David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Thomas Dilworth

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Preface

Part one: Beginnings

1. 1895–1910

2. 1909–14

3. 1914–18

Part two: New beginnings

4. 1919–21

5. 1922–24

6. 1924–27

Part three: Wonder years

7. 1927–30

8. 1930–33

Part four: Time between

9. 1933–37

10. 1937–39

11. 1939–45

Part five: Resurrections

12. 1945–52

13. 1952–60

Part six: Endings

14. 1960–74

Abbreviations

List of Illustrations

Citations

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright

About the Book

As a poet, visual artist and essayist, David Jones is one of the great Modernists. The variety of his gifts reminds us of Blake – though he is a better poet and a greater all-round artist. Jones was an extraordinary engraver, painter and creator of painted inscriptions, but he also belongs in the first rank of twentieth-century poets.

Though he was admired by some of the finest cultural figures of the twentieth century, David Jones is not known or celebrated in the way that Eliot, Beckett or Joyce have been. His work was occasionally as difficult as theirs, but it is just as rewarding – and more various. He is overlooked because his best writing is imbedded in two book-length prose-poems – In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, making it difficult to anthologise; the work is informed by his Catholic faith and so may feel unfashionable in this secular age; he was a shy, reclusive man, psychologically damaged by his time in the trenches, and loathed any kind of self-promotion. Mostly, though, he was a complete and original poet-artist – sui generis, impossible to pigeon-hole – and that has led to the neglect of David Jones: a true genius and the great lost Modernist.

About the Author

Thomas Dilworth is the pre-eminent reader and interpreter of the work of David Jones and has published extensively on the subject. His books include The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, Reading David Jones and David Jones in the Great War. He is the editor of Jones’s illustrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Jones’s Wedding Poems and Inner Necessities, the Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Liturgical Parenthesis of David Jones

The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones

Reading David Jones

David Jones in the Great War

Here Away (poetry)

AS EDITOR

David Jones, Inner Necessities: the Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute

David Jones, Wedding Poems

S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by David Jones

with Susan Holbrook, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson

for Alison, Molly, Christine, Zachary, Zoey

It is about how everything turns into something

else & how you can never tell when a bonza is

cropping up … & how everything is a balls-up &

a kind of ‘Praise’ at the same time.

David Jones

Preface

A latter-day British original, David Jones is sui generis. This and aversion to self-promotion limited his recognition as one of the foremost figures of modernism. If Beckett was the last great modernist, Jones was the lost great modernist. In scope of achievement, he resembles William Blake – both in the first rank of engravers, both eminent painters, both important poets, though Jones is the better painter and, arguably, a far greater poet. He wrote two of the best epic-length poems in English – In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952). Yet he has been omitted from academic discussions of modern poetry – even, in 1986, from a book on the modern long poem. This neglect was owing largely to his poetry being unusual. Ignoring lyric conventions (verse, metre, regular stanzas, brevity), it often even went unrecognised as poetry. * And it is generally regarded as difficult, vast in vocabulary and range of reference, requiring rereading. T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid considered it, as does W. S. Merwin, among the best writing of the twentieth century. Most of Jones’s paintings are subtle and complex, impossible to appreciate at a glance, but Kenneth Clark thought him the best modern painter.¹ Few have read his essays on aesthetics and culture, yet they have been recognised by Kenneth Clark, Harold Rosenberg, W. H. Auden, and Guy Davenport as important to understanding modern culture and civilisation.

Here is a little of what some have said or written of Jones and his work. Eric Gill placed him ‘in the first rank of modern artists’. Kenneth Clark thought him ‘absolutely unique, a remarkable genius’. T. S. Eliot called In Parenthesis ‘a work of genius’. W. H. Auden considered it ‘the greatest book about the First World War’. The military historian Michael Howard called it ‘the most remarkable work of literature to emerge from either world war’. The novelist and poet Adam Thorpe wrote, ‘It towers above any other prose or verse memorial of … any war’. Graham Greene ranked it as ‘one of the great poems of the century’, Herbert Read called it ‘one of the most remarkable literary achievements of our time’. Of The Anathemata, Auden wrote, it is ‘very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century’. Seamus Heaney described Jones’s The Sleeping Lord (1974) as ‘enrich[ing] not only the language but people’s consciousness of who they have been and consequently are’. T. S. Eliot considered Jones ‘of major importance’, ‘one of the most distinguished writers of my generation’. Igor Stravinsky thought him ‘a writer of genius’. Dylan Thomas said, ‘I would like to have done anything as good as David Jones has done’. Hugh MacDiarmid publicly pronounced Jones ‘the greatest native British poet of the century’. W. S. Merwin considers him ‘one of the greatest twentieth century poets in English’. About Jones’s essays on culture, Harold Rosenberg wrote, ‘He formulated the axiomatic precondition for understanding contemporary creation.’ And Guy Davenport wrote, ‘He realised for us the new configuration, which only our time can see, into which culture seems to be shaped, and the historical processes that shaped it.’²

Chapter 1: 1895–1910

At 8.54 on the cold, foggy evening of 1 November 1895, he was born into an argument. His Welsh father, Jim Jones, wanted to name him after his own dead younger brother, David. His English mother, Alice, wanted to name him ‘Dorian’, after the protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s novel. Jim protested against any association with Wilde, whose trials in the spring had been a public scandal. She said, ‘I do not care what was said about Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest is the most brilliant and certainly the most amusing play ever written. I dislike the name Oscar, and, therefore, Dorian it shall be!’ Jim nevertheless persisted, and eventually she conceded that ‘Dorian’ might be unwise. But she then insisted on ‘Walter’, probably (since not a family name) in homage to recently deceased Walter Pater. ‘David’ could be his middle name.¹ The child would later insist on being called David, and that is what I will call him, though for most of his childhood he was Walter.

