Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones
This is true also of two other modernists, C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’,
1892–1978) and David Jones(1895–1974). MacDiarmid, a Scottish nationalist who
rejoined the Communist party afterthe Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, would
not want house-room in a Sassenach literary history: not for his fine early lyrics in
a Lowland dialect enriched by words from the older Scottish tongue; nor for A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), a Dostoevskian Tam O’Shanter (though
Burns was not his model); nor for his later ‘poetry of fact’ in a stony kind of English.
Jones, a Londoner whose mother was Welsh, travelled in a different direction. A
sensitive and individual artist, he converted after the war to Catholicism. He took up
the pen when in 1931 he found himself unable to paint, writing a rhythmical prose
which uses poetic techniques found in Hopkins, Joyce and Eliot. Jones was a private
soldier, and his work has a more everyday humanity than is usual in modernist writ-
ing.In Parenthesis (1937), the only modernist book about the war, was too belated
and too considered to catch many readers. Eliot thought it a work of genius, and
Auden used to recommend it widely. It has a narrative drive lacking in The
Anathemata (1956), a richly imagined Catholic myth of Britain from prehistory and
archaeology to Arthur and (more thinly) the present. Jones’s humility is unique, but
his work has the long historical perspective and universal ambition of major
modernist poetry. This is true also of the nuggets of Basil Bunting (1900–1985), a
disciple of Pound who won late recognition with Briggflatts (1966). This sequence
applied modernist techniques to his Northumbrian subjects with fierce economy.
Modernist poetry asks and gives more than many readers want. Its ambitions live on
in the verse of Donald Davie (1922–1995), Charles Tomlinson (1927– ) and Sir
Geoffrey Hill (1932– ).
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf(1882–1941) was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, critic, rational-
ist, scholar and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Its pages contain
other Stephens, as well as Huxleys, Darwins, Stracheys and Trevelyans: families of
gentry, evangelical or professional background, who had abolished the slave trade,
pioneered science, reformed the Civil Service, and climbed mountains. Having
administered Britain and its Empire, and written its history, they would now ques-
tion its rationale.
After her father died in 1904, Virginia lived with her sister and brothers in
Bloomsbury Square, London, near to the British Museum, a quarter which gave its
name to the Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals, critics and artists: Lytton
Strachey, the biographer; John Maynard Keynes, the economist; Roger Fry and Clive
Bell, art critics; and E. M. Forster. All the men had been at Cambridge. Virginia’s
sister Vanessa,a painter, married Bell and settled nearby. Virginia Stephen – or
Woolf, for in 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, civil servant and author – had
become central to the Group. Bloomsbury memoirs, letters and diaries show wit and
intel ligence, snobbery, and a gossipy delight in unorthodox sexual mores, homosex-
ual, bisexual, adulterous, or incestuous.
The interest their lifestyle once held for prurient journalism has nothing to do with
the Group’s intellectual, critical and artistic achievements. Keynes’s economics had
worldwide influence. In art, Bloomsbury critics introduced Post-Impressionism and a
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 357