David Jones is something of a puzzle.  How is it that a painter, poet, and engraver so deeply admired by the likes of Auden, Eliot, and Heaney remains so little known?  Why didn’t critical acclaim from his peers and contemporaries ever turn into wider recognition and popularity?  Thomas Dilworth’s meticulously researched and perfectly judged account of Jones’s life and work tries to answer those questions and it’s no fault of the biographer’s that he doesn’t quite succeed in doing so.

Born in south London in 1895, Jones concentrated initially on engravings, watercolors, and paintings in the first phase of his career which started when he returned from the trenches in 1918. (No other Great War poet or artist saw as much of the fighting as Jones).  He was associated with Eric Gill in the 1920s, emerging eventually from Gill’s shadow and the narrow and suffocating Catholicism of Gill’s guild of craftsmen. He turned more seriously to writing in the late 1920s, completing In Parenthesis in 1937 in spite of his devastating mental collapse (most likely a delayed reaction to what he saw and suffered in the Great War) in 1932.  A career spanning more than three decades followed, made possible in part by a period of psychotherapy, during which he attracted prestige and honors and built a tight network of close, loving friends. Poverty and the shadow of mental illness were never far away, however.

Dilworth’s slightly tentative conclusion at the end of this long and heavily illustrated biography that Jones “may be the foremost native British modernist” offers a clue to the neglect he has suffered. The fact is – and it’s strange this never seems to occur to his biographer – that Jones’s work is difficult. His most important written works, The Anathemata and In Parenthesis (“the best work on war in English”), are dense and rich in religious, historical, and classical allusions and symbols most likely to be beyond ordinary secular readers.  His paintings and watercolors, though beautiful, can also seem difficult to penetrate beneath their crowded, filigree-like surfaces.  His early engravings and lettering are the most accessible work he did.  David Jones won’t break into the mainstream.  He’ll most likely stay where he has always been: a major figure with a small audience.