David Jones by Thomas Dilworth
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier,painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth Jonathan Cape £25
How different David Jones’s life might have been had his mother prevailed. Casting about for a name for her newborn son in November 1895, Alice Jones hit on ‘Dorian’: a brave choice for a lower-middle-class woman in a terraced house in Brockley. Oscar Wilde had
been jailed for indecency six months before. ‘I do not care what was said about him,’ Alice persisted. ‘ The Importance of Being Earnest is the most brilliant and certainly the most amusing play ever written.’ She disliked the name Oscar; ‘Therefore Dorian it shall be.’
It took her husband, Jim, a printer on the Christian Herald, to have the boy baptised Walter David.
But perhaps Alice Jones was wiser than she knew. Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, David, as he would be called, was to be an artist, although, like Gray’s creator, he would also be a poet. Like Wilde as well, David Jones was very probably a homosexual. There similarities end. Where Wilde’s’s downfall was brought about by indulgence, Jones seems never to have had sex with anyone. The question of his sexuality thus remains moot. In spite (or perhaps because) of this, it is a source of fascination to fans, as now to his biographer, Thomas Dilworth.
Dilworth’s interest is not prurient; perhaps not prurient enough. Jones is allowed to speak for himself.
‘It is absolutely natural to me to appreciate and enjoy the physical charm of my men friends and to love their features and their faces,’ Dilworth has him saying to a friend, Harman Grisewood. ‘This is entirely natural to me, and involves no implication of homosexuality.’ Instead, Dilworth trustingly traces Jones’s neuroses back to his mother. Little David’s love for Alice was thwarted by an older brother, Harold. David, hazards Dilworth, wished Harold dead. When Harold obligingly died – of tuberculosis, in 1910 – his sibling was left with Oedipus and castration complexes and survivor’s guilt. These seeds of instability were sprouted by Jones’s witnessing ‘sexual mutilation and castration-like severing of limbs and heads’ as a soldier at the first Battle of the Somme. Et voilà.
Mm, well. One might have thought the horrors of Mametz Wood enough to have maddened a young man without the help of Freud. What is interesting is that, in the face of so much contrary evidence, Dilworth feels the need to de-gay his subject, to find an explanation other than homosexuality for Jones’s oddness. To have refused to discuss his leanings at all would have been difficult; but to replace one set of unsubstantiated suppositions about them with another even more tenuous version seems unsatisfying.
This is a shame, because Dilworth’s book is otherwise meticulous, and much needed. Jones was certainly many of the things claimed for him by the names on the dustjacket of his new biography: ‘a
remarkable genius’ (Kenneth Clark); ‘a great poet’ (Henry Moore); ‘one of the most distinguished writers of his generation’ (T S Eliot). But, as with his own hero, William Blake, the question is how easily reputation can be unpicked from personality. To put it briefly: had Jones not been so peculiar, would he have been as great? Had he not been gay, would he have been so peculiar?
The question is best approached by way of his work. All his adult life, Jones affected to be attracted to unavailable women: lesbians and happily married friends’ wives were a speciality. One who turned out to be alarmingly available was Petra Gill, daughter of Eric, whose wacko Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic Jones joined in 1924. Although notionally engaged, and to his fiancée’s bemusement (the Gills were not prudish), sex before marriage was out of the question. When Petra eventually tired of this and broke off with Jones, her
father wrote to her, ‘His love for you is real enough, but it is not “married love”.’ Elsewhere, more bluntly, he wrote, ‘D J’s “crow” is better than his cock.’
Perhaps he had in mind one of the engravings his ex-son-in-law-to-be had recently made for an edition of the Book of Jonah. The prophet lies with his back orgasmically arched, six-pack clenched and the wooden pole of a shed rising mightily from between his thighs. Noting the similarity between the names ‘Jonah’ and ‘Jones’, Dilworth takes this to be the self-portrait of a young man in torments of lust. I would agree, with the proviso that the lust is not Jones’s for Petra, but Jones’s for Jonah. This is not a consciously Freudian image, in other words, but an unconscious one. In his mind, Jones blurs the thing desiring with the thing desired: put more bluntly, he wants both to be Jonah and to shag him. This is, I think, true of all the male figures Jones invented, notably Dai Greatcoat,
virile hero of his war epic, In Parenthesis.
This is not to belittle David Jones, merely to understand him. Why Dilworth feels otherwise is a puzzle. To order from Wordery for £22.25 incl p&p, go to http://www.theoldie.co.uk/books