The Anathemata

"He’s a recent discovery for me. David Jones has something of that quality of Simone and Dante, of foreshadowings all the way through: he even finds them with the Neanderthals. I went completely bonkers going to the exhibition of him in Pallant House Gallery in Chichester this year. There are some wonderful watercolours. To me, The Anathemeta really says more about Christianity than even the first four books we’ve mentioned. It’s in bits, and he admits that some bits he put in a completely different order when he was starting it. What lies behind it is that the central event of history, the central event of anything, is the Crucifixion, but that it is a mistake to think of history in a linear way. There’s a statue from 400 BC of a man with a calf around his neck on the Acropolis. That, for him, is a foreshadowing of the good shepherd. Simone would have loved that, but, unlike her, he’s very genial. As well as being modernist and difficult, his attitude of humanity and of life is very genial. You do need the notes, particularly for the Welsh bit, which many of us would struggle with. I know it’s a bit mad to choose it as one of the great Christian works but, to me, it is. It absolutely encapsulates what’s interesting about Christianity, whether you believe it or you don’t. It’s important to see what is interesting and distinctive about this religion or mindset, even if you don’t believe it. And I think that this book, almost more than any other, certainly of books written in my lifetime, shows what is so very distinctive about it. Because it is not a set of moral commandments, it isn’t just a myth that happens to be true, it is something which encapsulates everything that’s ever happened. David Jones, in this poem, sees it going right back to prehistory. The extraordinary thing which he captures completely brilliantly is that Christianity is something that is universal, but it only makes sense in terms of each individual person who subscribes to it. He manages, almost in the same breath, both to retell the story of the last supper, for instance, and turn the disciples who are going to prepare the room for the last supper into people like his mother’s ancestors in Rotherhithe. He was brought up as ordinary Church of England, I think, not particularly devout. It was World War I that changed him. He became a Roman Catholic as a result of World War I. He went into a barn when he was serving on the Western Front and saw a priest saying mass. It had an extraordinary effect on him. He didn’t become a Catholic until several years after that moment. He actually went to Jerusalem to meet up with Eric Gill. He met British squaddies saying, ‘Christ, what an awful, bloody place this is,’ as they threw a cigarette on the corner of the street in Jerusalem. That’s what gave him the idea for The Anathemata actually: it was just ordinary soldiers who’d led Christ off to be crucified. It was just part of their day’s work. It is obviously true, and there had been all kinds of attempts — either very sentimental or excruciating — to reconstruct what it must have been like for the soldiers and other people. Jones gets it because he never sentimentalised World War I. He is the only poet of the First World War, I think, who didn’t. Even Robert Graves does, and Wilfred Owen is fantastically self-pitying. He loved it. My old art teacher loved every second of it. He was gassed. He said it was the happiest time of his life. David Jones loved it. He wasn’t gay, but he liked the companionship of men. Which most men do, of course. Yes. I had a phase of being a non-believer. I also realised, looking back, that I had a long, long phase—probably most of my grown-up life—of being a keen churchgoer without really believing it. Over the last ten years. I wouldn’t quite know when. I think I started believing, I don’t think it was ‘again’. I don’t think I quite knew what it was, even. I’ve been very, very inarticulate this evening—I’m sorry—but I don’t think I quite knew what it was and I think these five do know what it was, and they’ve helped me to see what it was. I’ve never had any mystical experience at all, but I completely believe it now. Partly because of our five friends. I think they are onto something."