Steven J. Zipperstein

Isaac Rosenfeld’s Dybbuk and Rethinking Literary Biography

There were evenings in Barrow Street, while I played the violin part in Bach’s B-minor to Isaac’s flute, when his musical sense of style would make me gasp. It was as exquisite as his handwriting. Isaac always meant to perform well. The flute dominates the B-minor Suite, and Isaac certainly came in strong. The sound of these notes reverberating off Isaac’s breath like water drops were of a silvery intensity. It seemed to me that Isaac expressed himself in perfection at last, wrote his signature on the air.

–Alfred Kazin, New York Jew

Elegiac in tone, the passage is meant, as I see it, to consign Isaac Rosenfeld to the dustbin. In Alfred Kazin’s contentious, competitive literary milieu, to write one’s "signature on the air" was, in effect, to disappear. And Rosenfeld, who succumbed to a fatal heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, in 1956, has had his death depicted often–and often by some of his closest friends–as all-but-inevitable, as the severe, but also curiously just price for failing to live up to one’s potential. Death, in short, as the ultimate price for writer’s block.

Isaac Rosenfeld’s death fascinated, even obsessed his contemporaries in the circle that came to be known as the New York intellectuals. The film, "Bye, Bye Braverman" was built around the tragedy. It was inspired, in turn, by a novel about the day of Rosenfeld’s death written by Wallace Markfield, To an Early Grave. Saul Bellow would later capture Rosenfeld–as King Dahfu, a tragic hero who dies–in Henderson and the Rain King where the monarch was modeled, as Bellow has admitted, after his lifelong friend. Early drafts of Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift were inspired as much by Rosenfeld as by Delmore Schwartz; the novel’s title recalls the expansive neighborhood park where Rosenfeld and Bellow spent so much time together as teenagers. Humboldt’s Gift is, too, of course, a tale of promise, of intellectual waste, dissipation, and premature death.

Rosenfeld, a writer of great promise and stature in the 1940s and early ’50s, was the author of the novel, Passage From Home (1946), and many essays and short stories. At his height, he was seen–as Irving Howe wrote in his memoir, A Margin of Hope–as the "golden boy" of New York’s fiercely ambitious literary intelligentsia. Eager to launch the next great American novelist, leading figures in this circle predicted it might well be Rosenfeld. According to Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv, Rosenfeld in his prime was a more expansive writer than Delmore Schwartz, and more erudite than Bellow. "There was," writes Howe, "an air of yeshiva purity about Isaac that made one hope wildly for his future." Rosenfeld, not Bellow, won a Partisan Review literary contest. ("We were all entering" it, admitted one of his competitors.) He was selected as an assistant literary editor of The New Republic, and, almost immediately after arriving in New York as a philosophy graduate student at NYU, in 1941, he started publishing in the best national intellectual magazines. Bellow, still in Chicago at the time, remembers thinking that Rosenfeld had left him behind in the dust. After his death, five (still) unpublished novels were found among his papers.

In retrospect, it is the distance between promise and execution that tends to be remembered about him. James Atlas writes in his recent biography of Bellow that Rosenfeld "had always represented [for him] the obverse of Bellow’s startling rise to fame. The obscurity that was Rosenfeld’s reward seemed a far more plausible outcome of literary aspiration than winning the Nobel Prize and just as dramatically compelling."

So much was expected of Rosenfeld. When he was only fourteen, Bellow informed friends at Chicago’s Tuley high school that Rosenfeld was the only boy in the city to have read all of Immanuel Kant. Bellow later captured this amazement with the young Rosenfeld: "In short pants, he was a junior Immanuel Kant. Musical (like Frederick the Great or the Ezterhazys), witty (like Voltaire), a sentimental radical (like Rousseau), bereft of gods (like Nietzsche). . .Not only did he study Hume. . . .but he discovered Dada and Surrealism as his voice was changing."

