Al-Joulan, Nayef Ali (1999) "Essenced to language": the margins of Isaac Rosenberg. PhD thesis ...

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Al-Joulan, Nayef Ali (1999) "Essenced to language": the margins of Isaac
Rosenberg. PhD thesis.

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'Essenced to Language': The Margins of Isaac Rosenberg
Nayef Ali Al-Joulan
BA (English Language and Literature)
1993 Yarmouk University, H. K. of Jordan
MA (English Literature and Criticism)
1996 Yarmouk University, H. K. of Jordan
A thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature,
Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, for the degree of
Ph.D.
August, 1999
11
Abstract
Isaac Rosenberg was more than just a war poet, and a general failure to take this into
consideration has contributed to the belated recognition of the distinctions of his
work. He started writing long before the Great War and, as a working-class London
Jew, he schooled himself to respond to issues of class, culture, art and poetry. It was
this combination of dependency and self-sufficiency which sustains his mature work;
and which gave him a sense of himself as an Anglo-Jewish poet.
In order to illuminate Rosenberg, Chapter One considers the conditions ofthe Jewish
community in the East End of London at the turn of the century, and examines the
writer's attitudes to the Zionism in vogue at the time. Chapter Two investigates the
striking echoes of Freudian psychology which feature in Rosenberg's work, and
which are related to the Jewish heritage of both writers. Chapter Three investigates
Rosenberg's feminine principle, suggesting that, as part of an Orphic vision of art, it
fused an allegorical 'female god', with seductive females familiar from Jewish
narratives, effectively combining English and Hebrew cultures.
Chapter Four traces Rosenberg's working-class literary heritage, and suggests that
his treatment of class differs from his Gentile contemporaries in that it parallels
Freudian and Marxist perceptions, while manifesting a modem Jewish insight.
Chapter Five details the role class and race played in the critical marginalising of
Rosenberg; special attention is given to the 'Georgian' literary ideals of the period,
against which Rosenberg reacted and which influenced his reputation and the
reception of his poetry. Chapter Six focuses on Rosenberg's debts of origin, and his
'anxiety of influence', uncovering his revision of his precursors, in light of a modem
urban, and Jewish perspective. The thesis concludes by examining Rosenberg's idea
of language as a vehicle for mental essence, suggesting that the roots for this
perception lie in the painter's mind, along with class and race associations.
111
© Copyrights to the author: Nayef Ali AI-Joulan, 1999.
IV
Table of Contents
Abstract ii
Table of Contents
IV
List of Abbreviations
V
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 8
Part I The Margins ofJ ewishness: A Jew in the East End
Chapter I The Partial Fate: Rosenberg and Zionism 18
Chapter II The Dead Past 56
- 'Past days are hieroglyphs' 56
- 'Moses must die to live in Christ' 74
Chapter III In the Underworld 92
-'The Old Prometheus' 92
-Daughters of War 107
Part II Literary Margins: Intellectuals, Artists and the Masses
Chapter IV The Working-class Jew and the Ordeal of Gentile Civility 132
-Rosenberg and the Working Class 132
-The Jewish Cockney: The Alter-ego ofModemity 153
Chapter V The Social Mission: Marginalising Isaac Rosenberg 175
- The Door Knocker 175
-Responsive Voices 192
Part III Language Essences: The Margins of Tradition and Talent
Chapter VI 'Essenced to Language' 220
-Blown Words 220
-The Influence of Anxiety 233
Bibliography 246
v
List of Abbreviations
CW: Isaac Rosenberg, The Collected Works OfI saac Rosenberg, ed. Ian Parsons
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1984)
CPW: Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works ofM atthew Arnold, ed. R. H.
Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960-77)
SE: The Standard Edition oft he Complete Psychological Works ofS igmund Freud,
24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74)
VI
Acknowledgements
lowe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Royal family of Jordan; the late
King Hussein, may God bless his memory, who awarded me a scholarship to
pursue my Ph.D., and H. M. King Abdullah Ibn AI-Hussein who continued the
sponsorship. I am grateful to H. R. H. Prince Gazi Ibn Mohammad, the
cultural secretary of H. M. the King.
My sincere appreciation goes to my supervisor Dr. David Pascoe who has
been unfailingly helpful in guiding me while conducting this thesis and who
unsparingly gave me of his time, kindness, invaluable assistance and
practical help.
I should also like to thank Mr. Sa'ad Sroor, former Chairman of the Jordanian
Lower House of Parliament; Dr. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Dr. Adam Piette, Mr.
Richard Cronin and Miss Ingrid Swanson, from the Department of English
Literature, University of Glasgow; and to Mohammed al-Dahmesh.
