OUR CHIEF CRITIC’S TOP BOOKS OF 2017

Only a handful of great artists have been able to write and to paint with equal brilliance, but David Jones was one, and Edward Lear another. By chance, each was the subject of a fine biography this year. Jenny Uglow’s Mr Lear: A Life Of Art And Nonsense (Faber €27.99) was a sharp, loving portrait of the peculiarly English genius, Edward Lear.

His life might so easily have been given over to self-pity or misery. He suffered from epilepsy, often having several fits a day. In those days it was considered shameful, so whenever he felt a fit coming on, he retreated into solitude, shutting the door behind him. Even close friends had no idea of his affliction. ‘It is wonderful that these fits have never been discovered,’ he wrote in old age.

His sense of solitude was intensified by his mother’s indifference to him – he was the youngest of her 21 children – and something appalling, possibly sexual abuse, from which he had suffered aged ten.

Throughout his life, he battled against depression. ‘The morbids,’ he said, ‘are not allowed.’ Instead, he used his genius to transform despair and muddle into art, creating beauty and laughter out of nonsense. By doing so, he changed the way we see the world. Small wonder that The Owl And The Pussycat was recently voted Britain’s favourite poem.

He was prodigiously gifted: he is equally renowned as a painter of landscapes and birds, a creator of nonsense poems, and the drawer of the delightful, slightly frightening and wholly original cartoons that accompany them. He was also an accomplished composer and musician.

Jenny Uglow has written a wonderful portrait of this deeply sympathetic man. She is particularly adept at uncovering psychological clues buried in his verse. ‘Every time one returns to the limericks,’ she writes, ‘one can find something new: the gap between the characters, never quite touching, the action suspended in time; the darkness and anger.’

Mr Lear: A Life Of Art And Nonsense is also generously published, with plenty of colour illustrations, and the nonsense verse and accompanying drawings slotted into the text at just the right moments: all in all, a fitting monument to one of the most remarkable Englishmen who ever lived.

My other favourite biography is of the Welsh painter and poet David Jones, who was born in Brockley, south London in 1895 and died, penniless, in a residential home in Harrow, north-west London in 1974. Other poets revered him. ‘Your work makes me feel very small and madly jealous,’ said WH Auden, and Dylan Thomas once remarked, ‘I would like to have done anything as good as David Jones has done.’

Thomas Dilworth has devoted his life to the appreciation of the great, neglected genius, and David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (Jonathan Cape €27.99) has a depth of thought and feeling lacking in many slicker literary biographies.

In World War I Jones served longer on the front – 117 weeks – than any other British writer, surviving both the Somme and Passchendaele. He was profoundly damaged by the experience, terrified to the end of his life by loud noises and open spaces. But, like Lear, through talent and willpower he transformed his distress into a thing of beauty. His paintings and his poetry are kaleidoscopic explosions of consciousness, at one and the same time earthy and mystical.