the book of balaam’s ass

Summary

Assigned to "battalion nuclear reserve," David Jones saw the worst of the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, in July and August 1917, from behind the front lines. But these grimmest days of the First World War would inspire a poem Jones began in the mid-1930s after completing a draft of his first book, In Parenthesis (1937), about the Somme, July 1916, in which he had been wounded. This new work, The Book of Balaam’s Ass, attempts expiation of survivor’s guilt. It celebrates the "baptism by cowardice" of one Private Shenkin (Private Jones in the drafts), a Chaplinesque antihero who emerges from the horror unscathed thanks to his good misfortune to fall into a shell-hole during the assault.

The recent work of Tom Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison (see The Grail Mass and Other Poems, Bloomsbury, 2019) has drawn attention to the unstable form of this poem. It fit originally into a much larger poetic work Jones had envisioned about the Roman Catholic Mass, but out of which Jones “quarried” pieces that became The Anathemata (1952) and The Sleeping Lord (1974), the latter of which contained a version of Balaam. The presence of multiple versions amongst Balaam’s manuscripts, however, show it to be impossible to pin down to one definitive edition. It therefore provides a fascinating case study for a genetic edition of Jones’s work and his creative process.

Scope

Roughly 300 sheets including: full manuscript copy and two corrected typescript copies of The Book of Balaam’s Ass; six further collections of manuscript and typescript notes and insertions to the poem, as well as manuscript drafts of the headnote to the version published in The Sleeping Lord (originals held in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the Burns Library, Boston College)

View the Book of Balaam’s Ass materials here: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/davidjones/23

Key people

Erik Tonning (SPIRE grant lead), Tom Berenato (coordinating editor), Huw Jones and Yasmin Faghihi (TEI instructors in 2021 workshop)

Editorial Team

Tom Berenato; Catherine Enwright; Bradford Haas; Jasmine Hunter Evans; Huw Jones (Swansea); Paul Robichaud; Anna Svendsen; Bead Vidrine

Funding

Award of 75,000 NOK (about $7,000) as part of the SPIRE Grant Scheme in partnership with the University of Bergen, Norway. Covered:

  • scanning and hosting of The Book of Balaam’s Ass manuscripts (originals at the National Library of Wales) on the Cambridge Digital Library

  • costs of a hybrid TEI training workshop (at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth) using the BBA manuscripts

Future

With appropriate funding and technological capability, the editors hope to create a born-digital genetic edition of The Book of Balaam’s Ass, which would be the first of its kind in Jones Studies.

 Image Credit

Taken from “Manuscript of Book of Balaam’s Ass,” leaf 1R (LR7/1/1, National Library of Wales). Copyright: the Trustees of the David Jones Estate.

All images reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the David Jones Estate/Bridgman Images.