"Recent Criticism on David Jones" 1986

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Review: Recent Criticism on David Jones

Author(s): Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Review by: Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 409-422

Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208354

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RECENT CRITICISM ON DAVID JONES*

The modern British poet David Jones (1895-1974), highly praised in his lifetime by such contemporaries as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, has until recently received only limited, largely introductory attention from scholars. Eliot praised him as one of the great modernists, both for In Parenthesis (1937), widely admired as an important poetic response to the Great War, and for his long poem The Anathemata (1952). Auden proclaimed The Anathemata "very likely the finest long poem written in English in this century." Yet despite these and other accolades from prominent poets, Jones's work remained largely neglected during his lifetime, apart from a relatively small circle of Roman Catholic and Anglo-Welsh readers, many of them personal friends of the poet. However, in the decade since Jones's death in 1974, and especially in the last five years, critical work is beginning to appear which not only pursues the necessary tasks of commentary, explication, and biography begun by Jones's friends and early promoters, but also begins to explore effectively the relations among source and structure, allusion, poetic intention, and ideology in the work of David Jones. As a result, he is beginning to receive both the recognition and the more probing critical analysis that he deserves as a major poet of the twentieth century.

*William Blissett, The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981; Toronto: Anson-Cartwright, 1984. 159 pp. $15.00.

Neil Corcoran, The Song of Deeds: A Study of The Anathemata of David Jones. Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1982. 120 pp. $22.00.

Thomas Dilworth, ed., Inner Necessities: The Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute. Toronto: Anson-Cartwright, 1984. 101 pp. $14.95.

Elizabeth Ward, David Jones: Mythmaker. Manchester: Univ. of Manchester Press, 1983. 263 pp. $35.00.

Contemporary Literature XXVII, 3 0010-7484/86/0003-0409 $1.50/0 ?1986 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System


William Blissett's The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones, first published by Oxford University Press in 1981 and now available from Hugh Anson-Cartwright in Toronto, marks an important transition between early work on Jones by the poet's friends Ren6 Hague, Harman Grisewood, and others, and more recent and broader- based explorations and explications. The book consists primarily of Blissett's detailed memoirs of his conversations with Jones during some thirty visits to the poet's rooms in Harrow-on-the-Hill. It also includes the two men's correspondence, and thus covers a period of some fifteen years, from 1959 to the poet's death in 1974. During the author's earliest visits to "Mr. Jones" on seven separate occasions during the summer of 1959, we see the poet through the eyes of an admirer and a dedi- cated scholar, and the conversation centers largely on literary gossip and on sources and influences in the poet's work. Beginning from the initial, rather shy formality of a scholar interviewing an admired poet, Blissett's book gradually reveals the deepening friendship between "David" and "Bill" as it evolved, first in letters exchanged, and even- tually during Blissett's frequent visits on annual trips to Britain between 1969 and 1974.

Beyond its obvious value as an addition to biographical criticism on Jones, The Long Conversation illuminates David Jones's work within the political, social, and personal contexts of the poet's and the author's time. Scholars interested in the interpretation of Jones's poetry will find here a wealth of illuminating explanatory details, especially in Blissett's meticulous listing of the poet's corrections to and comments on In Parenthesis and in conversations about the sources of scenes, events, and characters in that volume, which is based very closely on the poet's own experiences with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the Great War. For those interested in Jones's relation to the poetry and thought of his time, Blissett recalls the poet's brief anecdotes and comments - some of them very amusing - about famous contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Evelyn Waugh, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, and others. Conversations about such familiar Jonesian preoccupations as the Tudor subjugation of Wales, the disastrous effects of liturgical reform in the Roman Catholic church, the relation of art to sacramental theology, and the poet's many recollections of the Great War include much that is already familiar to Jones's readers from Ren6 Hague's Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones Through His Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), but Blissett's account of these topics as they arose in conversation gives a clearer picture than the letters can of the intensity of the poet's feel-

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ing on these matters and of the extent to which they are interconnected for him.

