452
JOHN HOLLANDER
the colloquial.
An
infantry unit in the trenches about twenty kilometers
south of Ypres marches, tarries, fights and suffers, and the language
in which their life is described seeks to grasp the apocalypse of the
mundane, as well as to collate timeless, frozen moments of history. The
overall method of the book is palimpsestic in a manner not un–
recognizably like parts of
The Cantos:
there
is
constant reference to
Arthurian romance, to Mallory, to the English Bible and to
King
Henry V
of Shakespeare. The historical ironies of the war to end wars,
and of the impossibility of heroism in single conflict and the minute–
ness of the total area of terrain involved in marches and retreats, are
pointed up by the additional force brought to the experience by a
poet of a minority culture. Jones feels only too keenly how desperately
England looked to the Wales it had subdued to provide a British epic
hero. His repeated interpolation of material from Mallory, and his
adaptation of Mallory's prose style constantly reminds us that the
English recension of Welsh materials was a kind of continuous pro–
cess in the development of the English poetic imagination. An addi–
tional spiritual disturbance in the narrator's voice is provided by
Jones' Catholicism (he is a convert) with its relevance for him to the
medieval allegorical tradition. It is clear, however that the method of
the book is far from :allegory. The historical juxtaposition of already
allegorized romance material and the most naturalistic of fictional
impulses leads to what are not at all like the (after all) seedy ironies
of
The Waste Land,
in that when past and present are confronted,
neither one nor the other is intended to suffer from the comparison.
Jones is fascinated in a very Welsh way with the magic of language
itself, and parts of the book become almost litanies of the colloquial–
lists, celebrations, comments and explarrations of the slang of the
trenches. He has glossed the book heavily with notes, and while they
seem to reflect something of the famous Eliot notes, they have the real
function of relieving the whole book of what has become almost the
traditional emblem of modern war writing, a kind of inside-dopester
tone in the use of terms with which the reader is expected to
be
unfamiliar, but which he must learn to understand from their use in
the book itself. Kipling is probably responsibli for this, in the very
tone of his explanations of what it's
really
like to be one of those
deeply moving civil servants in India, and Hemingway undoubtedly
learned this tone from him.
It
is completely and splendidly missing in
Jones' book.
The frequent shiftings of syntax and ellipses in the prose (''Oc–
casionally a rifle bullet raw snapt like tenuous hide whip by spiteful
