‘There's a Welsh Poet Named Jones’

212 HENRY H. WEINBERG between an obscure, seemingly insignificant missive and a highly useful piece ofa puzzle that throws a revealing light on the behaviourofa complex human being in the grips of adversity and despondency. Walker and Speirs seem to have tracked down the most obscure titles and allusions referred to in the letters, thus redeeming the value of whatappears to be a routine, trivial note. In a more general sense, the fruitful results of the careful and comprehensive editing in this 'thin' volume vindicate the policy of the editors to include in their massive undertaking all available material emanating from Zola's pen, a policy many a critic has been tempted to question in the past. 'There's a Welsh Poet Named Jones' WILLIAM BLISSETT Neil Corcoran. The Song of Deeds: A Study of The Anathemata of David jones Cardiff: University of Wales Press 1982. xii, 120. £9.95 Thomas Dilworth, editor. Inner Necessities: The Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute Toronto: Anson-Cartwright Editions 1984.101, $15.00 Philip Pacey. David jones and Other Wonder Voyagers Bridgend Mid-Glamorgan: Poetry Wales Press '982. '34· £7·95 Elizabeth Ward. David jones, Mythmaker Dover, New Hampshire: Manchester University Press 1983. 236. $35.00 William Carlos Williams wrote to Ezra Pound, 12 April 1954: 'What you want is something to help break down the barriers of ignorance. There's a Welsh poet named Jones to whom we have just given, by we I mean the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Loines award. It's a poem. Believe me, if you want something tough but rewarding, tackle that. Some publishing firm in England publishes it....' The editor of the letters does not further identify the poet that Dr Williams prescribes for his old friend's confusion of mind, or name the poem that is praised as 'tough' though admitted to be 'too much for me,' or identify the publisher. David jones, The Anathemata, Faber '952. Think of it. If Browning had written to Tennyson, under indictment for treason in the Crimean War and confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, recommending as an intellectual tonic the prophetic books of William Blake (perhaps using the words of his young contemporary, Huck Finn - 'the statements was interesting but tough'), we would never have heard the last of it. But one looks in vain in the vast literature on Pound and Williams for any comment on this pronouncement. One finds Jones, James, and Jones, Leroy, and even (in Hugh Kenner's magisterial The Pound Era) jones, Pistol-Packing, but not jones, David. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1985/6 DAVID JONES 213 Elizabeth Ward, in David Jones, Mythmaker, is much preoccupied with the continued 'unpopularity' of his writings. The sort of bad luck we have just been noticing has stood in his way - bad luck mixed, to be sure, with good: he did win the Loines and other awards and he was praised strongly, and recognizably, by Eliot and Auden and other poets. I am myself satisfied that the readers who have discovered David jones keep returning to him, that all his writings are in print, and that these four well-produced hardcover books by and about him should have appeared in recent years. Of these, only David Jones, Mythmaker deals at length with the whole literary work, both imaginative and critical. It has a consecutively argued thesis - that the thought of David Jones is highly dualistic and that his kind of mythmaking is an expression of this - and it comes to conclusions, on balance negative, as to the value of his literary achievement. It is to be recommended to all close students of the writer as an antidote to cosiness and cultism. Of its value to the less dedicated reader I am not convinced. It has no grace of style and permits itself such phrases as 'supported right-wing views' and 'overly strategic use of metaphors' and the common but irksome 'obverse' for 'reverse' and 'one dimensional' for 'two dimensional.' Some of the observations strike me as quite askew, as in referring to David Jones's 'opaque and fragile paintings' when they are typically just about...