David Jones: "In Parenthesis"; BBC4, Thursday, 14/7/16; 8:00pm

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07kt9pj/the-greatest-poem-of-world-war-one-david-joness-in-parenthesis

Described as "the greatest poem" of the first World War, but that doesn't begin to cover what Jones achieved in In Parenthesis - prose, verse, and everything in between, it defies categorization. If the documentary gives even a glimmer of how bloody good this work is, it'll be the Arts documentary of the year. Worth watching to find out - it's only in the last decade or so that I've got to know Jones' work (he was a fine draughtsman and illustrator, too - the script outside the BBC building in Cardiff is an example of his poetry and caligraphy) and whilst I can see that he might never be a "popular" writer, I cannot understand why he was totally neglected from my Twentieth Literature studies.

Recommended (if anyone wasn't certain )

[french frank]

A lot of his paintings and drawings here. Wrong thread, but I don't recall much comment about Iain Bell's opera for WNO which was on R3 last month. aeolium went and reported, but no comments on the broadcast?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I don't recall much comment about Iain Bell's opera for WNO which was on R3 last month. aeolium went ... but no comments on the broadcast?

Jean mentioned it, and I thought I had made a comment, but can't find it! I shall rectify that in due course.

A very good programme as an introduction to an important and unfathomably neglected Artist - some juggling with the chronology of his life during the War, and that during the writing and after which didn't quite work for me, but not so much as to stop the programme from making me keen to re-read the work.

Any chance of another programme on (the arguably even finer - certainly "tougher") Anathemata, I wonder?

[french frank]

Thanks for mentioning the television programme which I've now watched. It was good, mercifully free of presenter gimmicks. The constantly marching feet were probably an appropriate image. I have a copy of the work and think it's been on my 'To Read' list for … forty years or so One of many on that list …

[jean]

Jean mentioned it, and I thought I had made a comment, but can't find it! I shall rectify that in due course.

I did, here:

Did anyone hear Iain Bell's In Parenthesis this evening?

But the only reply was this:

I tried and lasted for, ooh, about ten bars before I switched off. Ghastly plink-plonk modern jarring to these ears music (if it can be called music). I put on Britten's War Requiem instead.

I happened to be in London when it was on at the ROH, and knowing nothing about it, I cautiously spent £9 on a standing place. 'Plink-plonk' it wasn't, indeed quite Britten-like in places I thought. I am ill-equipped to say much more about the music.

I didn't know the poem at all (I was aware of David Jones chiefly as a painter) but some of the reviews were scathing about the libretto's hacking at it.

I found the symbolic women a bit tiresome, especially when, with twigs for hair, they resembled nothing to much as Burnham Wood. But it was interesting to compare the work with Observe the sons of Ulster marching towards the Somme, which I also saw recently.

.

[french frank]

I've been looking at my copy which has notes at the end - presumably Jones's as it isn't an edited edition. The section headings don't seem to be the same as the ones on television - at least, I took those to be the poem's section headings? I did wonder what the title In Parenthesis meant, and Jones obligingly supplies the answer at the end of his Preface:

'This writing is called ‘In Parenthesis’ because I have written it in a kind of space between – I don’t know between quite what – but as you turn aside to do something; and because for us amateur soldiers (and especially for the writer, who was not only an amateur, but grotesquely incompetent, a knocker-over of piles, a parade’s despair) the war itself was a parenthesis – how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18 – and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.'

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If you have the edition from 1961s, I envy you, frenchie - I've been looking for a copy to match my Anethemata on the shelf. Mine is the paperback version of the same edition used in the documentary - that republished in 2014 as part of Fabers' "Poets of the Great War" series, which (from the typeset/font) looks like a straightforward if slightly smaller sized reprint of the earlier edition. (Eliot's 1961 Introduction, then Jones' 1937 "Preface", the work itself, and finally the poet's "Notes".)

The seven sections in this edition are:

Part One: The many men so beautiful
Part Two: Chambers go off, corporals say
Part Three: Starlight order
Part Four: King Pellam's Launde
Part Five: Squat garlands for White Knights
Part Six: Pavillions and Captains of Hundreds
Part Seven: The five unmistakable marks

I think you're right that the documentary didn't match these titles - and much of sections three to six were skated over. (Inevitably so, I suppose:there could be a four-part series of hour-long programmes to "introduce" this work to a wider audience!)

[french frank]

If you have the edition from 1961s, I envy you, frenchie

No, not that one. It's a 1978 reimpression (paperback) of the 1963 Faber edition, with the Eliot introduction which I imagine all editions now include. The 1978 one includes the few corrections that originated with DJ which I don't think were in any of the early editions.

Yes, the sections have the titles you quote. I wasn't sure whether the ones on the BBC film were supposed to be Jones's own (which I thought) or appropriate ad hoc inventions.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes, the sections have the titles you quote. I wasn't sure whether the ones on the BBC film were supposed to be Jones's own (which I thought) or appropriate ad hoc inventions.

I've watched it again - the seven titles are taken from the text of In Parenthesis as a whole, and (I think) are meant to encompass not merely the seven sections of the work, but also have reference/relevance to the biographical information covered in those sections of the documentary.

Late on Parade

Some Approaching Violence

By Tunnelled Ways

This Frontline Trench

Such a Lovely Day

Beginning of the Darkness

Sweet Sister Death

[french frank]

They do seem to be a bit more easy to understand - vis-à-vis the text. I certainly don't get the significance of some of the original titles.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I certainly don't get the significance of some of the original titles.

Like the titles of the Sections of The Waste Land, they have their sources in older literature. These are detailed in Harro Grabolle's Verdun & the Somme:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verdun-Somme-Harro-Grabolle/dp/9630581922/

... in summary:

The Many Men So Beautiful is a quotation from part four of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (where the men so described are all dead)
Chambers Go Off, Corporals Stay is from Act Three, Scene III, lines 1 & 2 of Henry V
Starlight Order - the part containing the soldiers celebrating Mass - is a quotation from Hopkins' The Bugler's First Communion (a poem not published until 1918)

March, kind comrade, abreast him;
Dress his days to a dexterous and starlight order.

King Pellam's Launde is the most Waste Landesque. King Pellam is the "Amfortas" figure of the Fisher King mythology. A land laid waste by the neglect of its ruler.
Squat garlands for White Knights makes reference both to the old knight in Alice Through the Looking Glass ("she thought she had never seen such a strange-looking soldier in all her days") and to Hopkins' poem about unemployed soldiers, Tom's Garland.
Pavilions and Captains of Hundreds comes from Malory's Morte d'Arthur; a description of the soldiers' camps the night before the final battle in which Arthur kills and is killed by Mordred.
The five unmistakable marks is from "The Bellman's Tale" (Fit the Second of The Hunting of the Snark) - "Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again / The five unmistakable marks / By which you may know, wheresoever you go, / The warranted genuine Snarks." The "fit" that also includes the lines "he stood and delivered his speech. / 'Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!' / (They were all of them fond of quotations: / So they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers, / While he served out additional rations)."


There was an article "Unmistakable Marks": Symbols and Voices in David Jones' "In Parenthesis" published on pages 63 - 73 of Volume 25, Issue 4 of the Critical Quarterly in December 1983. I have not been able to access it.

[french frank]

Like the titles of the Sections of The Waste Land, they have their sources in older literature. These are detailed in Harro Grabolle's Verdun & the Somme:

Well, that just about sews that up - the only one I cautiously guessed was wrong: I thought the 'Five unmistakable marks' was Christian symbolism for the stigmata.