vincent sherry
I
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••‘You bunch together before a tarred door. Chalk scrawls on its planking—initials,
numbers, monograms, signs, hasty, half-erased, of many regiments. Scratched out
dates measuring the distance back to antique beginnings’ (IP, 22). Here, in Part
2ofIn Parenthesis, whose narrative follows the six-month course of Jones’s early
experience of the war, beginning with embarcation to Flanders in late December
1915 and ending on the first day (1 July 1916) of the disastrous Battle of the
Somme, the vocal protagonist speaks his way into a collective memory, some
conjured sense of martial legend and tradition, as he passes through this highly
charged port of entry into the trench system. An initiation, an unmaking and
remaking of a prior private identity, this moment takes its place in the typical
sequence of stages in the combat memoir. Yet, in its pointed details, it also recalls
one of the salient sites of the modernist imagination, as, say, in the opening
poem of Pound’s Cantos—where the ritual invocation of the gods of poetry
includes the digging of the ‘ell-square pitkin’ and the imagining of access to the
underworld, which, in Pound’s mythological geography, stands as world-cultural
and world-historical museum.^2 Pound and Jones provide different instances of a
single riddle, a generative tension in literary modernism, a sensibility which, in
its acute sensitivity to the pressures of the modern, the contemporary, the present
day, opens understandably if paradoxically to the blandishments of the past. These
appeals range from the more grandiose iterations of the value of ‘tradition’, which
affords some sense of formal order to the chaos of living so intensely in the present,
to the obvious nostalgia for other days, sometimes calmer but always better, richer,
more significant days.
Jones’s poem (really a verse-with-prose experiment, an initiative that this painter-
writer can indulge in part because his education at Art School spared him the
restrictions of the standard literary curriculum) turns a good deal of its innovations
and imaginative action around this typically modernist challenge of ‘making it
new’. Most obviously, he adapts Joyce’s signal instance of the technique that Eliot
named ‘the mythic method’.^3 For each of his narrative’s seven parts he provides an
epigraph from the early medieval Welsh bardic epicY Gododdin. The older poet’s
account of the mustering, march, preparation, and consummation of the Battle
of Catraeth, fought between local Britons (under the leadership of the putative
model for the legendary Arthur) and invading Saxons, affords one of the available
analogues for this modern Welsh regiment meeting the new German Army in 1916.
Contemporizing the legend is not just the enabling challenge, it is the daunting
(^2) Ezra Pound,The Cantos(London: Faber, 1986), 3.
(^3) The phrase provides the main interpretive argument throughout Eliot’s review of Joyce’s novel,
‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), inSelectedProseofT.S.Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber,
1975), 175–8.