Why, then, in his late twenties, did he write a book about the most predictable of themes in American Jewish literature–the uneasy relations between a Jewish son and his father? He seemed to wander about too much, all-too-visibly, vocally, openly–between married and single life, between jobs, between many, sometimes patently unsuccessful, forms of writing. And he wondered at times, in his copious journals, at least, whether what seemed to be his obsessive womanizing might have been prompted by an inclination–one which he found terrifying–to wander beyond heterosexuality, too.

So, in the memoirs of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, William Phillips, and others, Rosenfeld was made into (at best) a poignant, (at worst) a ridiculous failure. Kazin, once again in his memoir New York Jew: "As even the [Greenwich] Village desperados noticed, Isaac was a ‘failure.’ Precocious in everything and understandably worn out, he died at thirty-eight. Even his dying would be a kind of failure."

"Everyone knows the great Dr. Johnson," writes British biographer Richard Holmes at the opening of his splendid biography of a biography, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage,

And the scholars seem to know him in the minutest detail; almost no one knows anything definite about the obscure, minor poet Richard Savage. But Johnson and Savage were friends–intimate friends–in London for about two years in the 1730s. In those dark days in the city, dark for both of them in many senses, the position was almost exactly reversed. Johnson was then unknown, and Savage was notorious. Thereby hangs a small, but haunting mystery of biography.

Isaac Rosenfeld, unlike Richard Savage, was never notorious; still what I’ve learned of his life reveals something comparable, at least in terms of the awful risks and, of course, the occasional, lavish prizes of a life spent with literature. It, too, is a tale replete with reminders of life’s many contingencies. An examination of his life highlights the unpredictable vagaries of literary reputation, the fluid, critical intersections between an individual life and the various settings in which it is lived. It examines the vagaries of influence, of literary isolation, and also those intrusions so crucial–and also, at times, so devastating–to one’s work as an intellectual.

Since discovering Rosenfeld, I’ve asked myself often that question raised by so many about the nature of biographical work, but put so well in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot:

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writers’ personality; yet still we disobediently pursue. The image, the face, the signature; the ninety-three percent copper statue and the Nadar photograph; the scrap of clothing and the lock of hair. What makes us randy for relics? Don’t we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died, his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling the hair which she claimed to have cut from the writer’s head forty years earlier. The believers, the pursuers bought enough of it to stuff a sofa.

I return later to this question, but a few words about it now. Recently, when then—Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky announced his project to record (in anticipation of the new millennium) the favorite poems written in the last hundred years of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans, he declared, in an interview in the New York Times, that his own personal favorite was Saul Bellow’s Yiddish translation of T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This loose, ironic translation–more, in truth, an exercise in cultural transmutation–is truly wonderful. The text of it has never been published in full, but here is a sample in both Yiddish and English translation. First, Eliot’s poem in its original form:

Let us go, then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats. . . .
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

Nu-zhe, kum-she, ikh un du
Ven der ovnt shteyt unter dem himl
Vi a leymener goylem oyf tishebov.
Vi di bord bay dem rov. . . .
Lomir oyfefnen di tir.
In tsimer ve di vayber senen
Redt men fun Karl Marx un Lenin

Nu, let us go, you and I
When the evening stands beneath the sky
Like a clay golem on Tisha b’Av
Let us go, through streets that twist
Like a rabbi’s beard. . . .
Let me open the door
in the room where the wives are
talking of Marx and Lenin.

"A startling x ray of [Eliot’s] hallowed bones, which brings Anglo-Saxons and Jews together in a surrealistic Yiddish unity, a masterpiece of irreverence." These last words are, indeed, Bellow commenting, as it happens, on the Prufrock translation produced not by him, as Bellow has always acknowledged, but by his dear friend Isaac Rosenfeld. So, the poem designated, albeit tentatively, by the former U.S. Poet Laureate as the finest written by an American in this century is the work of a writer who is so distant from canonized memory that Pinsky himself can’t manage to identify him as the author of his own work. "Thereby," as Holmes writes, "hangs a small but haunting mystery of biography."

