In Parenthesis Among The War Books

Abstract

'I did not intend this as a 'War Book" - it happens to be concerned with war. I should prefer it to be about a good sort of peace. ...' In spite of this disclaimer, In Parenthesis by the bias of its material substance is a war book, whatever the author's expressed intention. 'Here is a book about the experiences of one soldier in the War of 1914-18. It is also a book about War,' writes T.S. Eliot in his introduction, though he adds immediately, 'and about many other things also, such as Roman Britain, the Arthurian Legend, and divers matters which are given association by the mind of the writer." In the last analysis perhaps it belongs with the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, the Morte Darthur, Henry V, and St John Perse's Anabase, but at first sorting it belongs with the books of the Great War and, within that category, to the fictional and autobiographical recollections of life on the Western Front rather than to the poems written under fire or to the books in which the War is only an episode. In order to examine In Parenthesis from this angle, I have read a good number of war books up to 1937 available in English to the interested reader.' I have learned that David Jones rather tended to steer clear of them during the writing of his book (in the late 1920s and early 1930s) and that his reading did not go much beyond Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Blunden, and Ernst Jünger at the time, with the addition, much later, of Aubrey Wade's The War of the Guns (1936) and The War the Infantry Knew (1938), a circumstantial account compiled by an anonymous medical officer of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, his own regiment. My interest throughout has been in analogues, not influences: indeed, I have found no evidence to indicate that In Parenthesis was influenced by any other war book, either in conception or in detail.