Freaks of chance
Francis King
Isaac Rosenberg, Poet and Painter Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Woolf £4.75) Isaac Rosenberg: The Half Used Life Jean Liddiard (Gollancz £6.00) When my brother-in-law John Rosenberg, himself a writer, was once introduced to one of our foremost women novelists at a party, she exclaimed: "Oh, I've always wanted to meet you! I love your poetry!" It is unlikely that she would have made a similar mistake to Jocelyn Brooke or Frank Owen. Yet, with the passing of time, it is slowly becoming apparent that Isaac Rosenberg was a better poet than Rupert Brooke and potentially as good a poet as Wilfred Owen. His true stature, like that of his painter friend David Bomberg, has taken a long time to be adequately acknowledged because firstly, both men were distanced by their Jewishness and their early poverty from the English tradition and, secondly, because each was essentially an innovator. Now, by one of those publishing freaks of chance, two lives of Rosenberg, one by Jean Moorcroft Wilson and the other by Jean Liddiard, have appeared in the same week.
Miss Liddiard subtitles her book 'The Half Used Life' a quotation from that beautiful poem 'Break of Day in the Trenches':
None saw their spirits shadow shake the grass
Or stood aside for their half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth . . .
But if Rosenberg's life was half used, the fraction of it that both these biographers have beep able to uncover is even smaller. This is not their fault. Many of the people who might have been able to give them information Ruth Gollancz, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, John Rodker, Edward Marsh are dead; Rosenberg spilled little of himself into letters or poems; and he was, in any case, a man whose life, unlike Gertler's, was largely an inner one, with no known love affairs, no particularly close friendships and no dramatic happenings until he was killed cruellest of April Fool' jokes on April 1, 1918, having survived almost two years of war despite fragile health and the enormous toll of lives.
Because of this paucity of material, both biographers resort to a great deal of "It is not difficult to imagine Rosenberg's reaction. "Almost certainly it was here that . . .," "It is more than likely that Rosenberg . . .," and things of that kind. Neither biographer is above padding out the narrative with, say, a disquisition on Henry Tonks (whom Rosenberg certainly admired as a teacher but with whom he had no personal relationship) on Imagism (Rosenberg met T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound but was never a member of the movement) or on Impressionism and POst-Impressionism. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, so far from two biographies being needed, adequate justice could have been done with a single long essay.
Miss Liddiard is the better of the two on the early years. She has more to say about the family origins in Western Russia; about what it meant to be a poor immigrant Jewish family in Stepney, struggling against poverty, barriers of class and language and anti-semitism; about Barnard Rosenberg's work as a pedlar (an occupation regarded in those days as superior to employment in a factory) and about Anna Rosenberg's role as the pivot of a close-knit family. After that I prefer Dr Wilson, who is easier to read both because her style is less congested and because she orders her material with more skill. Both women, inevitably, quote from the same letters and other sources, pecking like famished hens at the few scraps available to them.
From both books emerges with a vividness that does credit to them a picture of a pathetic, sometimes absurd, yet oddly dignified figure. Rosenberg was the only outsider and ranker among the more important poets of the First World War; and when he joined up, to be admitted to the Bantam Battalion, because of his diminutive stature, it was not in Brooke's mood of "Now God be"thanked that matched us with this hour" but out of financial desperation. In the past he had survived through the sales of paintings to people like Sidney Schiff ('Stephen Hudson', novelist and lamentable translator of Proust) and Edward Marsh and on subsidies from the Jewish Educational Aid Society and Sonia Cohen a patroness who would send her secretary to inspect Rosenberg's latest work to confirm that he was still worthy of her aid. But with the outbreak of war these sources of income dwindled. As a soldier, Rosenberg could be sure that his mother would receive a separation allowance of 16/6 per week; and this consideration outweighed the distaste for war of an alien with no deep-rooted attachment to Britain and a family tradition of Tolstoyan pacifism. Had he had the charm and pertinacity of Gertler and the influential circle of friends that they won him, he might well have spent the war painting at Garsington as a conscientious objector instead of scribbling poems on scraps of paper between fatigues, drilling and cowering from shell-fire.
Both books bring out yet again the goodness of Edward Marsh. Midwife to the Georgian • poets, he had little sympathy with Rosenberg's poetry, which was so unlike theirs. The Georgians were limpid and mellifluous with the attitude of well-to-do weekenders to the beauties of the countryside. Rosenberg's verse must have sounded disagreeably rebarbative in his ears; and he was often to complain of the "obscurity" arising from Rosenberg's tendency to use polymorphic clusters of images. But though serving that most exacting and egotistical of politicians, Winston Churchill, and though stricken by the death of his beloved Brooke, Marsh nonetheless found time to intervene with the War Office on Rosenberg's behalf on a number of occasions.
It is doubtful if Rosenberg would ever have achieved any great distinction as an artist many of his surviving paintings look as if they had been executed in a mixture of Brown Windsor soup and glue and he vids clearly right to believe in himself more as a poet. His most powerful, though not invariably his best integrated poems are his war ones. Jotted down line by line or phrase by phrase at odd momentS "You can only, when the ideas come hot, sieze (sic) them with the skin in tatters raw, crude, in some parts beautiful in others monstrous" they often lack development and architectural unity. But his very clumsiness with rhythm, rhyme and language and the consequent tension generated by the struggle to overcome this clumsiness seem merely to result in a stronger surge of power after the initial check. "The swift iron burning bee" (a bullet); "all a red brick moving glint" (soldiers' necks in the sunlight); "the same old druid Time as ever": such phrases stick in the mind as only the finest poetry is able to do.
Dr Wilson's book has the advantage of containing three times as many illustrations as Miss Liddiard's and a costing £1.25 less. On the other hand it has no bibliography and no checklist of the pictures, whereas Miss Liddiard provides both. Strangely, though both women mention the threat of tuberculosis that drove Rosenberg to South Africa, neither refers to the rumoured epilepsy.
Francis King's latest novel, The Needle, is to be published later this year.
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