His father was thirty-five years old, a printer’s overseer for the Christian Herald, the son of a North Welsh plasterer and builder, John, and Sarah (née Jones), both descendants of North Welsh stonemasons and farmers. Jim’s natal family was Anglican, anglophile, monarchist, and Conservative. His parents spoke only Welsh to each other, allowing their eight children to speak Welsh or English as they liked, except for Jim, their eldest son, who, to ensure worldly success, was allowed to speak only English. Consequently, he was not fluent in Welsh. Usually calm and with ‘inward strength’, Jim was gentle, generous, humble, and affectionate but had a fiery temper. He smiled easily and often, had a ready sense of humour, and laughed uproariously. An open-air speaker for the parish of St James, Hatcham, he spoke publicly with ease in any circumstance. Soon after moving to London from Holywell in 1884, he had begun teaching Sunday school in Rotherhithe, where he met tiny, auburn-haired Alice Ann Bradshaw, with dark brown eyes. She was six years older.² On 20 September 1888, they married.

Alice was descended from carpenters and shipwrights. Her father, Ebenezer Bradshaw, had been a master mast-and-block maker during the height of Victorian Thames-side prosperity. He was handsome and his wife, Ann Elizabeth, beautiful. She was the daughter of a boatbuilder, Joseph Mockford, and a Piedmontese beauty maiden-named Vergado. Eb’s workshop was east of Cherry Garden Stairs in Rotherhithe, its yard running down to the river. He was a devout Anglican – for forty years parish clerk of St Mary, Rotherhithe – but, his daughter Alice said, ‘very Protestant’. He nicknamed her ‘Hard Nails’. As a girl she took her own boat onto the Thames and later boasted, ‘I could row better than any man.’ Fully grown, she was 4 feet 5 inches tall, replying tartly to comments on her size, ‘Little and good, like Zacchaeus!’ Nervously energetic, with quick intelligence and wit, she conversed well but was anxious, prickly, impatient with those she considered fools and liable to flay them with her tongue. According to her grandson, Tony Hyne, she was ‘quite a Tartar’. Emotionally undemonstrative, she was embarrassed by any show of affection. She had been a teacher for twelve years at the School of Industry in Rotherhithe, instructing older children in all subjects, including drawing, at which she excelled. Then, in 1878, she trained in Oxford to be a governess. Under the influence of the Oxford Movement, she became theologically High Church, ‘bowing and scraping’, a nephew, Maurice Bradshaw, recalled, until her evangelical family ‘knocked that nonsense out of her’. She became headmistress of Christ Church School and helped with Sunday school. In her fifth year as headmistress, Jim Jones courted her, frequently visiting the Bradshaw home with his brother David, who loved Alice’s sister Dolly. David and Dolly intended to marry, but he died in 1887 of typhoid fever while teaching on the Isle of Wight. Alice would retain her High Church doctrinal convictions but in practice deferred to Jim’s evangelicalism. She admired his lack of worldly ambition but, caring about social distinctions, disliked his addressing meetings of Nonconformists because ‘those people have not Holy Orders – and anyway half of them are grocers’.³

1. Arabin Road

Jim and Alice began married life in her father’s house at 11 Princess Street, in a row of the grandest Georgian houses in Rotherhithe. Here their first son was born in 1889, Harold Thomas Peart, and, two years later, a daughter, Alice Mary, called Cissy. Eb Bradshaw died in Jim’s arms of a heart attack in 1891, and the Joneses moved with his sixty-eight-year-old widow into a terraced house at number 1 Arabin Road (fig. 1) in Brockley, south-east of London. Four years later, upstairs in the master bedroom, their third and last child was born and contentiously named. When he was three, they moved west along Arabin Road to number 67.

The family was artisan lower-middle-class. Housemaids in black dresses, white caps, and aprons came to do the housework. Alice suffered from indigestion and ate very little and only bland food – boiled chicken, fish, rice, stewed fruit – which is what the family also ate.⁴

Jim and Alice gave their children a strict upbringing. She enforced discipline with a thin bamboo cane called the ‘tickley-toe’, whacking the hand of a child resting elbows on the table or improperly holding a fork. She was, her daughter remembered, ‘a tyrant’ in the house. Seeing David take a halfpenny from a chest of drawers, she gravely warned, ‘That way lies the gallows’, words he never forgot. He was spanked but rarely by his father, who was mild, gentler than Alice, and, unlike her, quick to show affection. The children called him ‘Dad’, her ‘Mother’.⁵

She was less strict with David. He was her favourite and, Cissy later said, ‘spoiled’. When he was indulged, his brother, Harold, muttered, ‘It’s always little Benjamin’s mess’, alluding to Genesis 43:34, in which ‘Benjamin’s mess [portion] was five times’ that of any of his brothers. The rebuke stung.⁶

