Review of Keith Aldritts Biography David Jones a Life
I n 1966, Robert Speaight published a biography of Eric Gill, a volume that the poet and artist David Jones, an erstwhile friend of Gill's, was asked more than once to review. But every time he refused. Jones, who was by then living in a dilapidated boarding house in Harrow-on-the-Hill, and among whose tenants was a lobotomised salesman, had firm ideas most biography. "I don't similar a person [writing] more than one biography in a lifetime," he told a friend. "He cannot accept researched the homo properly." Speaight, having already produced several lives, was non to be trusted with "the complex quiddities & haecceities of the chap".
Jones's biographer, Thomas Dilworth, has devoted 30 years to writing his book. Whether he will ever produce some other major life, I don't know. But if nosotros're talking about quiddity, his labours have non been in vain. Those interested in Jones'south fine art (his dreamy watercolours, his masterly engravings), or in his singular poetry (the dandy piece of work is In Parenthesis, a modernist epic inspired by his experiences in the trenches that TS Eliot regarded every bit a masterpiece), will not exist disappointed with the careful, delicate way Dilworth connects them to his confounding story. But the existent joy of his book is not analytical. It is that information technology makes Jones so vivid. Sweet, eccentric and unexpectedly comical, there are moments when it is about every bit if you tin smell him: the damp of his long overcoat; the must of hoarded newspapers equally he reluctantly opens the door of his room. Glamorous people come up and get: Jones'south circumvolve included Ben Nicholson, Kenneth Clark, Clarissa Eden, and (the mind boggles) the Queen Mother. He, however, never changes, in the sense that he is always vulnerable, unpredictable, stubborn and (determinedly and then) impoverished. One-half-human and half-boy, sometimes you experience his genius is the only straightforward thing virtually him.
The son of a Welsh printer, Jones was built-in in 1895, and grew up in Brockley, southward London, in a "Kipling-conditioned earth". He knew his scripture – his begetter was besides a preacher – but his "apprehensive psychology" he attributed to his granny Brad, whose household speciality was gloomy foreboding. His creative talent was obvious early on – the animals he drew as a male child are unnervingly animated – and at 14 he persuaded his parents to permit him attend Camberwell School of Arts; it was there that his teacher, AS Hartrick, fabricated the famous comment: "Look at that, y'all see, Jones leaves out everything simply the magic." But then, of course, came the war. Wanting to exist function of history (and to ride a horse), he was desperate to enlist. Twice refused on physical grounds ("scarce chest measurement"), in 1915 he finally joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
If people know anything at all about Jones, it is that he fought for longer than any other British author – a foot soldier for four years, he spent 117 weeks at the front – and that he was injured in the assault on Mametz Wood in 1916. Simply what Dilworth makes shockingly articulate, to 21st-century sensibilities, is Jones'southward paradoxical devotion to the war. It would damage him permanently – paralysing breakdowns would follow – and yet, in the midst of battle, he found a strange peace. He loved the men, the comradeship of the ranks. In 1917, granted leave after his battalion had been subjected to shelling for days, he astonished the adjutant past postponing it in order to avert having to help his parents motion firm. Afterwards, he returned "happily" to the trenches at Bois-Grenier. With morning glory trailing over their frames, they were "quite cute".
The war over, he resumed his educational activity, this time at the Westminster School of Fine art, where his tutors included Walter Sickert. In 1921, he was invited by his friend Father John O'Connor — he would before long convert to Catholicism — to visit Eric Gill in Ditchling, Sussex, a coming together that, for him, was momentous (fifty-fifty if he would later roll his eyes at his mentor's dictatorial ways). Jones, likewise, moved to the village, and there he learned to engrave. He also grew close to Gill's daughter, Petra, to whom he became engaged in 1924. Like all his (many) relationships with women, this one was substantially chaste. His fragility and his Catholicism led him to idealise the contrary sexual practice, and though he wept when they inevitably went and married someone else, as Petra did, there was a performative element to his heartbreak. He was not built for total-time love, and he knew it. "I am only interested in the things eternal," he told a tailor who asked what kind of suit he wanted making out of some itchy ginger tweed Petra had woven for him.
His beginning breakdown came subsequently he completed In Parenthesis in 1932. Information technology changed him physically – Dilworth has him retreating from "the barrage" into the "dugout of his body" – though not, perhaps, then much as the barbiturates his psychiatrist prescribed. But while it'south painful to read about Jones's low – he referred to it every bit "the Rosey" (after neurosis) – one's sense is nevertheless of an astonishing productivity: poems and pictures are made, exhibitions are mounted, awards are received. And he is surely the most gregarious recluse who e'er lived. He meets Yeats and Auden and attends Evelyn Waugh's wedding; he has Christmas tiffin with TS Eliot, and his new married woman, Valerie ("Finished!" was Jones'southward annotate on Eliot's artistic life, on seeing his marital spooniness). What makes all this the more astonishing is his itinerant lifestyle. For a long time, he lived at home with his parents. Only he was always camping, as well, turning up at friends' flats ready to outstay his welcome.
"You're not going to make me normal, are you, because I don't want to exist," Jones once told a compress. There was never whatsoever danger of that. In 1947 he took a room in a grotty Harrow boarding house that smelled of cabbage. He lived there for 16 years. When information technology was about to exist demolished, he moved to a residential hotel farther downward the hill. He worried that, in summer, it would be like "Palm Beach or Capri". But his room, "as dark as the inside of a moo-cow" and sometimes visited by rats, he thought "jolly nice, similar existence in the trenches". This hotel even so exists – Jones lived in that location until he entered the nursing habitation where he died in 1974 – and when I reached the end of this marvellous book I stared for ages at an prototype of its pebble-dashed exterior on the internet. Until recently, it was a Comfort Inn.
At this point, I'm probably supposed to consider why a man who was envied by Auden and acclaimed by Stravinsky isn't better known. But hell, if people won't come to Jones for the paintings or the poetry, which it seems, frustratingly, they won't, perhaps his life will do the trick. How brave it is, how sweet-sad. When it comes to fame, I read information technology as a kind of parable. One minute a bloke tin exist visiting the Tate with the Queen Mother. The next he can be staring at the flock wallpaper every bit he queues to use the telephone in a inexpensive Harrow hotel.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/11/david-jones-engraver-soldier-poet-painter-thomas-dilworth-biography-books-review-rachel-cooke
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