Whitechapel Boy

To mark the centenary of the first world war, Sheffield University Bookshop had prepared a special counter exhibiting books by the writers. The poets were represented by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas. There was also a pile of Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Erich Remarque’s German classic All Quiet on the Western Front. I asked the manager for Rosenberg’s poems. ‘Who?’, he answered. I repeated my request. ‘I shall have to look him up – I don’t think that we’ve got one. Was he English?’

Even his name is enough for many English readers to doubt his Englishness, in today’s cosmopolitan England too. The son of Lithuanian Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression, Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890. His family moved in 1897 to Cable Street, Stepney in London’s East End, where Isaac began primary school at St Paul’s, Wellclose Square and continued his studies at Baker Street School from 1899 to 1904. His headteacher noticed his talent for art and arranged for him to attend special afternoon classes at Stepney Green Art School. It sounds like an ordinary enough East London schooling for a talented Jewish working-class boy, who, on leaving school, became an apprentice for a Fleet Street engraver’s and was, as he puts it in his early poem ‘Fleet Street’ fully exposed to the ‘shrieking vortex’ ¹ of the City of London.

Sassoon, in his moving introductory commendation to Rosenberg’s 1937 Collected Works asserted that ‘behind his poetry there is a racial quality – biblical and prophetic. Scriptural and sculptural are the epithets I would apply to him.’ ² Perhaps this is why Rosenberg’s poems, unlike those of Owen and Sassoon, have often been seen as ‘difficult’ and less amenable to quick understanding than those of other poets who wrote from the torment of the first world war. That is partially because Rosenberg was never simply or categorically a ‘War Poet’. He wrote much before and even during the horror of the trenches that went beyond the experience of war. In the last few months of his life, despite its overwhelming agony, he was writing poetry and verse drama of a mythopoeic form, using Hebraic tradition and narrative that were deeply ingrained in his culture. For Rosenberg, his experience of war was a necessary phase, a cataclysmic part of a ‘plan terrific’, ³ a cycle of poetic creation, one that he must endure and fully internalise before transforming it to poetry at a later stage. ‘I am determined that this war’, he wrote from the trenches in autumn 1916, ‘with all its powers of devastation, shall not master my poeting. I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the extraordinary conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.’ ⁴

Unlike officers Sassoon and Owen, Rosenberg was a working-class private soldier in the ranks and entirely subject to the brutal and often racist authoritarianism and contempt of military life. He joined the army neither for patriotic reasons nor through the draft – but because he had no money and needed the army’s separation allowance to provide some meagre income for his mother. He was physically frail with weak lungs – ‘damp and exposure is whispering to my old friend consumption’ – and his very small stature meant that ‘the only regiment my build allowed’ ⁵ was the Suffolk Bantams. During his training at Bury St Edmunds he discovered that ‘this militarism is terrorism to be sure’ ⁶ and suffered the ‘brutal militaristic bullying meanness’ ⁷ with its unremitting pressure. ‘Believe me’, he wrote in March 1916 to the poet Lascelles Abercrombie, ‘The army is the most detestable invention on this earth and nobody but a private in the army knows what it is to be a slave.’ ⁸ He saw neither glory nor camaraderie in war: ‘I despise war and hate war’, ⁹ he wrote in 1914 when he heard, at his sister’s house in Cape Town, of its outbreak in Europe. By 1916, when he was training in Hampshire, he wrote that he was hearing talk of mutiny every day. ‘One regiment close by did break out’, he recorded, ‘and some men got bayoneted.’ ¹⁰

