The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones by William Blissett (review)

436 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 WiUiam Blissett. The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones Oxford University Press. '59. £9.75 'I promise that this memoir will move, as this sentence does, from the personal pronoun "I" to the proper name "David Jones": William Blissett has kept that initial promise. His book is more than a record of interviews with a modem British painter and writer whose greatness has yet to receive proper recognition. Itis an engaging, tactful, often humorous, and sometimes quietly poignant recalling of a Canadian scholar's encounters with a makerwho, though often feeling besetby the legions ofcontemporary history and the guerrilla forces emerging from the hinterland of his own mind, knew that he was himself called to celebrate life's infinite variety. Blissett has admirably negotiated the twin dangers of such a memoir: the rocks of factitious objectivity, the whirlpool of histrionic self-presentation . Beginning with the first exchanges of letters in 1954-5 and the first visit in 1959, he gives us through notebook entries written shortly after the fact a gradually unfolding account of his twenty-year 'conversation : As we move from those early hesitant approaches towards the confident and complex exchanges of a sustained friendship, the shifting balance of the narrative from T to 'David Jones' seems exactly right. The flexible and capacious style modulates easily through Blissett's own responses to persons and places, renderings of Jones's digressive anecdotes, and deft evocations of the sudden twists of dramatic encounter. At the journey's end the story seems not broken off but properly rounded out by the distanced account of Jones's death in 1974. For those acquainted with the work of David Jones this memoirwill be a valuable source of further insight. It is full of good talk around and about the poems, books, paintings, and personal experiences from which Jones took the bits and pieces that he fashioned into his own labyrinthine 'things: Other readers will find this vivid and anecdotal presentation a delightful introduction to the subject. Indeed, The Long Conversation is a necessary complementto Dai Great-Coat: A Self-PortraitofDavidlones in His Letters, edited by Rene Hague for Faber in 1980. We know that a self-portrait, too, is always from a certain angle; and the most intimate glimpses may be most misleading. In his letters to such close friends as Rene Hague and Harman Grisewood, Jones often let himself dwell on anxieties and misgivings that constituted the paralysing side ofa life that also radiated an astonishing determination, courage, sympathy, and high spirits. Because of its various personal distances and its fidelity to the shape and tone of a conversation with David Jones (as I can testify from the several hours I spent with him in 1970 and again in 1973) this memoir adds depth and nuance to our view of one who was, to use the title of his quasi self-portrait in oils, a remarkable 'Human Being: HUMANITIES 437 Blissett's title alludes to David Jones's own comparison of his 'attempted writing' called The Anathemata to 'a longish conversation between two friends, where one thing leads to another.' That fact will suggest that the interpersonal mode of this memoir is eminently suited to one premise ofJones's rather idiosyncratic modernism. But surely there is a larger implication. As a critical act this book will encourage all who believe that any work of art or literature, regardless of its style, is essentially neither an impersonal structure nor an instrument of the will but a manifold and clarified act of conversation. (THOMAS R. WHITAKER) Bryan D. Palmer. The Making of E.P. Thompson:Humanism, Marxism, and History New Hogtown Press. '44· $4.95 paper The enormous prestige and influence of E.P. Thompson's historical work depend not only upon his recovery of lost radical traditions but upon the way he has insistently explored the contemporary political implications of that recovery. The informing connections between his historical practice and his political commitment to Marxism have long been recognized - by his admirers, by his detractors and, not least, by Thompson himself. Now a Canadian historian has come forward with breathless urgency to tell us what we already know...