The title of Blissett's volume acknowledges Jones's characteristic mode of communication and of composition, evident when the poet compares the structure of his long poem The Anathemata (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) to "a longish conversation between friends, where one thing leads to another; but should a third party hear frag- ments of it, he might not know how the talk had passed from the cultiva- tion of cabbages to Melchizedek, king of Salem" (Anathemata, p. 33). In keeping with the title, many of the conversations recounted here seem to wander rather haphazardly among apparently unrelated topics. The conversation recorded for August 19, 1972, for example, moves from a discussion of the manuscript of Jones's last published work, The Sleeping Lord (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), to Jones's recollections of his state of mind and health while he was composing "The Book of Balaam's Ass" in the 1930s, to the poet's newly published essay on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to the origins of the character "Aunty Bembridge" in In Parenthesis, to anecdotes about the war, to "the woes of the church," to the theologian Dom Gregory Dix, to James Frazer and Jessie Weston, and finally to "gossip about the laureateship"- with comments on John Betjeman and Hugh MacDiar- mid. Blissett weaves his accounts of such meandering conversations so that the connections among such apparently disparate topics seem natural and logical rather than forced or idiosyncratic.

Much of this book's strength lies in the author's willingness to reveal his own preoccupations and personality, including his differences with the poet. His prologue tells us of how he first became interested in Jones as a young man, picking In Parenthesis off the shelf of the Victoria Public Library in 1938 or 1939, soon after its publication. It also includes his first letter to Jones, part of a formal survey Blissett sent out to a number of modern poets to find out to what extent Edmund Spenser's poetry was still read and appreciated by contemporary poets. Jones's own reaction to Spenser remains persistently unenthusiastic. Blissett, himself a prominent Spenserian scholar, never succeeds in convincing the poet to share his own enthusiasm for The Faerie Queene, but his attempts to do so, described with appealing self-deprecation, form a convincing starting point for a friendship based on a common appreciation of Western literature and history, of beautiful books, and of the life of the spirit. Blissett's anecdotes frequently offer illuminating and corrective insights into the interpretation of Jones's poetry, sometimes at the author's own expense. For

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example, upon hearing the poet's recording of "The Tribune's Visita- tion" in 1971, Blissett proposes to Jones the phrase from Tertullian, regnum Caesaris regnum diaboli as an epigraph appropriate to the poem's dark mood. While the poet recognizes the phrase's derivation, he rejects the proposed epigraph with an explanation that challenges any simplistically negative reading of Jones's bleak portrait of late imperial Rome in the poems of The Sleeping Lord (p. 90).

Blissett brings the man to life in his concise accounts of the poet's personality, mannerisms, and state of mind during various encounters: "He sat bowed forward so that he needed from time to time to give quick upward glances in his slow speech. There were flashes of vivacity, especially in his starting the word 'ap -' and, raising his head, closing his eyes, clenching his hand, then completing it with great force, '- palling"' (p. 69). When an unknown and unwelcome Yorkshireman, friend of an acquaintance of Jones, drops in during one visit, Blissett describes appreciatively the poet's cool reception: "The nurse brought the visitor a chair; tea began to cool. David dug himself in, lying doggo, did not initiate topics or volunteer information; the Yorkshireman moved a company of questions up the line to death" (pp. 97-98). Else- where in Blissett's memoir one discerns a kind of confidential mascu- line understanding between the two friends. Recalling the unexpected visit of a young woman anthropologist - unnamed but described as "attractive" and the daughter of one of David's oldest friends, Blissett writes, "We all found the girl very congenial, David most of all, who manifestly enjoys the company of women. It was wonderful the way he perked up as an animal without for a moment ceasing to be also a man of the spirit" (p. 105). Observations like these give Blissett's book a personal warmth and honesty that save it from the scholarly hero-worship that can be a pitfall of this kind of memoir.

Because its subject matter is determined by the time of the friendship and by Blissett's own primary interests, this volume gives somewhat more information on In Parenthesis, the text that first brought Blissett to Jones, and to the Sleeping Lord poems, which Jones was writing and revising in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period of most of Blissett's personal visits. One might wish that the two had spent an equal amount of their time together discussing The Anathe- mata, although the correspondence published here does include the poet's useful responses to some of Blissett's published essays and reviews on the poem. Nonetheless, the reader of A Long Conversa- tion comes away, not only with a fund of new information about the sources and allusions in Jones's work, but also with a clearer sense



than any previous critical work has given us of the poet's personality and of the connections among the themes and problems that pervade his writing. Even apart from its contribution to Jones scholarship, this book will appeal to some as a fine example of the literary memoir as genre, for it reveals much about the personalities and concerns both of a gifted twentieth-century poet and of one of his most perceptive and sympathetic readers.