Most useful biographies are shaped, in some fashion, by metaphors–everyday life is simply too messy, too full, too unmediated by actuality, if you will, to be stuffed into a book. It just doesn’t fit. And so many biographies since Boswell have been built, at least in their initial moments, around the unsettling of older, supposedly tired, over-used, at least less-than-useful metaphors.

Here is an example of posthumous mystification of Rosenfeld in terms of the critical reactions to his novel Passage From Home. The book’s apparent lack of success, its tepid reception later was said to have foreshadowed the remainder of his life. A perusal of its reviews, however, reveals that, on the whole, it was vigorously celebrated at the time of its release–by many of the same critics who would later disparage it as a minor work.

Praise came from rather surprising quarters. The Nation’s normally acerbic reviewer, Diana Trilling, was especially suspicious of Jewish literature when written by an American Jew with ample opportunity, as she saw it, to embrace a larger, more interesting world. True, Diana Trilling’s suspicions on this score were showcased in her review of Rosenfeld’s Passage From Home, where she proposed that despite the book’s "start as a Jewish genre novel," it "develops into a novel of profound universal meanings." (Note the comparison between the small, cloistered world of the Jews, and the large, expansive world beyond it.) Yet Trilling compares Rosenfeld’s sensibility to that of Henry James–a sure sign of literary transcendence: "Its high estimation of the young mind and spirit is. . .not the only regard in which Passage From Home proposes a comparison with James. In its preoccupation with the moral nature of the early educative process, Mr. Rosenfeld’s novel recalls Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and The Pupil." The novel achieves, as Trilling puts it, a full, persuasive exploration of what it meant to take "life at so high a moral pitch."

Rosenfeld’s book so overwhelmed the then-very-young Irving Howe that, on his first reading, he was inspired to write both a fulsome review and an autobiographical essay. The latter piece was, at one and the same time, an extended reflection on the novel and a candid, painful analysis of his own relationship with his father. He published both in Commentary–his first articles in a national magazine. Howe then insisted that the novel’s portrait of relations between a father and a son were built around a "helpless, tragic conflict . . .a true and acute perception, the very stuff of which literature is made." Yet, in his memoir A Margin of Hope written some forty years later, he sums up his impressions of the book quite differently: "Little remains of his flawed, noble spirit. A minor first novel, some fine critical miniatures, and a legend of charm and waste." "At thirty-eight," he adds, Rosenfeld "died in lonely sloth."

"Lonely sloth" is the most frequently utilized description for Rosenfeld; the term recurs, in various guises. Rosenfeld died, it is said often, alone and in a dreadful room–the most palpable signs of a misspent life. Rosenfeld himself spoke often of his various, rented rooms. He described the isolation of his last few years, in particular–an isolation all the more jarring because for so much of his life he was surrounded by lively, adoring friends, by family, by lovers, by worshipful students, by a small, but eager coterie of disciples. "It’s awful being alone in Chicago," he writes to his friends Oscar and Ruth Tarcov, half a year before his death, "I’ve had enough of living in exile in rooming houses, I want to be back where my life is."

Much of the work he produced even in his best, most fertile years was built around lonely men living in rooming houses. The last short story he wrote before his death described a King Solomon contemplating his demise in a place that looked, smelled, and sounded much like a boarding house. The king here is disarmingly sloppy, sexually indifferent, and he lives in a city that is something of an unlikely cross between Jerusalem and the Lower East Side. He is unmoved by the Queen of Sheba, herself portrayed as resembling a middle-aged widow in the Catskills. Here is the story’s end:

The counselors vouch for it, they swear they have seen the proof. That King Solomon now takes to bed, not with a virgin, as his father, David, did in old age, or even a dancing girl, but with a hot water bottle. . . .[I]f there were any rewards, he’d settle for a good night’s sleep. But sleep does not come. He hears strange noises in the apartment, scratching. . .Mice? He must remember to speak to the caretakers. . .at last he drowses off, to sleep awhile. And if he does not sleep? Or later, when he wakes, and it is still the same night? Does he think of the Queen of Sheba and wonder, whom is she visiting now? Does he remember how she danced on the table? Or the song he wrote soon after her departure, with her words still fresh in his mind, resolved to pour out his love to her, but from the very first line pouring her love for him. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine. It has been years since he heard from her. . .