His working-class origins circumscribed his experience as an artist and poet. He hated his work in engraving which made his mind ‘so cramped and dulled and fevered’ and complained, ‘I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without hope and almost desire of deliverance, and the days of youth go by’. ¹¹ Yet he rarely wrote directly of the urban East London world of Stepney and Whitechapel where he spent most of his formative years. His early poems evoked pastoral and pre-Raphaelite images of the countryside that in his real, day-to-day life he rarely imbibed, unless it was walks among the trees of Victoria Park, or Hampstead where he lived for a while or as far east as Epping Forest on the fringes of London, where he would sometimes go to paint. ‘So shut in are our lives’, he wrote in ‘The Poet’, ¹² yet explicit images of brick, concrete and tenements were not common in his poetry, and only rarely did he write about the darkness of East London or the struggles of its people. An exception is ‘A Ballad of Whitechapel’, telling of an encounter with a young woman prostitute, her parents sick and ‘grim hovering in her home’ and ‘her wasting brother in a cold bleak room’. ¹³ But for Rosenberg it was ‘a vain belief that art and life go hand in hand’. ¹⁴ The imagery of his pre-war poems was more often the antithesis of the living world he knew all around him, and his life of colours often came streaming from the other world of his paint box:

Violet is the maddest colour I know

And opal is the colour of dreams,

But a girl is the colour of snow

The violet-like noon haze she seems

And of opal the lights on her brow. ¹⁵

Nothing could be more starkly different from the infernal images of hellish murk and malodorous darkness of the trenches he was to live, sleep, fight and write within just a few years later when he declared:

Iron are our lives

Molten right through our youth. ¹⁶

Then, suddenly, iron becomes the dominant element: crushing, murderous, omnipresent.

* * *

Racism and anti-Semitism were always an underlay of the poet’s life. Three years after his family arrived in East London and moved into 47 Cable Street in the St George-in-the-East neighbourhood in 1897, the ex-Indian Army officer and founder of the proto-fascist British Brothers’ League, Major William Evans-Gordon, was elected as the new Member of Parliament for Stepney. ‘There is hardly an Englishman in this room who does not live under the constant danger of being driven from his home’, he declared at a public meeting, ‘pushed out into the streets, not by the natural increase of our own population, but by the off-scum of Europe.’ ¹⁷ As for St George-in-the-East, General Charles Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had written that it was the poorest and ‘most desolate’ district of the East End and it had ‘stagnated with a squalor peculiar to itself’. ¹⁸ In March 1901 the Eastern Post described how a Jewish family new to the area, with a cart full of furniture, arrived in nearby Cornwall Street, ready to move into a vacant house. The street-dwellers charged at the van, overturned it and smashed to pieces all the furniture it was carrying. They also broke the windows of the house that the family had arranged to occupy, its members ran from the scene with their screaming never-to-be neighbours in hot pursuit, eventually managing to escape minus virtually all their possessions. Such events were not uncommon in the neighbourhood where the Rosenbergs found their first London home.

The prevailing hostility to Jews was, according to Rosenberg’s closest friend Joseph Leftwich, made less pernicious to local Jewish families by their close and communal kinship and solidarity. When I interviewed him in 1975, Leftwich remembered: ‘We felt little of the racism. Our life was mostly centred around our own families and our own people.’ ¹⁹ But beyond such local mutual protection was the build-up to the passage of the Aliens Act of 1905, which set a significant precedent for all subsequent immigration laws in Britain and raised a tide of hatred against the Jewish arrivants. Rosenberg later was to declare from the trenches in his poem ‘The Jew’:

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,

With the same heaving blood

Keep tide to the moon of Moses.

Then why do they sneer at me? ²⁰

Rosenberg found that in the midst of the British Army, which he had voluntarily joined, racism was allied to a class hatred that made it even more loathsome, sometimes launched by young and hostile officers. In a letter to the novelist Sydney Schiff in December 1915 during his training, he wrote: ‘we have pups for officers – at least one – who seems to dislike me – and you know his position gives him power to make me feel it without me being able to resist’. ²¹ And earlier, in October, he had also written to Schiff: ‘Besides, my being a Jew makes it bad amongst these wretches. I am looking forward to having a bad time altogether.’ ²² To his longstanding friend, Winifreda Seaton, he wrote, almost desperately and futilely in Spring 1916: ‘How ridiculous, idiotic and meaningless the Army is, and its dreadful bullyisms, and what puny minds control it.’ ²³ And in his final letters of March 1918, he told how he had applied for a transfer to the Jewish Battalion of the British Army fighting in Mesopotamia. He was killed before he received an answer.

