Isaac Rosenberg Statue Appeal

A campaign has been launched by the Jewish East End Celebration Society to erect a commemorative statue of Isaac Rosenberg in Torrington Square, London. As the campaign states, 'The proximity to the two great learning centres in Rosenberg's life, Birkbeck and the Slade, makes this an even more fitting memorial to his genius.' It is astonishing that this would only be the fifth statue of a poet in London. To find out more, or make a donation, visit the campaign website here.

Shakespeare, the Somme, and the EU

The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death may be three years distant, but plans are already afoot to mark the occasion with appropriate fanfare. And what better way to celebrate his genius than to fasten him to a dying animal?

The European Parliament in Brussels has received a proposal to make Shakespeare the European laureate. According to Ewan Fernie, Chairman of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, Shakespeare remains 'intimately important in European culture, not just as somebody or something for Stratford and not just for self-congratulatory English patriotism'. Readers are supposed to consent to the tautology: of course English patriotism is self-congratulatory, which could never be said of that noble Eurocratic project expensively pursued by the political classes of Brussels. Fernie may acknowledge that 'Shakespeare cannot be definitively identified with any political or religious lobby', but it is precisely the political lobby comprising the EU, and not the whole of Europe, which Shakespeare would be obliged to represent. What has the Bard done to deserve such an honour?

These issues are, from certain angles, uncannily reminiscent of debates surrounding the tercentary of Shakespeare's death in 1916, a year in which events overtook long-planned celebrations. Israel Gollancz began his Book of Homage to Shakespeare by noting dolefully that 'For years past—as far back as 1904—many of us had been looking forward to the Shakespeare Tercentenary as the occasion for some fitting memorial to symbolize the intellectual fraternity of mankind in the universal homage accorded to the genius of the greatest Englishman... Then came the War; and the dream of the world's brotherhood to be demonstrated by its common and united commemoration of Shakespeare, with many another fond illusion, was rudely shattered.' Gollancz's Homage collected contributions from across the world, but restricted itself to friendly nations; the many important German Shakespeareans of the day were conspicuously absent. A partisan audience hailed Shakespeare's universal genius. As John Lee has argued in a fine essay, 'A Book of Homage to Shakespeare is, and is not, a war work; Shakespeare is seen both as a support to the war effort and a symbol of liberal values which see recourse to war as failure.'

It would be pleasing to believe that the EU will give careful thought to the question of whether Shakespeare is best treated as quintessentially English, or British, or European, or as a citizen of the world. But such lofty matters must come after a more basic requirement: if you want to pay homage to 'Shakespeare', make sure that, unlike François Hollande, you manage to choose the right one.

John Jarmain: Flowers in the Minefields

John Jarmain, novelist and poet, was killed in Normandy within a month of D-Day. He had already enjoyed several lucky escapes during the desert campaign and in Italy. That luck ran out on 26 June 1944, when he came under German mortar bombardment in the village of St Honorine and was fatally wounded by a piece of shrapnel as he dived for a slit-trench.

At that time, Jarmain was known as the author of one novel, Priddy Barrows. His poems were published posthumously in late 1945 and attracted positive notices, but soon disappeared except for the occasional sighting in anthologies of Second World War poetry.

Only now, with the publication of this superb new edition by the indefatigable James Crowden under his own Flagon Press imprint, can Jarmain's achievement be properly appreciated. The book collects Jarmain's poems along with essays by two of his military friends; Crowden also provides generous selections of photographs, and annotations of individual poems combine his own knowledge as an ex-officer with what has clearly been a forensic examination of Jarmain's life and works. If you want to know the angle at which a Stuka dives, James Crowden is the perfect editor, but he will also tell you where and when the poems were written and how they work as poems. Jarmain's work is enhanced by this attention: he was, undeniably, an uneven poet, but at his best he belonged among the finest of the War.

Seventy years ago, give or take a day or two, Jarmain settled down to write 'New Year, 1943' at El Agheila. In it, he described himself standing 'tall and alone', only a 'shadow in an empty place' but making his 'lonely sign':

Not to the year to come, the year that's gone,
Not to the unimpassioned fields of space,
But for myself, because the tale runs on;
Because in this notch of time on the small round earth,
Quite close across a little friendly sea
One like myself has watched and answers me.

The Erotic Poetry of the Bayonet

The French loved their bayonets. The image on the left is of the Rosalie, that most ostentatiously eroticised of all weapons. In a song of 1914, the Rosalie was celebrated as elegant in her tight-fitting sheath-dress. When she 'surged', terrible and naked, she pierced and excited the victim's body, and plunged herself into the roseate blood which inspired her name. She was, bizarrely, both lover (often described as the soldier's 'wife') and phallus, and her penetrative killings were also a rape. She made her soldier appear devastatingly sexual: according to another song, when he marched through villages the local girls would gladly pay an écu---and give up their virtue---to play with his bayonet.

English poetry of the War was a little more restrained. Siegfried Sassoon's 'The Kiss' surrenders to sadistic pleasure as it imagines the bayonet ('Sweet sister') entering the quailing body of the enemy, although Sassoon backs away slightly from the logic of his metaphor by describing the bayonet's thrust as a 'downward darting kiss'. An unpublished poem by Ivor Gurney, 'Joyeuse et Durandal', complains that his new bayonet is 'longer, certainly not stronger', and has 'no looks to speak of'; Gurney would prefer his old bayonet, 'Having caressed that fair blade with long fingers'. Similarly, Wilfred Owen in 'Arms and the Boy' invites the boy of the title to 'try along this bayonet-blade / How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood'; the bayonet is 'famishing for flesh'.  These examples may be plain enough in their fetishisation of the bayonet, but they remain understated compared with the extremities of the French tradition. I once made passing comments about the sexual content of 'The Kiss' in a talk on Sassoon's poetry, and was astonished to be approached afterwards by a disapproving audience member who assured me that 'Sometimes, Sigmund, a cigar is just a cigar'. Even the most wilfully determined anti-Freudian would struggle to deny the extreme sexual violence apparent in the French cult of the bayonet.

I am grateful to Hazel Hutchison for introducing me to an anglophone poem about the Rosalie. It is by the American poet Grace Fallow Norton (1876-1926), whose volume Roads (1916) deserves wider attention. 'The French Soldier and His Bayonet' is suitably disconcerting:

The French Soldier and His Bayonet

Farewell, my wife, farewell, Marie,
I am going with Rosalie.

You stand, you weep, you look at me—
But you know the rights of Rosalie,

And she calls, the mistress of men like me!
I come, my little Rosalie,

My white-lipped, silent Rosalie,
My thin and hungry Rosalie!

Strange you are to be heard by me.
But I keep my pledge, pale Rosalie!

On the long march you will cling to me
And I shall love you, Rosalie;

And soon you will leap and sing to me
And I shall prove you, Rosalie;

And you will laugh, laugh hungrily
And your lips grow red, my Rosalie;

And you will drink, drink deep with me.
My fearless flushed lithe Rosalie!

Farewell, O faithful far Marie,
I am content with Rosalie.

She is my love and my life to me.
And your lone and my land—my Rosalie!

Go mourn, go mourn in the aisle, Marie,
She lies at my side, red Rosalie!

Go mourn, go mourn and cry for me.
My cry when I die will be ‘Rosalie!’