April 23, 2009
New book on Isaac Rosenfeld
A new book on Isaac Rosenfeld, Steven J. Zipperstein’s “Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing,” suggests that the late writer may have accomplished more than what the critics have given him credit for.
Yes, he died at the age of 38, having written just one critically acclaimed novel, “Passage from Home,” and never reached the great heights of his buddy, Saul Bellow. But he still did a lot of noteworthy things in his 38 years on this earth.
At least, that’s what Saul Rosenberg says in his review of the book for the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Zipperstein’s account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness — nor did he entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth would have it.
As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe faulted (not unfairly) “Passage From Home” for relying, weakly, more on rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off from early promise are in fact “a marvel of output,” as Mark Schechner has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should
be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would later lament his “failure.”
Even so, the question remains: why didn’t Rosenfeld produce more during his lifetime? Writing a review of “Rosenfeld’s Lives,” in the Forward, Glenn C. Altschuler takes us through some of the reasons why:
Was it his bohemian proclivity to live in the moment at the expense of all that is lasting? Was it his skeptical stance toward rationalism and science, which rendered his work abstract, vague and metaphysical? Was it his attachment to the wacky sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich?
Zipperstein isn’t all that certain. In his journal, Rosenfeld addressed his inadequacies: his failures as a husband and father; his intractable childhood phobias; his fears of homosexuality — and the toll they took on his writing. And yet, Zipperstein acknowledges, it’s by no means clear “how truthful, or better said, how truthfully characteristic journal entries are.” As vessels of angst, discontent, depression and self-loathing, journals, Cynthia Ozick has observed, “are notoriously fickle, subject to the torque of mutable feeling, while power flourishes elsewhere.”
So, we may never know why but Zimmerman receives kudos from Rosenberg for his handling of Rosenfeld’s life in this first full biography of the writer:
Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of Rosenfeld’s life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of Rosenfeld’s place in literary history too insistently, perhaps recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his death, half again as long as he lived.
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