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Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure.
In this deeply contemplative book, Steven J. Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by “opening up” his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the “small mountain” of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life.
Rosenfelds Lives is a fascinating exploration of literary genius and aspiration and the paradoxical power of literature to elevate and to enslave. It illuminates the cultural and political tensions of post-war America, Jewish intellectual life of the era, and—most poignantly—the struggle at the heart of any writers life.
Review:
According to Hemingway, more writers fail from lack of character than from lack of talent. Certainly, Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-1956) — the boyhood pal of Saul Bellow and, for a time, his serious rival — was once thought to be a comer, the likely front-runner in the race to produce the Great Jewish American Novel. Like almost everyone with literary ambitions back in the 1940s and '50s,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Rosenfeld regularly turned out essays, reviews and provocative cultural think-pieces for Partisan Review, Commentary and the era's other intellectual magazines. Along the way, there were a couple of awards, including a Guggenheim. He even taught for a bit at the University of Minnesota, in New York and in his home town of Chicago. Gradually, however, and then increasingly, Rosenfeld started to talk more than publish, to launch into new projects and then abandon them, and to pour his soul — and best writing — into letters or notebooks. He had married young and at times felt burdened by his two children. Soon he and his vivacious wife began an "open" marriage. They drank, partied, quarreled and generally slummed about with a feckless bohemian crowd in 1950s Greenwich Village. Rosenfeld was just emerging from a long period of writer's block when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was 38. Those who knew Isaac Rosenfeld mourned, and Saul Bellow eventually memorialized him in an unpublished novel called "Charm and Death." Yet what had Rosenfeld really done with his life? There was a single novel, "Passage From Home" (1946), which his biographer, Steven J. Zipperstein, likens to early Philip Roth as a psychological portrait of "the making of a Jewish intellectual," and a handful of semi-autobiographical stories, and enough essays to make a posthumous volume titled "An Age of Enormity." That's pretty much it. In truth, Zipperstein shows, Rosenfeld simply didn't have the hunger that kept Bellow at his desk day after day. He just didn't work hard enough, preferring to coast along on charm and fading promise. From an early age, though, the man certainly could write. Zipperstein quotes from an unpublished sketch about a serious young intellectual of 13, who escapes from his family and life's complexities by — what else? — going to the library: "This trip to the library, necessitating an early breakfast, a clear knowledge of the subject to which he would confine his research and the necessary and important books that had dealt with it, a sharpened pencil in case his pen ran dry, a note book; all this had to be assembled without haste and yet without delay. The trip itself, on foot if the weather permitted, followed by a consultation of the card catalogue, the wait at the desk, and the explanations with (sic) the librarian, whenever it happened — and it did quite frequently — that the books were out. Then a seat at the right table, in relation to light, drafts, and other people using the library. This was an exhausting ritual, especially to one who took it quite seriously, as the student did." In photographs the young Rosenfeld looks chunky and amiable, with thick black specs and a sloppy, nonchalant air. At parties he was famous for reciting a kind of pastiche/parody — in Yiddish — of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This was thought to be hilarious, and as recently as 1999 poet Robert Pinsky named it "the finest poem by an American in the twentieth century." Pinsky must have been teasing because even as a joke the poem doesn't seem any good at all: "I grow old, I grow old/And my navel grows cold." Perhaps you need to have heard the author declaim it when both you and he were seriously drunk. Because Isaac Rosenfeld's life simply isn't all that long or interesting, Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford, uses the man's might-have-been career as a way of examining the place of failure in American literature. No doubt American writers — most famously, Scott Fitzgerald — are obsessed with this theme, because our whole society worships at the altar of the Bitch Goddess Success. For every Bellow there is a Rosenfeld, a Delmore Schwartz, a Wallace Markfield and a thousand other brilliant shipwrecked talents. As Zipperstein emphasizes, Rosenfeld gradually turned away from the "jungle morality" of his era's intellectual and political scene: "Its hardness, its calculation, its unremitting unkindness — these pushed Rosenfeld to define himself in opposition, and more and more he embraced categories (spirit, faith, transcendence) associated with theology, not politics." Early on, he defined the Holocaust as "modernity's central experience," and concluded that the camps, in Zipperstein's paraphrase, "demolished the prospect of belief in the power of culture as a redemptive force." Soon thereafter, Rosenfeld found in the psychology of Wilhelm Reich — who invented the "orgone box" and advocated a more open and affirming sexuality — a source for useful ideas as well as a philosophy of life. Reich, says Zipperstein, "espoused ... a science in which the achievement of total orgasm was the key to personal and societal health." Rosenfeld's fascination with sex and his Jewish heritage led to his most notorious essay and his best late story. Zipperstein writes that in "Adam and Eve on Delancey Street" (1949) Rosenfeld argued that "the food restrictions meted out to Adam and Eve were prompted by the desire to regulate sexual conduct. This preoccupation with sexual restriction permeates the Jewish consciousness, and the maintenance and multiplication of dietary restrictions in Judaism through the ages is infused with a never-articulated sexual repressiveness." Zipperstein compares the explosion that resulted when the piece was published in Commentary to the uproar in the Jewish community surrounding Philip Roth's early novels and Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." In his similarly powerful story about sex and intimacy, "King Solomon" (1954), Rosenfeld focuses, in Zipperstein's words, on "an aging monarch, a man not unlike the now kingly Bellow, someone who has published book after book but whose wisdom ... is fading." Its opening startles even now: "Every year, a certain number of girls. They come to him, lie down beside him, place their hand on his breast, and offer to become his slaves." Alas, the king finds himself incapable of feeling emotionally close to anyone. In the end, Solomon gives up women and instead goes to bed with a hot-water bottle. Will this sharp, often highly personal biography revive interest in Isaac Rosenfeld? Maybe for a while: Zipperstein's summaries and quotations do show that the man is worth reading, that he really could have been a contender. Still it's hard to disagree with Bellow's assessment of his old friend. As Zipperstein says, Bellow "remained convinced that Rosenfeld didn't take his talent seriously, that he wasted too much time on random sentiment, on friendships, on sex, on the sort of things that were, as Bellow saw them, best done once the writing day was over." The Muse is a harsh mistress. Reviewed by Michael Dirda, whose e-mail address is mdirda(at symbol)gmail.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University. His previous books include The Jews of Odessa, which received the Smilen Award, and Elusive Prophet, which received the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in California.
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