Meanwhile, the bottle has grown cold. Shall he ring for another? He shifts the bottle, kneads it between his knees. "And thou like a young hart upon the mountains of spices." Look forward, look back, to darkness, at the light, both ways blind. He raises the bottle to his breast: it does not warm him. He gropes for the cord, and while his hand reaches, he thinks, as he has thought so many times, there is a time and a season for everything, a time to be born and a time to die. Is it time now? They will lay him out, washed, anointed, shrouded. They will fold his arms across his chest, with the palms turned in, completing the figure. Now his own hands will lie pressed to his breast, and he will sleep with his fathers.

That dreadful room and his isolation are given prominence in the most widely cited text about Rosenfeld’s death–Saul Bellow’s obituary in the October 1956 issue of Partisan Review. It appeared in the pages of the magazine where the two–dubbed the "Chicago Dostoevskyians"–vied most visibly for primacy. Their longstanding, intense friendship, their vitality, their lavish talent, their penchant for literature, not politics–all this made them stand out. It also rendered their competition all the more intriguing. Here, in his obituary, Bellow had the last word.

Bellow admits elsewhere that theirs was a sometimes uneasy relationship: "I loved him, but we were rivals, and I was peculiarly touchy, vulnerable, hard to deal with–at times, as I can now see, insufferable." The obituary is touching, and vivid. Its chilling conclusion is what is most often cited:

He endured boredom and deadness, despair, even madness. This is the truth about the reign of the fat gods. It is not merely dull and harmless. It destroys and consumes everything, it covers the human image with deadly films, it undermines all quality with its secret rage, it subverts everything good and exalts lies, and on its rotten head it wears a crown of normalcy. Most do not fight but make their peace with it. Isaac fought.

He won. He changed himself. He enlarged his power to love. Many loved him. He was an extraordinary and significant man.

He died in a seedy, furnished room on Walton Street, alone–a bitter death to his children, his wife, his lovers, his father.

The term "alone" possessed distinctly dreaded connotations in the Yiddish-dominated culture in which Bellow, Kazin, Rosenfeld, and so many of the other New York intellectuals were reared. Little was deemed worse than being left alone–with no one to care for you, beyond the buzz of talk, beyond the care of family, of loved ones, beyond all that made life bearable. It was in such a state, or so it was said, that Isaac died. His estranged wife, Vasiliki, and his two children, Eleni and George, were in New York, where the boisterousness of their Barrow Street apartment had given way to the isolation and anonymity of a grim rooming house. This was how Rosenfeld’s last days would be recalled. When James Atlas published one of his first poems in the journal Poetry, he titled it, "Isaac Rosenfeld Thinks About His Life." It begins with Rosenfeld contemplating life, alone, in a dismal room:

I’m in a single room again.
Always it’s the same
a cellar crammed
With papers, ashtrays, books. Even if I chose to survive without these means,
why is it that I return to this, a way
of life that I would remember as my own?

Similarly, the distinguished poet John Berryman, who taught with both Bellow and Rosenfeld at the University of Minnesota in the early fifties, wrote the following poem for Rosenfeld’s son, George, soon after Rosenfeld’s death:

"He ought to be a father, not a child"–
his own child too said so. I had to glare
into a room where, half-through, he crampt dead,
where all his lovers, seeking his cry, drown,
and the solo I reel in a word disspelled.

Morgan Blum, a colleague of Rosenfeld’s at the University of Minnesota published a poem in The New Republic on September 3, 1956, entitled, "Isaac Rosenfeld: for a Friend Who Died Alone":

Isaac, the Age of Reason came of age
That day you stiffened, suffered, died alone:
In capsules, hypos and his cradled phone
Then failed your heart, now whet our frustrate rage.