* * *

Yet despite, and perhaps partly provoked by this entanglement of hostility of race and class, not only were Rosenberg’s finest poems created and crafted in the most dire of conditions, but whole generations of Jewish intellectual and cultural genius in East London were conceived and developed from East London streets in profoundly unpromising circumstances. There was Leftwich, poet, diarist, scholar, translator and anthologist of Yiddish literature; David Bomberg and Mark Gertler, painters; John Rodker and Stephen Winsten, poets. With Rosenberg, poet and painter, these were the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, called so because their study and discussion venue and daily rendezvous was the oasis of Whitechapel Library, where they could meet until the library doors closed. After that, there was only one thing to do: ‘we walked the streets until one or two every morning,’ Leftwich told me in 1975. ‘Talking in the darkness or under the gaslight, talking all the time down to Aldgate and back again to Stepney Green.’ ²⁴ Or, as Rosenberg wrote in his poem ‘Imminence’:

Midnight struck, then one o’clock, two,

We still talked of what things we would do.

Down Hannibal Road, Jamaica Street,

Then back again with untiring feet,

We talked of our hopes and of our fears. ²⁵

These writers, artists, political activists and street intellectuals marked a profound moment in their people’s history and gave birth to a Jewish renaissance in East London which was to spill into the next half-century, through 1936 and the resistance to British fascism, the successful pre-war rent strikes against slum landlords and the election in 1945 of the Jewish Communist Phil Paratin as MP for Mile End. ²⁶ Such was the context of the blooming of East London Jewish dramatists like Bernard Kops and Arnold Wesker in the first two decades after the second world war, and the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ had been at the birth of all this ferment.

* * *

The conditions he endured in the trenches made painting impossible. ‘I sketched myself in a dugout, but lost it’, he wrote to Marsh in June 1916. His penultimate self portrait (‘in a steel helmet’) of many of his life was drawn in 1916 with black chalk and gouache on brown packing paper – all that he had for his art – so different from his Slade days and the romantic verse he wrote at the time. That was full of the shining, coloured, pre-Raphaelite images that he saw on his trips to Epping Forest, or those other-world images he imagined from his Stepney street in lines like this:

God looked at me clear through her eyes,

And when her fresh and sweet lips spake,

Through dawn-flushed gates of Paradise

Such silvern birds did wing and shake. ²⁷

Or from At Night of 1914:

To breathe on burning emerald grasses

And opalescent dews of the day ²⁸

There can be no greater contrast with what he saw around him and how it affected him, in his last trench letters written by the light of ‘an inch of candle’. He felt he was losing all sensitivity and ability to create as both poet and artist. Two months before his death he wrote to Miss Seaton of ‘the devastation this life seems to have made in my nature. It seems to have blunted me’, and to the poet Gordon Bottomley two weeks later he set down that ‘no drug could be more stupefying than our work … and this goes on like that old torture of water trickling drop by drop unendingly, on one’s helpnessless’. ²⁹

Leftwich was very clear that the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ were, as a group, deeply influenced as working-class men by socialist ideas and organisations. ‘We all belonged to the Young Socialist League’, he affirmed, ‘and we were very active in it. First there was the theory, there was Marxism, the criticism of capitalism. We heard this at open air speakers’ corners at almost every street corner.’ ³⁰ He talked about their membership of the Stepney and Whitechapel Branch of the Social Democratic Federation and Young Socialist League, the pamphlets they read by Socialist leaders like H. M. Hyndman and William Morris, and the letters he exchanged with the Socialist artist Walter Crane, who helped them organise a May Day march. He spoke of the 1906 strikes in East London tailoring workshops and the 1911−1912 mass meetings of East London dockers and transport workers. Rosenberg, he said, was quiet, taciturn – never a public speaker but that ‘at our meetings we discussed everything, but mostly literature. Isaac used to read his poetry to us, and his essays.’ Socialism came from him ‘unobtrusively’, said Leftwich: ‘Moving with us and around us, the socialist dream must also have been a part of him.’

