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Jeremy Hooker reviews
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet
by Thomas Dilworth

The full title announces the scope of Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones. This is the life of a man who was a maker in several modes, and whose experience as a private in the First World War stained ‘the litmus of his identity’. Dilworth, however, does not see everything in Jones’s life in terms of what went into the making of his Great War epic, In Parenthesis. Jones’s life was periodically deeply troubled; it was, in fact, a struggle to achieve his religious vision in a mechanical civilisation inimical to his beliefs and the spirit of his work. Visiting Jones late in his life, Igor Stravinsky said it seemed ‘like visiting a holy man in his cell’. This was the impression of others privileged to visit him. But to what extent was the cell a prison?

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