Harold and Cissy resented him. He was, she said, ‘a nuisance … always crying and grizzling’. Ordered to take him in a pushchair to the Hilly Fields, a nearby park, they sat him in the wet grass hoping he would catch cold and be kept indoors. A few years later, they put a firework down his jumper, burning his neck and back. April Fools tricks were, David would remember, ‘cruel and violent’. And there were accidents. Re-enacting the escape of St Paul from Damascus (Acts 9:25), Harold and Cissy lowered him from an upstairs window in a laundry basket. The bottom gave way but close enough to the ground to prevent serious injury to the apostle to the Gentiles.⁷

The children called Alice’s mother Granny Brad. * She sat in a chair in the corner, wearing a buttoned black Dickensian dress. In mid-July when ‘Lavender: Who’ll buy my sweet lavender?’ was sung in the streets, she would say, ‘Winter is not far off.’ After Christmas, she said, ‘As the light lengthens, so the cold strengthens.’ David later thought that her ‘gloomy forebodings’ contributed to his own ‘apprehensive psychology’. She became senile, acting oddly at meals and wandering the house at night. He found her behaviour unnerving. Twice he was caught shaking his fist at her – the first time he was warned; the second, he received ‘a real whacking’. She died at the age of 78 in the autumn of 1907, when he was twelve.⁸

On Sundays, they visited or were visited by Alice’s relatives, including her aunts and uncles, who were, he later said, ‘absolutely pure Dickensian’. The language of nautical commerce suffused their conversation and would emerge decades later in his poetry. He knew best his Great-uncle Jack Mockford, a maritime engineer who had made the family proud and himself wealthy by inventing a device to improve steam-navigation which was exhibited in the South Kensington Museum. Once or twice David visited his riverside workshop. His Dickensian elders were also Dickensians, speaking of Dickens characters as though living acquaintances. Their chief poet was Robert Browning.⁹

David’s language had its deepest roots in nursery rhymes, songs, and stories. ‘Three Blind Mice’ was the first song his mother sang to him – it would surface in his poetry (A 60) – another was ‘Johnny’s so long at the Fair’ (IP 43, 49). She told stories of the Norman kings including Henry I, whose elder brother died in a hunting accident and who, after his son perished in the foundering of the White Ship, never smiled again. (Deaths of brothers and sons would soon have special meaning for David.)¹⁰

His first vivid memory was of being awakened from a nap in his cot beside his parents’ bed by noise in the road. Slipping to the floor and lifting a slat of the venetian blinds, he saw cavalry riding in column in a cloud of dust and heard, above the clatter of hooves, bugles. It was January 1900. The Boer War had begun, and the City Imperial Volunteers were on recruitment parade. His mother arrived and lifted him back into his cot. ‘Who are they?’ he asked. She said, ‘You’ll know soon enough.’ Persisting, he asked whether they were guardian angels. (He had heard a friend of hers mention guardian angels and his father say there was no warrant for them in scripture.) Before falling asleep, the distant bugles convinced him that the riders were indeed angels. He now wanted someday to ride a horse. *

His second vivid memory was of being awakened on the night of 16 May 1900 by a frightening noise and explosive light – a motor car, the first of his experience, come to take his father to insert news of the relief of Mafeking on the front page of the morning paper.¹¹

That summer he would sit in the garden beneath a pear tree on a small log of lignum vitae from his grandfather’s workshop. At the bottom of the garden was a wall he liked. From its top and through a hole in the brickwork, he enjoyed watching a fruiter’s horses stabled on the other side.¹²

At the age of five, he was moved into his brother’s bedroom, where, on a wall map of the Transvaal, Harold pinned tiny Union Jacks to mark places captured by the British. David became aware of the strain between his father, who opposed the war, and other relatives – one of them his mother’s brother Ebenezer, who, pounding the table, declared, ‘Jim, you’re a Little Englander!’ David saw pictures of the war and the far reaches of the empire in newspapers and magazines that inundated the house. His father brought these home each weekend from the printing office. David’s was, he later said, a ‘Kipling-conditioned world’.¹³

His parents subscribed to the Books for Bairns series of monthly volumes, of which his favourite was King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (September 1899). Of its stories, he liked best ‘Prince Geraint and Fair Enid’, in which Geraint avenges Guinevere by defeating a knight who is a bully and a thief. David’s mother read them aloud to him, and he paid his sister a penny an hour to read them.¹⁴

After teaching him the alphabet with difficulty, his mother sent him to a series of children’s schools in nearby houses. In one of these, he fell in love with a young teacher, from whom he began learning to read and write and add. Subtraction eluded him. Wearing her hair in two long plaits, she asked whether if she wore her hair in a bun that would be ‘a plus or a minus in plaits’. Failing to understand, he wept, but she was kind. The school soon closed, and then he ‘vaguely understood what was meant by minus two plaits’.¹⁵

* * *

Shops delivered groceries. In the street passed church parades, organ-grinders with dancing monkeys, a man with a donkey offering children a ride for a penny, and a man with a bear dancing at the end of a leash – for David, ‘a horrible’ sight. Peddlers filled the air with cries. The ‘heavenly’ singsong, ‘Lavender: Who’ll buy my sweet lavender?’ held him spellbound – it would bracket the central monologue of his long poem The Anathemata (125, 168). Until he was five or six, a dancing Jack o’ the Green appeared on May Day at the door, frightening him – the green man would later emerge in his poetry (IP 168; SL 68). David bowled an iron hoop, which his mother considered a ‘regrettable … low class habit’ and allowed only in the garden. Stilts were in vogue – he found them difficult. Bicycles were popular, and he learned to ride one.¹⁶

