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William Blissett: The Long Conversation, A Memoir of David Jones; Oxford, £9.75.

Between 1959 and 1974 William Blissett, a Professor at Toronto University, called on David Jones when he visited Britain. This book records their conversations and also contains a number of letters they exchanged.

   It is useful to have some more of David Jones's letters in print. Of the dozen here reproduced some are long & detailed, some are brief and the subject matter of others emphasises that one day an edited selection of letters will be necessary because (inevitably with a correspondent as prolific as Jones) there is a certain amount of repetition of sentiment, and even phrase, in letters to different correspondents. There is also an inevitable overlap between already published material and some of the conversations here recorded. Anyone reading this book will find much of interest, but a newcomer may be unaware of overlaps because, although the Bibliographical Note mentions Dai Greatcoat ed. Rene Hague, London, 1980, there is no reference to the interesting collection of letters to Vernon Wakins, ed. Ruth Pryor, Cardiff, 1976, or of the publications of individual or small collections of letters in various journals. A shortcut to some idea of context could have been effected by citing Samuel Rees's, David Jones: An Annotated Bibliography, New York and London, 1977, though much has been published even since then.

   Of unquestionable value are an author's annotations of and corrections to his own works. Perhaps the most exciting pages of this book (79-86 and 123-4) are David Jones's comments on some queries Blissett raised about passages of In Parenthesis. These repay close study and a general review such as this could not do justice to them.

Within the conversations, the remarks of Jones concerning other writers, artists and critics are also of much interest: Pound, T. E. Hulme, Epstein, Waley, Graves, Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Bewick, Samuel Palmer, etc. etc. and it would have been good to have seen even more detail of these remarks. There are anecdotes about Evelyn Waugh, Roy Campbell and others, all of which indicate the width of interest and acquaintance of Jones and, often, his puckish sense of humour .

The general presentation of the narrative is usually clear, but some pruning could, I think, have been done both in the use of simile and metaphor and in Blisset's autobiographical detail. A couple of examples may illustrate both these points. Blissett tells us how important was a public library near his school:

...I cut through it like a blowtorch. I made a point of bringing a different book to school every day  with no thought of endearing myself to classmates or teachers.' Or later  'Not unaffected by the Scotch, I held forth on the delights of teaching: to the effect that, whereas in writing, of a hundred possible statements I must find the right one, in teaching almost everything I say will leave the students' minds in better shape than I find them. The one thing is to establish ascendancy in no-man's-land.'

   In a letter to a correspondent (Merton College Archive D-l- 43), David Jones once wrote that he was disconcerted that his work was sometimes thought to be 'obscure' or 'belonging to a "privatism" of some sort.' It is therefore all the more a problem for those who admire him, particularly if they happened to know him, to dispel any notion of a possessive coterie of the initiated. Blissett recognises this when recounting how a visit was interrupted by the arrival of a Yorkshireman:

'The visitor breezed in as if on wheels –
compact, sandy, brisk, pleasant smile,
good teeth… The Yorkshireman moved a
company of questions up the line to death, etc.' (pp 97-99)

Blissett, finally confesses, 'I was jealous, that's the truth, as a dog is jealous of a bone'.

   In the first sentence of the prologue Blissett writes, 'I promise that this memoir will move, as this sentence does, from the personal pronoun 'I' to the proper name 'David Jones'. I do not think that the balance is always right; but the reader will find, as I have already indicated, many interesting topics discussed and facts recorded, and valuable additions to our knowledge of the text of In Parenthesis.