JONES, David ~ In Parenthesis.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Faber & Faber Ltd., London: 1937

8vo., oatmeal-coloured publisher's cloth with contrasting green painted label gilt to spine; frontis illustration in black and white by the author, along with another facing p.226, and a map facing p. 193; THE BOOK a nice copy, a little darkened at spine with some very light fraying to the cloth; lightly spotted to the prelims, with overall marginal toning and previous ownership sticker to rear paste-down; very good plus. The wrapper is protected in a removable mylar cover. First UK edition, first printing, with newspaper clipping regarding the author and a publisher's postcard loosely inserted. Lacking the elusive dustwrapper. David Jones (1895-1974) was born in Kent, the youngest of three children to James and Alice Jones, the former a Welshman born into a Welsh-speaking family. Beginning his career as an artist, David is recorded as claiming that he knew from the age of six that his life would be dedicated to art. During the First World War, he enlisted in the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and served as an infantryman on the Western front from 1915–1918 in the 38th (Welsh) Division. He was wounded at Mametz Wood, recuperated in the Midlands, returned to the Ypres Salient, joining the attack on Pilckem Ridge at Passchendaele, and nearly dying of trench fever the year after. In all, Jones spent more time on the front line than any other British writer during the war. It was the experiences during these four years which would form the basis for his first literary work, In Paranthesis. Jones suffered with post-war shell-shock (now widely known as PTSD), and during October 1932 it contributed to a nervous breakdown which in turn coincided with a period of intense writing and painting. During this time, he produced the first continuous draft of In Parenthesis, inspired by his first seven months in the trenches between December 1915 and July 1916. Part novel, part epic poem, and part memoir in a style entirely his own, the author assimilates cockney colloquial, military slang, and allusions to The Gododdin, The Mabinogion, and the sixth-century Welsh poem Preiddeu Annwn, altogether succeeding in aligning the Battle of the Somme with the catastrophic Welsh defeats at Catraeth in the 7th century and Camlan (the final battle of King Arthur). Jones was one of the first modern engravers to combine white-line and black-line engraving, and the two plates provided here are evocative, harrowing, and deeply moving. “I think the day by day in the Waste Land” he writes in his introduction, “the sudden violence and the long stillnesses, the sharp contours and the unformed voids of that mysterious existence, profoundly affected the imaginations of those who suffered it. It was a place of enchantment.” Jones’s literary debut won the Hawthornden Prize in 1938, and was widely admired by such writers as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. W. H. Auden later wrote that Jones did "for the British and the Germans what Homer did for the Greeks and the Trojans". T. S. Eliot declared it 'a work of genius' in the preface to his 1961 Faber re-issue.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good +