Thomas Dilworth, who accompanies Blissett on several of the visits to Jones recorded in The Long Conversation, is the author of a number of critical essays and monographs that have contributed significantly to the understanding of all the poet's major works. His edi- tion of the letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute, recently published by Anson-Cartwright in a beautifully designed volume, will advance readers' understanding of some of the most difficult portions of The Anathemata. It also offers unusually informative insights into the poet's methods of composition, here recalled shortly after the poem's publication for the benefit of a sympathetic reader who is also an old friend.

Jones came to know Father Desmond Chute in the 1920s, when both men were members of Eric Gill's community of Catholic Crafts- men at Ditchling Common in Suffolk. Chute taught the young Jones wood-engraving, which always remained one of Jones's principal crafts, along with poetry, watercolor, and painted inscription. Ordained a priest in 1927, Chute moved to Rapallo, Italy, in the thirties for his health, and there he became a member of Ezra Pound's circle. When Jones's Anathemata appeared in 1952, Chute wrote some fifteen letters to the poet asking for clarifications of the poem's technique, meaning, and allusions, partly as an appreciative reader desiring to enhance his understanding of a work he already admired, and partly to obtain information for the review of the poem that he was writing for the Downside Review. Dilworth includes the final version of this review as an appendix to the volume. Colorfully lofty in its style and directed primarily at the journal's Catholic readership, Chute's review represents an important document in the early history of critical response to The Anathemata, and it offers a good introduction to the poem's basic purpose and structure, distilling as it does the treasury of information contained in Jones's letters on the poem.

The Jones letters collected here, which often contain very specific explanations and explications of his poem, represent a valuable addition to the information already collected in Ren6 Hague's Commen- tary on The Anathemata of David Jones (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto

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Press, 1977), for as Dilworth points out in his introduction, these letters were written while the poem was still very fresh in the poet's mind, and when he was preoccupied with its reception among potential readers and still eagerly hoping to be understood. Hague's Commen- tary, in contrast, is based on a correspondence dating from some fifteen to twenty years after the publication of The Anathemata.

It is to be regretted that Chute's side of this correspondence has not survived, for one infers from the poet's letters that his friend offers perspectives which, though new to the poet, offer some original and perceptive insights into the poem. Dilworth's skillful editing fills this gap to some degree by explaining anecdotes and shared jokes to which Jones's letters refer, and by tracing liturgical and theological allusions which were obviously common ground for Jones and his correspondent, but which remain obscure for most readers. Drawing on his extensive work with Jones's glosses on the published version of The Anathemata, Dilworth also manages to infer some of the readings that Chute must have proposed, notably his suggestion that there might be a connection between the structure of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and "The Lady of the Pool," Book V of The Anathemata, a suggestion that seems to have been new and a bit bewildering to the poet (p. 77).

Other insights and queries from Chute may have been conditioned at least in part by his association with Pound's circle at Rapallo. It appears, for example, that his earliest letter in this correspondence must have proposed some affinities between the work of Jones and Pound, affinities that Jones attributes, in Chute's phrase, to "the voice of the Zeitgeist," rather than to any direct influence. In fact, he acknowledges with some embarrassment that he is only reading parts of the Cantos for the first time in 1952. Chute also seems to have offered to give a copy of The Anathemata to Pound, a suggestion that Jones endorses heartily in one letter. One wonders very much whether Pound reacted to Jones's poem and whether Chute reported any reaction to Jones.

Many of the letters published here reply to Chute's apparently quite specific questions regarding the meter and scansion of passages from The Anathemata, an area in which Jones professed himself to be a complete novice. His responses here will be illuminating to serious readers of the poem, especially since even the few readings from the poem that Jones recorded are not widely available. But the letters published here also reveal much in passing about the poet's actual method of composition, and in so doing they illuminate the procedures behind The Anathemata, a poem that often seems meandering, digressive,



and uncontrolled on a first reading, yet whose underlying structure and verbal form are carefully crafted. In the letter from which this volume takes its title, Jones claims that "as far as I am consciously aware, the form of The Anathemata was determined by the inner necessities of the thing itself." Disavowing any desire to "experiment" with poetic form, Jones insists "I merely tried, as hard as I know how, to say with precision what I wanted to say and to lose as little as possible of the overtones & undertones evoked by the words used" (29 December 1952, p. 24).