And sometimes through the romantic haze of his early verse a cry for justice comes careering out. In his 1914 poem ‘Expression’ he writes about ‘the troubled throng’ and how,

words break out like smothered

fire through dense

And smouldering wrong. ³¹

In September 1912 he had written to his trusted ex-teacher Alice Wright (who had introduced him to the poetry of Blake and Shelley), lamenting ‘this pettifogging, mercantile, money-loving age’, which, he averred, was ‘deaf, dead as their idol gold, and dead as that to all higher ennobling influences’. ³² The very early ‘Dawn Behind Night’ of 1909 reads like an explicit socialist poem from the Women’s Dreadnought or Lansbury’s Labour Weekly, both published in East London, and shows the ideas within which Rosenberg and his friends moved. In the opening stanza he describes ‘the red streaming burden of wrong we have borne and still bear’, caused by ‘wealth with its soul-crushing scourges’ which only offers ‘bleakness assigned us for the fruits that we reap and they rob’. ³³ By the final stanza he is invoking the ‘heaven’ opposed to this oppression and the liberating ship of freedom ‘that will find us and free us and take us where its portals are opened wide’. While his 1912 poem ‘The Poet’ reflects his love of Shelley and characterises the poet as a ‘divided self’, seeking to expose ‘the story of earth’s wrongs’, carrying ‘the burden of alienated days’, while still singing his ‘dewy lays’ to freedom. ³⁴

Rosenberg, Lithuanian by origin, Bristolian by birth, was definitely a London poet. The urbanised, infernal world of ‘the smoke-throated, man-thundered street’ of ‘The Poet’ that he so rarely described in his youthful poems, except in ‘A Ballad of Whitechapel’ (where he lived, studied and walked) and ‘Fleet Street’ where he despondently began his working life, was relived so many more times worse, in his trench poems:

I watched the gleams

Of jagged warm lights on shrunk faces pale.

I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams

Or hell’s harsh lurid tale. ³⁵

This was neither the Somme in 1916 or Arras in 1918, but Whitechapel in 1910, and it was as if Rosenberg, reluctant to look into the East London reality for the imagery of his early poems, conserved it, remembered and adapted it for the stygian world of the unremitting figurative power of the trench testimony of his final poems like ‘Dead Man’s Dump’.

Rosenberg’s early devotion was to another London poet-painter who had walked the ‘chartered’ streets of their ‘great-clanging city’ a century before and who had recognised ‘in every sigh, in every tear’ ³⁶ of its working people, a kindred empathy to Rosenberg’s consciousness of ‘the sobbings of humanity’ all around him in East London’s streets. In a letter to Miss Seaton, sometime in 1912−1913, he wrote: ‘I hold Blake to be the highest artist England has ever had, as high above the next highest as this to the lowest.’ ³⁷ He wrote about seeing the Blakes at the Thameside Tate Gallery, and declared that ‘England has turned out one man second to none who has ever lived’, although it was Blake as a visual artist who most excited him.

Ironic perhaps, that a poet-artist whose essential ‘Englishness’ has been so doubted and misunderstood, had such an admiration for the poet-artist who wrote ‘Jerusalem’ and is frequently seen as the most archetypal of English poets. Blake envisioned his ‘Jerusalem’ in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, and in his final poem of March 1918 ‘Through These Pale Cold Days’, Rosenberg looked into the ‘dark faces’ and ‘wild eyes’ of his tortured trench mates, his ‘brothers dear’, and saw them looking to England or their ‘pools of Hebron’ and ‘Lebanon’s summer slope’ – a new, more generous, more just and humane England. ³⁸