David Jones: In Parenthesis

'To attempt to explain, in such a note as this, is futile.' Such was T S Eliot's warning when he added a laudatory introduction to David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937). I see no reason to promise more than Eliot, but in this blogpost I aim to gather some of the online resources which may help to guide readers through what Eliot considered to be 'a work of genius'.

Jones took several decades to find the right form for In Parenthesis. He had served during the War as a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, coming nearest to a fellow poet when (as the two men established many years later) his company once relieved Siegfried Sassoon's. In Parenthesis ends in Mametz Wood, where Jones himself was shot and wounded. After the War, he attempted to convey his experiences through visual art: 'Part of me, the artist within me, has never left the trenches'. But although he excelled as a painter and an engraver, Jones remained dissatisfied with his work until finally inventing a new literary form capable of such a task. The drafts record the drama of that struggle.

It has to be acknowledged that there are two major (and related) obstacles for Jones's audience. In Parenthesis is, from orthodox perspectives, a fiendishly difficult text; and it earns that overused label, sui generis. A contemporary readership is given few if any bearings. What sort of text are we wrestling with? Neither novel nor poem but held in parentheses between them, Jones's hybrid exposes the sameness and formal conservatism of all but a few subsequent writers. That tends not to be a successful career move. Wordsworth believed that great poets create the taste by which they are to be appreciated, and in that single respect, Jones seems to have failed, until now at least. Eliot could optimistically state in 1961 that In Parenthesis would be 'widely enough known in time'. The best reviewers of Jones today (such as David Wheatley and Alex Preston) repeat the mantra that Jones is scandalously neglected, and continue to hope for better.

Perhaps that hope is justified. Jones's work has always attracted a brilliant scholarly cult (although I agree with George Simmers, contra most scholars, that Jones's version of the modernist 'mythic method' is the least interesting thing about In Parenthesis, and blights his later poem, The Anathemata). However, his influence on creative writers has seemed negligible. The most significant exception is (as ever) Geoffrey Hill. A powerful advocate for Rosenberg and Gurney, Hill keeps such silence in respect of David Jones that even the least Bloomian of his readers ought to grow suspicious. A recent lecture by Hill praised Jones in passing, but to date Hill has published virtually nothing on Jones's work, despite passages like this:

The memory lets escape what is over and above---
as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,
and again drenched down---demoniac-pouring:
who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,
pint-pot---from milliard-quart measure.

This is pure Hill. Proto-Hill, I ought to say. It comes from Part 7 of In Parenthesis.

If Hill's prominence, and our increasing familiarity with his voice, offer one way of approaching In Parenthesis, so much the better. But In Parenthesis comprises multiple voices, sudden shifts in perspective, characters which appear and disappear --- the whole making a 'shape in words' as Jones called it, but a shape the like of which has never previously been encountered.

In Parenthesis has strong claims to be the literary masterpiece of the War. Read it, one part per day for seven days, and don't stop for what you don't understand. Ignore Jones's notes until you read it a second and a third time. Beyond that, I must admit as Eliot admits: 'All that one can say amounts only to pointing towards the book, and affirming its importance and permanence as a work of art.'

Robert Graves in Interview, 1965

The BBC is currently digitalising much of its vast archive. Amongst the treasures already dug up and put on display has been a number of interviews with modern English novelists, from Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley to Zadie Smith.

Most noteworthy for this blog's purposes is a discussion between Malcolm Muggeridge, at the top of his game, and Robert Graves, which you can see here. Graves is billed as 'the author of I, Claudius', but he takes just a few minutes to dismiss his fiction as the means to an end --- the end being to pay his bills. That is as comfortable as Graves gets; under Muggeridge's deceptively good-natured questioning, his body language betrays a growing unease. When he is asked about his 'homosexual phase', the reaction is excruciating.

Graves starts to discuss his experiences of the Great War, and their lasting effect on him, from about 15.30, announcing that the war was 'marvellous' and explaining why the rates of attrition among officers were so much higher than the lesser ranks endured. He also tells a fascinating story about how he avoided contributing to the prosecution of a 'deserter' who, Graves had been instructed in advance, 'had to be shot in order to support morale'.

