David Jones Special Issue, The Chesterton Review
Wheeler, Edward T
ENGRAVINGS FROM LIFE David Jones Special Issue, The Chesterton Review, February and May 1997 $25,258 pp. Edward T. Wheeler David Jones (1895-1974) was a poet, watercolorist, and engraver, a...
...Whatever that moment brought in surprise to him then, it wasn't until after the war that he sought instruction in the faith...
...In the preface to The Anathemata he explains what the poem "is about": "In a sense the fragments that compose this book are about, or around and about, matters of all sorts which, by a kind of quasi-free association, are apt to stir in my mind at any time and as often as not 'in time of the Mass.'" Jones's most widely read and accessible book, In Parenthesis, is a rendering of the life of one John Ball, an infantry private, whose experience of war parallels that of the writer...
...For Jones, the artistic is the sacramental, and the re-presentation of art, which is the making of signs, is a form of divine activity...
...The horror of the war has been redefined for us in so many novels, poems, and films, that Jones's unique response makes his books and his paintings revelatory...
...There is no web site which hosts his images...
...That novel-poem is undoubtedly the place to begin reading Jones...
...Given Jones's relative obscurity, one has to wonder when his reputation will undergo a much-deserved awakening from the dead...
...There are pieces by the writer, reminiscences by those who were his closest friends, strong background articles which link him to Chesterbelloc and to the theology which shaped the age, and assessments of his standing as a plastic artist...
...Enclosure of the Children of Troy...
...Anglo-Welsh, he was received into the church by the Reverend John O'Connor who later received G.K...
...As a Welshman, London born and raised, he saw in his Celtic heritage a direct link to Roman Britain and to a Christian tradition which had retreated into Wales...
...The curious will have to travel to galleries in Britain to see the full effect of his watercolors...
...inscription on the cross, are-strangely beautiful...
...There are four explanatory notes for these lines...
...Eliot, in the introduction he wrote for In Parenthesis (1937), called it "a work of genius...
...The tradition he embodies in his poetry and in his visual art is many tongued and has many visual sources, Latin, Welsh, English, old, middle and modern...
...he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme...
...This special issue of The Chesterton Review is a belated celebration of the artist's birth, and although it preaches to the choir in a way, it makes a case for Jones's artistic significance which Commonweal readers should hear...
...At his most difficult, Jones's verbal art drags the associative properties of language to the fore...
...A German machine gun made suffering a defining fact for Jones...
...Edward T. Wheeler David Jones (1895-1974) was a poet, watercolorist, and engraver, a fervent convert to Catholicism, a friend and associate of Eric Gill, and perhaps most tellingly, a scarred veteran of World War I. "A certain rising from the tomb" has to accompany the works of man, Jones wrote, and those words characterized his sacramental vision and the central place of the Mass in his life...
...As watercolorist and engraver Jones has few peers among twentieth-century British artists...
...But there are also substantial critical studies which can guide one not only through the obscurities but to the revelations-and many there are-of the poem...
...Buarth Meibion Arthur...
...The controlling figure that emerges in his making, his poesis, as he would say, is the Cross...
...For example, but a few pages into section 1 we face, All the efficacious asylums in Wallia vel in Marchiea Walliae ofofau of, that cavern for Cronos, Owain, Arthur...
...his books and his illuminated pages move bewilderingly at times from one language or epoch to the next...
...His book of essays, Epoch and Artist, offers a direct approach to Jones's understanding of life and art...
...He makes words self-evidently signs and then offers clues to their referents in elaborate notes...
...In some literal sense Jones came to understand his wounding in battle, his fall on that French battlefield, as drawing him down into a Roman and Roman Catholic past...
...So for Jones, Catholicism was an active soliciting of the revealed truth, and liturgy had for him the full power of an efficacious sign...
...Only four...
...Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...No one, however, ever said Jones is an easy read...
...indeed, the rood or tree of life is the intersection of meaning for Jones, the meaning of his own suffering-life-long depression and two nervous breakdowns-and the meaning of his art...
...Terra Walliae...
...Auden thought Jones's The Anathemata (1952) "probably the finest long poem written in English in this century...
...Moreover, deeply affected by the sacramental theology of the French Jesuit Maurice de la Taille, Jones saw in the sacrifice of the Mass the transcendent form of all artistry...
...Jones wrote once of a chance discovery: stumbling on a shed somewhere off the battlefield, he disturbed a priest saying Mass for soldiers...
...He was received into the church in 1921...
...The reproductions of Jones's wood engravings are particularly effective, and the strangely beautiful illuminated pages, inspired according to Jones by the I.N.R.I...
...The long poem, The Anathemata, especially challenges even the most determinedly friendly admirer on every level...
...T.S...
...As this issue of The Chesterton Review attests, readers who can manage the effort are rewarded in kind...
Vol. 124 • November 1997 • No. 20