Not yet part of greater London, Brockley was an unfinished housing development. Near Crofton Park station were remnants of a farm, including stiles on which he climbed to improve his view. Behind the pub across from Brockley Hall were open fields and a scattering of houses under construction. To the south were fields of wheat; to the north open space, with a brickfield between Brockley and Wickham Roads and a blacksmith’s shop, where he took his hoop to be soldered and watched the smith shoe horses. Farther north, New Cross was open country. At the east end of Arabin Road was a yard with chickens; across the road, a builder’s yard. On Easter and Whitsun his father hired an open carriage to take the family into the country. David was impressed by how near the country was. A short walk south along Brockley Road and east along Adelaide Avenue, the Hilly Fields was a green area nearly a half-mile square rising high above the roofs of bordering houses. As a schoolboy and later, he would go there alone and with friends. From its height he could look south to the bare green hills of Kent and south-east to the towers of the Crystal Palace and, at night, the weekly fireworks display there. To the north-east, he could see Blackheath and the southern slope of the hill of Greenwich Park, and far to the north-west the dome of St Paul’s.¹⁷ This was his native hill, the height of his earliest imagining, the familiar prototype of the ancient hills with maternal guardian spirits celebrated later in his poetry (A 55–8; SL 59–69). Only in 1910 with the felling of the elms lining Brockley Road to accommodate tramlines would Brockley lose its feeling of being in the country. The matrix of his spatial imagination was this semi-rural zone of metamorphosis.

* * *

His mother took him into London. He loved the Thames and its shipping. In 1903 she introduced him to the British Museum. His father took him to visit his office in Tudor Street, off Fleet Street, where he talked with the Cockney compositors. He visited the office of his Uncle Ebenezer, who manufactured paper in Great St Thomas Apostle Street near the river, an area David later remembered as having ‘the atmosphere of Dickensian London’.¹⁸

Apart from excursions into the city, his mother disliked ‘going places’. When Jim received an offer of a better job in the United States and wanted to emigrate, she refused. (David later wondered what he would have been like as an American.) Jim wanted to travel during his two-week holidays, but she preferred staying home, so they did, sometimes taking short trips to the seaside.¹⁹

When David was four or five, the family visited Deal, where he first saw, at the far end of a narrow street, the taut blue horizon of the sea. It stirred in him ‘a distinct emotion’ he never forgot. Astride a cannon in the ruins of Sandown Castle north of town, he gazed at the Channel and, when weather and the tide were right, the wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, to which he would refer in his poetry (A 110). The family travelled to Herne Bay, Tankerton, and, in the summer of 1899, Littlehampton, where they had a family photograph taken (fig. 2), the grouping suggesting the closeness between David and his mother.²⁰

* * *

David was brought up on the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. He heard scripture read in Sunday school, at church, and at home, where his father read favourite passages ‘in his best manner’. (On Sunday evenings, Jim also read aloud from The Pilgrim’s Progress, which impressed David ‘a good bit’, and, on Christmas mornings, Milton’s ‘Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’.)²¹ His father made lists of scriptural passages for family members to read prayerfully each day. David would know scripture better than any other important modern writer, being able to quote it from memory easily and at length.

2. Jim, Harold, Cissy, David, Alice Ann Jones, 1899

He liked looking at Keble’s Christian Year, illustrated by Johann Friedrich Overbeck.²² He paged through the weekly tabloid his father worked on, the Christian Herald and Signs of our Times – an ecumenical paper except for marked antipathy to ‘Romish and Ritualistic influence’.

Evangelising kept his father busy. For a time he travelled, selling Bibles. With a hwyll (the high-pitched monotone of Welsh preachers), he preached on weekends to small audiences on Clapham Common and Peckham Rye, where the family sometimes accompanied him and picnicked. (David heard him call people to Jesus in the field where young William Blake had seen a tree spangled with angels.) Four evenings a week, his father took part in mission meetings – in Church of England Mission Halls, Deptford lodging houses, and Nonconformist halls – for which he acted in turn as speaker, leader, secretary, and organiser.

Jim brought five- or six-year-old David to a meeting, sat him on a chair at the back of the speaker’s platform, told him to stay put, and commenced preaching. Unnoticed by his father, David, wriggling, got his head stuck in the double loop of the chair-back. Attendants removed the chair-and-boy and, unable to separate them, one said, ‘We’ll have to get a saw.’ Horrified, David thought they were going to cut off his head. The man returned and, without explaining what he was doing, sawed through the top of the chair-back, freeing him. (His father had to pay for the chair.)²³

On Good Friday afternoon when David was six or seven, playing alone in the garden, he tore up two wooden slats bordering a flower bed and (after accidently breaking pots in the garden shed) nailed them together to form a cross. Holding it aloft, he was carrying it round the garden when his father came upon him. Pale with rage, he lectured David about doing such damage ‘on this most solemn day of the Christian year’ and, with patient fury, explained that parading round holding up a cross was the sort of thing ‘people called Catholics’ do ‘but true Christians do not’. For punishment David was sent to bed, broken-hearted at his father’s failure to appreciate his intention. Afterwards, Jim asked his wife, ‘Where did the boy pick up such a papistical and Puseyite idea?’ ²⁴ *