T. P. Cameron Wilson: 'Magpies in Picardy'

My fellow Devonian T. P. Cameron Wilson (1889-1918) belongs alongside Julian Grenfell and Patrick Shaw Stewart as a poet of the Great War who is now remembered for a single poem. Merryn Williams, who wrote a pamphlet about him several years ago, had to search long and hard for a photograph of her subject. I haven't yet seen the book to find out if she was successful.

Wilson published a novel, The Friendly Enemy, which has recently been reissued, and some of his letters appeared after he was killed in France. However, it is the title poem of Magpies in Picardy for which he is known. The internet is no respecter of line breaks; the volume can be found here in a partially mangled state. It was published in 1919 by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, and Monro's introduction is full of hesitancy: 'His literary talent showed itself precociously early, but afterwards developed rather slowly'. Not surprisingly, the book did not sell well, but Wilson was rescued into semi-obscurity when some poems were included by Lord Wavell in Other Men's Flowers.

Looking through Magpies in Picardy now, it is hard to find much worth salvaging. Hibberd and Onions include 'A Soldier' as well as the title poem in their anthology, and a case could also be made by the generous-spirited for 'Song of Amiens' and 'During the Bombardment' (all of which are strategically positioned near the start of Monro's edition). After that, the quality falls away. A poem titled 'Stanzas Written Outside a Fried-Fish Shop' begins with mesmerising awfulness: 'O Mother Earth! Whose sweetest visions move / Through the blue night in silver nakedness'. It isn't a joke, and it doesn't get better. As for Wilson's attempts at Devon dialect, they are more extreme than anything found in supposedly humorous pamphlets from Dartmoor tea-shops.

And yet... the title poem, 'Magpies in Picardy', is a wonder, with all the strangeness of genius. Monro's edition misses two stanzas which later editors have added and which I include below. The first of them (which is now the penultimate stanza) is the weakest in the poem, and makes no grammatical sense unless considered for upwards of five minutes. (The verb is 'works on', not 'works', and 'the ancient plan' is the subject, not the object.)

Magpies in Picardy

The magpies in Picardy
Are more than I can tell.
They flicker down the dusty roads
And cast a magic spell
On the men who march through Picardy,
Through Picardy to hell.

(The blackbird flies with panic,
The swallow goes with light,
The finches move like ladies,
The owl floats by at night;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as artists might.)

A magpie in Picardy
Told me secret things—
Of the music in white feathers,
And the sunlight that sings
And dances in deep shadows—
He told me with his wings.

(The hawk is cruel and rigid,
He watches from a height;
The rook is slow and sombre,
The robin loves to fight;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as lovers might.)

He told me that in Picardy,
An age ago or more,
While all his fathers still were eggs,
These dusty highways bore
Brown, singing soldiers marching out
Through Picardy to war.

He said that still through chaos
Works on the ancient plan,
And two things have altered not
Since first the world began—
The beauty of the wild green earth
And the bravery of man.

(For the sparrow flies unthinking
And quarrels in his flight;
The heron trails his legs behind,
The lark goes out of sight;
But the great and flashing magpie
He flies as poets might.)

Gurneyfest

Gloucester hosts the Three Choirs Festival this year. Ivor Gurney sang at the festival as a young Gloucester Cathedral chorister, so it is appropriate that music by this native son should be well represented in the programme.

The festival sees the world première of Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody, to be performed tomorrow (Thursday 12 August) in Cheltenham by the Philharmonia Orchestra. On Friday, back in Gloucester, the Three Choirs Festival chorus performs Gurney's choral setting of Edward Thomas's poem 'The Trumpet'. It is orchestrated by Philip Lancaster, who discusses both poem and setting here. Gurney's String Quartet in A Major is performed today by the Dante Quartet, along with two songs by Gurney Trustee Ian Venables (who also edited A Gloucestershire Rhapsody along with Philip Lancaster.)

Having been shamefully slow to honour one of its most gifted sons, Gloucester is now making amends with a new 68ft Candle statue, recently installed in the docks, which has lines from two of Gurney's poems at its base. This follows the official unveiling of a blue plaque last September near Gurney's birthplace.

The flurry of activity coincides with the culmination of Philip Lancaster's three-year project to create an online catalogue of Gurney's papers, the first part of which will go live later this week. Philip has been recording progress via his blog, and he gives an account of the importance of Gurney's papers in the University of Exeter's press release here. Philip is finishing a PhD with me at Exeter on Gurney, and he and I are currently working towards a three-volume edition of Gurney's complete writings for Oxford University Press.