I have met two women–both vibrant and smart, and at least one who was at the time desperately in love with Rosenfeld–who had plans to see him on the day of his death. There may well have been a third. This, it seems, is hardly the routine of a hermit.

But the identification of Rosenfeld with a sordid, anonymous room has proven so resilient that in Brian Morton’s remarkable recent novel of New York literary life, Starting Out in the Evening, mention of Rosenfeld’s name immediately inspires reference to such a room. The book’s protagonist, an erudite, out-of-print novelist named Schiller, explains to his young, eager would-be biographer his ambivalent relationship in the 1940s and ’50s with the work of D. H. Lawrence. He tells her that what particularly upset him about Lawrence at the time was his impact on the likes of Norman Mailer and Isaac Rosenfeld–Jewish intellectuals like himself, he adds, whose attraction to the "wisdom of the blood" he deplored:

She wasn’t happy about this answer. She had never heard of Isaac Rosenfeld, and Mailer had never meant much to her. . . .But it wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in these people. It unsettled her to hear Schiller putting himself in this context. When she thought of Schiller as a writer, she liked to imagine him in the "one big room" that E. M. Forster speaks of in Aspects of the Novel–the room in which all novelists, past and present, are writing side by side. In her mind Schiller’s place was somewhere in eternity, next to Lawrence or Melville, not in the 1950s, next to Isaac Rosenfeld.

So, on the one hand, there is Forster’s room, a place of grand achievement, even immortality; many floors below–quite literally, in the cellar–there is Rosenfeld’s room, a grim place, a mid-century metaphor for Grub Street, where the unread (like Rosenfeld), or the overrated (like Mailer) go to die.

In concentrating attention on the room where Rosenfeld died, I’m reminded of John Updike’s challenge in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, "One Cheer for Literary Biography": "The main question concerning literary biography is, surely, why do we need it at all?" Updike explains how such books aren’t, as he sees it, utterly dispensable, but they’re not altogether essential either. He tends to tuck away most of them in his barn, not on the more accessible shelves of his house.

I offer Updike the following reply, which supports the argument that biographical knowledge is revealing not only in terms of what it tells us about the making of literature, but also in terms of the making of cultural memory, in the broadest terms. It can tell us much about how one builds out of such artifacts our sense of the past–when we rub the often all-too-smooth surfaces of collective memory against the confounding messiness of everyday life as captured in the best of biographical writing.

Isaac Rosenfeld did not die in the room described by Bellow. Nor did he die on Walton Place. His new, airy, two-room apartment, to which he moved a few months before his death, was on Huron, near Chicago’s Loop, where he then was teaching at an evening school branch of the University of Chicago. Bellow had last seen him at the Walton flat. Without access to the primary sources used by biographers–letters, journals, interviews, etc.–this could not have been known. Still, this constitutes more than a mere, passing errata.

This information was culled from interviews, as well as letters Rosenfeld wrote at the time. In one letter written a few months before his death, Rosenfeld tells Freda Davis, the friend who discovered his dead body, about the apartment, and he relates a conversation he had with his son, still living with his ex-wife in New York: "[George] knew I was sad. I assured him my life was much better now. ‘I’m no longer in that basement. I have a nice room, new clothes, a car. I have lots of friends.’"

Davis, a high-school sweetheart whom he met again near the end of his life, spent much time there. As she described it, the flat had a bright kitchen, a desk in the living room piled high with manuscripts; the bathroom was in the hall, the bedroom was tiny and somewhat dingy, but the main room was large and filled with books. Isaac had bought himself a convertible. Interestingly, none of the descriptions of his sudden, sordid death ever mention this sporty car. In this same place, according to Davis’s account, Rosenfeld enjoyed cooking for her, an apron tied around his waist, a flashy car waiting for them outside the window. In letters to friends, and in his journal, he speculated that he might soon break off their relationship. He also suggested that he might well marry her.