Yet in response to Chute's persistent and specific questions about meter, Jones distinguishes his method from that of poets more self- conscious about metrical form. In the course of disavowing any specific intentions as to meter and prosody, Jones offers suggestive insights into the relation between form and intention in The Anathemata: "It looks as if blokes like me when they write tend to employ scansions and/or accentuations of a recognizable and traditional nature 'by acci- dent' but that the 'accidents' are directed by the changing moods and meanings of the poem! . . . a work made to recognizable and known 'laws' of metre, scansion, accent, etc. has this great advantage of being read in the way intended by the writer. . . . Whereas the eclectic or catch-as-catch can method such as I employ (Or as some will say 'Irish- stew' method - though I think it would be an unfair description, for the bits of carrot, old bones, gobbets of meat, peelings of onions, etc. are not, as in a stew, floating about, but are placed with precision in the pot of the poem) leaves a wide no-man's-land for debate as to exactly how a given passage should be read in order to get the full intention of the writer" (27 January 1953, p. 39).

The parenthetical remark on Jones's "Irish stew" or "catch-as- catch can" method here, taken together with such asides as his account of "a prose method breaking out, where the tension demands it, into a quasi-verse method" (p. 48) and his claim that the form of "The Lady of the Pool" was inspired by the conversation of "simple persons" (p. 71), gives a fascinating composite view of the working method of this poet, whose text combines a startingly idiosyncratic inventiveness with an almost obsessive poetic craftsmanship. The account of a poet at work that emerges from between the lines of the Jones-Chute correspondence may prove to be of interest not only to Jones scholars, but also to more general readers interested in the procedures followed by poets of this century.

The Long Conversation and Inner Necessities continue the indis- pensable tradition of biographical and exegetical criticism on Jones begun by the poet's friends and admirers during his lifetime. But other

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recent criticism on Jones-including many published essays by Dilworth and Blissett - moves beyond biography and exegesis to offer fuller contextual analysis and critical readings of Jones's major works. Two book-length critical studies of Jones, recently published in Great Britain by authors who were not personal friends of the poet, open promising new areas of inquiry for Jones criticism by raising questions that should interest many students of literary modernism.

Elizabeth Ward's David Jones, Mythmaker is very likely the most provocative and potentially controversial study of Jones yet to appear. In this comprehensive survey of the "Jones myth" as it manifests itself in the major works, Ward hopes to expose what she sees as the fundamentally reactionary, even protofascist ideology underlying Jones's work, and to argue that the poet's ideological allegiances constitute a basic flaw in his poetry, explaining and justifying the continued critical neglect of his work. Even on the face of it, this argument may seem questionable, especially if one considers the critical attention that continues to be paid to avowed fascists and conservatives among the modernists, including Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and Jones certainly never explicitly professed the fascist loyalties that Ward discerns in his work. Nonetheless, this book establishes an important new direction for analysis of Jones's work by raising the issue of his relation to the conservative, even reactionary political climate of Britain in the thirties, and particularly to the ideological commitments of a circle of British Catholics who were Jones's close friends and associates.

Ward's book is most instructive for its account of Jones's association with the "Chelsea Group," a circle of Catholic intellectuals including Christopher Dawson, T. F. Burns, Harman Grisewood, and others among Jones's close friends. Ward demonstrates persuasively that many of the Catholic intellectuals of the thirties tended to sympathize more with the propaganda of the emerging fascist movements in Italy and Germany than with the democratic principles of their own society, and she traces this conservatism to the traditional alienation of British Catholics from English culture and to their corresponding sympathy with the idea of a unified European culture based in Catholic Christianity. Unfortunately, Ward's effort to portray Jones as a kind of fascist by association suffers from the clear but unacknowledged ideological slant of her own argument, which tends to present ideological alternatives reductively and dualistically. She greatly exaggerates the case, for example, when she writes that Jones's poetic vision is "identical" to that of his friend Christopher Dawson, author of Age of the Gods, Progress and Religion, and many other historical treatises



about the emergence of Western Christianity. It is true that Jones used Dawson, Spengler, and other historical-mythical thinkers as sources for the structure of his myth, and that Dawson's Age of the Gods provides the narrative underpinnings of "Rite and Fore-time," Book I of The Anathemata; but there is no evidence in Jones's poems, essays, or correspondence that he saw his poetry as a way of promoting Dawson's conservative ideology.