A selection of Gurney's manuscripts is on display to the public at the Gloucestershire Archives all week.

Updates from Philip on the week's events can be found here, here and here.

John Gower on War

Here is the beautifully decorated tomb of John Gower (c.1330-1408), which I came across by chance when I visited Southwark Cathedral this week.

Gower's head is resting, not very comfortably, on his three most important works: Vox Clamantis, Speculum Meditantis, and Confessio Amantis. As the first of these is in Latin, and the second (thought lost for many centuries) in French, Gower's reputation as one of the great Medieval English poets relies on the third: Confessio Amantis. Gower writes in the prologue to the poem that 'fewe men endite / In oure englysshe'. The fact that he chose to do so ensures that, along with his friend Geoffrey Chaucer, he has often been celebrated as a founding father of English poetry.

At 33,000 lines, the Confessio Amantis fully deserves the title of unread masterpiece. It does, however, contain an early account in English of the ethics of war, in the form of a discussion between 'fader' and 'sone' (Bk III, 2200ff). To the question, is it ever allowed to kill another human being, the 'fader' replies with a spirited defence of capital punishment, before moving on to the more problematic subject of war. A man may act in self-defence, he argues, to protect his 'contre', his 'hous' and his 'lond'. But the 'sone' continues to prompt: what about those people who seek 'dedly werres' for worldly ends? This amounts to the 'foule horrible vice / Of homicide', the 'fader' claims, and is explicitly outlawed by Moses. What is more, the birth of Christ coincided with the blessings of angels who brought peace 'to the men of wellwillinge'.

Warming to his theme, the 'fader' lists some of the evils of war, and goes on to explain that those who pursue war for earthly or for spiritual ends will not have their hoped-for 'mede' (reward). They are driven by sin. Quite what King Richard II, who was supposed to have commissioned the poem, or King Henry IV, to whom later editions were dedicated, made of this severe warning is, unfortunately, lost to time.

Bot dedly werre hath his covine
Of pestilence and of famine,
Of poverte and of alle wo,
Wherof this world we blamen so,
Which now the werre hath under fote,
Til god himself therof do bote.
For alle thing which god hath wroght
In Erthe, werre it bringth to nocht:
The cherche is brent, the priest is slain,
The wif, the maide is ek forlain,
The lawe is lore and god unserved:
I not what mede he hath deserved
That suche werres ledeth inne.
If that he do it forto winne,
Ferst to acompte his grete cost
Forth with the folk that he hath lost,
As to the wordes rekeninge
Ther schal he finde no winnynge;
And if he do it to pourchace
The hevene mede, of such a grace
I can noght speke, and natheles
Crist has comanded love and pes,
And who that worcheth the revers,
I trowe his mede is ful divers.
      (Bk III, 2267-2290)

Rupert Brooke: 'Peace'

Away on a research trip, I missed Rupert Brooke's birthday on 3 August, so I offer belatedly his sonnet, 'Peace', by way of recompense. At his best, Brooke was a superb poet, despite the common travesty of his work as foolishly innocent. This was a man who, after all, had fought in the defeat at Antwerp, and witnessed the devastating effects on the civilian population. His sense of duty was born out of experience of suffering and of watching others suffer, not out of ignorance.

Brooke's five sonnets titled '1914', beginning with 'Peace' and ending with 'The Soldier', are acts of persuasion and explication, and as such, their first audience is Brooke himself. More powerfully than any of his fellow soldier-poets, Brooke accounts for his decision to enlist. Compare, on a similar theme, Edward Thomas's revealingly muddled 'This is no case of petty right or wrong', or Wilfred Owen's grand (and nonsensical) self-portrayal as a 'conscientious objector with a very seared conscience'. Brooke's own verse is also marred by rhetorical afflatus, but we hear its faults clearly because we are unwilling to share its assumptions. The vast majority of his contemporaries had no such problem. Brooke's poems were far more popular among soldiers, throughout the war and for decades afterwards, than were those of dissenters like Owen and Sassoon.

Brooke wrote 'Peace' in late 1914 after the evacuation of Antwerp.

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
  And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
  Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
    Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
  But only agony, and that has ending;
    And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.