Sacred Mysteries: The artist's dangerous retreat from the world

Telegraph

2 days ago

David Jones, the poet and visual artist, almost ended his days in a residential hotel called Monksdene in Northwick Park Road near Harrow-on-the-Hill. He'd lived there on his own in a bed-sitting room for 20 years when in 1972 he broke his hip.
So for the last two years of his life he was cared for by nuns of the Little Company of Mary at the Calvary Nursing Home. I've seen a good account of visiting Jones in his last years (his late seventies), in which a misprint calls it the Calgary Nursing Home. The difference is important, for Jones came to see creative work, such as painting or poetry, as united with the Eucharist, which collapses time and makes present the sacrifice accomplished by Christ on Calvary, where the cross was set up.
And now David Jones features, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, in an enjoyably written book on an important subject: whether it is good for an artist – or anyone else – to retreat from the world. In The World Within, Guy Stagg (whose previous book was on walking to Jerusalem) writes about Wittgenstein as the Saint, Weil as the Martyr and Jones as the Hermit.
Of course these roles are highly individualised by the three figures chosen. In pursuing Jones through his strange kind of hermit life, Stagg visited Caldey Island, now a Trappist monastery, where Jones stayed repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was a Benedictine house, as his life took a decisive turn.
Jones founded his morality, art and religion on his experience of the First World War, when he was in action for long periods. He admired the virtues of the private soldiers and was deeply affected by seeing, through the cracks of a shed, a priest in vestments saying Mass for men kneeling on straw.
After the war, Jones learnt to be an accomplished wood-engraver and joined in with Eric Gill's commune at Ditchling, following him to Capel-y-ffin in Brecknockshire. Then came another crossroads. He was engaged to Gill's daughter Petra, but held back, worried about whether he could afford to marry and how he could continue his life as an artist. She at last wrote, saying she wanted to marry another man.
I can never quite decide whether it was Jones's experiences in the war or the failure of his engagement to Petra Gill that left him with the depressions and agoraphobia that shrank his external life to a Harrow bedsit. These symptoms came upon him on his finishing the first draft of his long poetic account of the war, In Parenthesis. His was not a voluntary retreat from the world, but was imposed by his ill health. That did not mean it was no vocation.
Stagg points out that a BBC film from 1965 picks out in Jones's crowded room an inscription in his masterly lettering combining in Welsh and Latin the phrases from the Mass Hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam – 'This pure sacrifice; this holy sacrifice, this perfect sacrifice.' When the BBC interviewer asked if, in his studio and living room, he was making his own world in the middle of this one, he answered: 'It's the only way I can do it.'
Stagg wonders whether the last days of Wittgenstein, Weil and Jones – alone, without friends or family beside their beds – 'should serve as a model or a warning'.
'The promise of retreat,' he says in conclusion, 'is that we find our true selves, unhampered by the compromises of company, but I suspect there is more truth in the character that emerges through encounter.'