Though she occasionally qualifies her argument with passing con- cessions about differences among Jones and his friends, Ward tends to apply labels that blur important distinctions, equating conservative political views, for example, with "anti-democratic" and "illiberal" tendencies (p. 51). Elsewhere she describes as "Ditchlingesque" Jones's celebration of medieval Welsh culture, implying that he shares with Eric Gill and the community at Ditchling a kind of primitivistic desire to return to the structures of agrarian society. On the contrary, Jones's essays on Eric Gill suggest that while he understood Gill's philosophy and to some degree sympathized with it, he also rejected it, finally, as unrealistic and untrue to the contemporary situation. Jones writes of Gill that "he sought to work as though a culture of some sort existed or, at all events, as though one should, and could make a culture exist" (Epoch and Artist, ed. Harman Grisewood [London: Faber and Faber, 1959], p. 289). Jones's subsequent discussion shows that he does not share Gill's goals, because he believes that we live in an age devoid of the kind of unified and universal culture that Gill envisioned (Epoch and Artist, p. 291). For all his admiration for Gill, who was a friend and mentor, Jones cannot be said to have shared Gill's sense that present society ought to be reformed on the model of cultures from the past. His chief concern was always the solitary vocation of the artist in a society to which he could not belong.

This is not to deny that Jones, like other intellectuals writing during the thirties, expressed political sympathies that proved dangerously naive. His response to Hitler's Mein Kampf, recorded in a letter to Harman Grisewood published in Rene Hague's Dai Greatcoat, reveals a disquieting readiness to sympathize with Hitler as a thinker (Dai Greatcoat, pp. 92-93). But Ward seriously distorts the case when she quotes selectively from this letter (pp. 54-55), leaving out Jones's quite explicit rejection of Hitler's anti-Semitic racial ideology and of the "steel grip" of Nazi imperialism. By omitting these qualifications, Ward implies that David Jones sympathized with aspects of Nazi ideology and tactics that were in fact abhorrent to him. Certainly there is more to be said on the question of Jones's troubling response to Mein Kampf,

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but the misleading use that Ward makes of quotation here makes one question the factual basis of her broader effort to portray Jones as a fascist or protofascist ideologue.

In her more specific account of what she calls "the Jones myth" as revealed in the poetry from In Parenthesis through The Sleeping Lord, Ward makes suggestive use of Marxist critical methods, but here again, the rigidity of her formulations leads her to indict Jones as at best a naive primitivist, at worst a dangerous reactionary. In part because she reads Jones's myth as a fundamentally dualistic opposi- tion of the primitive to the technological, Ward discerns no progres- sion or development in his work. She prefers In Parenthesis to The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord because its objective and "painterly," even "realistic," representations of life in the trenches, made possible by the poem's subject matter, manage to balance the poem's more subtle condemnation of modern warfare's inhumanity. Perhaps because she prefers this realistic mode in literature, Ward finds anti- pathetic what she terms The Anathemata's didactic and apocalyptic thrust. She says of the poem that "Its first and most important element is the belief that contemporary Western civilization is - or was - experi- encing a cultural crisis of apocalyptic proportions. This belief is dependent upon the separate but, in David Jones's mind, related notions of a 'break' between the past and the present, technology hav- ing modified the very nature of human life by altering its material basis, and of the cyclic character of history, in accordance with which analo- gous crises may be seen to have occurred in the past and to darken the future" (p. 125).

Though Ward is clearly right in pointing out The Anathemata's sense of cultural crisis, she seems to miss completely the poem's affirmative character as an attempt to resist inevitable cultural crisis by insisting on the continuity of sacramental and mythmaking activi- ties; its central theme, after all, is the making of "anathemata" or "things offered up" as signs, a gesture that for Jones has defined the history of Western culture and that continues into the present. Ward gives this assertion of continuity a sinister propagandistic twist which simply is not present in Jones, when she suggests that "The anti-technological impulse which is the seed of The Anathemata grows into a belief in a supreme cultural struggle, in which the idea of 'progress' itself is the aggressor, and a cluster of primitive ideals 'lifted up' from many sources is the opponent and victim" (p. 129).