Rosenfeld completed several of his best essays and stories in the last months of his life. At the time he was at work on a book on the Chicago fire, and a literary study of Tolstoy. He was writing sketches for Chicago’s Compass Players–the precursor to the comedy group, Second City–and one of the sketches, "The Liars," was performed in Chicago by Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Shelly Berman. Mike Nichols later optioned it for television. "King Solomon" appeared in Harpers soon after his death. A lengthy essay about Chicago, published posthumously in Commentary, is often considered his finest piece of nonfiction. Among his unpublished novels were expansive explorations of many different worlds: Ghandi’s India, Soviet Russia, a Reichian sex colony, and, in probably his strongest work of fiction, Greenwich Village. He was still working on this manuscript at the time of his death.

Perhaps, on the verge of a breakthrough? Isaac himself recorded just this in his journals. Nothing of the sort appears in the writings of his friends. "Wunderkind grown to tubby sage," Irving Howe summed him up at the time of his death.

A passage in Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge may help us understand better his friends’ reactions. With reference to Coleridge’s turbulent, sometimes dreadful, final decades, Holmes discusses the responses of friends when the now-puffy, opium-addicted, but still brilliant writer returned to England after his extended stay in the Mediterranean. Significantly, Coleridge still had many superb books ahead of him:

He was living out what many people experience, in the dark dis-order of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface with astonishing, even alarming candor that many of his friends found unendurable, or simply ludicrous. Moreover, he continued to write about it, to witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the understanding of these struggles not (like Wordsworth, perhaps) in their solution. So, it was. . .in these first weeks back in England. . .that he first glimpsed the crisis that would close round him in these middle years. With his peculiar mixture of comedy and pathos, he projected out of his private chaos an universal dilemma. He was only thirty-four that October, but he felt that somewhere in the Mediterranean he had imperceptibly crossed a shadowline into darker waters.

Rosenfeld, too, seemed to have lavishly, and all-too-visibly squandered an extraordinary opportunity. Years went by without a new novel; his first book–written at a time when he was lauded as a new Kafka–came to be seen as little more than a slim, predictable tale of a Jewish adolescent’s struggle with his father. Rosenfeld’s marriage fell apart for reasons that remained obscure to Rosenfeld himself. He wandered between New York, Minnesota, and Chicago; he gave up a job at The New Republic to work on a barge; he experimented, often with mixed results, with many different forms of writing; he threw himself into Reichism, and he devoted himself, somberly, to free love. He benefited little from his Reichian work, and, judging from his journals, he gained little palpable pleasure from his sexual experimentation.

Friends watched perplexed and, perhaps, at times fearful that they, too, might similarly stumble–that the various messy details of their everyday lives might also come crashing in. Many of them did fail, as they themselves saw it, in one way or another. William Phillips, Partisan Review editor, insisted late in life that he had "pissed his time away in talk." Rahv, Phillip’s co-editor, fell into terrible, prolonged depressions, and he never managed, despite his much-lauded brilliance, to complete a single, full-length work. William Barrett recalls running into Rahv, in the late fifties, and while walking around Gramercy Park, Rahv "began ticking off one by one some of the people we had known and their initial hopes, ending always with the refrain, ‘It wasn’t in the cards.’" Even Kazin never produced a book of comparable stature to On Native Grounds, which he published in his twenties. He would revisit this singular moment time and time again, in memoir after memoir, throughout the remainder of his life.