For David, Jesus would always be ‘our Lord’. Religion contributed to his formation in many positive ways, as when he overheard his mother ask the family doctor, a Yorkshire Quaker, why Quakers have no sacraments. And the doctor replied, ‘But Mrs. Jones, surely the whole of life is a sacrament.’ David remembered his words and, as an adult agreed with them. But religion also encouraged psychologically toxic guilt feelings. At home the family sang a hymn including the words, ‘I wake I sin, I sleep I sin, I sin in every breath.’ ²⁵

* * *

With his mother’s encouragement and example (some of her framed red-crayon drawings hung in the house), he began drawing, drew well, and was praised for it. By the age of five, he was making pictures obsessively. After aunts took him to a Royal Academy summer exhibition of animal drawings, he began drawing animals. Seeing that he was good at it, his mother took him to Regent’s Park Zoo to draw mainly the big cats, antelope, and deer.²⁶ In 1901 he made a large picture (18 by 18 inches) of a truncated leopard backing away from a tiger (fig. 3), an astonishing achievement for a five-year-old, and the media – ink, wash, and white body paint – surprisingly sophisticated. At the age of seven he quickly sketched from the front window a bear dancing at the end of a leash, finishing the drawing from memory (fig. 4). (To get the fence slats straight, he borrowed a ruler from his sister, who said, ‘No real artist would use a ruler.’ He thought, ‘blow what a real artist would do’, and ignored her.) The drawing is large (20 by 11 inches), the work of a prodigy. In 1958, he would hang it over his mantel and write to a friend, ‘It’s much the best drawing I’ve ever done, which shows how, in the arts, there ain’t no such thing as getting better as you get older!’ ²⁷

3. Tiger and Leopard, 1901

4. The Bear, 1903

5. Sketches, Daily News, 19 October 1903

Adding enthusiasm to his mother’s encouragement and providing large sheets of paper, his father thought that David’s drawing might lead to a career in journalistic art. In 1902, he enrolled him in the Cork International Exhibition and the Royal Drawing Society’s Revival of Youthful Art League, which commended him for a drawing. In 1903, The Bear and a drawing of a roaring lion were ‘Highly Commended’, and the Morning Advertiser singled him out as noteworthy for his ‘series of wild animals’.²⁸ In the autumn of 1903, after visiting the zoo, he drew from memory a lion, a rhinoceros, and an elephant – drawings that his father sent to the Daily News, where they were engraved and published in the ‘Children’s Corner’ (fig. 5).

He made a painting for the family Christmas card for 1904 which his father had photographically reproduced in pale green (fig. 6), its lettering and floriate border erratically alive. *

When David was eleven or twelve, the quality of his drawing declined, owing to the appeal of realism (the nemesis of all children’s art) and the influence of the publications that flooded the home with perfunctory, lifeless illustrations. Equally baleful was the influence of old Royal Academy catalogues and tasteless praise by relatives and teachers. As he later said, his artistic ability was ‘practically destroyed’. Such a fall from grace happens to most children who draw. Spontaneity gives way to imitation as eagerly, proudly, inevitably they exit aesthetic Eden. Still drawing continually, he produced little of merit. Among his last impressive childhood works, done in 1906, is a painting of a wolf in a snowy mountainous setting (fig. 7). His mother hung it along with The Bear in the sitting room.²⁹

6. Christmas card, 1904

7. Wolf in Snow, 1906

Alice did not share her husband’s optimism about David having a career as a journalistic illustrator. During trips into the city, whenever she and David passed a pavement artist, she invariably dropped a coin into the artist’s cup or extended hand. David asked, ‘Why do you give to all regardless of the quality of their work?’ She said, ‘That is my business, and anyway we are obliged to give to the poor.’ Years later she confessed to fearing that if he continued drawing he, too, would end up in the gutter.³⁰ For his sake she was giving alms in the spirit of sympathetic magic.

* * *

At the age of seven, David began attending Brockley Road School, half a mile south of the family home. He joined an unruly class of nearly sixty junior boys and was, he later said, ‘appallingly bad’ at lessons. In compensation he drew and painted more. He could not read with ease until he was nine and would remain a slow reader – at the age of 69 saying about reading, ‘it takes … time for things to sink in’.³¹

At school and at home he read history. He learned about the Roman conquest of Britain and was made to memorise Cowper’s poem about Boudicca, the ‘British warrior-queen/Bleeding from the Roman rods’. * He probably read in Stories from Ancient Rome (Books for Bairns, May 1901) about the fall of Troy, the founding twins, the attack on Rome by Gauls – all strands woven into The Anathemata and later poems. He read Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), which influenced him deeply – its phrases and episodes echo in his poetry † – and its sequel Rewards and Fairies . All this history and historical imagining deeply impressed him, partly because he had been to Deal, where Caesar had landed, and partly because London was originally a Roman town. As half British-Celt, three-eighths English, and one-eighth Italian, he embodied the genetic imprint of his nation’s history.³²