The dualism implicit in her own method is clearest when Ward critiques Jones's The Sleeping Lord for the obvious dialectical opposi-



tion it establishes between the Roman world of imperial military and technological world rule and a simpler order that this volume associates with rural and medieval Welsh culture and legend. This oppo- sition, indisputably basic to The Sleeping Lord, does not necessarily result in the array of simplistic dualities Ward finds there. Especially in the Roman poems, "The Wall," "The Dream of Private Clitus," and "The Tribune's Visitation," there is considerable ambiguity in the allegiances of the poems' Roman speakers to imperial Rome, on the one hand, and to their own families, traditions, and myths, on the other. Similarly, the "Celtic" poems that comprise the second half of the volume seem more concerned to pose the possibility of an alterna- tive order of value than to define a political program. In a striking line from "The Tutelar of the Place," one of Jones's Celtic speakers turns to the sacramental order as a defense "In all times of Gleich- schaltung, in the days of the central economies" (The Sleeping Lord, p. 63). Ward finds disturbing political implications in Jones's failure here to distinguish morally between fascist and Marxist forms of cen- tralized control-between Nazi Germany's "Gleichschaltung" and Soviet Russia's "central economy." At the same time, she condemns the primitivism of Celtic culture, which embodies the sacramental order in this poem, pointing out that the defense of such primitivism is a fundamental precept of the fascist ideology that the poem seems to condemn (p. 190). This criticism exemplifies well, I think, the way in which Ward's somewhat rigid ideological categories lead to misunder- standing and misrepresentation of Jones's poetic intentions. Jones's later work insists repeatedly on mythmaking and sign-making as activi- ties that assert human creative freedom in the face of all totalitarian impositions of value, whether conservative, liberal, political, religious, or aesthetic. In her eagerness to establish Jones's sympathy with "anti- democratic" ideologies, Ward appears to miss the more complex ideological implications of his suspicion of all institutionalized forms of what he calls "the utile," including, in his later life, his distress at liturgical reforms in his own Roman Catholic church.

Indeed, Ward's very title, David Jones, Mythmaker, turns out to be an indictment, for in the ideological framework she posits, "myth" is the opposite of "reality," and a mythmaker is thus by definition one who is unable to come to terms with the world around him. This particular condemnation implies a basic lack of sympathy for Jones's whole poetic project, since he identified mythmaking, also called "sign- making" or "sacrament," as the most fundamental human activity, evident in the work of poets, priests, and artists in every political and

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social era. Though he does contrast the mythmaking impulse to what he calls the "strictly utile" orientation of contemporary societies - including both the social democracy of postwar Britain and the totalitarian "technocratic" states that he identifies with all Western imperialism - there is little evidence in his prose or poetry that Jones sees mythmaking or sacrament as bases for new political institutions.

It is clear that the questions Ward raises about Jones's conservative ideological and political commitments are questions that must be faced by the poet's admirers and interpreters. Unfortunately, the ideological commitments implicit in her argument, coupled with a fundamental lack of sympathy for Jones's avowed poetic project, limit the authority of Ward's reading of Jones. Even so, despite these limita- tions, Ward's study remains an important contribution to Jones scholarship precisely because it opens the question of Jones's ideology and its relation to the poetry, a question that others have so far avoided. Despite the flaws in its reading of Jones's poetry, Ward's book does establish the groundwork for future discussion of the implications of ideology in Jones's work and of his relation to the political climate of his own time. It is to be hoped that future efforts in this area will be undertaken by critics more fundamentally sympathetic to Jones's enterprise as poetic mythmaker.

Probably the most useful critical and contextual reading of Jones yet to appear is Neal Corcoran's insightful and lucidly written The Song of Deeds, A Study of The Anathemata of David Jones. The Anathemata is by any standards a difficult, highly idiosyncratic poem, but Jones clearly viewed it as his most poetically successful work, describing it to one correspondent as "the one that matters." In addition to clarifying details of structure and meaning in the poem, Corcoran analyzes it in its historical context. His first chapter is particularly suggestive in its account of the literary historical context of Jones's work both in relation to the modernists' preoccupation with tradition and history and in its brief but informative look at the issue of the influence on Jones of such contemporaries as T. S. Eliot, Jacques Mari- tain, W. F. Jackson Knight, and others. His concluding chapter sketches briefly but intriguingly the relation between Jones's work and what Corcoran proposes as a "tradition originating in David Jones," particularly in the work of John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Hugh MacDiarmid, and other contemporary British poets who have acknowledged admiration for Jones's work. Particularly suggestive is Corcoran's careful exploration of the poem as an intensely personal response to an intolerable historical situation. In his second



chapter, he insists on The Anathemata's importance as a poem originating in the devastated London of the Second World War. Acknowl- edging the historical background of the destruction of London, and with it, in Jones's view, of the West itself, Corcoran shows how the poem's fragmented form and idiosyncratic idiom reflect the poet's sense of personal and cultural fragmentation and reveal the work as at once a significantly historical and a profoundly personal text. Against the background of the war, The Anathemata, in Corcoran's account, "offers its personal testament of wholeness, integration, and health" (p. 40).