These were, on the whole, self-made men, essentially self-taught, with their learning picked up in prodigious fits of reading at the local library, or during long, dull stints in the army. (Howe claims to have started reading seriously only as a soldier.) They had little to fall back upon, except for their willfulness, and their ambition. Mary McCarthy describes Rahv in her 1949 novel, The Oasis:

Facts of any kind, oddities, lore, local history intoxicated. . .this realist, whose own experience had been strangely narrow–a half-forgotten childhood in the Carpathian mountains, immigration, city streets, the Movement, Bohemian women, the anti-Movement, downtown bars, argument, discussion, subways, newstands, the office. This was all he knew of the world; the rest was hearsay. . . . Practical jokes were anathema to him; they belonged to an order of things which defied his power of anticipation, like children, birds, cows, water, snakes, lightning, Gentiles, and automobiles.

"I now feel. . .that our little world was deficient in friendship and loyalty and that objectivity often has been a mask for competitiveness, malice, and polemical zeal–for banal evils," writes Phillips in his memoirs. Rosenfeld’s posthumous reputation may well have been a victim of this. He was the first of this circle to die; he had many, visible meanderings about which he talked far more openly than most of the others in this milieu; and his faltering steps as a writer were all-too well known. Many near him may well have lived with the fear that they, too, might fall prey to similar demons. No one has captured just such demons better than Bellow. Near the beginning of his second novel, The Victim, published in 1947, his narrator muses:

He said occasionally to [his wife] Mary, revealing his deepest feelings, "I was lucky. I got away with it." He meant that his bad start, his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had somehow combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful (he never forgot that hotel on lower Broadway), the part that did not get away with it–the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.

This is uncannily similar to how Rosenfeld came to be seen. Attached to him were many of the more discordant, embarrassing moments of the collective life of the writers best equipped to remember him. Bellow, as well, had been a devotee of Wilhelm Reich, the wildly controversial, once influential disciple of Freud. Bellow writes extensively about Reich’s influence on him in Seize the Day and in Henderson and the Rain King. Still, in the memoirs of their mutual friends, such as Kazin and Howe, one is left with the impression that this, too, was a singularly mad enthusiasm of Rosenfeld. Kazin even asserts that Rosenfeld’s Reichianism contributed somehow to his early demise: "And everything came back to the Isaac the prisoner in his cell the orgone box. He never broke out." Whether the symbols are a grim, awful room, or that small, silly box, Isaac in such accounts locks himself in, he suffocates his talent, his potential, his own life.

It seems germane to add that Rosenfeld abandoned his orgone box, too, a few years before his death, and not long after Bellow did. Both had their orgone boxes built for them–by childhood friends from the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Rosenfeld brought his box along with him to the apartment where he died. It was folded up in a comer of the room. By then, he poked fun at the Reichian movement; one of his unpublished novels is a grim, anti-utopia set in a Reichian sex colony, a place that rivals in its totalitarianism another unpublished novel based in Soviet Russia.

In the end, Rosenfeld was made–and, arguably, also rather undone–by much the same intellectual circle in which he lived much of his life: left-wing, post-Trotskyist, Jewish, and competitive in almost epic terms. Bellow remained fiercely loyal to him and his memory. But for most, Rosenfeld was an errant genius whom they nurtured, advertised, mythologized and, eventually, helped marginalize. He would be used as both clown and object lesson, as an unsettling, but also reassuring example of what they had managed to avoid, or so they hoped.

The room, then, in which Rosenfeld did not die, like the orgone box that almost certainly did not trap him–these images, and the excessive reliance on them in the texts produced about him after his death, teach us something essential about his milieu. It shaped him, it helped launch him, and eventually, it also played its role in consolidating his eventual oblivion.

The book I am writing is built to a great extent on tissue letters–letters saved by friends, treasured by lovers, hoarded by competitors, savvy or optimistic literary investors, and others. Their discovery is among the few actual, lived adventures in an otherwise mostly sedentary scholarly life. For this book, I, too, have tracked down many, many hundreds of letters; I have sat with them in a good many strange, even somewhat unsafe living rooms, thinking about and, at times, also rather reenacting scenes out of Henry James. Such letters, as Janet Malcolm so perceptively writes in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, "are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling. . . .Everything else the biographer touches is stale, hashed over, told and retold, dubious, inauthentic, suspect." No less pertinent is a comment on this score in A. S. Byatt’s novel, Possession: A Romance, "Letters. . .are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going."

