Description
Jonah Jones – Seren, 1989
The Gallipoli Diary is a collection of essays and memoirs by Jonah Jones. The essays reflect his life from humble beginnings, his service as a field medic in the war, and his new life afterwards as an artist, threatened at the outset by acute tuberculosis. They show, too, his artistic credo: his adherence to the workshop rather than the studio, the classical and ancient sources of his work, and contemporary influences such as Mann, Klee, Brancusi, Noguchi and David Jones.
There are also portraits of Jonah Jones’s friends and neighbours in North Wales: Bertrand Russell, Clough Williams-Ellis, John Cowper Powys, Huw Wheldon, Richard Hughes; and one of Jacob, the Biblical figure who almost obsessed the artist. In an essay-letter to his editor, Jonah Jones looks at the origins of his novels, Zorn and A Tree May Fall. ln other essays he discusses his struggle for a Welsh identity and compares his father’s war with his own experiences at war thirty years later.
Through these essays and journals Jonah Jones shows us what it was like to have lived as an artist and man in the twentieth century.
Seren have kindly transferred the remainder of their stocks of the book to Scene & Word.
148 pages. ISBN 1-85411-010-1. Price includes UK shipping.