Chauvinism distorted the history he learned. He was taught, for example, that the British fought the Hundred Years War against ‘the tyrant’s yoke’ and won it on the strength of victories at Crécy and Agincourt but not that the French subsequently reconquered. He imbibed Victorian admiration of the Romans as forerunners of the imperial British in spreading enlightened civilisation. On Empire day, he and his schoolmates sang Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, about imperialism being virtuous if humble and contrite. He read the patriotic stories in the Union Jack Library. A naval commander addressed the student body on ‘the Bull-dog breed’ and ‘the Union Flag in very hot, and very cold places’ and ‘how the sea was free’. History lessons stressed ‘the Inquisition and the habitual cruelty of foreign nations’.³³

By the age of eight, David was devoted to Nelson, whose death was the most poignant historical moment in popular imagination – emphasised by the centenary celebrations of Trafalgar in 1905. In the upper Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, he repeatedly saw the objects handled by the admiral and the uniform in which he had died. To view these relics, David several times walked from Brockley across Blackheath – with its, to him, ‘heavenly deer’ – a distance of two and a half miles. (He enjoyed walking.) In his hero-worshipping he was torn between Nelson, later criticised and commemorated in his poetry (WP 38; A 114), and Owen Glendower.³⁴

At school David was unable to memorise multiplication tables. When his teacher brusquely challenged him with ‘Seven sevens’, he ventured a guess and covered his head because she hit him when he was wrong, as he usually was. (No wonder, as an adult, he could not easily count by tens.) Neither did he learn to spell well. This was a special irritant at home. His proofreading father spelled perfectly, and his mother – ‘very hot on spelling’, David later remembered – was particularly ‘horrified’ at his misspelling common words. Anxious about this fault, she tutored him, and, with the help of Butter’s Etymological Spelling Book and Expositor (1878), he made progress but still tended to spell phonetically. His adult writing contains ‘desease’, ‘desasterous’, ‘devision’, ‘devine’, ‘rediculous’, ‘ribbonds’, ‘peninsular’ (the noun), and ‘aspedister’ (the plant) – ‘Passchendaele’ defeated him. He would always regard his faulty spelling as ‘an awful curse’, exclaiming near the end of his life, ‘Great God, how I wish I could spell.’ ³⁵

He was academically inept for the same reason he was artistically gifted: the right hemisphere of the brain, which thinks and imagines spatially, was dominant rather than the left hemisphere, which thinks and imagines temporally. Left-brain people are proficient at mathematics, enjoy music, read early, quickly, and easily, are highly articulate, spell well, but are (usually without realising) visually imperceptive. Jones was the opposite. His speech would always be hesitant, groping. Apart from his father’s singing in Welsh and a madrigal called ‘Livia’s Frock’, he did not, as a child, care for music.³⁶

‘Physically feeble’, he ‘loathed’ and avoided organised games. But he may have joined in dancing round the schoolyard maypole draped with ribbons which dancers interwove, unwove, and rewove round the pole – imagery that emerges in his poetry (A 243; SL 61) and suggests a paradigm for its interwoven texture.³⁷

He had loved ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’. Now he participated in a circle-chant that began slowly and accelerated until the reciters became breathless or confused: ‘It was a dark and stormy night, the brigands sat round their camp fire, the chief said to Antonio, Antonio, tell us a tale, and the tale ran thus: It was a dark & stormy night, the brigands sat round their camp fire …’³⁸

Encouraged by teachers to visit historical sites, with a class-six school friend David went to the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, where, at the age of twelve (careful that no one was looking), he spat on the tomb of Edward I, conqueror of Wales.³⁹

By the age of seven, David had felt strong affinity with Wales. At a boarding-house table during a seaside holiday, his father had spoken about failing to get a job requiring fluency in Welsh because Taid (grandfather) had forbidden him to speak it. David announced, ‘Taid was a bloody old bastard.’ His father whisked him away and told him that, though he did not know the meaning of those awful words, picked up from older boys, he had to be punished ‘for offending against man and God’ – he told the story of Elisha who, jeered at by boys, prayed to Jehovah, who sent two bears to devour them (2 Kings 2:23–5). David said, ‘Taid was a bloody old bastard and Jehovah isn’t any better.’ A spanking ensued.⁴⁰

David’s Uncle Ebenezer and four cousins, who lived nearby in Wickham Road, were aware of his attachment to Wales and, when playing a children’s version of rugby in the garden, infuriated him by taunting, ‘Don’t you try any of your Welsh tricks.’⁴¹

In one respect at least, his affinity was political. He was, like his father, a Lloyd George enthusiast and sent him a fan letter, to which the Chancellor replied on 23 December 1910, thanking ‘Mr. W. David Jones for his good wishes’. One of his teachers would remember him as ‘a worshipper of Lloyd George’.⁴²

* * *

His mother was not entirely happy in her marriage. Jim suffered by comparison to her handsome and capable father, with whom she remained enamoured. And her brother earned more and lived in a bigger house. Regarding the English as superior, she spoke of the Welsh scornfully as ‘country people’, joked about ‘Welsh heathens’, and would say, ‘That’s your father, born half way up a mountain with the back door open.’ In later years when Jim was late for tea, she would, in the presence of grandchildren, call him an ‘old fat head’. Moreover, she was devoid of domestic interests and frustrated at not working outside the home. (No middle-class wives then did.) Having delayed marriage, she had become used to independence and responsibility. Now, watching children on their way to and from school, she wished she was their teacher.