A biography must know, however, at least on some level, where it is going. I end with an experience that helped me decide something essential about my book’s trajectory: It is a story about Isaac’s rooms–his rooms on Greenwich Village’s Barrow Street, the flat mentioned by Kazin in the citation at the beginning of this essay.

Sitting in an Upper West Side café a few years ago, I decided to try to see the interior of Rosenfeld’s apartment. I had visited the building, of course; I had peeked into its windows; I had read much about the place–its wild parties, Delmore Schwartz drunk on the floor, guests climbing in and out of its first story windows, its dirt, its pets (dogs, snakes, etc.), its smells, its eventual, unmistakable shoddiness. I took a taxi to 85 Barrow Street, in the Village, something like a (now gentrified) English working-class street with cobblestones running nearby, eastward, a few blocks toward the Hudson River. About eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning I rang the bell for apartment 1k and a gruff male voice answered.

I had practiced my absurd little talk in the taxi, explaining that I was a Stanford professor writing a book about someone who had once lived in this apartment. An article of mine about Rosenfeld had, as it happens, appeared that weekend in a New York newspaper. I carried it with me, prepared to wave it as proof. I expected to be shouted at, to be chased away, or, at least, ignored. Instead, the voice told me that he had just emerged from the shower, and asked me to wait.

A few minutes later I was buzzed in. In the notes I took later that day, "His face appears from behind the apartment door, which is just to the right of the entrance to the narrow apartment building. He is about 5’8", he had light brown hair, somewhat curly, full lips, a wide smile, sympathetic eyes. He looks much like Isaac."

I was too unsettled at the time to write down his name, but I remember his telling me that he had just moved from Maine after finishing university. He had come to New York to be a writer. He was working at a small publishing house, and he explained, eerily and much as Rosenfeld himself would have said, that he desperately wanted to continue to trust people, and for this reason had opened his apartment to a stranger. I insisted that he must never do this again. I stayed there chatting with him for half an hour, talking about his love for New York, his work, about writing, its pleasures, and frustrations. I looked over the small apartment, took measure of its rooms, noted how close the children’s room would have been to the living room with its wild, loud parties. (Rosenfeld’s only remaining child, Eleni, is now a Buddhist nun in the south of France.) Its new resident promised to rush out later that day and buy a copy of my article on Isaac. He was healthy, he was unpublished, untested, still hopeful, and I felt extraordinarily pleased that it was he who now lived in Isaac’s place.

What I recognized later, as I thought about this encounter–an encounter with, perhaps, one of the world’s more benign, gentle dybbuks–was that I wanted most for my book to capture something essential about a life spent with books. Isaac Rosenfeld confronted this with unusual honesty, both in terms of its limitations and joys. What derailed him was also what most inspired him: he was devoted to exploring what most mattered in life, and he was unwilling, or unable, to pour all his considerable ambition into his written work. Still, he was found dead beside a desk piled high with manuscripts, in a room surrounded by books.

"To read as if for life," says David Copperfield. This line now seemed to promise so many different, discordant things. In writing about Rosenfeld’s life I sought to clarify these, to nuance them, to say something essential about one singularly self-aware life spent in intimacy with books. I hoped this would provide a clue as to how such a life starts, how it is sustained (or not), how it comes to an end, how it is later recalled, forgotten, perhaps revived. Rosenfeld himself summed up well this quest in the last lines of his last essay on Chicago, seeking to define what he called the principle of all great cities:

As I see it, this principle is very simple (but I am a luftmensch: with a thirst for water). It is to give the city something to lose. And this is done by producing without manufacturing, consuming without eating. . .and finding the everlasting in ephemeral things: not in iron, stone, brick, concrete, steel, and chrome, but in paper, ink, pigment, sound, voice, gesture, and graceful leaping, for it is of such things that the ultimate realities, of mind and heart, are made.