It’s difficult to write a book about war that doesn’t exhaust itself in being either pro- or anti-combat. As I found out when I wrote Did You Kill Anyone?, which explored why soldiers miss the military and might feel alienated from home upon their return, authors who write about war must walk a razor’s edge. Falter too much to one side, and you find yourself reducing your entire experience to lurid moralizing. Stumble too far in the other direction, and you risk becoming one of those propagandists for whom war is man’s highest raison d’etre.
My own experiences of war as an enlisted infantry soldier were too rich and complex to fit neatly into either extreme. Yes, of course, war is violent and demeaning. But it also necessitates moments of bravery, compassion, and even love. War just seemed too complicated to be summed up in dry political language — pro or con, thumbs up or down. And for a long time, I searched for authors who were able to reveal war’s intricacy and depth. There are a few, such as Harry Parker, Norman Mailer, and occasionally Ernest Hemingway. But none do it with such grace and skill as David Jones.
Jones (1895-1974) was an Englishman of Welsh ancestry, known in his time as much for his visual art as for his writing. At the outbreak of World War I, Jones joined up with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and served as an enlisted infantryman on the Western Front from 1915 until 1918. Unlike the most famous of his British war poet peers, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Jones truly saw the war from the bottom up. He was too occupied with guard duty, work details, and actual fighting to write poems while he was deployed. After the war, Jones divided his life between engraving, painting, and writing — and found success with all three. His paintings still garner retrospectives, and his writing was admirable enough for T.S. Eliot to include Jones in a modernist quartet along with “[James] Joyce and [Ezra] Pound and myself.”
It wasn’t until 1937 that Jones published In Parenthesis, an epic poem based on his war experiences. The plot of the poem is rather simple: It follows a character named John Ball, no doubt based on Jones himself, living on the Western Front in the early part of the war, and culminates in the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme. What makes In Parenthesis unique is its avoidance of the spare factual language we usually find in stories about war. Instead, Jones lets actions, language, and events spill out over their own temporal borders. It’s as if the characters are caught in a web of associations. Chronological time slips away: A soldier standing guard becomes a Roman soldier in the ancient Welsh hillsides, Merlin watches over battles, and ancient prayers fall from the lips of 20th-century cockneys. And in perhaps the most entertaining example of the past infiltrating the present, one of the characters, Dai Greatcoat, delivers an insinuation of soldierly immortality in the grand tradition of the Welsh boast:
My fathers were with the Black Prinse of Wales
at the passion of
the blind Bohemian king.
They served in these fields,
it is in the histories that you can read it, Corporal — boys
Gower, they were — it is writ down — yes.
Wot about Methuselum, Taffy?
I was with Abel when his brother found him,
under the green tree.
I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes.
I was the spear in Balin’s hand
that made waste King Pellam’s land.
Some critics have argued that Jones’s method of historical and mythic association is just another way of ennobling war. But in eschewing naturalism, Jones gets at a deeper truth about humans’ need to place experiences within a cultural and historical matrix in order to make sense of them. By ironically comparing “young Harry with his beaver on,” an allusion to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, with a soldier in the trenches wearing a gas mask, Jones is really illustrating various ways that humans have kept their humanity in adverse environments. Or as Kathleen Henderson Staudt, author of At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics, puts it, though the characters in the book are exiled from home and trapped in a wasteland, they are “accompanied in their exile by some sense of continuity with previous generations whose experience has been like their own, despite radical differences in external circumstances. … Jones’s vision remains quietly, almost perversely, affirmative.”
When I returned home from war, people asked a lot of questions. Most were polite, and some were salaciously rude. You might be amazed at how comfortable people are with projecting their own insecurities onto veterans. But of all the questions asked, the stark, moralizing ones — whether or not I should have been there, whether war is good or bad — were the most banal. Of course, war is violent and cruel. Of course, as a political act, it can be necessary or unnecessary. But when you’re trying to understand the experience of being in war, this didacticism blinds you to the vastness of the event. War is always everything you think you know about it and then more. And for me, it was Jones who expressed most perfectly what a rich and inexhaustible subject the combat experience can be. It’s something so big that it often contradicts itself. It’s personal and universal all at once. It spills over boundaries both physical and cultural and takes on an afterlife in our memories.
Greatcoat, towards the end of his boast, says:
You ought to ask: Why,
what is this,
what’s the meaning of this.
This is the most pertinent question about war. I’m convinced that Jones thought it was never meant to be answered, only repeated again and again.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
