At The Thirteenth Hour

Letters

Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003

From Thomas Dilworth

It seems a shame that William Wootten's review of my edition of David Jones's wedding poems (LRB, 25 September) will, largely for political reasons, dissuade many from reading Jones, who is in my view the greatest native British poet since Hopkins. In seeing Jones as ideologically pro-Fascist, Wootten badly mistakes the direction of the political energy of Jones's poetry. No other poet in the past century comes close to him in consistently and thoroughly opposing totalitarianism. It is true that in conversation with friends before the war, Jones agreed with Hitler's critique of Western parliamentary democracy as 'plutocracy'. But what's wrong with that? Plutocracy is now generally recognised as the major flaw in our democratic systems, where those who raise the most money dominate the media and conduct the most effective political campaigns, and wealthy contributors and highly paid lobbyists have inordinate influence over the framing of legislation. Because Hitler blames the English for plutocracy, Wootten blames Jones for using the word in one of his Wedding Poems, implying that he thereby, in 1940, aids and abets the enemy. Jones continued to use the word negatively, after the war, in The Anathemata, which is an implicitly anti-Nazi poem. It is a term Jones first acquired not from Hitler but in 1929 from his friend the historian Christopher Dawson, who was ardently anti-Fascist.

Jones was sympathetic to the prewar Germans. It was not a political or ideological sympathy. He believed, as virtually every historian now does, that the Treaty of Versailles was unjust and punishing. He thought the Germans were right to rebel against it. Furthermore, in wanting conquest, the Germans were, he thought, no worse than the imperialist English and French. That is what he means in words Wootten quotes against him: 'For any evil that war apologists can fling at the Axis Powers the Axis Powers can easily and justly retaliate' – words Jones wrote before the war. When the existence of Nazi extermination camps was revealed, Jones was appalled, and said: 'I was wrong about the Nazis.' Not wrong in his agreement with aspects of their political criticism – he had always disapproved of the 'corrective measures' proposed by Hitler – but wrong in imagining the Nazis incapable of such extremes of evil. He never published an admission of error because he had never made his position public – none of the quotations for which Wootten holds him accountable was published by Jones; but in private he was candid and forthright about his mistake.

Before the war he was not pro-Nazi. He merely believed Hitler's repeated claim to want peace. Jones desperately feared war because for three years during World War One he had experienced mechanised slaughter first-hand. Wootten sees Jones's immediate postwar poetic manuscripts as 'far from loyal literature of the home front. Ancient Rome is depicted in Fascist terms on one page and refigured as the British Empire on the next.' Here Jones is more politically astute than his reviewer. Jones opposed imperialism of any kind, agreeing with Augustine's definition of empire as 'robbery'. Does Wootten think there is no continuity between Roman, Fascist and British imperialisms? Jones had experienced that continuity while serving with the British occupying force in Ireland in 1918. He saw, in his words, 'how fear made men brutal' towards the local population. Of course there are degrees of injustice, and Nazi Germany was worse than imperialist Britain. Not much moral sensitivity is needed to appreciate that, and poetry is seldom improved by stating the obvious, especially when it is nationalistically self-serving.

Thomas Dilworth
University of Windsor, Ontario