When he set out to write about World War I, in which he’d served as an infantryman, David Jones gave himself a straightforward task: “to make a shape in words, using as data the complex of sights, sounds, fears, hopes, apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia of that singular time and of those particular men.”
Straightforward, but deceptively so, because as soon as we live through an experience we immediately begin smothering it with narratives, simplifying and pruning and distorting and inventing for our own purposes. And if we have no connection to the experience at all…well, that primary data is quite simply unavailable to us. Which is why I was skeptical of Ishion Hutchinson’s book of poetry about World War I, School of Instructions. Its cover and accompanying letter from the publisher directly reference Jones as an inspiration. But for Jones, whose In Parenthesis may be the single greatest book about the experience of the frontline soldier, the reality of combat and the trenches lived rawly within him throughout all of his poverty-stricken life. How could a modern writer follow in Jones’ footsteps when their subject but crucially not their experience is also the First World War?
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