The David Jones reckoning cannot be long postponed. I was reliably informed that, preparatory to a serious grappling with Jones’s second great long poem The Anathémata, there were tremendously useful essays, collected in The Dying Gaul, published in 1978 and long out of print. I no longer remember which essays they were: perhaps ‘Use and Sign’? Or ‘Art in Relation to War?’
I seem to recall a conversation with Dr Cornelius van Muchey (lately of Sumatra):
Have you read In Parenthesis?
I have, yes. Twice.
Okay with that?
I think. . . yes, pretty much.
Watched the films? Read the biography?
Yes. Yes.
And have you read The Anathémata?
Sort of.
What does that mean?
It means that In Parenthesis is like Ulysses while The Anathémata is more like Finnegans Wake.
Ah. Have you read Finnegans Wake?
Sort of.
Ah.
I now have a copy of The Dying Gaul.*
‘It was a dark and stormy night, we sat by the calcined wall; it was said to the tale-teller, tell us a tale, and the tale ran thus: it was a dark and stormy night . . . ‘
* And I belatedly see that Faber, presumably taking advantage of the publication of Thomas Dilworth’s biography from Cape, have reprinted in paperback both The Dying Gaul and the wonderful Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters.
Reconstructionary Tales 