For her, David’s company made the house less a prison. At the slightest sign or attestation of illness, she allowed him to stay home from school. He liked her attention. Sickness got it, and that conditioned him to be ill and malinger. Later in life, he would stay in bed for weeks with colds that would keep few from going out to work.⁴³

Her concern for his health was genuine. He was thin, small, and prone to respiratory ailments; and she feared tuberculosis, which had killed her sister Dolly, and afflicted her brother. So when her younger son had a cold, she put him to bed and pumped steam at him. Her habitual response to illness was, ‘Be sure and stay in bed – & be still for a while.’ As a consequence, he spent much of his childhood in bed drawing and reading – whereas, ill or not, Cissy was sent to school and resented it. Even in 1908 when the family moved to 128 Howson Road, shortening the walk to school to a few hundred yards, he stayed home as often as possible. He missed so much school that he could later say with some truth, ‘I had no education.’⁴⁴

In their long conversations, Alice recreated her Thames-side childhood in Rotherhithe, which, when David was eight, ‘seemed an almost mythological world’. She spoke of the technical details of shipbuilding and enacted her father and uncles speaking of sight-drafts, brokerage, bonded goods, and harbour dues. (Years later the phrase ‘C.i.f. London documents: at sight’ in The Waste Land, line 211, would instantly evoke for him the world of the Pool of London as his mother had spoken of it.) She regaled him with family anecdotes in which her father figured large and her mother hardly at all. She praised her father’s integrity as a workman and related an argument about repairs to a ship bearing sulphur from Sicily that would inform the ‘Redriff’ section of The Anathemata (118–21). She spoke of the churches and wards of the city, as would ‘the Lady of the Pool’ at the centre of that poem (124–68).⁴⁵ Her description of family prosperity declining as metal steamships replaced wooden sailing vessels made him aware for the first time of momentous technological changes transforming the world.

David’s parents were both, he later said, ‘very wonderful people … absolutely marvellous’. His relationship to them enriched him imaginatively. He drew and painted largely to please his mother. This may be reflected in his ‘always’ finding ‘so moving’ the medieval story of the tumbler who, lacking other gifts, performed acrobatics before the Blessed Mother.⁴⁶ His father also valued his artistic gift and modelled love of language. David would psychologically negotiate his relationship with his parents through his visual art and, later, his writing – in which he would revere maternal figures and find complementary value in male saviour-figures, though never with comparable lyricism.

* * *

During his first eight years, the family did not visit Wales. His mother got on badly with her in-laws. When they visited, she would leave the sitting room and bustle about the kitchen, banging saucepans and slamming doors. There may also have been moral disapproval of Jim’s father cohabiting (since 1891) with his dead wife’s sister Eleanor without benefit of marriage. Eleanor died in 1903, and in 1904 the Jones family visited North Wales.⁴⁷

David first saw Wales at the end of an all-night train journey, waking to his father saying, ‘Well, here you are now.’ To his right, the coastal flats of the estuary of the Dee extended to the sea horizon; to his left rose hills and, beyond, mountains appearing and disappearing in the mist. It was a life-changing moment, for which he was well prepared. Among his earliest memories were his father beautifully singing – Ar Hyd y Nos (‘All Through the Night’), Aderyn Pur (‘The Pure Bird’), Dafydd y Garreg Wen (‘David of the White Rock’), and the national anthem, Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (‘Land of My Fathers’) – filling David with pride and ‘awe’. Jim had no close Welsh friend and belonged to no society of London Welshmen but was proud of being Welsh. He told his children stories of his native Gwynedd (Flintshire), and conveyed a sense of place in which his identity was rooted. David found that the ‘otherness’ of this place, seen for the first time, left ‘an indelible mark on the soul’.⁴⁸

8. David Jones reclining; behind him Effie Tozer and parents; back right, Harold and Cissy, c. 1910

The family stayed at Llandrillo-yn-Rhos, later called Rhos-on-Sea, on the western point of Colwyn Bay, with Jim’s older sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, James Tozer, a pawnbroker (see fig. 8). (Alice said he could speak English and Welsh out of the two sides of his mouth simultaneously.) The Tozers’ two daughters, Effie and Gladys, were determined to be as English as possible. Close to David in age, Effie told him that his interest in Welsh history and language was ‘crazy’.⁴⁹

He and Effie played by the sea, often squeezing into St Trillo’s Chapel there (fig. 9), a sixteenth-century building on the site of a sixth-century oratory. In its dank, cobwebbed darkness was a shallow, gravel-bottomed ‘holy well’ filled with cool fresh water. He thought it ‘marvellous’ that the spring at the edge of the sea should be free of the taste of salt. Just offshore was a fishing weir, 630 yards long and 9 feet high, constructed in the twelfth century by Cistercian monks and still in use. David loved its rough wattling.⁵⁰

Behind Rhos on Bryn Euryn (Hill of Gold), the Joneses and Tozers picnicked in the overgrown ruins of Llys Euryn (Golden Court), originally the thirteenth-century fortified manor house of the chief minister of Llywelyn the Great (fig. 10). Eight-year-old David sat in these vine-covered ruins thinking ‘a lot’ about Llywelyn and his minister.⁵¹ At the top of the hill, from a circular Stone Age fort, David could view Rhos, the immensity of Colwyn Bay, Conwy Valley, and the craggy summits of Snowdonia.

