary on the action and meaning of the writing. It positively directs the reader to the rich scriptural commentary and it pointed this reader to the surprisingly sparse pictorial record, explicit in Holman Hunt’s terrific “Scapegoat” in the Lady Lever Gallery, implicit in Robert Rauschenberg’s “Monogram”, in Stockholm — that angora goat with a tire round its middle, its face bashed in and covered with paint, standing on a tiny plot of waste ground. The reverberant idea of the scapegoat is rooted in ritual, which in turn is fixed in scriptural writing, the scroll, the Book. This raises the related question, especially relevant to David Jones and other artists who are not only highly literate but exercise a second, even an equal, talent in writing — the question of the effect of literacy on visual art. Debates, long, hot, ill-defined, inconclusive, keep taking place on the Sister Arts, the literary in painting, the pictorial in writing. The same purists who scorn the “literary” in art will say of some quite non-representational piece, “the way I read this painting….” It is germane to note that the great bulk of easel paintings, water-colours, engravings, and finished drawings are either the shape of a page of print or of an opening of a book, and that a visitor to a gallery habitually, almost automatically, gives each item on display the sort and duration of attention he gives to a printed page. I have tried to come to grips with the ramifications of this phenomenon with particular reference to the doubly-gifted Wyndham Lewis and David Jones. Only one of my probes into aspects of Jones’s achievement originated in his work as a painter, and so I have only the smallest claim to a place beside Paul Hills and Nicolete Gray, Derek Shiel and his collaborator Jonathan Miles, though the vein I am exploring I think is a rich one. Painters who are concerned at all with representation may be divided into those who approach their “thing” as if looking through a window and those who have no such thought. David Jones is, many times over, what I call a fenestralian. The fenestral picture looks out; it embraces an interior, a window or aperture, and a view through it to something exterior. It depicts or implies depth of recession — two planes, which can evoke two states of mind, two qualities of time, two tones of feeling. The use of the window motif has always required of the artist second thoughts, a refocusing of attention, an effort to catch the dimension of depth; and it makes the same demand on the viewer. It can never be simply an “impression” or an “expression”. Unlike the door, the window is a threshold of perception, not of action. You hesitate and decide at a doorway; you glance or gaze through a window, blankly, sharply, with dread, with curiosity, with longing. The perceiver remains here, but there opens out to him in imagination and futurity, promise or threat. The interior may be full or spare, lived-in or strange; it may range from the fortress to the prison, from safety to confinement, from cozy familiarity to crushing boredom. The exterior is the realm of at least potential movement, whether of danger or enjoyment, of exhilaration or routine. Interior and exterior in pictorial conjunction may co-exist in various degrees of harmony or discord, and either can stand for “appearance” to the other’s “reality.” In this regard, Jones stands with the Pre-Raphaelites and not with Turner or Constable; not with Picasso or Braque but emphatically with Matisse and Bonnard; not with Ben but with Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. My full treatment of this subject, on which I have far too much information, is not yet complete, and one thing I hope to explore is whether the use of historical allusion in the writing can justly be likened to the opening of windows. The final two essays share with the first a wide comprehensive scope. I have given them the names “Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis” and “In this Place of Questioning.” “Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis” is the motto of the Carthusian Order: “the Cross stands still while the World revolves around it,” quoted, with emphasis, several times by David Jones. Restless, fragmentary, his writings may seem, touching momentarily upon myriads of topics, puzzling, at times even distracting, in spite of the most ample and intentionally helpful annotation ever supplied by poet to reader. That reader, however, is never quite lost at sea, never has the dismaying sense of a maze without a centre or an exit, of its signifying nothing. In The Anathemata the great prehistoric and historic voyages of the first half are made in ships, types of the Ark of Salvation, whose masts recall the Cross (a time-honoured patristic image), whose keel and rib-cage recall the Cross no less (a striking image original with Jones). The second half culminates in a vision of Christ reigning and triumphing from the Tree. In the Preface (23) a great question is put: “If the poet writes ‘wood’ what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked?” I have taken up that challenge and have found and tried to demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction that the wood and iron in all his writings regularly and in detail recall the cross and thorns, the nails and spear of Calvary. The trees in Biez and Mametz Woods recall the Tree of the Cross implicitly, as it is explicitly evoked at the end of The Anathemata:
I had thought of ending there, for fear of being in the case of Gustav Mahler, who wrote a Resurrection Symphony and then went on to compose other ambitious works on different and necessarily lesser themes. However, while David Jones brings both his extended writings to strong conclusions, any reader will have noticed that the two concluding sentences just quoted both end with question marks. The first draft of the first piece I ever wrote on David Jones began with a question: “An epic in the interrogative mood?” Any reader of his writings, from beginning to end, will be struck by the great number — uniquely great if I am not mistaken — of questions there, with or without the mark of interrogation. It was one of the matters of style he himself remarked on in the Preface to In Parenthesis; it continues. Sometimes it is an antiphonal chant of question and response; memorably in The Anathemata, it is an advancing column of questions, all beginning, by anaphora, with “how else?” Sometimes it is simply an exclamation of wonder at the thisness of people and things. Everything occurs “in this place of questioning where you must ask the question and the answer questions you.” I chose those words, from the posthumous Roman Quarry, to frame the bookplate made for me by the eminent wood-engraver Simon Brett, himself an admirer of the engraver-poet. I wanted there and I want now to leave the same sort of impression that Jones wanted his work as a whole to leave, one of openness and promise, of eager questioning in lively expectation of an answer — this being over and above the dogged endurance (“The Duration — wot you signed for”) that he embodied in his day-to-day existence. In old age he struck Stephen Spender as “happy”, and so he always struck me as happy and hopeful and questioning to some purpose, even when feeling “mouldy” and grousing like an old soldier about the weather in Christendom. William Blissett 19 February A.D. MMIX
Footnotes:
1.
But see Dai Greatcoat, 151, for DJ’s letter to Mrs Ede of 28 August 1949, in which he traces the origin of the picture to trees outside the window of a nursing home.
2.
Dai Greatcoat, 46, dates David’s introduction to J.L. Weston to 1929.
William Blissett: Writings on David Jones, Excluding Reviews
II. Published Articles
1. “Himself at the Cave-Mouth,” University of Toronto Quarterly. 36, 1967, 259-273
2. “In Parenthesis Among the War Books,” U.T.Q. 42, 1973, 252-286.
3. “The Efficacious Word,” in Roland Mathias, ed., David Jones Eight Essays, Llandysul, Gomer Press, 1976, 22-49.
4. “Paul Fussell: The Great War in Modern Memory,” (review-article) U.T.Q. 45, 1976, 268-274.
5. “The Syntax of Violence,” in John Matthias, ed., David Jones Man and Poet, Orono, National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 1986, 193-208.
6. “To Make a Shape in Words,” Renascence, 38, 1986, 67-81.
7. David Jones Artist and Writer, Fisher Library, University of Toronto (illustrated catalogue) 54 pp.
8. “The Welsh Thing in Here,” in Paul Hills, ed., David Jones Artist and Poet, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1997, 101-121.
9. “David Jones and the Chesterbelloc,” Chesterton Review, Special David Jones Issue, ed. William Blissett, 33, 1997, 27-55.
10. “Things Unattempted Yet in Prose or Rhyme,” in M.I. Cameron, etc. ed., The Old Enchanter: A Portrait of George Johnston, Toronto, Penumbra Press, 1999, 86-101.
11. “The Scapebeast,” in Belinda Humfrey and Anne Price-Owen, ed., David Jones Diversity in Unity, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000, 26-42.
12. “Painters and Literacy,” in Jens Brockmeier, etc., ed., Literacy, Narrative, and Culture, Richmond, Curzon Press, 2002, 110-130.
13. “The Pre-Raphaelite Window,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 13, 2004, 5-16.
14. “Footslogging,” David Jones Journal, 6, 2007, 35-43.
1. Pictures from Malory, 1991
2. Three Fusiliers: Jones, Graves, Jünger, 1996 and 2003
3. Fenestralia, 1998
4. Balaam’s Ass and Other Animals, 2000
5. Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis
6. In This Place of Questioning, 2002
7. T.S. Eliot and David Jones, 2006
8. Sacrifice and Slaughter
9. Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Jones, 2007
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