In 1966, Robert Speaight published a biography of Eric Gill, a book that the poet and artist David Jones, an old friend of Gill’s, was asked more than once to review. But every time he refused. Jones, who was by then living in a dilapidated boarding house in Harrow-on-the-Hill, and among whose tenants was a lobotomised salesman, had firm ideas about biography. “I don’t like a person [writing] more than one biography in a lifetime,” he told a friend. “He cannot have researched the man properly.” Speaight, having already produced several lives, was not to be trusted with “the complex quiddities & haecceities of the chap”.
Jones’s biographer, Thomas Dilworth, has devoted 30 years to writing his book. Whether he will ever produce another major life, I don’t know. But if we’re talking about quiddity, his labours have not been in vain. Those interested in Jones’s art (his dreamy watercolours, his masterly engravings), or in his singular poetry (the great work is In Parenthesis, a modernist epic inspired by his experiences in the trenches that TS Eliot regarded as a masterpiece), will not be disappointed with the careful, delicate way Dilworth connects them to his confounding story. But the real joy of his book is not analytical. It is that it makes Jones so vivid. Sweet, eccentric and unexpectedly comical, there are moments when it is almost as if you can smell him: the damp of his long overcoat; the must of hoarded newspapers as he reluctantly opens the door of his room. Glamorous people come and go: Jones’s circle included Ben Nicholson, Kenneth Clark, Clarissa Eden, and (the mind boggles) the Queen Mother. He, however, never changes, in the sense that he is always vulnerable, unpredictable, stubborn and (determinedly so) impoverished. Half-man and half-boy, sometimes you feel his genius is the only straightforward thing about him.
The son of a Welsh printer, Jones was born in 1895, and grew up in Brockley, south London, in a “Kipling-conditioned world”. He knew his scripture – his father was also a preacher – but his “apprehensive psychology” he attributed to his granny Brad, whose household speciality was gloomy foreboding. His artistic talent was obvious early on – the animals he drew as a boy are unnervingly animated – and at 14 he persuaded his parents to let him attend Camberwell School of Arts; it was there that his teacher, AS Hartrick, made the famous comment: “Look at that, you see, Jones leaves out everything but the magic.” But then, of course, came the war. Wanting to be part of history (and to ride a horse), he was desperate to enlist. Twice refused on physical grounds (“deficient chest measurement”), in 1915 he finally joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
If people know anything at all about Jones, it is that he fought for longer than any other British writer – a foot soldier for four years, he spent 117 weeks at the front – and that he was injured in the assault on Mametz Wood in 1916. But what Dilworth makes shockingly clear, to 21st-century sensibilities, is Jones’s paradoxical devotion to the war. It would damage him permanently – paralysing breakdowns would follow – and yet, in the midst of battle, he found a strange peace. He loved the men, the comradeship of the ranks. In 1917, granted leave after his battalion had been subjected to shelling for days, he astonished the adjutant by postponing it in order to avoid having to help his parents move house. Afterwards, he returned “happily” to the trenches at Bois-Grenier. With morning glory trailing over their frames, they were “quite beautiful”.
The war over, he resumed his education, this time at the Westminster School of Art, where his tutors included Walter Sickert. In 1921, he was invited by his friend Father John O’Connor — he would soon convert to Catholicism — to visit Eric Gill in Ditchling, Sussex, a meeting that, for him, was momentous (even if he would later roll his eyes at his mentor’s dictatorial ways). Jones, too, moved to the village, and there he learned to engrave. He also grew close to Gill’s daughter, Petra, to whom he became engaged in 1924. Like all his (many) relationships with women, this one was essentially chaste. His fragility and his Catholicism led him to idealise the opposite sex, and though he wept when they inevitably went and married someone else, as Petra did, there was a performative element to his heartbreak. He was not built for full-time love, and he knew it. “I am only interested in the things eternal,” he told a tailor who asked what kind of suit he wanted making out of some itchy ginger tweed Petra had woven for him.
His first breakdown came after he completed In Parenthesis in 1932. It changed him physically – Dilworth has him retreating from “the barrage” into the “dugout of his body” – though not, perhaps, so much as the barbiturates his psychiatrist prescribed. But while it’s painful to read about Jones’s depression – he referred to it as “the Rosey” (after neurosis) – one’s sense is nevertheless of an astonishing productivity: poems and pictures are made, exhibitions are mounted, awards are received. And he is surely the most gregarious recluse who ever lived. He meets Yeats and Auden and attends Evelyn Waugh’s wedding; he has Christmas lunch with TS Eliot, and his new wife, Valerie (“Finished!” was Jones’s comment on Eliot’s creative life, on seeing his marital spooniness). What makes all this the more amazing is his itinerant lifestyle. For a long time, he lived at home with his parents. But he was always camping, too, turning up at friends’ flats ready to outstay his welcome.
“You’re not going to make me normal, are you, because I don’t want to be,” Jones once told a shrink. There was never any danger of that. In 1947 he took a room in a grotty Harrow boarding house that smelled of cabbage. He lived there for 16 years. When it was about to be demolished, he moved to a residential hotel further down the hill. He worried that, in summer, it would be like “Palm Beach or Capri”. But his room, “as dark as the inside of a cow” and sometimes visited by rats, he thought “jolly nice, like being in the trenches”. This hotel still exists – Jones lived there until he entered the nursing home where he died in 1974 – and when I reached the end of this marvellous book I stared for ages at an image of its pebble-dashed exterior on the internet. Until recently, it was a Comfort Inn.
At this point, I’m probably supposed to consider why a man who was envied by Auden and acclaimed by Stravinsky isn’t better known. But hell, if people won’t come to Jones for the paintings or the poetry, which it seems, frustratingly, they won’t, perhaps his life will do the trick. How brave it is, how sweet-sad. When it comes to fame, I read it as a kind of parable. One minute a bloke can be visiting the Tate with the Queen Mother. The next he can be staring at the flock wallpaper as he queues to use the telephone in a cheap Harrow hotel.
• David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Poet, Painter by Thomas Dilworth is published by Jonathan Cape (£25). To order a copy for £18.75 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