Yet while insisting rightly enough on the integrative and unify- ing intention underlying The Anathemata, Corcoran's subsequent chap- ters give fullest attention to the poem's apparently fragmented form. Adopting a terminology that deliberately raises the question of Jones's relation to modern and postmodern formal concerns, Corcoran notes Jones's insistence on "the essentially open nature of his writing" (p. 25). "The Anathemata, " Corcoran suggests, "more than most long poems perhaps, manifests form as process, as discovery, as 'invention.'" Critics familiar with the poetic theories of Charles Olson and other postmodern poets might find somewhat contradictory Corcoran's simultaneous insistence on the poem's organic unity and integration and on the "openness" of its form, and indeed more needs to be said about the form of The Anathemata in relation to other recent poetry - as Corcoran himself admits.

Corcoran attempts to reconcile the poem's apparent fragmentation with its evident push toward unity by positing what he calls the "meta- morphic" form of the poem. According to this reading, the central theme of Jones's long poem is what Corcoran calls "the process of metamorphosis" as "the essential mode of life on earth, and as the means by which our arts, our religions, our cultures, come into being" (p. 78). Corcoran's argument that the poem's form both "celebrates and enacts" this process of metamorphosis is useful in its identifica- tion of The Anathemata as a text that in some sense performs an action that it also represents. Yet his claim that "the process of metamorphosis" is the poem's central theme may seem to some readers to avoid or to abstract unnecessarily Jones's obvious commitment in this poem to the particular historically and culturally conditioned processes of sign-making or sacrament that he sees enacted at once in the celebration of Mass, in the Western tradition of the voyage of discovery, in the Christian mythos of the dying God who redeems the world, and in the creation of poetic artifacts. Corcoran acknowledges this to some

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extent in his opening chapter when he says that "Jones's real origi- nality as a theorist" lies in "the construction of a sacramental theory of artistic representation or re-presentation" (p. 8), and he also describes the poem as both a history and an enactment of "sign-making." Cer- tainly the metaphor of metamorphosis is an important one in the poem, notably in the opening section, "Rite and Fore-Time." But the relationship between what Jones calls "sign-making" or "sacrament" and what Corcoran calls "metamorphosis" as themes and strategies in the poem needs further clarification and exploration, as does the more problematic question of the relationship between formal "openness" and thematic "closure" in the structure of The Anathemata.

Corcoran points usefully to the concreteness of language itself both in Jones's theory and in the text of The Anathemata, adding that "the world in The Anathemata seems to be discovered in the process of generating names for itself, of bringing itself to birth through language" (pp. 97-98). His detailed account of the quality and variety of Jones's linguistic invention in The Anathemata - a primary source both of the poem's evocative power and of its initially daunting ob- scurity - illuminates some of the poem's most difficult passages and points the way for further work on Jones's poetic language. Another significant critical question is raised toward the end of Corcoran's book when he suggests formal and thematic connections between The Anathemata and other modernist long poems, including William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, "and perhaps, in a rather different way, Robert Lowell's History" (p. 107).

Concisely and lucidly written, skillfully argued and filled with illuminating and suggestive detail, Corcoran's book should certainly be required reading for anyone seriously interested in making sense of Jones's Anathemata and of Jones's relation to the poetic and cultural concerns that dominated his time. Its value to future scholarship on Jones lies not only in the authority and suggestiveness of its own critical readings, but also in the questions it raises about The Anathemata's form, structure, and intention in relation to the concerns of other writers and critics working in the latter part of this century. It may well map out the direction for future critical work on David Jones's complex and highly original poetry and poetics.

Kathleen Henderson Staudt Drexel University

422 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE


"Recent Criticism on David Jones" 1986

Documents

Transcript of "Recent Criticism on David Jones" 1986