David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth - review

It’s ever so rarely you get a perfect biography, a marvellous match of subject and writer — but Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones is just that. It’s not just a full account of a man but a compelling argument as to why Jones should be as admired by us as he was by his contemporaries, who thought him wonderful: T S Eliot; W B Yeats (he bowed from the waist as he entered the sitting room where Jones was having tea , intoning: “I salute the author of In Parenthesis”); Igor Stravinksy; Kenneth Clark; Dylan Thomas; W H Auden; Eric Gill.

That selection (there were umpteen others) of critics who thought him first rate gives a clue about why our generation hasn’t given Jones his due. He was that inconvenient creature, a genius in two spheres. Contemporary critics can handle the art, or the poetry, but not both, although Jones considered that his uniqueness as a writer lay in being an artist too.

Then there’s Jones’s religion, a problematic matter nowadays: he was a Catholic convert and his faith — generous and non-sectarian — informed everything he did. His fundamental view was that man is a maker — of signs as well as things. He was a medievalist who effortlessly embraced Modernism .

His Great War poem, In Parenthesis, is many-layered. There’s the experience of the soldier in the trenches mixed with echoes of the Roman world mixed with Welsh mythology and Christian allegory. His Dai Greatcoat (modelled on a shit-wallah he met in the trenches, carrying buckets of excrement) is an epic figure, with elements of all these things, with a bit of Kipling’s Tommy Atkins.

His other great poem, The Anathemata (with its sharply perceptive preface about the fissure between religion and contemporary culture), was described by Auden as analogous to sitting at Mass with your mind wandering.

This being the centenary of the First World War, it is astonishing that In Parenthesis hasn’t been endlessly discussed and that it (and the war art) isn’t on exam curriculums with the “war poets”. In fact, Jones saw more action than any of them — when he met Siegfried Sassoon later, they agreed that they could never get away from the war. For him it was “like ordinary life … only more intensified”, with the compensation for the horror being “the tenderness of men in action to one another”. One impetus for the poem was his re-reading of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: “Bugger this! I could do better.”

His father was Welsh, a printer; his mother of London shipwright stock; they lived in Brockley. He went at an early age to art school, where Sickert was his teacher. His good fortune was that he never went to university but was wonderfully well read.

After the war he joined Eric Gill’s artistic-religious community at Ditchling (the religion is now excised from the centre there) where he became engaged to Gill’s daughter, Petra — he never quite got over her breaking it off. His subsequent romantic career was a succession of passionate, unconsummated crushes on beautiful, clever women.

But although he absorbed Gill’s worldview and his craft of lettering, he was never absorbed by it: for him beauty was the goal of art. His own paintings are as many-layered as his writing. They can seem simply lyrical, even whimsical but, close up, they are dense with meaning.

Jones never trusted biographers who were too prolific, who didn’t live the life of their subject: well, Thomas Dilworth has done just that.

£17, Amazon, Buy it now