Footnotes

• 'IT'S PART OF MY NATURE TO WRITE... IT'S A JOY TO WRITE TO YOU...': ILLUSTRATED LETTERS FROM DAVID JONES TO VALERIE WYNNE-WILLIAMS.
  
  Jones's letters are unique: 'annotated in several colours, [they] tumbled effortlessly from sheet to sheet and subject to subject like the dialogues of Plato. He concentrated on a friend, on a subject of conversation, on a detail of any kind, historical or technical or visual or intellectual, with uncommon intensity' (Peter Levi, ODNB).
  
  It is somehow fitting that David Jones and Valerie Price met as a result of a correspondence. In her own words '...I had written some letters to the Times with regard to Welsh affairs. Dafydd also contributed some letters... I later invited Dafydd to a Plaid Cymru party I was giving. He did not attend but telephoned and asked me to meet him at Northwick Lodge...', which she did, accompanied by her soon-to-be husband Michael Wynne-Williams (ed. René Hague, Dai Greatcoat: a self portrait of David Jones in his Letters, London, 1980, p.177). That was the beginning of a lasting and intense relationship: 'A native Welsh speaker, Valerie was twenty-five, dark haired, vivacious... By the end of their visit... Jones was smitten' (Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, London, 2017, p.298).
  
  Feeling that marriage and family life could not accommodate his artistic vocation, Jones had always been a believer in Romantic Love and had several strong platonic attachments to women throughout his life, most notably to Lady Prudence Pelham, perhaps seeing himself in the role of Malory's Sir Launcelot endeavouring to resist enchantment. Valerie was the last and arguably the most all-consuming of these attachments which, unlike the others, had the element of a strong physical attraction ("...I like your beautiful upper right arm... & I like the white upper part of your dress and, of course, your face, and the long black gloves..."). He was particularly attracted to her voice and had her read aloud to him in Welsh. His letters to her are love letters. He wrote to her frequently and at great length ("...I think about you every day and much more often than that..."), and he kept her replies in a red silk-lined case. It is "blissful" to be with her, he writes: "I rejoice in the thought of you always" and "in a special sort of way, adore you". He is preoccupied with her when they are apart; "...You did make me so happy...I do hope we meet again very, very, soon. I do wish that today was yesterday again... with very, very, much love..." he writes in April 1959. His dependence on her is almost childlike, his concern parental – he is "terrified" when she arrives late lest "something really awful has happened" and reprimands her for not writing ("...I, I admit, was disappointed on not hearing from you on my birthday, but in no way angry, do believe that..."). He continually worries about her health, that their letters are going astray and, sometimes forgetting she has the demands of a husband, family and career, pleads with her to write and repeatedly asks if she's read books or articles he has sent or heard his broadcasts, desperate for her approval ("...I ask only for a little note expressing come kind of affection..."). He takes great pleasure in sending her gifts - flowers (he is furious with the "vile, horrible interfloral people" when they fail to send the right ones), a golden torque ("...it becomes you very much..."), inscriptions (including a marriage poem which was lost) and pictures. Whilst many of his friends feared her influence as an interloper and possible predator, in the opinion of Jones's great friend Harman Grisewood she was 'sympathetic, gentle, and honest, never... exploitative' (Dilworth, p.300). To Jones, as is abundantly clear here, she was the unchanging epicentre of his world.
  
  These letters are not only love letters to Valerie Wynne-Williams, however, they are love letters to Welsh culture and language, the very thing that brought them together. Throughout he lapses into Welsh (which he asks her to correct) and digresses into long discourses on Welsh history and legend and the etymology of the language. He laments the decline of spoken Welsh ("...because of the attitude of mind of so many Welsh people. If only they would stand firm and see what they are betraying, something could still be done..."), whilst finding his own inability to master the language a constant preoccupation and disappointment, lamenting "...You've no idea what it means to me – it is a disaster & prevents me fulfilling so much of my heart's desire. I feel an alien in ways I can't explain...".
  
  Throughout the correspondence his continuing battle with depression is revealed which keeps him confined to his room and refusing invitations, leaving him in a "...low, unreasonable, irritable, depressed trough and very muddled...". By May 1962 he is on "six different kinds [of pills] a day", and continually complains of feeling "drugged" and "feeble" which, according to his biographer 'all but ended his creative life' (Dilworth, p.315). His illness is bound up with struggles with his painting, most notably here with Gwener, Ceidwades Caolnnau (Venus, Keeper of Hearts) - sold in these rooms on 22 November 2017 - where Valerie is depicted as the embodiment of Venus: "...I do hope you like Gwener, because you've made it possible for me to do it..." he writes in September 1959 and announces "It's title I think is The Lee-shore". He writes too of his subsequent works Trystan a Esyllt ("could not be more different") and Annunciation in a Welsh Hill Setting, which he famously refused to sell to Stravinsky, and admits to her that, despite the difficulties in completing these major later works, he is resigned to the struggle as "there's nothing else I can do at all, nothing".
  
  His illustrations on these letters are striking; delicate floral vignettes adorn her name, he sends a delicate pink rose reminiscent of the woodcut he customarily presented to women he admired, a cat curled-up in an armchair, the horses in the field below his house, a herd of pigs ("...much harder to draw than the horses or cats... sheep are also jolly hard..."), a beautiful girl ("...with a very long white neck & long golden hair... a bit like a white horse... mostly because of the mane I suppose..."), even a prosaic map of Harrow with road names and annotations in Welsh becomes a work of art. From his childhood memories he sketches Capel Drillo ("...It was just by this chapel that I first met my Welsh grandfather John Jones when he was very old...") and from his reminiscences of the Great War, the view from his tent on Salisbury Plain.
  
  Our letters include several examples of the inscriptions which, later in his life, gave him most pleasure and less anxiety to complete, serving to 'combine (or bridge between) painting and poetry...' (Dilworth, p.284). He enjoyed the placing of the letters and the use of Welsh, Latin or Greek texts which allowed the piece to be seen rather than read. A particularly fine piece of thirteen lines included within a letter of December 1959 in biro and coloured inks begins 'Gwedia Dros Cymru' and is written to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the last Welsh-born Prince of Wales, a date he often commemorates with her. Jones, however, is not happy with it ("it really is a bad bit of lettering") and asks her to "forgive it's aesthetic inadequacy"; another, comprising two lines of Latin and Welsh in yellow and green inks begins 'Veni Sanctificator', the first line of a prayer in the Latin mass.
  
  Valerie Wynne-Williams had a successful career as a radio and television broadcaster, model and actress. An ardent Welsh Nationalist, she was instrumental in promoting the establishment of a Welsh-language TV channel in Wales and was elected as the Plaid Cymru candidate for Barry. It came as a surprise to Jones to read in the Radio Times that she had also been a champion hurdler in her youth before recalling "...I shall always remember your leaping up the stairs with the lightness of a deer, a hydd – one of the few animals names I know in Welsh without thinking hard...".
  
  The correspondence has been in Valerie Wynne-Williams' possession until now, and was made available to Thomas Dilworth for use in his recent biography. They are not published, however, in René Hague's collected letters. Her letters to David Jones are held in the National Library of Wales (ref. CT1/11).