Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones

If one were required to distill the concerns of Anglophone Modernist writers to a single phrase, “language in time” seems a plausible solution to an impossible problem. From the memories and speculations coiled within Clarissa Dalloway's thoughts to Leopold Bloom's voyage through human culture in the form of Dublin's streets, much of Modernist authors’ creativity was dedicated to the problem of representing both duration and simultaneity of experience in language—and in teasing out the implications of language's own duration and the histories sedimented within it. For many, medieval literature served as a wellspring for linguistic creativity, and as a signifier for that which is paradoxically and simultaneously self and other—an enduring essence, and an alienating marker of modernity. The Anglo-Welsh poet and visual artist David Jones (1895–1974) reflected throughout his long career on the past's endurance in the face of so much that would efface it, and on language as a form in which the past takes shape and is reshaped. Drawing on significant new research in Jones's archives, as well as the full range of his published and unpublished writings, Francesca Brooks's Poet of the Medieval Modern demonstrates that Old English was much more important to his thought than had previously been recognized. While focused primarily on Jones's late works, Poet of the Medieval Modern traces the evolution of his views on the English language and the nature of British identity, which culminated in the pageant of palimpsestic time and hybrid indigeneity that is The Anathemata. In the process, Brooks shows how closely engaged Jones was with cutting-edge scholarship on British premodernity. Her book thus serves both as a valuable contribution to our understanding of David Jones's work and as a remarkable case study of what can happen when research on medieval literature and language finds receptive new audiences beyond the academy.The foundation of Brooks's research is a detailed study of the books on Old English and more broadly “Anglo-Saxon” subjects in Jones's personal library, a collection which is now held by the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. As Brooks's first chapter and Appendix I show, Jones owned more than three dozen relevant books and maps, most of which he annotated. Her exploration of those annotations in the context of his letters and published work demonstrates that he was actively engaged with Old English language and texts, experimenting with and absorbing words, phrases, and structures: with various tables, along with appendix 2, Brooks makes visible—and indisputable—her contention that Jones worked with Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader—in particular to glean Old English words and compound forms which he used in The Anathemata. This in itself nuances the typical picture of Jones's strongly Welsh-aligned sensibility. Although Jones never abandoned his commitment to his Welsh cultural and linguistic heritage, Brooks shows that his rejection of Englishness did, in fact, soften over time; in The Anathemata, published in 1952 (when Jones was 57), Old, Middle, and Modern English have become strands in the cord that is language as spoken in Britain, intertwining with Welsh, Latin, Old Norse, and even Greek to connect antiquity to the present.Consequently, Brooks is able to persuasively build on her archival work to trace Jones's engagement with the texts of his “Anglo-Saxon Library” at key moments in The Anathemata. Though her book is packed with observations which will enrich readers’ experience of the poem, I found her fourth and fifth chapters—on St. Guthlac and The Dream of the Rood, respectively—particularly striking. In chapter 4, Brooks unpicks the densely macaronic weave of The Anathemata's “Angle-Land” section and reveals how Guthlac, and the Old English-inspired poetic compounds used to describe him, have been repurposed. In Jones's hands, the hermit becomes a half-comprehending witness to the survival of transmuted Romano-British culture in the Fenlands, imagined as a wilderness where the legacy of ancient Rome is melted down and reforged into chimerical forms of Welsh and English. As Brooks puts it, “Jones reimagines Guthlac as an Anglo-Welsh saint whose hagiography unites the Germanic and Celtic traditions of the fen” (p. 172). As the fraught encounter between Guthlac and the Welsh- or British-speaking demons has become a touchstone for scholarship on English settlers’ conceptions of the British, Jones's poetic rewriting of the scene—and particularly his understanding of the British as themselves already hybrid—may offer a productive new angle.The chapter on The Dream of the Rood and its many ramifications likewise reveals both how important a particular Old English text was to Jones and how essential hybridity had become to his conception of British identity. As Brooks shows, the poem was indelibly associated for him with the Ruthwell monument, which for Jones placed the poem in a physical border region where Roman Britain, Anglophone Northumbria, British-speaking Rheged, and Viking kingdoms coexisted in palimpsest. Given Jones's devout Catholicism (The Anathemata is presented as a series of nested meditations occurring during the Mass), his emotional connection to The Dream of the Rood is, in one sense, easily comprehensible. Yet Brooks's study, drawing on his letters, reviews, and marginalia as well as close attention to the full text of The Anathemata, shows how long-lasting and widespread its shadow was for Jones, and the unexpected forms in which he both encountered and represented the Old English crucifixion poem. Jones's most lasting impression of the text was aural: his cousin Ruth, who had studied at Oxford, read and translated passages for him, and this seems to have sunk deeper than the subsequent translations he read. It seems fitting, therefore, that The Dream of the Rood most prominently recurs in The Anathemata as the book's final “painted inscription,” Jones's distinctive artistic practice of making words into icons.As Poet of the Medieval Modern makes clear, the long list of authorities Jones credits in the introduction to The Anathemata in fact understates the depth of his engagement with contemporary historical and linguistic scholarship. Jones sought out and intensively studied new books, lectures, and essays, and corresponded with a number of important professional scholars. Though he held no academic posts and never matriculated at a university, Brooks points out that the Camberwell College of Art required significant study of medieval history and art during the time Jones attended it, and that later on he kept up with current scholarship through a variety of learned journals. It seems not quite right, therefore, to think of Jones as an “autodidact,” with all the connotations that word typically carries of idiosyncratic isolation from a wider intellectual culture. Idiosyncratic Jones undoubtedly was, but he was not isolated, and he took pains to correct his poetic imagination against the latest historical research.Among the most thought-provoking aspects of Brooks's book, therefore, is its portrait of an artist as a reader of academic medieval scholarship. Though Jones evidently enjoyed popularized accounts of medieval topics (including radio broadcasts), he did not require such mediation to understand or use the research in his creative work, even as he seems to have found certain formats—such as the Ordnance Survey's annotated maps—particularly helpful and inspiring. However, what he did often require was financial help accessing the literature he needed. Many of his books were gifts from patrons and friends, and he read others via public libraries. Although David Jones was a one-off, through Poet of the Medieval Modern we can both better appreciate his individual accomplishments and imagine paths by which contemporary artists might be able to encounter, and take inspiration from, the work of today's scholars. Jones was acutely aware of how essential shared, contemporary knowledge was for the survival of historically-conscious art: “If a requisite now-ness is not present, the sign, valid in itself, is apt to suffer a kind of invalidation,” as he observed in the introduction to The Anathemata (p. 15). Francesca Brooks's archival work thus gestures toward concrete means—including, perhaps, open-access publication—by which the now-ness of the medieval past can be offered for the use of the artists of today.