An artist and poet that time forgot
analogous to sitting at Mass with your mind wandering.
This being the centenary of the First World War, it is astonishing that In Parenthesis hasn’t been endlessly discussed and that it (and the war art) isn’t on exam curriculums with the “war poets”. In fact, Jones saw more action than any of them — when he met Siegfried Sassoon later, they agreed that they could never get away from the war. For him it was “like ordinary life … only more intensified”, with the compensation for the horror being “the tenderness of men in action to one another”. One impetus for the poem was his re-reading of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: “Bugger this! I could do better.”
His father was Welsh, a printer; his mother of London shipwright stock; they lived in Brockley. He went at an early age to art school, where Sickert was his teacher. His good fortune was that he never went to university but was wonderfully well read.
After the war he joined Eric Gill’s artistic-religious community at Ditchling (the religion is now excised from the centre there) where he became engaged to Gill’s daughter, Petra — he never quite got over her breaking it off. His subsequent romantic career was a succession of passionate, unconsummated crushes on beautiful, clever women.
But although he absorbed Gill’s worldview and his craft of lettering, he was never absorbed by it: for him beauty was the goal of art. His own paintings are as many-layered as his writing. They can seem simply lyrical, even whimsical but, close up, they are dense with meaning.
Jones never trusted biographers who were too prolific, who didn’t live the life of their subject: well, Thomas Dilworth has done just that.