Modernism’s little boy lost

Why did we forget poet and painter David Jones, asks Jeremy Noel-Tod

Painter, Poet – a biography 30 years in the making – offers the fullest portrait we are ever likely to have. Thanks to Dilworth’s fastidious attention to detail (a quality he shares with his subject), it is an enormously absorbing read, full of the curious life of the imagination and the colour-tinting of anecdote.

Dilworth’s previous book, David Jones in the Great War (2012), was an in-depth account of Jones’s formative but damaging time in France, as fictionalised by In Parenthesis, which concludes at the moment he was shot in the legs during the Battle of the Somme (“as if a rigid beam of great weight flailed about his calves”).

That material is abridged here and preceded by a richly anecdotal account of his London childhood and “Dickensian” family (when his black-gowned maternal grandmother heard the lavender sellers singing in the streets of Brockley in July, she would say, “Winter is not far off ”). Jones was born in 1895 – runs Dilworth’s laconic first sentence – “into an argument” between his Welsh father, who worked as a printer for an evangelical paper, and his English mother, who wanted to call him “Dorian” in homage to Oscar Wilde. In miniature, this quarrel dramatises the fundamental tension of Jones’s work: high Victorian, art-for-art’ssake romanticism versus downto-earth, working-class piety. He sought to reconcile his parents’ differences later in life through his own catholic theory of art, which held that all human sign-making was a sacred activity – a theme underlying his kaleidoscopic second book, The Anathemata (1952), on the mythical history of Britain and the West.

As a child, Jones was a slow reader and writer but had a preternatural talent for drawing animals. The visual arts would eventually become his main vocation, after leaving school at 13 to attend art college in Camberwell. One of this handsomely illustrated book’s strengths is to foreground his originality and accomplishment as a painter and engraver (he studied with both Eric Gill and Walter Sickert), and Dilworth’s subtly responsive descriptions of Jones’s compositions are among the best critical writing here.

Elsewhere, Dilworth deftly holds back, so that the story is told by a mosaic of quotations from conversations and letters, which vividly convey Jones’s warmth and charm. Shy, single and celibate, “Dai” combined pithy opinions with personal modesty. He spent his life among devoted friends and patrons of both sexes, who gave

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