David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose ed. by Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen, and Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Abstract

Reviewed by: David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose ed. by Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen, and Kathleen Henderson Staudt Paul Robichaud (bio) David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose Edited by Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen, and Kathleen Henderson Staudt Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 368 pp. $49.45, paperback. In "The Roland Epic and Ourselves," a review of his friend René Hague's translation of La Chanson de Roland, first published in The Tablet on December 24th, 1938, David Jones reflected that "It is, conceivably, for a baptized Führership that we might have cause to pray, if only in the sense that a sophisticated Roman of The Province would have asked heaven's prevenience for the difficult barbarian invested with The Purple" (in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood, Faber, 1976, p. 100). Jones's comment is in many ways typical of how he viewed modern politics through the lens of the longue durée, imagining Hitler as in some sense analagous to a barbarian Emperor during the last days of the Roman Empire. In suggesting that we might pray for "a baptized Führership," he recognizes that the actual Führership in Germany was a distinctly unchristian polity. His comment also acknowledges the possibility of Britain finding itself under the Reich, in which case his British Catholic readers may well have found themselves in the position of Roman citizens at the mercy of a "difficult barbarian." More optimistically, Jones offers the example of "a Celtic Christian" who "might, just conceivably, have prayed for Edwin, with his assumed insignia of the Dux Britanniarum" (100). Whether viewed as "sophisticated Roman" or "Celtic Christian," Jones suggests that a modern-day Briton may soon have need to pray for a merciful Führerhship. David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose brings together a variety of documents that provide fascinating background for Jones's more public responses to the upheavals of the twentieth-century, enabling a more nuanced assessment of his troubled (and troubling) politics as well as a deeper context for his views on religion and culture. Six days before the publication of his review of Hague's translation, on December 18th, Jones wrote a letter to Neville Chamberlain to accompany [End Page 227] a gift copy of In Parenthesis. The letter is the first of three prose texts and an interview transcript assembled in this carefully edited volume, which includes photographic reproductions of his manuscript pages. In the letter, Jones praises Chamberlain for his "forbearance, imagination, & very great courage" in pursuing a policy of appeasement in the face of "misunderstanding, prejudice, and stupidity in this country" (33, 39). What is at stake for Jones is the need to avoid another war, whatever the cost: better to pray for "a baptized Führership" than to fight Germany all over again. Having fought as an infantryman in 1914-18, he knew war's terrors, but also hoped that the shared experience across national lines might provide a model for peace: "we looked to the day when those opposite would be friends again—indeed that & perhaps that friendship might be the greater and more intimate because of our mutual hardship" (41). As with In Parenthesis itself, Jones's letter to Chamberlain alludes to Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, this time to condemn those who would make unnecessary war as well as English discontent more generally: "Alas this is a great default in us Englishmen for there may no thing please us no term" (43). As Oliver Bevington argues in his fine introduction to this letter, "by 1938, Jones's view had calcified into an inflexible and entrenched anti-war stance toward Hitler's Germany" (13). In May of 1939, Jones attempted to come to grips with Hitler in an essay that, until now, has never appeared in its entirety. Tom Villis's introduction suggests that there are many ways to read this ambivalent document, including "as a reminder of how far sympathy with fascism could go in the late 1930s, as a sophisticated critique of liberal materialism, as a plea for peace, or as an indication of the complexity of the cultural and...