9. St Trillo’s Chapel, c. 1900

10. Ruined manor house on Bryn Euryn

He met his Welsh grandfather, tall, now bent and using a cane. As they sat together on a bench near St Trillo’s Chapel, David’s resentment against Taid evaporated. The chapel, its holy well, the fishing weir, the ruins of Llys Euryn, and his Welsh-speaking grandfather combined powerfully to link him with an ancient past. A few years later he would associate the weir with Gwyddno’s weir in the Taliesin story and his grandfather with King Maelgwyn the Tall, whose principal seat had been nearby, and with Llywarch Hen, who uses a walking stick in Middle Welsh poetry. ⁵² His grandfather died in 1909 before they could meet again. Rhos was, for David, an enchanted place.

Back in Brockley, while listening to his father sing, he felt a ‘passionate conviction’ that he belonged to his father’s people without understanding why. Cissy showed some interest in Wales, Harold none. When David was nine or ten, he read his brother’s copy of J. F. Hodgetts’ Harold the Boy-Earl (undated, c. 1890) and wrote ‘furiously all over it in uninformed, passionate disagreement’ with its Germanophile bias for Anglo-Saxons and against Celts. Did his fury reflect rivalry with his brother, who felt entirely English and shared the boy-earl’s name? Coinciding with nine-year-old David’s determination to be an artist, his identification with Wales seems partly to have been compensation to his father for attachment to his mother, which underlay drawing. Indicating this was his renouncing at the age of nine the name ‘Walter’ – the choice, he knew, of his mother – because it was Saxon. Now he answered only to ‘David’. By his eleventh year, the name ‘Walter’ shrank to the initial ‘W’, which would vanish in his early twenties. Becoming David was also a way of abrogating his nickname since infancy, which was ‘Toady’ (as he spelled it) and originated, he was convinced, in Harold insisting that as an infant David resembled a toad.⁵³ Being ‘David’ was Oedipal compensation and a minor victory in sibling rivalry.

On visits to North Wales, David was encouraged in his enthusiasm for Wales by the vicar of St George’s Church, Thomas Evans Timothy, a classicist and Welsh patriot, avidly interested in the antiquities of his parish. He urged David to learn Welsh and read the Welsh poets. In 1910 Timothy was transferred to Raegs-y-cae, a hamlet near Holywell. David and his father visited him there, and Timothy spoke to David of local fighting in 1149 to win back for Wales what had been part of English Mercia for centuries. At the wall of the vicarage garden, Timothy pointed out hills that David’s father had often mentioned as landmarks of his boyhood: Moel Famau (Hill of the Mothers), Foel-y-Crio (Hill of the Cry), and Moel Arthur. He also identified Moel Ffagnallt, which he said meant Hill of Dereliction.⁵⁴ They impressed David as a kind of poem in place. By the time he commemorated them in The Anathemata (233), they would partake in an association between Calvary, Arthur-as-Christ-figure, the history of Wales, and the universal experience of decline and loss for all people and cultures.

With his father he visited Ysceifiog, the birthplace of his Welsh grandparents. Near it Offa’s Dyke is presumed to have run, and David began associating his grandfather with the eighth-century earthwork. At what had been his grandfather’s workshop outside Holywell, Jim stressed that both David’s grandfathers had been builders and taught him the Welsh word saer (carpenter), which would gain in significance when he learned that, for the Welsh, poetry is ‘carpentry of song’. They visited Gwenfrewi/Winifred’s Well, and he met the large ex-Chief Constable of the town, Ben Caesar Jones, whose name epitomised for David the historical Welsh-Roman connection and who looked to him like a fifth-century centurion left behind by the departing legions. In 1911, his father took him to Caernarfon for the investiture of the Prince of Wales. On that trip, David hoped to see Mt Snowdon but it was ‘too misty’ – he never would see it. Always their base was Rhos, where, playing on the shore one day, he came upon the corpses of two drowned men, a gruesome experience underlying references in his poetry to sailors lost at sea (A 104, 106, 141).⁵⁵

* * *

David had a small bow-shaped mouth, large ears, ginger hair, like his father’s – it would darken with age to brown like his mother’s – and deep brown eyes, inherited, his mother told him, from his Italian great-grandmother. In manner he was sweet natured and gentle like his father but with his high-strung, anxious mother’s inner disposition. He would later say, ‘I’ve always been deeply depressed inside’ like her ‘though she had great fortitude in tribulation’.⁵⁶

Since early childhood he had masturbated and felt guilty about it. In 1910, with acute embarrassment, he confided to his parents that his erections were painful. He suffered from tightness of the foreskin. The only cure is circumcision. His mother took him to a surgery, where a nurse chloroformed him for the operation. Recovery was slow and painful, acutely so after an erection broke the stitches. The initial problem, the operation, the pain, the involvement of his mother and the nurse, and his being fourteen: these are enough to make even a non-Freudian wince. Thirty years later the experience would give him nightmares.⁵⁷

Chapter 2: 1909–14

After primary school, David wanted to go to art school. His parents and other relatives wanted him to attend nearby Hilly Fields College, but he was stubborn and, after months of argument, he got his way. The