Dai the sponger

A good part of my failure to cull the too many books we own is the thought that some forgotten classic will go straight to pulp if I donate it to a charity shop. But it is too much effort to find the only other person in the country (world) who is on the same page in the long tail of printed books which are not Danielle Steel or Harry Potter. It is surely true that some Best Sellers of the 1930s or indeed the 1980s are unavailable in the 2026 library because fashions change.

But I'm the boy for giving The Forgotten of Yest time and attention. When the folks at Faber & Faber [read recent] were raving about, and publishing, Anathemata and other works of David "never 'eard of 'im"  Jones, then I scanned the library catalog to see what was available. There are two copies [Cork and Meath] of his WWI prose-poem In Parenthesis. But I reckoned it was fairer to  myself, and DJ, if I read rather a biography like David Jones : engraver, soldier, painter, poet (2017) by Thomas Dilworth [for whc long expository review] . . . and it was so. 

DJ must have had a charismatic glow because the middle part of his life was like that of eccentric mathematician Paul Erdős who, for decades, lived out of a suitcase. He'd turn up at the door of a fellow math wonk to stay and wouldn't go until he was good and ready. And had knocked off a handful of amazing scientific papers with his host as co-author. Which would give the host immortal fame with an  Erdős number of 1. Jones spent longer in the WWI trenches of Flanders [as L] than Wilfred Owen [prev], Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden or anyone else who left a literary or artistic legacy from that holocaust. And it left him with a bundle of PTSD including anxiety, depression and agoraphobia. He'd come to dinner, drink a lot, be offered a bed for the night, wake up 'shook' and stay for a week. The conversation, mostly with the man of the house, was wide-ranging and entrancing; the extra chores, entirely by the women of the house, were just . . . chores.

Being catered for re-enforced a learned helplessness which his friends, patrons and relations would rush to accommodate. He got [fn p225] £4.10s weekly from Helen Sutherland; £2 weekly from Tom Burns; and random gifts: £2 from his father, £13 from Prudence Pelham; £40 from Ralph Harari. The cooking, sewing, ironing, catering & cleaning are barely acknowledged, let alone accounted for, by Dilworth the author of the biography. And he has an annoying habit of setting the record straight by enumerating the errors of previous biographers.

But I think I can agree with his hypothesis that DJ's psychiatrist greatly diminished the poet-artist's creativity and productivity through over-medication [ft p314-315] Benzedrine, phenobarbitone, phenobarbital, lithium, Nembutal, Parnate (side effects anx, insom, drowsi), Drinamyl (amphetamine + phenobarb), Nardil, Trofanil, Diazepam were all prescribed over the years, several in steadily increasing doses. In the biter-bit spirit of setting the record straight I'll point out that phenobarbitone and phenobarbital are synonyms and Drinamyl is a potent mix of amphetamine and amylbarbitone  and has long been discontinued. They say that UK PM Anthony Eden's judgment was impaired by prescription Drinamyl to precipitate the Sue\z crisis of 1956. DJ was a pal of Clarissa "PM's wife" Eden, sending her gifts of his books and art-works and was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street. Maybe the chaps shared purple hearts over the iced-dainties (provided by the staff).

Title is a reference to the joke about "no, you want Jones the Spy at #37" which hinges on the paucity of Welsh surnames. Our current house-painter asked if the biog here discussed was about Davy "The Monkees" Jones, of whom he'd been a fan in his youth. errrm, No.