Charles MooreCharles Moore
until the end of the Great War. According
to Dilworth, he spent 117 weeks at
the front, including at the Battle of
the Somme, where he was wounded
in Mametz Wood. He saw more active
service than any other British writer.
In Parenthesis was his resulting book. It
looks like a novel, but is really a poem.
My theory, for which I have no direct
evidence, is that The Anathemata is
also a world war book, arising from his
experience of the first, but composed in
the light of the second. This helps explain
Jones’s desire to make ‘a heap of all I can
find’. Through total war, the 20th century
uniquely threatened all civilisation, so
his was a salvage operation. The best first
world war literature is explicitly about
war; the best second world war works
have a less direct connection. The Lord
of the Rings, The Four Quartets and The
Anathemata come in this category. Jones
suffered from shell-shock (which is now
called post-traumatic stress disorder),
which made him agoraphobic. He lived
for many years in one room in Harrow,
where the bookshelves at ceiling level
showed ‘a beer foam of dust two inches
thick’. He never lopped off or emptied
out anything. This tiny place was an oddly
right setting for his ‘diagnosis’ of poetry
as an ‘anamnesis’: ‘an effective recalling
of something loved’.H
is strong faith went with an
attractively caustic attitude to rules.
At confession one day, he admitted
that he had missed Sunday Mass. ‘What
would have happened if you had slipped
and hit your head and died?’ asked the
priest, ‘You might have gone straight to
hell!’ ‘Look father,’ Jones replied, ‘the
immortal soul is not like a watch that
you drop down the lavatory and it’s
gone forever.’T
he Mass was, for Jones, the greatest
work of art. Despite his love of
tradition, he saw it as a modernist
would. Its art form did not have linear
continuity, but moved by juxtaposition
and accumulation. It showed how
‘ludicrous’ was the division between
abstract and non-abstract art, because
‘nothing could...be more “abstract” than
the Mass, or less “realistic” or more real.’E
ach Easter, I think of David Jones
(1895-1974). He was a distinguished
painter and, I would (though unqualified)
say, a great poet. There is a new, thorough
biography of him by Thomas Dilworth
(Cape). A sympathetic review in the
Guardian wrestles with why he is
not better known: ‘The centrality of
religion to Jones’s work offers a clue
to his obscurity.’ Jones recognised this
possibility himself, writing about ‘The
Break’ in culture, which began in the
19th century. He thought it had to do with
the decline of religion, but more with a
changed attitude to art, caused by mass
production and affecting what he called
‘the entire world of sacrament and sign’.
Jones’s work is indeed religious, so Holy
Week is the best week of the year to
look at it afresh, but it is not pietistic. It
is better understood as an artistic quest
— a lifelong effort to collect and connect
the sacraments and signs strewn by our
history, implanted in our language and
available to our senses. In some ways, it
is a high-art version of that game called
‘Word Association Football’, invented
by Monty Python, in which each new
word or phrase must spark the next. The
end of John Cleese’s original monologue
goes: ‘... about human nature, man’s
psychological make-up some story the
wife will believe and hence the very
meaning of life itselfish bastard, I’ll kick
him in the Ball’s Pond Road’, an ending
which is almost Jones-like.
T
he preface to his greatest work,
The Anathemata (‘devoted things’),
expounds: ‘If the poet writes “wood” what
are the chances that the Wood of the
Cross will be evoked? Should the answer
be “None”, then it would seem that an
impoverishment of some sort would have
to be admitted. It would mean that that
particular word could no longer be used
with confidence to implement, to call up
or set in motion a whole world of content
belonging ...to the mythus of a particular
culture ...This would be true irrespective
of our beliefs or disbeliefs... The arts
abhor any loppings off of meanings or
emptyings out’.
H
ere are four lines from the final
section of the poem, concerningGood Friday:
As the bleat of the spent stag
toward the river-course
he, the fons-head
pleading, ad fontes
his desiderate cry:
SITIO.’
This passage turns Jesus into the hart that
‘desireth the waterbrooks’ in Psalm 42 of
the Book of Common Prayer, picking up
the Latin version from the Vulgate and, in
translation (‘the bleat’), the Welsh version
too. ‘Sitio’ is Latin for ‘I thirst’ — Christ’s
words from the Cross. Jones footnotes that
it ‘is the form most impressed upon me by
hearing the ministers singing the passion
on Good Friday. Three pitches are used
for words said by Pilate, the priests etc, a
middle pitch for the narrative and a deep
pitch for the words attributed to our Lord’.
Jones also illustrates these words set to
music in his poem with one of the painted
inscriptions at which he excelled. These few
lines quoted epitomise how his art works:
it is important to know what Good Friday
is, helpful to know the Psalm, not at all
necessary to be familiar with its different
versions, and an illuminating benefit to
have the music behind ‘SITIO’ explained.
He is writing about a shared culture, and,
in doing so, sharing it with those who may
not know it well, not locking it away. The
culture described is very particular —
because it draws on Jones’s cockney/Welsh
background, including the cries of those who
used to sell lavender on the London streets
of his childhood — but it is also about the
whole of western culture, and its two roots,
biblical and classical, summed up in The
Anathemata’s epigraph from the ‘Dies Irae’,
‘TESTE DAVID CVM SIBYLLA’.D
avid served as a private in the Royal
Welch Fusiliers from 2 January 1915