Special thanks to my uncle Nazzal AI-Joulan whose support and caring I will
never forget and to Dr. Nayel AI-Sharah, Dr. Fahmi Okour and his wife Dr.
Tatiana Okour.
My heartfelt gratitude is due to my father, mother, brothers and sisters whose
encouragement and patience kept me going when energy occasionally
flagged.
To all I say I am deeply indebted; however the inevitable mistakes are
exclusively my responsibility.
Vll
In memory of King Hussein,
to my country and my parents
Introduction: 'The Doomed Mouth'
Rosenberg is long dead, but his words are still capable of speaking for him:
None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
"Dead Man's Dump" (lines 27-9Y
The final verb on line 28 carries a peculiar energy, as a 'half used life', perhaps
borne on a stretcher, is allowed to 'pass' before the onlookers, who stand aside
respectfully; and then, while the preposition, 'out', clings tenaciously to the verb
across the enjambment, only to expire early in the following line, the life force
emerges from 'those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth' in the form of dying
breath; or, perhaps, haemorrhaging body fluid.
This is Rosenberg at his radical best; the lines draw attention to that "sense of
something hidden and felt to be there," (CW, 260) which he claimed existed in all
verse, and which the present study attempts to discover in his own writing. In that
same letter to Edward Marsh he also said: "poetry should be definite thought and
clear expression, however subtle; I don't think there should be any vagueness at all"
(CW, 260); and so where Owen writes of 'doomed youth', Rosenberg's gazing at
'nostrils' and 'mouth' here is far less abstract. It is, instead, 'essenced to language',
and the point at which words begin to fail: "where the words lose their interest as
words[,] and a living and beautiful idea remains." (CW, 198). For Rosenberg,
words, like the hapless infantry man, were expendable, serving only to detonate his
ideas: "Now when my things fail to be clear I am sure it is because of the luckless
choice of a word that would flash my idea plain as it is to my mind." (CW, 260).
Perhaps it because of such unique vision that Rosenberg still lives in the
margins of modem English poetry, his voice entombed in "the fragments of the
broken years." (CW, 277). As Joseph Cohen, Rosenberg's most persuasive
I Isaac Rosenberg, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Ian Parsons (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1979) repr. 1984, p. llO. Further references will be cited in parentheses and abbreviated as
Cw.
Introduction, N A. AI-Joulan 9
champion, puts it: "beginning with Eliot in 1920, critics have emphasised the
significance of his poetry without telling us precisely why we should read it and
bless his memory.,,2 T. S. Eliot had asked: "Let the public, however, ask itself why
it has never heard of the poems of T. E. Hulme or of Isaac Rosenberg ... let the
public also notice, in every case, who was the publisher. It will see, in the end, that
the disease of contemporary reviewing is only a form of radical malady of
journalism."3 It was hardly a recommendation; instead Rosenberg, appreciated, but
unread so soon after his death, had been recruited for Eliot's crusade against the
conservatism of contemporary publishers. Commenting fifteen years after the
publication of the 1922 volume of Rosenberg's poems, F. R. Leavis wrote that it was
"disquieting now to think that the volume did not establish Rosenberg's reputation.
Even Mr. Eliot, who stopped to call attention to Rosenberg, appears to have left him
with a passing mention.,,4 Yet despite this, in the remainder of his career, "Dr.
Leavis followed Mr. Eliot's example."s
The critical heritage of Rosenberg (such as it exists) incorporates many
incidental suggestions and claims, which this thesis will develop. Jon Silkin alleged
that: "it is uncertain how much Rosenberg's working-class origins and Jewishness
contributed to his comparative oblivion between the two wars, but it is not a factor to
be dismissed.,,6 Perhaps not; but, equally, echoing Eliot's earlier proposition, there
needs to be an awareness of the materialistic and elitist nature of the period's
criticism, publishing and reviewing, so clearly revealed in Rosenberg's work. In
"The Door Knocker", Rosenberg commented on the materialism that controlled
poets, particularly those belonging to the underprivileged classes; hence the poet
suffered the fact that "[P]ropaganda is a necessary evil." (CW, 280). In fact,
Rosenberg's many critical insights were overlooked in previous studies of his work,
2 Joseph Cohen, "Isaac Rosenberg: From Romantic to Classic", Tulane Studies in English, 10, 1960,
p.129.
3 T. S. Eliot, "A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry", Poetry Bookshop Chapbook, 1920.
4 F. R. Leavis, "The Recognition ofIsaac Rosenberg" in Scrutiny, vol. 1, no. 2 (1937). p. 229.
5 E. O. G. Davies, "Isaac Rosenberg", Unpublished Masters Thesis, Univ. of Nottingham, 1975, p.
207.
6 Jon Silkin, Out o/Battle: The Poetry o/the Great War (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987), pp. 273-74.