lOOKS
451
A RAID ON THE INARTICULATE
IN PARENTHESIS.
By
David Jones. New York, Chilmark Press. $5.75.
Historians like to point out that the twentieth century in
England started with the publication of the casualty lists from the Bat–
tle of the Somme. Certainly the major explosions of World War I in
the English literary
i~agination
were deferred for at least a decade.
One has only to compare the best "war poems" of, say, Owen and
Sassoon with
Parade's End
or
Goodbye to All That
to see that the
rhetoric of "realism" pervading the former was composed of essentially
Victorian gestures. For Yeats, the war remained a scene for individual
heroism wherein a young man's "lonely impulse of delight" might
intersect the line of desperate objective history.
In '
all the Georgian
poets, we get a sense of numbness and shock that deadened the spirit
of formal invention; it was almost as if the new horrors of trench war–
fare had to be set down
in
literature while there was yet time, and in
the only forms and attitudes at hand.
In
reportage and fiction, there
was at least a chance for the gap between literary conventions and
new modes of experiencing that most traditional theme of the poet
and lover at arms to become a kind of subjective matter of its own.
Among the poets, Wilfred Owen, in "The Show," manages to ac–
complish some remarkable things, but elsewhere, too often, he can
only muse on "the old Lie" of
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
But there are more ironies to history than that, and it perhaps
needed an age which followed the creation of a new kind of metamor–
phic poetry by Eliot, Hart Crane and Pound to allow a poet to deal
with World War I in a sufficiently intense way. By 1937, when David
Jones' remarkable
In Parenthesis
finally appeared, there were already
too many other things for poetry to be about: the Slough of Despond
of
The Waste Land
had already yielded to the thunders of Auden's
Europe, and a pure reaction, undiluted by a sense of intervening time,
to the first war would seem to have been impossible. But the grotesque
timing was indubitably necessary, for by 1928, when Jones started
his book, Eliot's poem had already had its repercussions, and even
though he appears not to have read Joyce or Pound, one certainly feels
in
the form of
Io'/1.J Parenthesis
a response to the demands of a new age.
The book's genre is neither, strictly speaking, lyric nor narrative.
It
is in a mixture of prose and free verse, by no means so startling in
its shifts of form, tone and voice as Auden's
The Orators,
for example,
and groping always toward a style that can synthesize the epic and
