554
PARTISAN REVIEW
called "Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs." The first treats Huck and
Ishmael and Natty Bumppo: "At the focus of emotion, where we are
accustomed to find in the world's great novels some heterosexual pas–
sion ... we come instead on the fugitive slave and the no-account boy
lying side by side on a raft borne by an endless river toward an impossible
escape, or the pariah sailor waking in the tattooed arms of the brown
harpooner on the verge of their impossible quest." This essay, read once
more among the others in the book, still seems fresh and brilliant and
extreme. It is strangely literal in its understanding of the secretly myth–
ical. Color guilt and the love of man for man whisper their names loud
enough for all to hear. The deeper innocence shrinks back further into
the shades. It will not be possible for some years to read
Huckleberry
Finn
or
Moby-Dick
without the glare, wanted or resented, of this flash–
light. The "suggestiveness"-in both meanings of the word-of Fiedler's
work on this theme is complete.
The essay on Ethel and Julius Rosenberg is more "literary" than,
for instance, the article on
From Here to Eternity.
The Rosenbergs are
judged, to a great degree, by aesthetic values, while Jones's work of
fiction is looked at as a social document. The real people are disappoint–
ing as "characters"-they are, the Rosenbergs, seen as rather dull fanatics
who pushed themselves into the darkness of treason. The critic, making
a newspaper acquaintance with this unfortunate couple who have com–
mitted the ultimate act and are faced with the ultimate punishment, is
fascinated. And yet the critical mind is not satisfied with what is given;
some refinement, some complexity, some greatness of view, some mem–
orable gift of expression seem to be demanded from those who are
standing so grimly on the edge of eternity. The Rosenbergs, looked at
with the eye of a literary man, seem too "superficial" for their immense
doom. They wrote so badly that they become, as one would say of a
character in a poorly written novel, "flat" and "unreal," "not able to
think of themselves as real people," not able actually to have a self
because "the line between the person and the case, between private and
public, had been broken down for them." And worst of all, "the Rosen–
bergs were quite incapable of saying in their last letters just what it was
for which they thought they were dying."
But these two people
did
make their point and it was quite clear
for what they were dying. Their letters are painful, awful documents
and yet utterly expected, shatteringly authentic. Fiedler wants life to
measure up to art. The Rosenbergs' failure to be great and deep is a
failure he sees as so thorough that it has some sort of superior force
and hold upon us-this very failure is at last offered as the ground upon
