The Chesterton Review.

David Jones (1895-1974) was a poet, watercolorist, and engraver, a fervent convert to Catholicism, a friend and associate of Eric Gill, and perhaps most tellingly, a scarred veteran of World War I. "A certain rising from the tomb" has to accompany the works of man, Jones, wrote, and those words characterized his sacramental vision and the central place of the Mass in his life. Given Jones's relative obscurity, one has to wonder when his reputation will undergo a much-deserved awakening from the dead. W.H. Auden thought Jones's The Anathemata (1952) "probably the finest long poem written in English in this century." T.S. Eliot, in the introduction he wrote for In Parenthesis (1937), called it "a work of genius." No one, however, ever said Jones is an easy read.

As watercolorist and engraver Jones has few peers among twentieth-century British artists. Anglo-Welsh, he was received into the church by the Reverend John O'Connor who later received G.K. Chesterton. This special issue of The Chesterton Review is a belated celebration of the artist's birth, and although it preaches to the choir in a way, it makes a case for Jones's artistic significance which Commonweal readers should hear. There are pieces by the writer, reminiscences by those who were his closest friends, strong background articles which link him to Chesterbelloc and to the theology which shaped the age, and assessments of his standing as a plastic artist. The reproductions of Jones's wood engravings are particularly effective, and the strangely beautiful illuminated pages, inspired according to Jones by the I.N.R.I. inscription on the cross, are - strangely beautiful. The curious will have to travel to galleries in Britain to see the full effect of his watercolors. (There is no web site which hosts his images.)

A German machine gun made suffering a defining fact for Jones; he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme. The horror of the war has been redefined for us in so many novels, poems, and films, that Jones's unique response makes his books and his paintings revelatory. In some literal sense Jones came to understand his wounding in battle, his fall on that French battlefield, as drawing him down into a Roman and Roman Catholic past. As a Welshman, London born and raised, he saw in his Celtic heritage a direct link to Roman Britain and to a Christian tradition which had retreated into Wales. The tradition he embodies in his poetry and in his visual art is many tongued and has many visual sources, Latin, Welsh, English, old, middle and modern; his books and his illuminated pages move bewilderingly at times from one language or epoch to the next. The controlling figure that emerges in his making, his poesis, as he would say, is the Cross; indeed, the rood or tree of life is the intersection of meaning for Jones, the meaning of his own suffering - life-long depression and two nervous breakdowns - and the meaning of his art.

Jones wrote once of a chance discovery: stumbling on a shed somewhere off the battlefield, he disturbed a priest saying Mass for soldiers. Whatever that moment brought in surprise to him then, it wasn't until after the war that he sought instruction in the faith. He was received into the church in 1921. So for Jones, Catholicism was an active soliciting of the revealed truth, and liturgy had for him the full power of an efficacious sign. Moreover, deeply affected by the sacramental theology of the French Jesuit Maurice de la Taille, Jones saw in the sacrifice of the Mass the transcendent form of all artistry. For Jones, the artistic is the sacramental, and the re-presentation of art, which is the making of signs, is a form of divine activity. In the preface to. The Anathemata he explains what the poem "is about": "In a sense the fragments that compose this book are about, or around and about, matters of all sorts which, by a kind of quasi-free association, are apt to stir in my mind at any time and as often as not 'in time of the Mass.'"

Jones's most widely read and accessible book, In Parenthesis, is a rendering of the life of one John Ball, an infantry private, whose experience of war parallels that of the writer. That novel-poem is undoubtedly the place to begin reading Jones. His book of essays, Epoch and Artist, offers a direct approach to Jones's understanding of life and art. At his most difficult, Jones's verbal art drags the associative properties of language to the fore. He makes words self-evidently signs and then offers clues to their referents in elaborate notes. The long poem, The Anathemata, especially challenges even the most determinedly friendly admirer on every level. For example, but a few pages into section 1 we face,

All the efficacious asylums in Wallia vel in Marchiea Walliae ofofau of, that cavern for Cronos, Owain, Arthur. Terra Walliae! Buarth Meibion Arthur! Enclosure of the Children of Troy!

There are four explanatory notes for these lines. (Only four!) But there are also substantial critical studies which can guide one not only through the obscurities but to the revelations - and many there are of the poem. As this issue of The Chesterton Review attests, readers who can manage the effort are rewarded in kind.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.