Words Gone to War

IN PARENTHESIS (224 pp. & notes)--David Jones--Chilmark Press ($5.75).

Britain's David Jones is a painter by inclination, but twice in his long life he has taken time out to write a book. In both cases, the books were highly unorthodox and highly acclaimed in esoteric circles. W. H. Auden called Anathemata (1952) "the best poem written since the war." T. S. Eliot has called In Parenthesis "a work of genius." Jarred Image. Jones claims that he was exasperated into writing In Parenthesis by the failure of other writers to describe adequately World War I's battle of the trenches as Jones had experienced it.

"Words ought to be germane to the stuff about," he complained, then set about writing an account of one soldier's war that relied on a language of fragmentation, jarred image and newspeak. In Parenthesis was published in England in 1937. Now, 25 years and several wars later, it has been published here. It is impressively germane to the stuff about.

Jones's title refers to the war as it was fought by "amateur soldiers" of a Welsh regiment--"how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of '18." In the regiment is Private John Ball, who goes off to France, endures six rainy months in the trenches, then finds combat ended for him with a bullet in the thigh.

But the narrative is only the simplest ingredient of Jones's work. While Private Ball waits nervously in the trenches, Author Jones goes off on precarious patrols into the no man's land of the language until, at last, he falls victim to a sort of syntactical battle fatigue and returns to Private Ball--who waits.

Sweet Clarity. Blizzards of shrapnel tear words out of sentences. A thought is splintered with the crack of a sniper's rifle.

Visions of Christ flood the narrator's mind at the sound of a curse on a dying man's lips. And the memory of Wales and the music of its language never leave Private Ball, turning his mind back to his beginnings and to the community of experience he shares with his comrades. To link present and past, Jones uses a dance of tenses that pitches the book back and forth-then and now, here and away.

For all his experiments with word and sound ("leper-trees pitted, rownspekye'd out of nature") and his curious taste for newspeak and inversion ("taller men stooped, hunchbackwise"), Jones is blessed with the sweet clarity of Celtic speech, the fond ear for language, the storyteller's voice. On patrol. Private Ball finds "saturate, littered, rusted ceilings, metallic rustlings, thin ribbon-metal chafing--rasp low for some tension freed; by rat, or wind, disturbed. Smooth-rippled discs gleamed, where gaping craters, their brimming waters, made mirror for the sky procession--bear up before the moon incongruous souvenirs. Margarine tins sail derelict, where little eddies quivered, wind caught, their sharp-jagged twisted lids wrenched back." Jones can conjure up the total irony of war in a simple turn of incident--as shells burst, officers scold their men about unfastened buttons; an announcement of victory along the line ends: "Troops are permitted to cheer." In Parenthesis is more a poem than a novel, more a shattered dream than a story. But its obfuscations mar only the surface, leaving clear and unmistakable the deep penetrations into the emotions of combat, the beautifully frail structure of religious, cultural and personal imagery.

The war and Private Ball serve only as the focus of the task Jones has set for himself--to "make order, for however brief a time, and in whatever wilderness."

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