That Awkward Elfin: Isaac Rosenberg, Painter and Poet
Isaac Rosenberg (1890 - 1918) Self portrait in steel helmet Black chalk with traces of wash, white and yellow gouache on brown wrapping paper 1916 24 x 19.5 cm Purchased with the generous assistance of The Art Fund and the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and those supporters who wish to remain anonymous.
The Jewish poet Isaac Rosenberg is the least well known of the handful of great poets - Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas were the others - who not only enable us to feel the full, protracted horror of the First World War on our pulses, but whose work helped to define the very nature of war poetry itself. Unlike Sassoon and Owen, Rosenberg was an infantryman, and his poetry is an infantryman's poetry, choked with mud, misery, lice and rats. His poetry differed from that of his contemporaries in other ways too. He was a much more experimental poet than Owen, Sassoon and Thomas, much more in tune with the literary modernism which we tend to associate with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. It is stuttering, imagistic, wayward, and often unpredictable. There is less of the truly great work too - to read through his Collected Poems today is to wade through a lot of derivative stuff which harks back to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others - until, all of a sudden, we reach the pure gold of his trench poetry. As with Owen, misery matured him at great speed.
Some writers are not well served by their biographers. To draw attention to the tittle-tattle of their lives serves to distract us from the quality of the writing. This is not the case with Isaac Rosenberg. We know much about Sassoon, Brooke, Owen and Thomas - but how much do we really know about Rosenberg? By comparison, precious little. Now, thanks to a new biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson entitled The Making of a War Poet, which sets his poetry within the context of his tragically brief life - Rosenberg was killed in action on the Western Front at the age of 27 - we can learn much more.
When Peter Ackroyd published his biography of T.S. Eliot, it was all the poorer for the fact that the biographer was refused permission to quote from the works. There is no such ban on Jean Moorcroft Wilson, and her book is all the richer and more comprehensible for that fact. It is more than a quarter of a century since an authoritative biography of Rosenberg was published. Much new material about his life has come to light since then. What is more, the fact that his own writings are out of copyright means that Jean Moorcroft Wilson can give us a biography which relates the life intimately to the great poems of his last year by quoting from them, in extenso.
Rosenberg was different from three of those great poets mentioned above on several counts. He was of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, and his father was a pedlar. The family lived a peripatetic life, a part of which was spent in straitened circumstances in Whitechapel, East London. Isaac, a slight, short, solemn, awkward boy of elfin-like appearance, left school at the age of fourteen to become apprenticed to an engraver. It was work whose arduousness and long hours he detested, though to an extent it was also in line with his early ambitions to become a painter. That ambition was gradually supplanted by another - to succeed as a poet.
Isaac Rosenberg in
Uniform, 1917 Bernard Wynick
His wartime experiences in France were quite unlike those of Owen and Sassoon. Rosenberg served as a private, and to be a private was a world of privilege away from that of the commissioned officer. To be a private was often to experience little but mud, lice and days of near starvation. But Rosenberg's character was quite unlike that of the other poets too. He lacked refinement of any kind. He never lost his Cockney accent. He was proud, irascible and self-absorbed. He could be both shy and maddeningly self-assured. He suffered fools, and adverse criticism of his work, very badly. In short, he was a square peg in a round hole.
Portrait of Sonia Rodker (1915) by Isaac Rosenberg image courtesy the Ben Uri Gallery
Was Rosenberg right to
abandon painting in favour of poetry? Undoubtedly. Although Rosenberg was
trained at the Slade, his painting and drawing lack the daring of his greatest
poetry. His poetry is experimental, disjunctive and deeply unconventional. Its
subject matter is unusual by any one's standards - two of his greatest poems
are about rats and lice.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, in the final third of her biography, brilliantly evokes this period of his life. She illustrates, very judiciously, how he fought to achieve what he achieved against the most terrible of odds, and what were the extraordinary results of his endeavours. The earlier parts of the biography feel slack and somewhat workaday by comparison. For all that, this book is an important glimpse into the creative tensions of an often near unbearable life.
The fact that Rosenberg was also a very accomplished artist is still relatively little known. A recent exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery in north London entitled 'Whitechapel at War, Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle' incorporated the first major exhibition of his art in almost half a century - the last, curated by the poet Jon Silkin, was at Leeds University in 1959 - and, bringing together paintings, prints, photographs, books of poems, letters and much else, it set Rosenberg's life within the context of Jewish Whitechapel at the turn of the twentieth century.
What was the story of Rosenberg's life as a painter? His childhood ambitions lay in the direction of art, not literature. After he left school at the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to an engraver; he then studied at the Slade alongside the likes of David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer.
The first gallery brought together a wider selection of his self-portraits than had ever been shown together before. The unfolding story was instructive. It demonstrated how he developed from a kind of rigid academicism to a much freer use of colour, brush stroke and form. Yet he never went very far in the direction of experiment - and certainly never as far as his Slade friend, David Bomberg, who also served as an infantryman. The artwork in the show which inclined most towards modernism was a charcoal drawing with monochrome wash called 'Hark, Hark the Lark', in which a group of human figures was depicted sparely, and with an almost geometric severity.
Rosenberg's own face clearly fascinated him - it is small and elf-like; the jaw is angular; the pose, often caught side on, suggests a strange mixture of jaunty pride, and great reticence. Some of the best pieces in the show were pencil drawings - of his mother, for example, whose face seems to bespeak fortitude and a rock-like dependability. His father on the other hand, who was an itinerant pedlar, looked as if he might be prone to fanciful anxiety.
Rosenberg's work was shown alongside drawings and paintings by his contemporaries - there were two particularly fine pencil studies for Mark Gertler's 'The Merry Go Round' (1916), which is the single finest picture to have emerged from that war. These were profile studies of some of those women who rode, stiff-backed, round and round that ever turning merry-go-round, as if trapped forever. The look - as in the painting itself, which belongs to Tate Britain's collection - was a mixture of terror and a strange kind of numbed indomitability. They would surely survive - but at what price?
Rosenberg himself did not survive. Many of those last poems were written on scraps of paper, and then pieced together during precious minutes of freedom. Those were his darkest days. His paintings, on the other hand, seem quite tamely ambitious by comparison. That career as a painter was finally abandoned so that he could respond to more urgent promptings, of a poetic kind.